Babel Clash

Thinking back over influences got me thinking about how the things we like don’t just influence our style; they also influence how we define what it is that we do and what its place in the overall culture is.

I don’t think there’s been any greater influence on my writing that Frank Herbert’s Dune novels. I love every single one of them and make a point of re-reading them every few years. They never fail to entertain and inspire me, and like all the best literature, I find new things to love about them with every subsequent run at them.

First mass-market paperback cover, which is the one I always look for in used bookstores

One of the really fascinating things about these books, especially Dune itself, is that it is an unapologetic blend of sf and fantasy. To be honest, I find the hard-sf bits the least interesting parts of the book, but there’s no denying that Dune is, in many ways, a hard-sf novel. All of the ecological details, the stillsuits, the water conservation, etc. are hardcore futurism. But they’re set in this beautiful, byzantine, deeply fantasy-inflected world, with a magical spice whose economics dictate the politics of the Universe, a cult of telepathic witches, precognitive human monsters who navigate hyperspace, and the Kwizatz Haderach himself, Paul Atreides, who is as Campbellian a hero as any to be found in literature.

What’s interesting to me is that in many ways, Dune is consciously anti-sfnal in its approach to some things. Herbert goes out of his way to rid his world of computers and artificial intelligence. At almost every turn he eschews the trappings of sf, opting for the baroque, the poetic, and the metaphorical. In fact, the characters who most embody technological progress, the Harkonnens, are portrayed as vicious and degenerate, rats in a sprawl of anti-human advanced technology. (The Ixians take on this role in a more measured capacity in the later novels, but they remain distant and amoral, never seeming particularly human.)

Even the stillsuit, which is probably Herbert’s clever idea, is ambiguous as technology. It’s craftsmanship; it’s not a device but a contraption, powered totally by its human wearer, a second skin that enhances the human rather than dehumanizing. In Dune, the “good” technology is always projected inward, blending with the personal.

Not having read these books when they came out, I’m not sure what Herbert’s mindset was when he wrote the book, how much of a reaction they are to the sf New Wave, about which I don’t claim to be an expert. The point is that I think you could make a case that Dune is as much a fantasy novel as it is an sf novel. God Emperor of Dune is indistinguishable from a fantasy novel. Taken on its own, there’s very little to imply that it’s anything else. And the last two books are pure space opera.

But regardless of the vast divergence in approach among the books of the series (and I’m starting to get to the point now), they come together to form what is (to me) a unified whole. So I ask the question: what kind of fiction is the Dune series? Is it Fantasy? High fantasy? Epic Fantasy? Is it sf? hard sf? Space Opera? Futurist?

The reason I bring this up is a roundabout way of getting at my proclamation that the labels we put on genre fiction are arbitrary, and the more strictly we try to define them, the less useful they become. I read an article yesterday in which the author claimed the Star Trek isn’t “real” sf because it doesn’t meet his definition of what sf is: an extrapolation of technology to create a conflict that sheds light on human nature, or human folly, or the world we live in, or whatever sundry things that sf can shed light on. Now, I agree that what he calls sf is certainly sf. But it isn’t, to me anyway, everything that sf can or should be, and the notion that it should be anything seems sadly limiting and self-defeating.

Dune is not the story of planetary ecology. It isn’t the story of interplanetary economics, or drug addiction, or magical witches. It’s the story of Paul Atreides, and how he progresses from young aristocrat to benevolent tyrant of the galaxy, and the enlightenment that he experiences along the way. Everything else that happens in the book, everything piece of set dressing and sfnal or fantasy trope contributes to the psychology and emotional makeup of Paul Atreides. Essentially, Herbert reached into his imagination and pulled out everything he could possibly imagine to make a compelling setting that would inform the ultimate concern of his protagonist, which is the progression from a self-focused ego driven individuality, to a holistically-focused, moral being who is the emblem of a massive, total human consciousness. (Whaddya want? It was the seventies.)

But if Herbert had espoused a strict definition of “what science fiction is,” he wouldn’t have allowed himself to create the Bene Gesserit, or the Spacing Guild, or the spice malange itself, or any of a zillion other things for which there’s no sound scientific basis. What a losst that would have been!

That’s probably why I’ve always been so leery and contrary whenever I hear people trying to define sf or fantasy or horror, or this or that subgenre. I realize that there are marketing concerns that dictate how books are bought and sold, and that’s whole separate kettle of fish, and probably worthy of another post, or a month’s worth of them. Here, I’m only talking about how we as community define what we do. And in short, my credo is this: labels and categories are merely pointers, circles in the great Venn diagram of imagination. If you try to make them anything more than that, if you try to make those circles into proscriptive boundaries, all you’re doing is shooting yourself in the foot.

(James, I’ll address the whole day-job question in a separate post later on!)

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