This book is a thought experiment. It discusses a number of science fiction narratives: three novels, one novella, three short stories, and one musical concept album. The works in question date from 1950 to 2017. Each chapter stands on its own as an exercise in close and careful reading. But together, in sequence, these eight analyses pursue a single line of thought. Extreme Fabulations is concerned with life and embodiment. I start with questions of what Kant called the “conditions of possibility” for life and thought to be able to exist at all, and for human beings to confront the rest of the universe (Chapters 1 and 2). I then consider questions of how we understand life pragmatically, and how we may thereby imagine controlling and changing it (Chapters 3 and 4). From there, I move on to ask questions about the aesthetic and social dimensions of human existence, in relation to the nonhuman (Chapters 5 and 6). And finally, I grapple with questions about the ethical value of human life under conditions of extreme oppression and devastation (Chapters 7 and 8).
I pursue these questions neither philosophically nor scientifically, but through the medium of science fiction. I believe that science fiction writing, at its best, offers us a unique way of grappling with issues that deeply and unavoidably concern us, but that are intractable to rational argumentation or to empirical verification. This is not to deny the importance of abstract reasoning and of quantitative research, but merely to acknowledge, as John Maynard Keynes put it, that much of the time “we simply do not know” what is going to happen. The future is not closed. In a casino, we can mathematically assign probabilities to every possible outcome arising from the spin of a roulette wheel, or the shuffling of a pack of cards. High finance attempts to apply this casino logic to everything in the world. But as Keynes argued long ago, such an endeavor cannot succeed. For in the broader world, there is no such thing as a finite set of all possible outcomes, on the basis of which we could assign them relative probabilities.
Science fiction, despite what is sometimes said about it, does not really claim to predict the future. It is neither prophetic nor probabilistic. It is true that science fiction – like what the business world calls “strategic foresight” – extrapolates from actually existing trends and tendencies, and imagines what might happen in the future if they were to continue. It is also true that science fiction texts – like derivatives and other arcane financial instruments – speculate upon the contingent outcomes of uncontrolled and even unknowable processes. But beyond both of these, science fiction crucially involves a movement of fabulation. The future is unavoidably vague and multifarious; it stubbornly resists our efforts to know it in advance, let alone to guide it or circumscribe it. But science fiction takes up this very vagueness and indeterminacy, by rendering it into the form of a self-consciously fictional narrative. It gives us characters who experience the vagaries of unforeseeable change.
In other words, science fictional fabulation concretizes futurity as such, with its social, technological, and ontological indeterminacy intact. In this way, it does something similar to what Claude Lévi-Strauss defines as the function of myth: which is “to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real)” (Lévi-Strauss 1963). But Lévi-Strauss sees myths as synchronic structures, existing all at once, suspended in the eternal present of a given society. In contrast, narratives are in their very nature diachronic or temporal – or better, historical. Science fictional fabulation deals in futurity, rather than being set in the eternal present of myth. In this way, science fiction is counterfactual, or (to alter this too-familiar word) counter-actual: it offers us a provisional and impossible resolution, suspended in potentiality, of dilemmas and difficulties that are, themselves, all too real.
Henri Bergson, who introduced the notion of fabulation into philosophy, defines it as “a counterfeit of experience,” or a “a systematically false experience,” that nonetheless has considerable value, precisely because of the way that “it can thwart our judgment and reason.” Fabulation emerges in conditions of emergency; it works to preserve us from the dangers of excessive certainty, or of “pushing too far” with our rationalizations (Bergson 1935). In its vital urgency, science fiction exemplifies Alfred North Whitehead’s maxim that “in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true” (Whitehead 1978).
Insofar as it is a “counterfeit of experience” that suspends our usual assumptions and trains of thought, science fictional fabulation demands to be taken literally. That is to say, any successful work of science fiction produces a powerful reality-effect. We cannot take its descriptions only as allegories or metaphors. We also need to accept them as factual conditions that have unavoidably been given to us, at least within the frame of the narrative. By speaking of givenness, I am trying to suggest that – in the world of a science fictional work – these conditions both overtly display to us their contingency or arbitrariness, and yet at the same time stare us directly in the face with their ineluctable actuality.
In this book, I try to take the science fiction narratives that I examine as literally, and as fully, as possible. Of course such an endeavor can never entirely succeed. Any text, and any commentary, is unavoidably riddled with all sorts of unwanted distortions and presuppositions. Nonetheless, I hope that I have succeeded in tracing a meaningful trajectory through these eight works of extreme fabulation. Chapter 1 discusses “The New Reality,” by Charles Harness, a short story that takes Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as its novum, or science fictional premise. This forces us to question the extent to which the real, external world can in fact be correlated with, or made to conform to, the all-too-human assumptions with which we approach it. Chapter 2, on Adam Roberts’ novel The Thing Itself, continues this line of Kantian questioning, asking what it might mean to imagine stepping outside the anthropocentric framework. This leads to doubts both about how we understand life, and about what we might imagine as the lifeless void. Chapter 3, on Clifford Simak’s short story “Shadow Show,” follows on to look at changing conceptualizations of life, both in science fiction and in actual biological practice. Chapter 4, with its discussion of Ann Halam’s young adult novel Dr. Franklin’s Island, extends these considerations in order to focus both on the scientific power to control life, and on the degree to which vital processes themselves may resist or push back against such control. Chapter 5 discusses Nalo Hopkinson’s short story “Message in a Bottle” in order to look at the ways that life is manifested in the potentialities and limitations of artistic creation. The chapter, following the story, touches on questions of both biological and social reproduction, and of our ability to confront the open future. Chapter 6, on Chris Beckett’s novel Dark Eden, moves these questions about vitality, reproduction, and futurity from an aesthetic register to an anthropological one. The last two chapters then work through all the concerns of the earlier sections in the context of our all-too-vivid experiences of social, economic, and political oppression. Chapter 7 looks at Splendor and Misery, a concept album by the experimental hip hop group clipping. Chapter 8 considers Gwyneth Jones’ novella Proof of Concept. Both of these chapters raise the prospect of abolition or extinction: a flight into the unknown as an ethico-political alternative to the catastrophes inflicted by an unjust social order. This returns us to the cosmic perspective of the opening chapters, with their endeavors to come to terms with a universe not to the measure of human prejudices and desires.