The Best of Science Fiction 12

Can you take another word? Two, really: criticism and category. They are why you probably never heard of Ellipsia before. Critics like categories. Some critical categories are: Pop, science fiction, avant-garde, mainstream, black humour. Hortense Calisher has a distinctive reputation as a mainstream writer — sub-category, female, One critic found the book wanting in a survey of Ladies' Novels; another put it down as inadequate neo-Joyce; one who did not review it thought it could have been an avant-garde hit if someone like William Burroughs had written it. S-f critics, who would have loved it, never saw it. The category it actually fits had not yet been invented.

I must admit that my enthusiasm for fabulation as a term is rather greater than for The Fabulators as a book. Prof. Scholes grants at the outset that his survey is not inclusive. He concentrates on Durrell, Vonnegut, Southern, Hawkes, Murdoch and Barth, and at least mentions Nabokov, Heller, Beckett, Donleavy, Purdy, and Friedman. One is of course less than startled to find he knows nothing of writers like Sturgeon, Ballard, Leiber, and Cordwainer Smith (let alone Disch, Delany, Zelazny); but it is surprising to find no mention of Calisher, Updike, or Burroughs, for instance — and downright painful not to find Borges or I. B. Singer anywhere.

Nevertheless: —

The shoe fits, and baby needs shoes. The need for such a category for critical straphangers is urgent, because fabulation is the future of the (published) fiction form. In spite of his hot/cool hashup, McLuhan's point about TV-viewers' participation-involvement vs. book-readers' detachment is both accurate and important. The printed page will never again be able to compete with the screen for realistic storytelling; but it will take an as yet undiscovered technique to make the tube into a suitable medium for satire, fable, or allegory — all of which require an audience suspended at that precise focal point which provides optimum discernment of the essential interplay between figure and background.

The new facts of technological life can be taken as an invitation to abdication of all responsibility by the writer. Or he can utilise the new insights into the nature of (both new and old) technologies to add power and scope to his techniques for the transmission of those messages which are, by their own nature, better conveyed through the slower, cooler, medium of words on paper.