Malmgren, Carl. “Meta-SF: The Examples of Dick, LeGuin, and Russ.” Extrapolation 43, no. 1 (spring 2002): 22-35.

Science fiction is less “about” science or the future than about fiction—world-making—and textuality—language, reference, interpretation.

George McKay, “It's not ‘about’ science, …”

Several critics have argued cogently for the appropriateness of the genre-name “science fiction” by focusing on the first term of the label. Science is the principal instrument through which we exert power over nature, and Scholes and Rabkin argue “above all else, science fiction has used its special vision and its unique knowledge to trace the history of human power over nature and to ask how that power ought to function” (191). Gregory Benford states that the science in SF “represents knowledge—exploring and controlling and semisafe” (13), and I have elaborated on this insight by arguing that the discourse of SF is grounded in a scientific epistemology which assumes that there is an inherent order to nature that can be discovered through the systematic application of the scientific method. The discourse of SF assures us that the novums structuring its estranged worlds will yield to scientific investigation (Worlds Apart, chaps. one and five).¹

Critics have dwelt on the science in SF, but have not given the same attention to the second term, “fiction,” involving the power to invent the novums themselves. George McKay does address the fictionality of SF and attributes to the genre a “doubled difference”: not only does it present a written world, separate from the real one, “but it seeks to displace or problematise the real world with its own imagined one” (52). McKay claims that SF is “about” fiction, but he doesn't really prosecute that claim. It has, in fact, been left mostly to SF authors to explore the nature and function of the genre's fictionality. SF deliberately and consciously unfolds in a made-up world—it knows that it is fiction—and some SF authors are acutely aware of that fact. These authors sometimes broach the question of reference, the relation between the fictive and the real. If they thoroughly thematize this issue, then they are writing meta-SF. The pioneer in this subgenre is Philip K. Dick. The opening sentences of Dick's “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” spells out some of the main themes and issues of the story. The tale begins with an awakening, presumably marking the passage from dream to reality, but it is an awakening that obscures the boundary between sleeping and waking, since protagonist Douglas Quail awakes dissatisfied, caught up in a very powerful “dream,” a longing for Mars fueled by an intense desire, a “yearning.” Indeed, the confusion grows, because, as he becomes more fully conscious, the dream grows more powerful, more real. Douglas Quail is a man who dreams both waking and sleeping about what he most wants—to go to Mars—and who tries mightily to translate those dreams into reality. The irony is that given his station in the futuristic world he inhabits—he is a lowly government clerk—the only way he can make those dreams real is, in effect, by dreaming them. He must hire someone to give him real dreams.

In order to real-ize his dream, Quail patronizes “Rekal, Incorporated,” a firm which implants “extrafactual” memories into its clients while they sleep. Afterwards, these clients can remember having done something without actually having done it. Rekal promises to implant in Quail a false memory pattern guaranteed to satisfy his “life-long dream” (184); he will wake up firmly believing that he has been to Mars as a secret agent for Interplan. But, in a typical Dick reversal, the project backfires when the Rekal technicians put Quail under sedation, and the real persona emerges from the apparently timorous government clerk; Quail is actually a steely secret agent for Interplan, whose last assignment did in fact take him to Mars on a cold-blooded assassination mission. This reversal further obscures the boundary between real and unreal: the “reality” Quail has been living since the mission is a false one, his identity as government clerk having been manufactured by his previous employers, Interplan, who intended in this way to reprogram their agent and neutralize him. The fact that Quail is in fact a planet-hopping secret agent helps to explain the intensity of his original dream: “So this is why you wanted to go to Mars so terribly badly,” the Rekal agent says to Quail (187).

It doesn't, however, explain the dream itself: why did Quail want to be an earth-saving Interplan agent in the first place? Dick niftily accounts for this by adding another layer to the story. Once his real identity has surfaced, Quail becomes a serious liability for Interplan. In order to forestall his elimination, Quail asks the agency to do another psychic probe on him, one that reveals his “absolute, ultimate fantasy wish” (198); Rekal can then graft this fantasy over the Mars memory, the stronger dream in effect supplanting and suppressing the weaker one. The agency agrees, and Rekal does another psychic probe. Quail's ultimate “wish-fulfillment dream fantasy,” a Rekal psychiatrist discovers, is “most interesting” (ibid.). Quail dreams of himself, as a child, encountering interstellar alien invaders, saving Earth from their invasion by treating them kindly and compassionately, and extracting from them a promise not to invade Earth while he still lives. “So by merely existing,” Quail ruefully notes, “by simply being alive, I keep Earth safe from alien rule. I'm in effect, then, the most important person on Terra. Without lifting a finger” (199).

Of course, when Rekal attempts to implant this memory, the technicians discover that it too is not a dream. At the age of nine, Quail did, in fact, forestall an alien invasion: “They told me not to tell,” he says under heavy sedation. “I wasn't even supposed to remember. But how could I forget an event like that?” (201-2). The memory may be suppressed, but Quail did not entirely forget. He had had an experience that placed him at the center of the universe. Compelled to forget that experience, his psyche made do, following orders but translating that experience into other, non-proscribed, terms. His desire² to be a planet-hopping secret agent is thus a displacement of the original experience. In that role he accepts assignments, which take him to other worlds on Earth-saving missions, in so doing re-enacting the original adventure in the only available way.

Quail's career can thus be seen as a struggle against an originary taboo—the aliens' insistence that he forget about his encounter with them. Unable to remember (or to tell), he acts the primal scene over again (in acceptable terms), at which point he is compelled to forget all over again (prohibition number two), this time by Interplan. In order to monitor him after the Mars mission, Interplan assigns an agent (Kirsten) to act as his wife. She serves literally and figuratively as shrewish superego, repeating and reinforcing the “reality” principle:

But the daylight, the mundane noise of his wife now brushing her hair before the bedroom mirror—everything conspired to remind him of what he was. A miserable salaried employee, he said to himself with bitterness. Kirsten reminded him of this at least once a day and he did not blame her; it was a wife's job to bring her husband down to Earth. Down to Earth, he thought, and laughed. The figure of speech in this was literally apt. (182)

Of course, it is doubly apt: she distracts him from his dreams of Mars by firmly grounding him in a (false) “reality” principle. The fact that Kirsten stands between Quail and his powerful dreams helps to explain his reaction when she walks out of his life: “The door closed. His wife had left. Finally!” (193). This is the reaction of a man who has put aside the reality principle, someone whose strident superego shuts up and walks out the door.

The story thus reads very neatly in psychoanalytic terms as an example of repressed original experience re-enacted in displaced form. But the dreams and desires of Douglas Quail also authorize another reading, a metageneric one. The first sentence of the story, “He awoke—and wanted Mars,” invites this metafictional reading, insofar as it describes the not atypical experience of an SF aficionado, someone who perhaps feels more attraction to the “dream world” of SF than to the everyday “real world.” The agency the dreamer Quail resorts to, Rekal, Incorporated, is in the business of satisfying dreams, fulfilling fantasies, by supplying real memories of false experiences. This, of course, is exactly what fiction in general does. Every fictional story, once absorbed by a reader, constitutes an “extrafactual memory” which exerts a kind of power over the one who remembers. McClane, the chief executive at Rekal, explains its services to Quail in the following terms:

This is the only way you can achieve your, ahem, life-long dream; am I not correct, sir? You can't be this; you can't actually do this. […] But you can have been and have done. We see to that. And our fee is reasonable; no hidden charges. (184)

He might well be speaking of the general experience of reading fiction, which allows us to “have been and have done,” at a reasonable cost. But Dick goes on to specify the kind of fictional fantasy that Rekal specializes in: “Programming an artificial memory of a trip to another planet—with or without the added fillip of being a secret agent—showed up on the firm's work-schedule with monotonous regularity.” In fact, McClane notes wryly, “ersatz interplanetary travel has become [the firm's] bread and butter” (185-6).

“Ersatz interplanetary travel”: this, of course, is one of the common fantasies that SF traffics in. Quail goes to Rekal, McClane remarks, “for the usual reason—a love by plain dull people for adventure” (194). And Rekal delivers; Quail himself admits that he

had gotten exactly what he asked Rekal, Incorporated for. Adventure, peril, Interplan police at work, a secret and dangerous trip to Mars in which his life was at stake—everything he had wanted in a false memory.

The advantage of it being a memory—and nothing more—could now be appreciated. (196)

Rekal panders to the fantasies of SF dreamers such as Douglas Quail, who imagines himself saving the world from aliens at the age of nine. It might be noted that nine is about the age that male adolescents begin to discover SF and perhaps to find in it their “absolute, ultimate fantasy wish” (198). Rekal mixes Dream 81, a magic healing rod from alien beings, with Dream 20, thanks from the UN for saving the Earth, standard motifs in adolescent SF. In this way Dick makes fun of the banality of certain SF conventions; they are all-too-standard fare. But at the same time he ridicules the (adolescent) readers who seek out and are satisfied by this kind of SF; they are all, in effect, pre-pubescent males who dream power fantasies about saving the world. Quail's fantasy may well be “quaint” and “touching,” as the Rekal operatives suggest; it is also “arrogant” and self-serving, as the police official counters. Given the year the story was written (1966), Dick is clearly targeting “Golden Age” SF, some of which did pander to the adolescent power fantasies of its male readers.

But it should be noted that Quail's dreams, however self-serving, do indicate or point to essential truths about his condition; they reveal something about (his) reality. This fact perhaps reminds us of the ending of another Dick SF metafiction, The Man in a High Castle. There the characters discover, from an SF novel, a very disturbing “inner truth” (247) about their own “reality,” namely that they are merely characters in someone else's fiction, not “real” at all. This suggests that Dick believes that SF can reveal hidden truths about the human condition; he fears, however, that in most cases it settles for playing to adolescent power fantasies. The title of Dick's story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” spells out a troubling inner truth, namely that some SF authors deliver the cheapest products on the market, “the grotesque dream[s] of [our] childhood” (198). In creating the story, Dick indicts that fiction even as he indites a story that might be said to inaugurate New Wave meta-SF.³

.....

Dick, LeGuin, and Russ all take a critical look at the power to invent SF worlds and stories and together express a kind of healthy ambivalence. Such worlds and stories can provide thrills and excitement, can render in convincing terms something alien to ordinary experience, can console us in times of suffering or loss. Visitors to these alien domains may enjoy vicariously interplanetary adventures, may encounter something extrahuman, may even become privy to buried truths about the human condition; the whole experience can, in fact, change their lives. But what SF cannot do is save the world. Even as the best meta-SF plays with and interrogates reality within its pages, it admits that it cannot deliver the impossible—the radical transformation of reality.

Notes

1. “The science in SF is not merely a matter of embellishment; it informs the epistemology of the narrative, subtends the rhetoric of the fiction, and constrains the aesthetic configuration of the tale” (Worlds Apart 10).

2. This is the term that a Rekal technician uses to account for Quail's first dream, distinguishing it from a mere memory: “Someone, probably at a government military-sciences lab, erased [Quail's] conscious memories; all he knew was that going to Mars meant something special to him, and so did being a secret agent. They couldn't erase that; it's not a memory but a desire” (188).

3. In addition to the LeGuin and Russ examples discussed below, other examples of New Wave meta-SF include: Samuel Delany's Babel-17 (1966) and Einstein Intersection (1967); Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream (1972); Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972); lan Watson's The Embedding (1973); Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue (1984); and William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984).

Works Cited

Benford, Gregory. “Effing the Ineffable.” In Aliens: The Anthropology of Science Fiction. Ed. George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. 13-25.

Dick, Philip K. The Man in the High Castle. 1962; rpt. NY: Berkley, 1982.

———. “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.” In Nebula Award Stories, Number Two. Ed. Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison. New York: Avon, 1967. 181-202.

Malmgren, Carl D. Worlds Apart: Narratology of Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.

McKay, George. “It's not ‘about’ science, it's ‘about’ fiction and it's ‘about’ about.” Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction 60 (Spring 1994): 51-7.

Scholes, Robert, and Eric S. Rabkin. Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Watson, Ian. “LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven and the Role of Dick: The False Reality as Mediator.” Rpt. in On Philip K. Dick: 40 Articles from Science-Fiction Studies. Ed. R. D. Mullen et al. Terre Haute, Ind.: SF-TH Inc., 1992. 63-72.