SF-TH Inc Generic Exhaustion and the "Heat Death" of Science Fiction Author(s): Elizabeth Hewitt Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Nov., 1994), pp. 289-301 Published by: SF-TH Inc Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4240367 Accessed: 12-08-2019 01:59 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms SF-TH Inc is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Science Fiction Studies This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Mon, 12 Aug 2019 01:59:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms GENERIC EXHAUSTION 289 Elizabeth Hewitt Generic Exhaustion and the "Heat Death" of Science Fiction Do everything at the proper time Keep everything in its proper place Use everything for its proper purpose. -Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, 1861 In 1964 Michael Moorcock replaced E.J. Carnell as editor of New Worlds. At that time, Worlds' subtitle was "science fiction," by 1967 that subtitle had changed to "speculative fiction," by June 1968 it had changed to "fiction," and by October 1968 the magazine had abandoned all generic subtitles (R0nnov- Jessen 80). These generic changes can be marked in the very packaging of the material: what had once been a bimonthly magazine printed on newsprint was transformed into a large-format avant-garde literary journal printed on glossy paper. I This ugly-duckling tale of New Worlds' coming-of-age can be seen as a metonymy for Darko Suvin's narrative of science fiction's own generative history. According to Suvin, sf rose out of "the compost heaps of.. .juvenile or popular subliterature," developing by subsuming and outgrowing its discur- sive foundations (Metamorphoses 22). But this story of maturation is much too easy, for both Moorcock and Suvin agree that there is something efficacious in sf's marginality and always tenuous self-identity-its ambiguous generic distinction from other literary categories-and, perhaps more importantly, in its distinction from what has variously been called realist, mainstream, or mundane fiction. Sf's paradoxical desire-to grow out of its shaky generic status and, yet, simultaneously to maintain the unique status it gains from that marginality-is no mere "academic" issue, exploding as it does into the dan- gerous ground of the politics of marginality. In this essay I will not speak directly to the larger theoretical problem of identity politics; instead I will consider the question of genre, focusing on the representation of generic iden- tities and dissolutions in a short, and not often criticized or reprinted, story- "The Heat Death of the Universe."2 2. Pamela Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe" consists of fifty-four numbered paragraphs describing California housewife Sarah Boyle's domestic duties on the day of her child's birthday. Interspersed within this domestic narrative are ruminations on entropy, chaos, and the heat death of the uni- verse. Certainly the interjection of scientific speculation into a narrative on the most mundane, the least extra-worldly of subjects--housework-is notable; and yet we still must wonder, as Mark Rose does in his book on sf and genre, why "Heat Death" should be classified as sf: This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Mon, 12 Aug 2019 01:59:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 290 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 21 (1994) An interesting piece of fiction, and one that clearly gains resonance and impact by having been published in a context of science-fiction expectations. But is it science fiction? "The Heat Death of the Universe" raises once again, and in a particularly provocative manner, a problem that seems to bedevil everyone who thinks seriously about science fiction. What is it anyway? (1) Rose's solution to this generic quandary is simply to force Zoline's story into a rather conventional generic formula; he describes it as a classic "alien invades human body" narrative where entropy is the antagonistic alien and Sarah Boyle stands for a generalized protagonistic human will (31). We also could fit "Heat Death" into a generic sf frame by seeing Sarah's "break- down" (where she tosses dishes, jars, eggs, and jam around the kitchen) as a metaphor for apocalypse, a standard sf theme (Lefanu 97). Such readings, however, simply classify Zoline's story as sf by using "science" as analogy for "real world." In such a reading, Zoline's insertion of thermodynamic theories would be merely a metaphoric vehicle for describing the chaos of an individual woman's life. This sort of analogic critical enterprise would produce a "Heat Death" that thematically resembles sf, but necessarily would squander its metaphoric play value, which is critical to the generic capacity of sf. For if metaphors in "mundane" fiction are ultimately determined by the "real" world, then meta- phors in sf are the building materials of the "new" sf world.3 Familiar metaphors signify differently when we read sf. Samuel Delany explains how this alternate reading functions: Then her world exploded. Should such a string of words appear in a mundane fiction story, we would more than likely read it as an emotionally muzzy metaphor about the specifically emotional aspect of some incident in a female character's life. In SF, we must retain the margin to read this sentence in such a way that a planet, belonging to some woman, blew up. ("Generic" 177) Following Delany's logic, to insist that Zoline uses thermodynamic theories as metaphors for the social condition of domesticity is to exclude the possi- bility that her tale is about the heat death of the universe. By including "Heat Death" in the sf genre by way of a thematically structured model as Rose does, critics risk foreclosing the critical possibilities of the genre. Rose's meta- phoric reading, although it renders "Heat Death" thematically legible as sf, also forces metaphor to function according to the logic of mundane fiction's reading strategy. Reading "Heat Death" with what Delany calls an sf reading protocol, one would begin from the possibility that the ultimate horizon from which to interpret "Heat Death" might not rest on the domestic landscape. The critical possibilities of this specialized sf reading method make it the most suggestive interpretive frame in which to read "Heat Death." Theoriza- tions of such an interpretive strategy, of course, are not unique to Delany. Formulations can be found in the work of several writers, as in that by Teresa de Lauretis: "The sign work of sf, by re-literalizing language and giving it use value, can oppose the entropy of social discourse and re-shape our semantic universe" (169). Here de Lauretis, like Delany, makes claims for the unique potential of sf's metaphoric play, but more interesting is de Lauretis's own This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Mon, 12 Aug 2019 01:59:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms GENERIC EXHAUSTION 291 choice of tropes. She knows the sf canon well enough to remember that the New Wave sf writers of the 1960s-especially those published in New Worlds -persistently focused on questions of entropy (cf Greenland). Her choice of tropes would seem to suggest that New Wave writers, like Zoline, were rais- ing questions of genre through their own textual manipulation of entropy and chaos. By reading Zoline's working of these thermodynamic tropes according to such a strategy of heterosemy, we can both survey Zoline's negotiation of genre theory in "Heat Death" and investigate the more general implications of such a negotiation. 3. In paragraph 20, in a notable reversal of the metaphoric directionality suggested by Rose, Zoline localizes her narrative of the effects of entropy (the heat death of the universe) by letting Los Angeles stand for that "universe," which has "unwound" itself-that is, "used up" all available energy: The Los Angeles sky becomes so filled and bleached with detritus that it loses all color and silvers like a mirror, reflecting back the fricasseeing earth. Everything becoming warmer and warmer, each particle of matter becoming more agitated, more excited until the bonds shatter, the glues fail, the deodorants lose their seals. (120) Here, a "real" Los Angeles functions as a metaphor for a "scientific" universe that remains only implicit. Her apocalyptic depiction of southern California is not simply an ecological manifesto bemoaning the polluted Los Angeles sky; more, it is an attack on the imagination of the generic nature of (poetic) lang- uage-an attack on the thought of a world in which all semantic matter has been fricasseed. Two paragraphs later Zoline suggests an alternative recipe to this fricassee, implying that she can "cook" a color that will not merely mirror "Cunt Pink" and "Avocado Green" (112): Sarah Boyle's blue eyes, how blue? Bluer far and of a different quality than the Nature metaphors which were both engine and fuel to so much of precedent literature. A fine, modern, acid synthetic blue.... The chemists in their kitchens cooked, cooled and distilled this blue from thousands of colorless and wonderfully constructed crystals, each one unique and nonpareil; and now that color hisses, bubbles, burns in Sarah's eyes.