Wondrous Portals:
Speculative Style in Science Fiction
by
Robert McGill & David F. Shultz
∞ ∞ ∞
Teleporters, stargates, time machines: science fiction is full of devices that transport its characters and readers alike to new, breathtaking places while standing as marvelous parts of the realities that the stories imagine. In the same way, the style of SF—how a story uses language at the level of the sentence—needn’t be just an instrument for storytelling. Instead, style has a key role in influencing our perception of the worlds being depicted. After all, those worlds don’t exist except as they’re made out of language.
Too often, though, SF style gets a bad rap. It’s derided for being, as the critic Peter Stockwell puts it, “pedestrian, conservative, unimaginative, and unspectacular.” Maybe that reputation’s unsurprising for a genre that privileges high-concept premises and world-building. Frank Herbert’s Dune series, for instance, is usually celebrated for its sandworms, mind-altering spice, and stillsuits, not for its stylistic verve. When you’re a writer evoking radical, complex ideas, societies, and technologies, it might seem best to use the clearest, least obtrusive language. You might aim for a plain style that mimics nonfiction science writing, helping readers to suspend their disbelief. In fact, Gregory Benford has gone so far as to argue that SF writers’ “essential task” is “to enlist the devices of realism in the cause of the fantastic.”
Look at the history of SF, though, and you’ll find many writers who have aimed for stylistic fireworks. That’s been the case at least since the 1960s, when members of the New Wave—writers such as J. G. Ballard, Harlan Ellison, and Ursula K. Le Guin—made use of modernist techniques including stream of consciousness, while writers such as Philip K. Dick adopted linguistic patterns from other genres: for example, noir in Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Nowadays, there’s plenty of stylistically sophisticated SF. Take Rebecca Roanhorse’s short story “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™,” which tackles the violence of colonial appropriation with a premise involving virtual-reality tourist experiences of Native American culture. The story’s told in the second person, compelling readers to take up the perspective of the Indigenous protagonist. Roanhorse’s use of the second person also serves as a reminder that literature’s another kind of virtual reality—one with its own history of appropriating Indigenous culture. There’s nothing new in using the second person to tell a story, but Roanhorse’s coupling of the second person with her virtual-reality premise is a great example of how familiar stylistic devices can pack a new punch when joined to SF conceits.
Maybe even more exciting to connoisseurs of style is SF that’s stylistically innovative, inventing its own techniques. The innovation’s especially impressive when tied to the narrative’s speculative elements. Such literature might be called stylistically speculative, in that it experiments with ways of expression that are new to SF and, in some cases, to literature as a whole. SF realizes its full potential as speculative writing when it explores not only strange new worlds but new possibilities for language. When it does, style becomes more than a vehicle for ideas: it’s a site for the same kind of speculative work that typifies the genre, enacted at the molecular level of the sentence.
One well-known form of stylistic innovation in SF is neologism. As far back as 1977, Samuel R. Delany could celebrate science fiction for being the most prolific genre of writing in contributing new words to the Oxford English Dictionary. Thanks to SF, the English language has gained terms such as “atomic bomb,” “cyberspace,” “space station,” “spacesuit,” “time machine,” and “webcast.”
While neologisms promote conceptual clarity by giving names to strange things, SF can achieve very different stylistic effects by using familiar words in surprising ways. A famous example occurs early in Robert Heinlein’s novel Beyond This Horizon, where the phrase “the door dilated” appears without elaboration, economically and evocatively introducing a speculative element. Or consider the first lines of Cordwainer Smith’s short story “Scanners Live in Vain”: “Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger. He stamped across the room by judgment, not by sight.” The story continues before making it clear that Martel is a “scanner,” someone whose body has been mechanized to give him exquisitely precise control over his bodily processes while removing his ability to perceive the world through the five senses. In the meantime, the story has created a kind of poetry with its opaquely lyrical phrasings, even flirting with nonsense in its juxtapositions of words, leaving us to wonder what it could mean to “adjust” our blood or “stamp” somewhere “by judgment.”
Yoon Ha Lee’s novel Ninefox Gambit is similarly opaque, using an extreme example of an SF technique that Orson Scott Card calls “abeyance”: temporarily withholding explanations of speculative elements. Early on, Lee’s narrator describes a briefing in which it’s reported that “the Eels had a directional storm generator. The storms scrambled vectors.” Instead of explaining this technology, Lee piles on the strangeness: we learn that “formation geometry” allows certain characters to “channel exotic effects,” and that “this ability depended on the local society’s adherence to the hexarchate’s high calendar.” In the subsequent battle, things go wrong because of “a radically heretical calendar.” Such language immerses readers in a milieu so alien that it seems to exceed the English language’s capacity to evoke it except in cryptic ways. And that’s the point. In Lee’s novel, the style’s opacity is a feature, not a bug. It enlivens us to the narrative’s language as language. It shows us that when SF represents radical alterity, outright weirdness, the genre can—and, sometimes, has to—take us careening over the edge of language’s representational limits.
Simile is another device that SF writers have used innovatively. A remarkable, SF-specific use of simile can be found in William Gibson’s short story “Burning Chrome.” As a hacker tries to penetrate a computer network’s defences, known in the story as “ice,” another character describes the attack in this way: “Ice walls flick away like supersonic butterflies made of shade.” Supersonic butterflies made of shade? Instead of making the esoteric nature of the attack more comprehensible to readers, the simile introduces further conceptual challenges. As it does so, Gibson demonstrates the gulf between our mindset and that of a character in a cyberpunk world who’d devise and use such a simile. In other words, Gibson’s simile isn’t just a conventional one that yokes together two disparate things; it also serves the SF project of cognitive estrangement, turning the proceedings bizarre to help us see in new ways.
Elsewhere, too, SF has innovated stylistically by presenting characters who see and describe things extraordinarily, producing lush, abstract sentences of a type that’s rare in prose narratives. In Gene Wolfe’s short story “Useful Phrases,” for instance, a man finds a phrasebook seemingly written for alien visitors to Earth. The book’s phrases include lyrical ones such as “I will tell the trees to be quiet” and “How like a ghost are the fountain’s waters! The flood carries away my riches.” Here, the premise of alien tourists seeking to express themselves in English has given rise to phrases that would hardly be out of place in poetry. Once more, dramatic and stylistic speculative qualities go hand in hand.
SF’s interest in characters with unique viewpoints has elsewhere led to dazzling variations in style within a single story. Take Daniel Keyes’s novel Flowers for Algernon: the protagonist, who has an intellectual disability, is subjected to a surgery that leads to his intelligence temporarily increasing. As he writes down his experiences in “progress reports” that constitute the novel’s sole mode of narration, we witness his literacy and articulacy increase, too, before eventually diminishing. Keyes’s stylistic innovation in presenting a narrator with a slowly changing diction is not only catalyzed by the dramatic scenario; it also enriches our engagement with that scenario.
Ai Jiang’s short story “Give Me English” similarly plays with linguistic limitation as it enacts its wild premise: a world in which words are a literal currency. Housed in each individual’s mental “langbase,” they can be traded for other goods, leaving people with enriched or depleted vocabularies. Throughout the narrative, words missing from the protagonist’s lexicon appear as blanks, as in this message from a friend: “Oh, you mean L———’s C——? The selections there are m————. I cannot f—— purchasing c—— elsewhere.” Like the protagonist with her limited langbase, we’re put in the position of wanting to decipher the sentences. At the same time, Jiang’s technique gives her story the quality of erasure poetry, insisting that words on a page are always haunted by what’s been said before, what can’t be said, and what one refuses to say.
If characters’ peculiar linguistic resources are one impetus for stylistic innovation in SF, another is the peculiar timescales with which the genre often works. A story that encompasses centuries, even eons, can give rise to a different kind of storytelling. That’s the case in Rachel B. Glaser’s short story “Pee on Water,” which, in just a few pages, relates a history of life on Earth from its earliest days to 2086. Here’s the opening paragraph:
“Though alien to the world’s ancient past, young blood runs similar circles. All those bones are born from four grandparents. Baby teeth and baby teeth all down the line. Jackets didn’t used to zip up. There wasn’t a single door.”
Singly, the stylistic elements aren’t that shocking: the short sentences and sentence fragments, the abstractions (“young blood”), the syntactical oddities (“runs similar circles”), and the paratactic leaps that challenge readers to connect the dots between one sentence and the next are all things found in other writing. Used in combination by Glaser, though, they make for a highly idiosyncratic style—one exquisitely appropriate to a story that, as it narrates evolutionary history, takes big, disjunctive leaps between fragments of time.
Stylistic innovation sparked by an unusual depiction of time is also on display in Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life,” which was adapted for the screen as Arrival. By learning an alien language, the story’s human narrator gains the ability to see time as simultaneous rather than sequential, and the story reflects her new abilities with a bravura oscillation between tenses, as in the second paragraph, where she addresses her as-yet unborn child:
“Right now your dad and I have been married for about two years, living on Ellis Avenue; when we move out you’ll still be too young to remember the house, but we’ll show you pictures of it, tell you stories about it. I’d love to tell you the story of this evening, the night you’re conceived, but the right time to do that would be when you’re ready to have children of your own, and we’ll never get that chance.”
The rapid frequency of tense-shifts is dizzying, leaving readers to puzzle out the chronological order of the moments described, and creating a confusion that the story goes on to resolve only when later revealing the narrator’s newfound abilities. In the meantime, Chiang’s play with grammar to express his speculative premise gives his story a unique stylistic quality.
In a 1977 interview, noting the writing adage “Style is the problem solved,” Frederik Pohl said he understood it to mean that “the style you write something in should be the only possible style the story could be told in.” Finding the style that works best for a particular story is a challenge facing all writers, not just those writing SF. In SF, though, there’s a unique potential for stylistic innovation, insofar as the genre’s wondrous dramatic scenarios can lead to—and, sometimes, even require—distinctive stylistic “solutions.” The examples we’ve discussed above are models for what SF writers can do in this regard, creating styles that are as fresh and imaginative as the worlds their stories explore; styles that, often enough, emerge directly from those worlds while deepening our understanding of them. In fact, there’s a case to be made that style in SF is most interesting when the style’s so closely tied to the narrative’s premise that the style wouldn’t feel as successful if it were adopted wholesale in a non-SF narrative. SF can be good fun when it imports styles from other genres, but it’s all the more interesting—and all the more culturally vital—when it forges its own styles that go hand in hand with its world-building and conceptual innovations, and when the style itself has a speculative quality.
In Karen Joy Fowler’s short story “Face Value,” a human couple on an alien world are studying the beings who live there. One member of the couple accuses the other of using terminology from Earth to describe their new environment in ways that don’t characterize it accurately. The other person responds that the couple’s work is the study of the alien beings, not “the creation of a new language.” His partner replies pointedly: “I really don’t see the difference.” In this moment, Fowler implicitly suggests something remarkable about writing SF: that when you’re describing things that are new, weird, and complex, you might need to find a language that’s equally new, weird, and complex. Through such stylistic speculation, SF can produce fresh possibilities for how we tell stories. And insofar as Ludwig Wittgenstein was right in saying that, for any one of us, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” stylistic speculation in SF has the potential to expand those limits. SF style can open portals affecting how we think about the world of the here and now, as well as about all the worlds that could be or come to be.
Robert McGill’s novels include The Mysteries, Once We Had a Country, and, most recently, A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life. His short fiction has been published by magazines such as The Atlantic, The Dublin Review, and Hazlitt. He’s also the author of two nonfiction books, The Treacherous Imagination: Intimacy, Ethics, and Autobiographical Fiction and War Is Here: The Vietnam War and Canadian Literature. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Toronto. Visit him at robert-mcgill.com.
David F. Shultz writes speculative fiction from Toronto, ON, where he is Lead Editor at Speculative North magazine and TDotSpec Inc. His 80+ publications appear in venues such as Augur, Abyss & Apex, and Diabolical Plots. He can be found online at davidfshultz.com.