Rhapsody Quotes

“I stepped through the doors of the SA Café with a borrowed copy of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot in my hand, expecting to find more of the same, only to find Philip K. Dick sitting at a table, obsessing over Gnostic demiurges and ersatz realities, Robert A. Heinlein across from him, spouting libertarian aphorisms but paying for Dick’s coffee.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Personally, I’d like to see the word genre taken out back and shot, a bullet in the back of its head, if it’s going to be so overloaded with meanings it’s just gibberish skewed to self-serving doublethink.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“We insist that this stuff we call science fiction is not SCI-FI. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is proper science fiction and then there’s that SCI-FI shit.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Losing maturity in one’s fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that’s not always a bad thing.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Slipstream – sorry, infernokrusher - takes a cut-throat razor to the hackneyed clichés of both strange and mundane genres. It cannibalises them, retrofits them, treats them the way Godzilla treats Tokyo, the Burroughs treats Interzone. Smash and grab. Cut up and fold in.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“– No SF novel ever won the Booker, growls a prowling clansman on his way into the SF Café.
The librarian swings a shotgun from inside her longcoat, blasts the bullshit axiom from the air. Screw the Booker, she thinks. She’d rather have a hookah.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“All prejudice presents itself as piety, propriety.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“This is the fiction that I’m referring to as rhapsody, this stitching of mimetic representation, oneiric imagery, ludic rules, allegoric morals, satiric critique and diegetic story into complex quiltings of narrative.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“the crescent sun is high, the moon low;
life is not for the faint-hearted;
so why the fuck should art be?”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Man, that’s a killer strategy, that is, an awesome way to persuade the incognoscenti that we’re not crazed hokum junkies, high on hackwork, trying to pimp our addled euphoria to anyone who passes. Yeah, vehement denial that we’ve got anything to do with the crack-whore pump-daddy beast of a thousand cocks locked in the closet. Bitter accusations of snootcocking snipewankery when they point out that crack-whore pimp-daddy beast of a thousand cocks in the closet. Offended outrage when they assume the mindfuck we’re touting is a cheap handjob, just because we’re, like, standing on a street corner dressed to sell our arses. And because our first words to a prospective customer just happens to be, ‘Hey, big boy.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“–It’s not Sci-Fi, we insist, It’s SF.
Every time you say that a Venusian Slime Boy dies, you know.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Fuck the epistemic modality; this is alethic modality we’re talking now, not factuality but possibility.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Essentially, in the model of strange fiction based in shifts in narrative modality, we are reversing the polarity, treating those ‘contents’ (errata, nova and chimera) as the end results of a literary technique of estrangement, the effects of strangeness rather than the cause. These quirks – dragons, spaceships, magic, FTL – are not things which, in and of themselves, make fiction strange. Rather they are the epiphenomena of an underlying process of semiosis, figurae generated and combined to create meaning, gaining their symbolic power by their application. Genre is not a question of which trove of tropes one uses, of a characteristic set of quirks; rather it is a quality emergent from the underlying dynamics of modalities, the nature of the impossibilities and our affective responses to them – the uncertainties and ethical imperatives too, if we include epistemic and deontic quirks in our scope along with the alethic and boilomaic.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Soylent Brown? It ain’t people, but it comes from them.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“The spelunkers of speculative fiction mining phosphorescent filth from the bowels of the city of New Sodom, the Sci-Fi freaks scraping kipple and back from the bins of decades-old shit sandwiches out back, composting it to grow shrooms, we have built this thing to take its place.
This is the legacy of generations of writers who’d rather tackle adult themes than pander to puerile power-fantasies, whose interests lay with the soft sciences and humanities as much as with the hard sciences and technology, for whom the fiction was always more important than either the fantasia or the futurology. It is also the legacy of those who simply don’t give a fuck about anything other than either fantasia or futurology. This is fiction in which the envelope has been pushed so far out, from ambition or expedience, that all descriptions and definitions – SCIENCE FICTION, SCIENCE FANTASY, SCI-FI, even speculative fiction – can only be, at best, nominal labels for it. It is the fiction that abandons those labels for a negation of description, an indefinition – the acronym SF, which might mean any or all of those things.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“In the ghetto of Genre, anything goes, man. When you live in the gutter it doesn’t matter if you’re filthy. In theory anyway.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“All worlds of fiction are alternative realities.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Fuck, if only ‘aesthetic idiom’ didn’t sound so damn poncy.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“So, fuck ’em, we say. Fuck the mundane of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We’re GENRE FICTION and proud of it, proud to wear that brand painted on the backs of our biker’s jackets.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Jack in and jerk off, kid! You too can save the world ... from those evil, bug-eyed commies from space!”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“The quirky flavourings of the idiosyncratic ideologue ultimately drowned in the ketchup of redheaded twins and nipples that go spung.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“I likes me some ‘Shit Blows Up’ fiction, don’t get me wrong.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“For some the label sci-fi is just a shortand for science fiction, an alternative to sf gesturing at ... you know, that stuff we like.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Fiction that fails to engage an audience with the emotional intricacies of viable characters will, for many in that audience, simply alienate them with its profound irrelevance at the human level.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“In a spectaculist fabrication, the cardinal rule is Shit Blows Up.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Brain out, sponge in’ fiction.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Popular and unpopular don’t necessarily map to shit and shinola, of course.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“AI will begin as Artificial Idiocy. Who cares if a computer can play chess or take control of cyberspace? Can it trash Tokyo, huh, huh?”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Writers are a combative bunch when it comes to aesthetics, and the generation before GENRE are born into a discourse that’s been brewing since Cervantes.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Here now, in the elsewhen of the SF Café, we’ve had the shenanigans going on for decades, but we haven’t yet adjusted to the idea of SF as a mode, still search for ways to parse it all as one big generic form, one big conventional template, bound in negotiated strictures albeit abstract.
We can offer any text as SF.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions