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Style Gives Substance

Written by Gregory Benford

Listen. Here's a story.

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

That is the classic opening of Raymond Chandler's hardboiled novelette, "Red Wind." Here's another story:

The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

That's the fourth and concluding sentence in the first paragraph of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, with its curious catch midway through, stirred by the breeze, which defeats the monotony you have by now come to expect from the repeated ands. This last sentence finishes the work that paragraph had to do, calling our attention to the momentary stirring before the living leaves fall, then yielding in turn a premonition of early death. Fear of death drives the narrator to abandon combat and in the end the early death comes not to him but to his beloved wife, while giving birth.

Listen. Here's another story:

The place stank. A queer, mingled stench that only the ice-buried cabins of the Antarctic camp know, compounded of reeking human sweat, and the heavy, fish-oil stench of melted sea blubber.

Claustrophobia and revulsion at close contact, the prevailing emotions that run through all of John W. Campbell Jr.'s novella, "Who Goes There?"—later made twice into films titled The Thing. Now listen to an opposite encounter with the alien:

The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space.

Abstractions link lyrically with sensations in Bradbury's "Mars is Heaven!”—alliteration-saturated, and grand and doomed in its black velocities.

Listen to Alfred Bester in "Fondly Fahrenheit" scramble your preconceptions immediately by fidgeting with grammar:

He doesn't know which of us I am these days, but they know one truth.

I submit that often and powerfully, the essence of the story appears in the tone, the style, of these opening passages. One of the signatures of particularly effective fiction is just such implication-rich beginnings. Grab the reader early, tell him by suggestion what’s in store, invite him to the fray.

And what of closings? Sometimes this tells us what a writer thinks and feels after writing the story. Suppose you wish to evoke, at a story's recessional, the feelings of resignation:

It was years before he saw her again. But they spent the last days of '99 together, shooting dodos under the shadow of mighty Kilimanjaro.

That is from Robert Silverberg's "Born with the Dead," and echoes Raymond Chandler's ending for The Big Sleep,

All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again.

That pale, resigned voice quietly closes the door on a story, maybe on a life. And William Gibson used it again in Neuromancer:

He never saw Molly again.

But by now it has become a cliché genre signature, yanking you out of the narrative's world and into your own. Gestures tire and wear out. Or so I read it.

Authors often concentrate their themes into stylistic turns, often near the opening. The manner of telling tells us much. You can see the story implicit in the style. Substance dances with style, and the dance is what we see, seldom the dancers. To separate them is to falsify the reading experience.

I suspect authors often don't quite realize what they're doing; certainly, I don't. Their styles tell us matters beyond their conscious control. So the unconscious gets its voice, too. I contend that style is not just an important element in fiction, but is especially so in science fiction. Style can be crucial in determining matters that the author cannot say any other way. Somewhat oddly, this seems true even in this supposedly analytical, science-based literature, its rational underpinnings so often displayed for all too see like a lady's scarlet bloomers. We might well agree with the opening of a great sf novel, LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness:

I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust.

Note that “Truth is a matter of the imagination”—a deliberate contrary to conventional wisdom.

"Style is the man himself," says Buffon. Indeed there is nothing more personal, no better way for our subconscious to gain its voice. For our words are chosen, all right, but not by "us"—that consensual, passing parliament of the mind we call consciousness. The subconscious lines up our words for us, so that even as I begin this sentence, not all of me knows how it's going to end—hence, style samples the dark netherworlds, the swamp we cannot see but do sense—with its nuances, allusions, illusions, and Freudian slips on embarrassing banana peels.

When discussing sf, indulge not in glossy generalities. We must quote. Voice is crucial, even in mere book reviews. There a reader will not truly know what we're talking about unless we give examples. You must let writers speak for themselves! It’s exactly what they long to do, after all.

Style-less Style

Of course, for long decades the prevailing opinion among fans and even writers of sf was that the best style is one that appears to be no style whatsoever.

The theory here was that the scientific ideas and wrenchings of social perceptions were so great, so alarming, that to mingle any of these with the flourishes, ambiguities and outright flummery of stylistics demanded too much of the reader. This was the ideology of hard sf especially, and largely remains so in the hands of Robert Forward, David Brin and Charles Sheffield, for example. There appears to be much to be said for this point of view, but the key words here are appears to be. Style is partly about appearances, after all.

No style is in fact transparent except to a certain kind of reader, with whom it shares plenty of assumptions. To become even translucent, a manner of telling must agree with the worldview of the reader. It gains transparency by supporting his or her basic assumptions about mechanism and roles. It even defers to the most superficial, ordinary views of the objective labyrinth of sense impressions.

Take the sun, for example. We see it every day, and throughout human history we largely agreed to forget about what it was, and what made it burn. It was so strange, if you thought about it, that everybody agreed to not think about it. Not thinking about things is the essence of the style-less style. Nobody knew what the sun was, so we slapped essentially religious assumptions into place and, understanding nothing, nonetheless made possible many reassuring phrases.

Think about "as sure as the sunrise." After all, the sun might have gone out while we were on the other side of the Earth from it. Worse, it might go nova, as in Larry Niven's "Inconstant Moon." Indeed, Niven got the striking idea for his story by questioning the obvious. The sun always has come up again, after all.

Now we know pretty much how the sun works through nuclear fusion, so we forget it again. But suppose aliens arrive who believe our sun is divine? The stylistics of dealing with this must be different. Gordon Eklund and I, in "If the Stars are Gods," used Swiftian references and humor, combined with stylistic immersion in the actual experience of merging with the divine sun:

Colder than cold, more terrifying than hate, more sordid than fear, blacker than evil. The vast inner whole nothingness of everything that was anything, of all.

I must say that this passage now seems to me rather overwritten. I can hope that Gordon wrote it, but that’s a dodge. I at least let it pass, after all. I recall that we meant to amp the character’s emotions—and thus the reader’s—with a rush of hard adjectiv3es attacking solid nouns.

That passage is an example of what I call effing the ineffable, a literary holy grail in sf, usually accomplished by what I call stylistic blowout. Overpower the reader with adjectives, throw apparently incompatible analogies at him, mingle senses ("he sounded green down the analytic corridors," to make up one on the spot). Give that already blurry-eyed reader rushes of prose, quiet pauses of apparent contradictions, tweaks and allusions to ideas he already knows but will find topsy-turvy here.

An opposite approach is the lofty Mandarin sentiments of Evelyn Waugh, who said,

“Properly understood, style is not a seductive decoration added to a functional structure; it is of the essence of the work of art. The necessary elements of style are lucidity, elegance, and individuality . . .”

Elegance is a tricky word, for Hemingway achieves it, but Hemingway himself said that "Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.” —which seems to contradict much of Waugh. Hemingway's elegance was that of Melville's “Call me Ishmael" and the Bible's “Jesus wept . . . ”—the short, declarative sentence, elegance in simplicity. Much emotional muscle behind few words. English is the largest of all languages, and style depends on that immense vocabulary. We have only a few puny tools to manage all this. First, positioning on the page, which has severe limits. The odd uses of this, as in Harlan Ellison's patchwork compositions and a single, spiraling sentence, are typically used only once: we have a curious resistance to spatial invention. And there are only a handful of punctuation marks, with some, such as the exclamation mark, virtually unused.

I remember a conversation with Samuel Delany and Quinn Yarbro about a new punctuation mark we'd like to have—the sarcasm mark. You could simply begin a sentence with it to denote sarcasm by yourself or your character, letting the voice being implicit. But we decided it probably wouldn't catch on; few prose inventions do.

One might think that genre authors pay less attention to style, relying on swift plots to enrapture their audiences, but I don't believe so. Witness Raymond Chandler:

In the long run, however little you talk or even think about it, the most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writers will always payoff. He can't do it by trying, because the kind of style I'm thinking of is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. But granted you have one, you can only project it on paper by thinking of something else. This is ironical in a way: it is the reason, I suppose, why in a generation of 'made' writers I still say you can't make a writer. Preoccupation with style will not produce it. No amount of editing and polishing will have any appreciable effect on the flavor of how a man writes. It is the product of the quality of his emotion and perception: it is the ability to transfer these to paper which makes him a writer, in contrast to the great number of people who have just as good emotions and just as keen perceptions, but cannot come with a googol of miles of putting them on paper.

This given, what is special about style in science fiction?

The Constraints of the Fantastic

I feel that the essential task we face as science fiction writers is to enlist the devices of realism in the cause of the fantastic. Yet this is not so simple as it seemed to be to writers of sf before the 1960s.

We ground our flights in the reality we already see and feel. So Joe Haldeman opens The Forever War with

"Tonight we're going to show you eight silent way to kill a man . . .” The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn't look five years older than me.

—and we are in boot camp, learning only when the word brainwipes comes along at the end of the third paragraph that something has changed: this is a future in which people can have their minds erased. But by then we've bought into the reality of this world.

Similarly, near the beginning Sheila Finch's Infinity's Web the narrator announces,

She would never forgive herself for not being there when her son was born.

and we know we are in a world of strangeness.

Establishing that confidence is crucial. Hard sf has done it with a choice of voices, all suggesting possible postures toward the material.

Most common is the distant, analytical tone. Arthur Clarke often uses a third person point of view with the lead characters' reactions described from outside, so that the true intelligence of the