Science Fiction and the Hermit Crab

In my immortality Honors class (which is probably due a post of its own, but at this point, I'll just wait until the semester is over), the students read "Lena" last week, which is a short story by Sam "qntm" Hughes that's written in the form of a Wikipedia article. As I prepared to teach it, this got me thinking: was there a term for stories, especially science fiction stories, told in nonnarrative forms? I could think of a couple examples right off the top of my head other than Lena; one was Isaac Asimov's thiotimoline stories, which are written in the form of peer-reviewed chemistry articles, another was Yoon Ha Lee's "Entropy War," which is written in the form of rules for a dice game. Some people love this form: Hughes uses it a lot, actually, so does Lee; among its most famous practitioners is surely Stanislaw Lem, who wrote a number of works of fiction in the form of introductions or reviews for books that did not exist!

I posted on r/PrintSF and r/AskLiteraryStudies asking if anyone else knew a term for these kind of tales; the latter was a dud, but the denizens of PrintSF (my favorite subreddit) came up with a bunch of examples and a couple suggestions for terms.

"Epistolary fiction" was suggested, and as a Victorianist, I am of course very aware of epistolary fiction, but what strikes me about all the examples I came up with is that it's a narrative told through a nonnarrative form. I have long had a fascination with what you might call the "non-novel novel," such as Nabokov's Pale Fire, a novel in the form of a poem with annotations and other critical apparatus. Epistolary fiction uses narrative forms, like letters and diaries, for the most part. (I once tried to do this myself. I began a book in the form of an episode guide to a fictional 1980s BBC science fiction show; my writing group seemed largely baffled but were game for it.)

There's also the term the "false document" story, which is one I'm not very familiar with, to be honest, and I'm trying to track down its precise origin and meaning. I think "false document" probably includes both epistolary fiction and what I'm trying to capture here.

The term I really liked, and had not heard before, so thanks to the PrintSF poster who suggested it, was "hermit crab fiction." If you Google "hermit crab fiction," the top hit is a locked Medium post by Dan Brotzel, but I was able to find it on the Wayback Machine. He defines them as "stories made from found verbal structures such as a shopping list or board game rules or FAQs or even a penalty charge notice," but he's not the originator of the term, which largely seems to be one used by creative writers, not literary critics. He doesn't really explain the term, but I assumed it was something like a story disguising itself by looking like something else.

But through him I was able to trace its origin, which actually comes out of creative nonfiction. Specifically, the term "hermit crab essay" was coined by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their textbook Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction (McGraw-Hill, 2005*). They define it as a form of lyric essay that "appropriates other forms as an outer covering, to protect its soft, vulnerable underbelly. It is an essay that deals with material that seems born without its carapace—material that is soft, exposed, and tender, and must look elsewhere to find the form that will best contain it" (111). So in its original concept, the "hermit crab" metaphor was about emotional vulnerability, something of importance to creative nonfiction, I assume, but not necessarily other genres of writing.

The emphasis on nonnarrative form isn't there in this original definition, as they say the "shells" may come "from fiction and poetry, but they also don't hesitate to armor themselves in more mundane structures, such as the descriptions in a mail-order catalog or entries in a checkbook register" (111). So if you're talking about nonfiction, a fictional form is a transformation. As the term has caught on later, though, in its use by fiction writers, it mostly seems to be about nonnarrative forms, as I said above.

They end their section on the hermit crab with this:

Think in terms of transformation. The word itself means to move across forms, to be changed. Think of the hermit crab and his soft, exposed abdomen. Think of the experiences you have that are too raw, too dangerous to write about. What if you found the right shell, the right armor? How could you be transformed? (113)

There's a big emphasis on emotional expression and protection from this transformation. To move back into science fiction, where I started, there's clearly something different at work. "Lena" and the thiotimoline stories and "Entropy War" are not about emotional vulnerability. Indeed, you might argue they're almost about the opposite. There are a lot of these hermit crab sf stories; just while writing this blog post I thought about three more I hadn't before!

I can't find any evidence of previous work on nonnarative forms in sf (which isn't to say it doesn't exist, as I haven't looked very much yet), so it seems to me something worth thinking about and theorizing further.

* At least, 2005 is the copyright date given on my library's first edition copy. The catalog entry, however, includes 2004 in the call number, and some people on the Internet claim it came out in 2003, so who knows when it was actually released.