On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre

Abstract

(Estrangement) THE IMPORTANCE OF science (SF) in our time is on the increase. First, there are strong indications that its popularity in the leading industrial nations (USA, USSR, UK, Japan) has risen sharply over the last 100 years, regardless of local and short-range fluctuations. SF has particularly affected some key strata of modern society such as the college graduates, young writers, and general readers appreciative of new sets of values. This is a significant cultural effect which goes beyond any merely quantitative census. Second, if one takes as differentiae of SF either radically different figures (dramatis personae) or a radically different context of the story, it will be found to have an interesting and close kinship with other sub-genres, which flourished at different times and places of history: the Greek and Hellenistic blessed island' stories, the fabulous voyage from Antiquity on, the Renaissance and Baroque utopia and planetary novel, the Enlightenment state (political) novel, the modern anticipation, anti-utopia, etc. Moreover, although SF shares with myth, fantasy, fairy tale and pastoral an opposition to naturalistic or empiricist genres, it differs very significantly in approach and social function from such adjoining non-naturalistic or meta-empirical genres. Both of these complementary aspects, the sociological and the methodological, are being vigorously debated among writers and critics in several countries; both testify to the relevance of this genre and the need of scholarly discussion too. In the following paper I shall argue for a definition of SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement. This definition seems Darko Suvin, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Zagreb and teaches in the Department of English at McGill University, has published on drama and on theater as well as on science fiction, both in English and in Serbocroatian. 1The first version of this essay crystallized out of a lecture given in the seminar on fantastic literature in the Yale University Slavic Department in Spring 1968. It was presented at Temple University, Philadelphia, at the University of Toronto, and at the 1970 conference of the Science Fiction Research Association at Queensborough Community College, New York. I am grateful for the opportunity of discussing it in these places. In particular I have derived much profit from personal discussion with Professor David Porter at the University of Massachusetts, J. Michael Holquist and Jacques Ehrmann at Yale, with Mr. James Blish and Miss Judy Merril, and with my colleagues at McGill University, Michael Bristol, Irwin Gopnik, Myrna Gopnik, and Donald F. Theall. This final version owes much to Stanislow Lem's Fantastyka i futurologia, undoubtedly the most significant full-scale morphological, philosophical, and sociological survey of modern SF so far, which has considerably emboldened me in the further pursuit of this elusive field, even where I differed from some of its conclusions. I am also much indebted to the stimulus given by members of my graduate seminar on SF in the Department of English at McGill University. The final responsibility for the structure and conclusions of the essay cannot be shifted onto any other shoulders than mine, however little I may believe in private property over ideas. Literature and literary are in this essay synonymous with fiction (al).