What the Republican presidents celebrated in their "utopian" tropes was clearly

not the betterment of humanity and the earth but rather the triumph of transnatlonal capital and
right-wing ideology, Engaged in restructuring since the end of
the postwar boom in the 1970s and furthered By the rise to power of ftonatd Reag m in the United
States, Margaret Thather in Britain, and Helmut Kolzl in Germany in the 1980s,tlze new hegemanic
constellation generally succeeded in slzifting from a less profitable centralized mode of production
to a more flexible
regime of accumtzfation that took h l l advantage of technological developments
in cybernetics and electronics.Wultinationa1 corporations based in and supported by
pc>werfufnation-states transformed themselves into transnational entities able to shift the rote of
their ""partner" sates away horn econctmic and social
regulation and into the narrowr job of providing national security (which in the
United States took the form of a "military Keynesianism" "at renewed the war
machine and led to Reagan's covert operations in Central America ancl Buslz's
open pursuit of the Gulf War) 184 scraps of the untainted

the logic of eccrnomic gro-cvth and governmental abdication of

sociaf,responsibilities was not only not stopped but actually intensified in a more
efficient and seemingly responsible manner.184

the domestic kont, tlze privileging

of corporate yowelr, the redistribtltion of wealtlz, the degradation of labor, the
dismissal of the poor, the violent abuse of those seen as different, and the destruction of the ecosystem
escalated in spite of righteous claims to rexrse such
practices

. The rising employment rates in the

United Slates and elsebvere in the West ancl North in the 1990s bespeak not the
revival of industrialization, democratic government, and horizontal redistribution of wealth bat rather
a more canny management of the population by an ecanomic system still intent on a competitiw and
hence exploitatiw exercise of
power over humanity and nature that takes the wealth of labor and the profits of
commerce from those wht) produce it and deposits it in the secure financial and
geographical enclaves of the upper echelons of the executive class.185

even with the rationality of reform liberalism, third-way ""solutions”and

social democratic alliances that repress and refuse their i w n inherent principles,
the world continues to drift toward Anti-Utopia. As the new century gets under
way the "utopian" "rhetoric of three presidential adrninistrations merely exemplifies two interconnected stages
in a historic transformation that banishes the hope
for a better world for humanity and nature from the realm of possibility. 186
Seekng to enclose and exploit every aspect of human and natural existence, the logic of:

what Paul Smith calls "millennia1 capitalism" "claims a planetary system presided

atper by the competitive machinations of transnational ccrrporations, yearning for

success yet ignoring the social and ecological cost. Supported by the largely

rhetorical threat srf corporate abandcrnment in an apparently global economy, the

leaders of the developed nations-whether neoconservatiive, neoliberal, or social

democratic-continue to justify their policy of dismissing soclat well-being in the

name of a false competitiveness that only ends up serving those within the state

who are already wealthy and powerful. 186

Wlzat formaly enables these open, critical texts is an intensification of the

practice of ""genre blurring," which Baccofini has traced in earlier dystoyiaen
works. By self-reflexively borrowing "qecific conventions from other genres,"
critical dystoyias more often ""burnthe received boundaries of the dystoyian form
and thereby expand rather than diminish its creative pcrtential for critical expression 189

As she puts it, the new dystopias "with their permeable bctrders, their
questioning of:generic conventions, anci their resistance to closure, represent one
of tlze preferred sites of resistance" "(""Gencler and Genre" "50). 1 would only add
tlzat this preferred site is not only, even tlzougla importantly, feminist but also
anti-capitalist, democratically socialist, and radically ecological in its overall
stance.

--

, I would argue that

both are examples of the resigned, closed, anticritical, pseudo-dystcdpian sensibility assabated with the anti-
utopian persuasion.

Conside~din terms of:the disthctions set out in the Clzqter 5,these historically
specific texts cluste~; as it happens, on the '3efi'\ide of the dystopian continuum, as
they negotiate the necessary pessimism of-the generic dystcrpia with an open, mtlitant, tztopian
stanGe that not only breaks through the hegemonic enclosure of the
text" alternative world btzt also self-reflexively refuses the anti-tztopian temptation
that fingers like a dormant virus in every dystopian acclount (see Figure 6.1).
In contrast, contemporary dystopian examples that are anti-criticat can be
identified as texts that more readily remain in the camp of nihilistic or resigned
196 The Critical Dystopia
ctxpressions that may appear to challenge the current social situation but in fact
end up reproducing it by ideologically inoculating viewers and readers against
any form of anger or acticzn, enclosing them within the very social realities they
disparagingly expose, Thus, anti-critical texts of this period can be located in an
anti-utopian canstellation of dystopian (better, psetldo-dystopian) cammodities
against which tlze critical dystopian fictions and films struggle for reception and
effect. 196

We live morally in an almost

complete dystopia – dystopia because anti-utopia – and materially (economically) on the
razor’s edge of collapse, distributive and collective. Defined by a hollow 382

Utopia defined as---the construction of a particular community

where sociopolitical institutions, norms, and relationships between people
are organized according to a radically different principle than in the author’s
community; this construction is based on estrangement arising out of an
alternative historical hypothesis; it is created by discontented social classes

interested in otherness and change. All utopias involve people who radically
suffer of the existing system and desire to radically change it.

Estrangement is a cognitive strategy of perception-cum-evaluation based on radical critical

desire. It comports multiple possibilities of anamorphosis and eversion of salient aspects in
the
author’s world, which has as its purpose the recognition that the reader
truly lives in a world of topsy-turvy values.

In case the imaginatively constructed community is not based principally

on sociopolitical but on other, say biological or geological, radically different principles, we
are dealing with Science Fiction (SF). The understanding that sociopolitics cannot change
without all other aspects of life also
changing has led to SF becoming the privileged locus of utopian fiction
in the twentieth century. 383 (tb anteriores)

This means that utopian fiction is, today and retrospectively,

both an independent aunt and a dependent daughter of SF. The lines of
consanguinity begin to intertwine in H.G. Wells’s sociobiological SF, where
biology is mainly a metaphor for social class. 384
EUTOPIA, defined
as in 4 but having the sociopolitical institutions, norms, and relationships
between people organized according to a radically more perfect principle
than in the author’s community; and DYSTOPIA (cacotopia), organized according to a
radically less perfect principle

Utopia is an epistemological beast: a method and not a state.

This disbars it from being translated in any straightforward way into the
ontological sphere. Nonetheless its reason for existing is such a translation
and anamorphosis.

ANTI-UTOPIA is a significantly different locus which is explicitly

designed to refute a currently proposed eutopia. It is a pretended eutopia – a
community whose hegemonic principles pretend to its being more perfectly
organized than any thinkable alternative, while our representative “camera
eye” and value-monger finds out it is significantly less perfect, a polemic
nightmare. Thus, it finally also turns out to be a dystopia.
“SIMPLE” DYSTOPIA (so called to avoid inventing yet another
prefix to “topia”) is a straightforward dystopia, that is, one which is not
also an anti-utopia. 385

The intertext of anti-utopia is, historically, the strongest

“currently proposed” eutopia. Ca. 1915–75 the intertext was therefore antisocialism, but both
earlier (from Souvestre to Kafka’s Penal Colony) and
later other intertexts, say of militarist or market violence, may prevail.

while eutopia and anti-utopia are more akin to satire and

pamphlet (Frye’s “anatomy”) and “simple” dystopia to the standard individualist novel, to the
extent they employ narrative agents and chronotopes,
all of these remain (pace Jameson) fictional strategies jelling into narrative
genres.

A reader of Plato in, say, the twentieth century is reading

against a different horizon of experiences and values, which colours all, so
that the shadow of the SS falls on the Guardians’ politics and erotics; we
might call this the “Pierre Ménard” syndrome or law. ANALIZA
Gloss 8b: This is not a defect but a strength of utopian horizons and
artefacts: born in history, acting upon history, they laicize eternity and
demand to be judged in and by history 386---
It took the second major step in
that tradition: to import into utopia’s other spatial (later: temporal) locus
a radically worse sociopolitical organization, and to do this by developing
the perceptive and evaluative strategy of estrangement into an array of
deeply critical micro-devices. Historically and psychologically, dystopia
is unthinkable without, and as a rule mingled with, satire

in utopia a Thing Which Is Not is posited as being

(in eutopia as being supremely valuable), while in satire a Thing Which Is
is posited as being despicable; one condemns what is by indirection and
the other by direction. If utopia is to be seen as a formal inversion of salient
387
sociopolitical aspects of the writer’s world which has as its purpose the
recognition that the reader truly lives in an axiologically inverted world,
then satire wittily foregrounds the inherent absurdity, and thus counteracts
utopia’s necessary but often solemn doctrinal categorization.

B1 Post-Fordism
14
If history is a creatively constitutive factor of utopian writings and horizons,
then we also have to recognize the epistemic shift beginning in the 1930s
and crystallizing in the 1970s: capitalism co-opts all it can from utopia (not
the name it abhors) and invents its own, new, dynamic locus. It pretends
this is a finally realized eutopia (end of qualitative history) but since it is in
fact for about 90 percent of humanity clearly, and for 8–9 percent in subterranean ways, a
lived dystopia, it demands to be called anti-utopia.(…) . The economists and sociologists I
trust call it PostFordism and global commodity market – unregulated for higher profit of
capital, very regulated for higher exploitation of workers. 389
unprecedented Post-Fordist mobilization and colonization of all noncapitalized spaces, from
the genome to people’s desires (…) After “belief became polluted, like the air or the water”
(de Certeau),
culture began supplying authoritative horizons for agency and meaning.
It does so either as information or as esthetics: information-intensive production in working
time (for example biotechnology, whose output is
information inscribed in and read off living matter) and “esthetic” consumption in leisure
time, the last refuge of desire. The new orthodoxy of
belief proceeds thus “camouflaged as facts, data and events” (de Certeau)
or as “culture industry” images. MUY IMP 390

all talk of
wholeness and totality be henceforth terrorized into extinction.
I can here identify three exemplary Post-Fordist constructions, all “esthetic.” One is
dystopian and anti-utopian: Disneyland (points
18–20), and two are reworkings of old stances and genres, Fallible Utopia
and Fallible Dystopia (points 21–24). This already points to the fact that
hegemonic bourgeois ideology (say in TV and newspapers) has kept resolutely systematic,
albeit in updated guises such as Disneyfication. 391

MUY IMP the overarching dystopian construct is the “informational” one of Post-Fordism and
global capitalism itself, the killer whale
inside which we have to live 391

Muy imp An exemplary (bad) case of a dystopian misuse of eutopian images are the
edulcorated fables and fairy-tales of Disneyland. I shall use it as a privileged pars pro toto of
the capitalist and especially US admass brainwash. Its
spatial rupture with everyday life masks its intensification of commodity
dominance. Its central spring is what I shall (adapting Louis Marin) call
reproductive empathy. As Benjamin remarked, “the commercial glance into
the heart of things demolishes the space for the free play of viewing” by
abolishing any critical distance. This empathy functions, perverting Freud’s
dream-work, by transfer ideologizing and substitution commodifying.
Gloss 18a: Transfer ideologizing is the continually reinforced empathizing immersion, the
“thick,” topologically and figurally concrete, and
seamless false consciousness, that injects the hegemonic bourgeois version
of US normality into people’s neurons by “naturalizing” and neutralizing
three imaginative fields: historical time as the space of alternative choices;
the foreign/ers; and the natural world. Historical time is turned into the
myth of technological progress, while the foreign and nature become the
primitive, the savage, and the monstrous.
In substitution commodifying, the Golden Calf is capillarized in the psychic bloodstream as
commodity. The upshot of Disneyland,
life as “a permanent exchange and perpetual consuming,” commodifies
desire, and in particular the desire for happiness as signification or meaningfulness. The
dynamic and sanitized empathizing into the pursuit of commodity is allegorized as
anthropomorphic animals who stand for various
affects that make up this pursuit. The affects and stances are strictly confined
to the petty-bourgeois “positive” range where, roughly, Mickey Mouse
introduces good cheer, the Lion King courage and persistence, etc (oh <3) (392-93)
In sum: Disneyland’s trap for desire, this fake Other, is a violence exercised
upon the imaginary by its banalized images. Disneyfication is a shaping of
affective investment into commodifying which reduces the mind to infantilism
as an illusory escape from death: a mythology. It can serve as a metonymy of
what Jameson has discussed as the Post-Modern “consumption of the very
process of consumption,” say in TV. It pre-empts any alternative imagination, any fertile
possibility of a radical otherness or indeed simply of shuttling in and out of a story. 394

Fallible Dystopia, a new sub-genre arising out of both

the shock of Post-Fordism and its imaginative mastering:
1. the society of textual action is dystopian, in open extrapolation
from or subtle analogy to human relations and power structures
in the writer’s reality;
2. this new Possible World is revealed as resistible and changeable,
by our hero/ine, often with great difficulty.
This form proposes that no dystopian reality is nightmarishly perfect, and
that its seams may be picked apart. 395

Commodity aesthetics

Superhuman powers- sci-fi trope

This our intermediate class-congeries in the world has since 1945 in the
capitalist core-countries been materially better off than our earlier counterparts: but the price
has been very high 400
But capitalism without a human
face is obviously engaged in large scale “structural declassing” of intellectual work, of our
“cultural capital” (Bourdieu, and see Guillory). There is nothing more humiliating, short of
physical injury and hunger, than the
experience of being pushed to the periphery of social values (and thus of
financing) which all of us have undergone in the last quarter century 402

The first step toward resistance to Disneyfied brainwashing

is “the invention of the desire called utopia in the first place, along with
A Tractate on Dystopia 2001 403
new rules for the fantasizing or daydreaming of such a thing – a set of narrative protocols
with no precedent in our previous literary institutions”
( Jameson). This is a collective production of meanings, whose efficacy is
measured by how many consumers it is able to turn, to begin with, into
critical and not empathetic thinkers, and finally into producers. 403

Last not least, why call our theme and focus “dystopia”, a neologism
invented by J.S. Mill in 1868? Again, one of the reasons is that it was widely
picked up by criticism from the 1950s on. As I discuss at length above,
there is by now wide scholarly consensus that the term of “anti-utopia”
should be reserved for a specific subsection of dystopias written to warn
against an existing utopia, not (as in most dystopias) against the existing
status quo. 408

dystopia” (and “cacotopia”) originated in the conceptual discourse of political philosophy

amid
the nineteenth-century rise of the industrial bourgeoisie and capitalism 408

a piece of
utopian literature, a Fourierist blueprint or Disney World does not fully
enclose any person: one may visit it, but not live in it, one may dwell on but
not in it, one is finally outside not inside.409

The state, in sf as in postmodernity, is replaced by

the multinational corporation. 140 cambridge companion to sci fi

Time Out of Joint (1959) Philip K. Dick

postmodernism’s analysis of the surface, hysteria, the sublime, the pastiche, the end of history, the waning of
affect and the simulacrum
over the original has opened up avenues of exploration which have yet to be
entirely excavated, particularly with regard to non-cyberpunk sf. 147 cambridge companion to sci-fi
sf writers do not have the space for deep
and studied character development, because they are bound to foreground
the imagined world, the action-adventure and the gadgets (…)sf relies, like the other
popular fiction genres, on a set of stock figures, recognizable and emblematic as the characters of pantomime or
the Commedia dell’Arte. 171 cambridge

The manipulation of mutation and evolution by humans is genetic engineering, once a fearful, undefined
prospect, now a multibillion-dollar industry.
The accumulating advances of the last half-century have found expression
in sf 180 cambrirdge

an alternate history dramatizes the moment of divergence from the

historical record, as well as the consequences of that divergence (…)the alteration announces itself quickly,
usually in the first few
pages. 209 cambridge

Alternate histories do not always dramatize their moments of divergence,

however. Often the story or novel begins many years after that moment has
occurred. The reader is immediately in a different world, so that a pleasure
of the reading becomes the discovery not only of what will happen but also
of what already happened, to make this ‘alternate world’ the way it is. 210

Establishing the historical breakpoint . . . is only half the game of writing alternate history. The other half, and to me the
more interesting one, is imagining
what would spring from the proposed change. It is in that second half of the
game that science fiction and alternate history come together. Both seek to extrapolate logically a change in the world as we
know it. Most forms of science
fiction posit a change in the present or nearer future and imagine its effect
on the more distant future. Alternate history, on the other hand, imagines a
change in the more distant past and examines its consequences for the nearer
past and the present. The technique is the same in both cases; the difference
lies in where in time it is applied. 211

Most alternate histories, however, are presented on a grander scale, and

they tend to depict dystopias, bad societies that might have been. Hence
the appeal of two questions around which many alternate histories have
been written: ‘What if Hitler had won?’ and ‘What if the Confederacy had
won?’ The best of both worlds, so to speak, were written at mid-century. 212

it is partially, if belatedly, a timetravel story. Many alternate histories make explicit the comparisons between
real and fictional timelines by intersecting one with another through some sf
mechanism, most commonly time travel. 213

countless fictional time travellers have gone into the

past to consciously or unconsciously, successfully or unsuccessfully, change
the course of history.214
Although time travel is the most common sf mechanism for rationalizing
an alternate history, other mechanisms exist as well. Many stories and novels
presume that more than one ‘parallel world’ with divergent histories can coexist, so that characters can
purposefully or accidentally travel, or ‘timeslip’,
from one timeline to another, like a commuter switching trains214

Related to the timeslip story is the ‘time loop’ story, a very personal sort of
alternate history in which a part of the protagonist’s life repeats itself, with
variations.215 MUY IMPOPOOO

Inspiración? Other alternate histories dramatize more than one timeline while denying
the protagonists any awareness of their parallel selves. (…) The cumulative effect of
the four parallel stories, each quite low-key in its own right, is quite moving,
and the umbrella title invites the reader to seek a broader meaning.

This is the best of all possible worlds’ (candide, voltaire <33))

like popular history in general, alternate history also suffers from militarism – a fixation on war as the
instrument of historical change – and from
the flawed assertion of historian Thomas Carlyle in 1841: ‘The history of the
world is but the biography of great men.’

Small wonder that so many writers have concentrated on the American

Civil War, the Second World War and other well-known cataclysms, and on
such fairly resonant historical figures as Lincoln and Churchill, in writing
their alternate histories.

AUTOBIOGRAFIA POETICAS DE LA FICCION

Deja la autobiografia progresivamente de ser una comunicación de un yo con un tu para

construirse mucha de la bibiografia actual sobre la relacion de ese “yo” con ese texto, mejor
sobre el modo como el texto construye ese “yo”. Un verdadero, tardio y redivivo triunfo de la
textualidad y de la lectura inmanente195

Reacciona De Man (en Rhetoric of Romanticism) contra los intentos de establecer una
distinción entre autobiografía y ficción. Frente a la idea de una referencialidad resultado de
una vida, la del autor, que se narra en la obra, plantea si no sería más acertado decir que es la
obra la que produce la vida: lo que el escritor hace está determinado por el proyecto y los
recursos del medio. No es pues el referente quien determina la figura, sino justo al contrario,
es la figuración la que construye su referente. Por ello el resultado es el mismo que el de la
ficción.(…) la relación entre ficción y autobiografía no es una polaridad o/o, es
indecidible.(..) la aspiración de la autobiografía a moverse más allá de su propio texto, a
trascenderlo e imaginar un “yo” al que se conoce y se narra, es una pura iluusión ya que el
modelo especulativo de la cognición, en el cual el autor se declara el sujeto de su propio
entendimiento es (la manifestación, al nivel del referente, de una estructura lingüística.197

El mundo, esa referencia, no es tal sino un libro, una serie de tropos sin voz. Es el lenguaje el
que figura esa voz y ese mundo, figura y des-figura. 198

El núcleo central del pensamiento de Lacan es la idea de que el sujeto no puede ejercer nunca
la soberanía sobre sí mismo, sino que unicamente puede surgir en el discurso intersubjetivo
con el Otro. El inconsciente está estructurado como lenguaje y es por tanto intersubjetivo.
Más radicalmente afecta aún a la autobiografía la idea lacaniana de que la identidadd del “yo”
sea una construcción significante y no una referencia, lo que genera su especularidad, su
relación con el espejo. 201

a pesar de lo anterior (la autobiografía) puede ser leída como un discurso con atributos de
verdad. (..) un discurso en la frontera de la ficción, pero marcando su territorio con esta. 202
(conviven) la ficcionalidad que de facto se da en todo discurso autobiográfico con la hipótesis
de autenticidad que de iure (y ese es el pacto) contrae ese discurso con sus lectores en el
funcionamiento social. 203

El pacto de lectura propone (la autobiografía) como discurso de verdad para ser leído con tal
valor 208
211

215

216
216

217
El juego de fforde:

219

220
223

Reader’s suspension of disbelief

Neologies call attention to themselves; they are artful. They also call attention to the linguistic power of their
users. 14 seven beauties

While scientific neologisms connote

the power of esoteric language to contain new knowledge, neologisms of exchange promise to enrich the status
quo. In our age, the main sources of such
neologisms are advertising and commercial discourse, whose language of newness conjures up solutions to
existential problems via the commodity-names
of putatively new objects. 16

The names of the so-called

icy moons are drawn almost exclusively from The Tempest; they now include
Miranda, Ariel, and the recently discovered Caliban, Sycorax, Prospero, and
Setebos. (The one exception, Umbriel, is taken from Pope’s Dunciad, making it our system’s sole satirical
moon.)8 This literary sourcing continues in
physics with modern twists, as in the naming of the quark from Finnegan’s
Wake, and the even more whimsical boojum. 17

sciencefictional neologisms will represent the social-evolutionary powers that dominate that fictive world’s
history 18

Artists must consider whether their audiences will be willing to process

their aesthetic information in the ways they wish, and whether audiences will
be willing (or even able) to break away from routine interpretations to construct new designs that will
accommodate the new techniques. These new designs may make many demands: historical familiarity with
artistic expression,
generic competence, openness to new information, and a willingness to reflect. Beyond these personal tasks is
the encompassing social question of what
forms and mutations of discourse are intelligible to a given interpretive community. A coterie of scientists or
hipsters might find it fun to decode an array
of imaginary terms, but the majority of even educated readers may have a consensual limit to how many new
words and neosemes they can entertain, beyond which the experience seems empty, pretentious, or mad. 20

If sf is a quintessentially estranging genre,12 it is in imaginary neologies that

this estrangement is most economically condensed. Imaginary neologies stand
out from other words as knots of estrangement, drawing together the threads
of imaginary reference with those of known language. Science-fictional neologies are double-coded. They are
prospectively anachronistic and, more
than most anachronisms, they are chronoclastic. They embody cultural collisions between the usage of words
familiar in the present (a neologism’s “prehistory”) and the imaginary, altered linguistic future asserted by the
neology. To get on
with the sentence and the story, the reader must imagine what tacit knowledge
went before to make the particular new meanings possible. 19

MUY IMPORTANTE Science-fictional neology operates between two termini. At the first are
neosemes, semantic shifts of words and sentences that remain familiar in
structure and appearance, but have been appropriated by imaginary new social conditions to mean something
new.13 The pleasure of reading them lies in
inferring surprising, and often humorous, pseudo-evolutionary connections
between the familiar and the imaginary new meanings. Science-fictional
neosemes correspond to sf-extrapolation; they are imaginative extensions of
historical and current linguistic practice. At the other terminus is neologism
in the strong sense, the invention of new words that have no histories. The intelligibility of such words does not
depend on social changes in usage, but in
their ability to evoke imaginary differences of culture and consciousness. 19

Newly formed words appear on the metaphoric/paradigmatic axis. They

are drawn less from the obligatory structures of familiar language, than from
a thesaurus of sounds and connotations, which often supplies surplus, sometimes serendipitous, meanings.
Radically new words, in contrast with neosemes, give a sense of distance and otherness; the reader does not
participate
in generating linguistic innovation. In practice, sf writers exploit both strategies together. A characteristic style
has much to do with how an author combines these two aspects of imaginary neology. Most sf neologies are
playful
combinations of arbitrary poetic connotations and established techniques of
making new words out of old ones. 20
The boojum is a particular variety of snark, which causes the baker at the end of the poem to
"softly and suddenly vanish away, and never be met with again".

(CHAPTER 13 BOOJUMED

Representing the future. SF writers sometimes place their stories in imaginary

pasts and presents, but most science fictions are futuristic. They are set in a future time vis-à-vis the author’s
present, or they include an event — an invention, a discovery, a seed — that will prove to be a history-
transforming novum. (CRIMEA? JANE EYRE KIDNAPPING??) 76

SF relies on the historical past tense, both because narrative requires it, and
because sf’s particular construction of the future does. It is the illusion of a completed future that allows science
fictions to be told, and for a parable-space to be
formed, through which readers can shuttle back and forth between the fictive
world and consensus reality. 77

MUY IMPORTANTE No story of its own? It is often said that sf has no distinctive myth or storytelling
formula, that it thrives by adopting the plots of other genres, punching them
up with its distinctively exotic futuristic settings. SF Westerns, detective, and
crime stories abound, as do quests, farces, romps, picaresques, Kafkaesques,
political parables, philosophical fables, fractured fairy tales, surrealist assemblages, rationalized fantasies, and
even terror-and-pity–inducing tragedies.
Given this abundance of host plots, however, it would be puzzling if there were
no shared story-forms latent in them to be shaped by the genre (…)If its stories are
always concerned with global/species/collective transformations mediated by
technology, we may reasonably expect that these concerns will exert morphogenetic pressure on storytelling
itself..216

Most commentators agree with Northrop Frye that sf stories derive from,
and adhere closely to, the mythos of romance: stories in which human heroes
prove their powerful virtue through a series of trials, many of which take place
in anomalous spaces where normal laws do not apply. 216

them modern adventure heroes is their almost instinctual power to deploy

specific kinds of technoscientific knowledge. In many ways, this resembles
cowboys’ generic knowledge of horses and firearms, or detectives’, lawyers’,
and doctors’ arcane gnosis in their respective popular paradigms. In modern
adventure, however, the hero commands practical knowledge that the sciences
codify in abstraction. The modern adventure plot requires that the textual
truths of the sciences, mathematics, practical engineering, anthropology, and
so on, be available — by education or by instinct — to the hero, for whom the
sciences are a warehouse of potential solutions to extremely risky, decisive
(both personally and culturally) situations 233

The style — both of the prose and the design — is governed by the same chaste rigor as scientific writing, or
better yet, the displaced
calculation and mathematical precision of detective fiction. (Hence the attraction of the detective form for many
sf writers — and the shared provenance of
detective fiction and SF in Poe and Conan Doyle.) 65

Common origins in pulp magazines

Many members of the new generation of professional writers created by

the new periodicals dabbled in scientific romance as they dabbled in detective
fiction and adventure stories. The most notable were Arthur Conan Doyle,
whose tentative pre-Wellsian The Doings of Raffles Haw

57 cambridge co

Many stories in the pulp

magazines revolved around solving a problem through scientific means: scientific information was doled out
throughout the tale, usually by characters
explaining to one another. This technique can be viewed as an aesthetic flaw;
it certainly slows the action down and hardly demands realistic characterization. However, if one thinks of the sf
story as a scientific mystery, in which
the reader is invited to accompany the characters on a voyage of discovery, then these blocks of explanation –
known in sf circles as ‘infodumps’
or, more kindly, as ‘expository lumps’ – function like the gathering of clues
by a detective. Each additional fact about a planetary orbit or an atomic
engine leads us closer to the ‘conceptual breakthrough’ that Peter Nicholls,
in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, identified as the central action and
emotional payoff in much sf.3 33 cambridge

sf, in its positioning as a non-literary form outside the canon,

certainly rejects the consolations of good form. However, its adherence to
thriller narrative shapes, odysseys, or detective-like uncoverings of truths
about the world 140 camb

The introduction of Vernian fiction into America initially followed the

same path, but was always distinctive by virtue of its cultural context. Stories about young inventors comprised
one of a number of marketing categories formulated by the publishers of ‘dime novels’, alongside westerns and
detective stories. 22 camb

(in crime finct, detectives) sift through the evidence of witnesses

of different degrees of reliability in order to reconstruct and solve a “crime

Science fiction, we might

say, is to postmodernism what detective fiction was to modernism: it is the
ontological genre par excellence (as the detective story is the epistemological
genre par excellence), and so serves as a source of materials and models for
postmodernist writers (including William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Italo
Calvino, Pynchon, even Beckett and Nabokov) 16 po mo fiction

Pynchon names his heroine Oedipa, suggesting that this novel, too, belongs
to the genre of detective story—which it does, in a sense. Oedipa, like the
classic private-eye, needs to know; she must struggle to bridge the gap between
appearances and reality; she must question the reliability of every piece of
information, every source.22 po mo fic

Science fiction, like postmodernist fiction, is governed by the ontological

dominant. Indeed, it is perhaps the ontological genre par excellence. We can
think of science fiction as postmodernism’s noncanonized or “low art” double,
its sister-genre in the same sense that the popular detective thriller is
modernist fiction’s sister-genre. 59

of the future, who have naturally already solved the mysteries of Mohenjo-Daro
and of the Etruscans, are only too eager to confront the puzzle of alienlanguage
and life, thereby placing their creators in the even more uncomfortable situation of having to invent the latter out of whole cloth in the first
place.
The SF novelist thus shares, but to a metaphysically far greater degree, that
problem of the construction of a "double inscription" which marks the
vocation of the mystery writer: namely that of inventing some fIrst narrative
which is to be hypothetically reconstructed as "fact" in the second or properly
narrative time of the detective himself It is a distinction that goes back to
Aristotle's differentiation of myth and plot - the original legend, rearranged
on stage into dramatic episodes by the playwright; and then reinvented by the
Russian Formalists (fable and "suzhet" ), and after them Genette. "Who cares
who killed Roger Ackroyd?" Edmund Wilson famously wondered; and
perhaps it is less the solution than the very deductive process itself which is
the true focus of our interest and fascination. Even the Great Detective, with
all his eccentricities, is only as charismatic as his Great Deductions. The consequence is unhappily not unlike the phenomenologists' account
of the act -
serving a tennis ball, for example - which must fail in order for us to become
conscious of it. So the Great Deduction must always be just slightly skewed
or flawed in order for us to grasp it as such; and in order to distract us from
a solution which would inevitably fall beneath the Wilsonian judgment. Thus
the grandeur of George C. Scott's supreme act of intellection in The List of
Adrian Messenger Oohn Huston, 1 963) consisted in the properly linguistic flair
with which this amateur detective construed the victim's delirious ravings, as
reported by a French witness: "the last brush: no more brushes! all gone!"
Scott conjectures that in reality the dying man had pronounced a synonym of
the English "brush", namely the word "broom", itself a homonym of the
name of the family - Brougham - whose heirs are in the process of being
successively eliminated. The flaw lies in the supposition that the Frenchman's
unconscious would have known English well enough to have been capable of
making this mistake: on the other hand, it seems possible that only a foreign
speaker would have been tempted to do so; and this slight hesitation between
plausibility and improbability endows the Great Deduction with its electrifying and paradigmatic value.
Seen in this way, it becomes clear that the SF author is placed in a position
of divine creation well beyond anything Agatha Christie or even Aristotle
might have imagined; rather than inventing a crime of some sort, the SF writer
is obliged to invent an entire universe, an entire ontology, another world altogether - very precisely that system of radical difference with
which we
associate the imagination of Utopia. 101 arqueologies of the future

As many writers, &ins, and scholars of s f have noted, the ctxperienced sf reader
moves through a text like a traveler in a foreign culture or a detective seeking clues
to unravel the mystery at hand,fWothproceed incrernenfafly,observing and gradually absorbing
information, making patterns, discovering wqs to see and understand the larger picture in its own right,
ancl finally to act decisively within tlzat
new context-ta enjoy the newfouncl culture or to solve the crime and reestablish
justice and well-being. Miorking from a comparison with the process of detection,
Edward Tames notes that ""the deccrding and assessment rrf these dues can be a major part of the
pleasure provided by the worte; indeed, without that dea3ding and
assessment, in a process of careful reading, it may be impossible to understand the
text at aff" "0th Gentziry 115)." SSf thus invokes and invites a particufar readerly
experience built around a distinctive ""snse of wctnder," qayuality that has long
been part of the sf community's self-~~nderstanding, as can be seen in flamon
Kniglzt's 1956 volume of sE criticism entitled Irz Sear& of6.21onder
(…)This invented world
challenges readers, or seductively invites them, to engage in the thoughtful activity of constructirlg
both tlze details and the social Xogic that comprise it," h doing
so, tl-tesf imaginary maclzine offers them the opportunity to reorganize ""their assumptions and
knowledge, reversing and distorting conventional structures ancl
relationships, and drawing upon the reservc3ir of other [sf) fiction, in order to
make sense of the text"
7 scraps of the untainted sky

fc~rmaland social significance of what Uarko Suvin calls

the "feedback oscillafon" "generated by the relationship between the sf reader and
the sf text: a feedback loop that as Suvin puts it, ""moves now from the author" and
implied reader" norm of reality to the narratively actualized novum [ofthe sf text]
in order to founderstand tlze plot-events, and now back from those novelties to tl-te
author's reality, in order ta see it afreslz kern the new perspective gained.'""L"s t>etany observes, it is this very
feedback loop, or rather the reading protocol it invites,
that constitutes for him the most fruitful m y to arrive at the specificitytrf sf itseff:
"The genre is not a set of texts crr of rhetorical figuresbut rather a reading protoa~l
ccrmpltex*. ..The texts central to the genre beccrme those texts that were clearly
witten to ctxplott a particular protocol complex-texts which yield a particularly
rich reading experience when read according to one complex rather than anc,ther.'qV

8 scraps

t>etectivefiction is written and read by women and often features women protagonists, and its exploration of
""genuine intellectual puzzles" p i n t s to a way to interrogate the status quo (220 Mii.i;t.e91). Russ, of course,
anticipates writers such as
Sarah Peretsky and Sue Grafton, who soon began to transft3rm the hard-boiled
detective novel, or "crime fiction:hs Russ names it, into even more p<>werful social in&errrrgations.
Supernaturat. fiction, also written and read by wctmen, offers
another way into the reafrn of the strange, the dangerous, and that which is not
regarded as "naturaln$ (…)In sf, however, she finds the mrrst p<>werful way fc)rwifrd; for she sees it as an
intellectual mode in which the very struct~jreof the narrative is ccrncerned with the
positing and exploration of new wrlds:

42

. In a discussion of BlochS account of the role of readerleritic (that is suited to the

"work"' of the sfjutopian reader), jack Zipes puts it this way: ""11e work of art] demands
that W become detective-critics in orxr appreciation and evaluation of sucln wrks. Xt is up
to us to determine what the anticipatory illumination [Bfoch'sconcept of Vi7r-Scheiuz)of a
work is, and in doing this we make a contribution to the junfi~ffilledand therefore radical]
cultural heritage. That is, the quality of our cultural heritage and its meaning are determined by our ability to
estirnate what is valuable and utopian in works of art from all periods"; see Zipes's intrc>cItlctionto The
Utoptt~aFUIZCIZ'OB ~ f A r tarzd Litemlure: Sciec~erA" E S S Q J ~
clfErt-lslRloch (19881

287