Sci-fi And Dystopia.docx

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 antiutopian 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

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El juego de fforde:

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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 historytransforming 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