Science Fiction Studies

Marc Angenot and Darko Suvin

Not Only but Also: Reflections on Cognition and Ideology in Science Fiction and SF Criticism

Abstract.-- All literature occupies a continuum whose poles are illuminating human relationships versus obscuring/occulting them. SF situates itself within this general spectrum of liberation vs. bondage and self-management vs. class alienation by organizing its narrations around the exploration of possible new relationships, where the text's novelty is historically determined and critically evaluatable. Thus, the understanding of SF--constituted by history and evaluated in history--is doubly impossible without a sense of history and its possibilities, a sense that this genre is a system which evolves within the process of social history. All this means that criticism (and in particular SF criticism) is centrally dealing with the interaction between text and context, the unique literary work and our common social world. In other words, an adequate critical approach will always, at the end of its exploration, relate literary production to social meaning. The critic's task is, thus, not merely to clarify the textual propositions but also to ask whether, beyond the author's craftsmanship, such propositions can be translated into a tenable conceptual system.

SF as a genre is in an unstable equilibrium or compromise between two factors. The first is its cognitive-philosophical and political potentiality as a genre that grows out of the subversive, lower-class form of "inverted world." The second is a powerful upper and middle-class ideology that has, in the great majority of texts, sterilized such potential horizons by contaminating them with mystifications about the eternally "human" and "individual," which preclude significant presentations of truly other relationships. If the above holds for literature in general, it is particularly blatant in the case of SF, which as a genre deals not only with humanity's collective destiny but also--and more particularly--with power relationships in society.

SF criticism must begin considering not only the major achievements of the genre but also the reasons for the unease prevalent in much SF today, which paradoxically corresponds to its marketing successes. In order to do so, SF criticism has to become able to look at its own blind spots as a prerequisite to fully illuminating the dimensions of both cognition and ideology in SF.

Dagmar Barnouw

Science Fiction as a Model for Probabilistic Worlds: Stanislaw Lem's Fantastic Empiricism

Abstract.--The Polish SF writer and theoretician of science, Stanislaw Lem, is one of the most sophisticated and effective commentators on the difficulties faced by the vastly complex and vulnerable social systems in an age dominated by science and technology. Many of his texts support the claims that a theoretician of SF like Darko Suvin makes for the unique responsibility of contemporary SF as well as its unique opportunities.

I shall attempt here to analyze Lem's concept of SF as a cognitive aesthetic model through which to explore contemporary social-psychological behavior. Lem is primarily a writer of SF. His theoretical, "philosophical" work like Summa technologiae--that far-ranging, fantastic, logical discussion of contemporary problems relating to science and technology and ironical secular challenge to Aquinas's Summa theologian--belongs to that genre, and so do his collections of learned introductions to and reviews of imaginary scientific studies, Imaginary Number and Perfect Vacuum. Lem has also been a very prolific commentator on the dubious aspects of much of contemporary SF marking out, by way of contrast, his own imaginative, intellectual territory and stressing the structural considerations that inform his own models.

Albert I. Berger

Nuclear Energy: Science Fiction's Metaphor of Power

Abstract.--The SF dictum that stories ought to be postulated on scientific concepts extrapolated from the existing data has not always been an easy standard for the genre's writers to maintain. Amazing Stories, the first pulp magazine to segregate science fiction stories under one cover, was also publisher Hugo Gernsback's editorial forum for just that dictum.

A central feature of this debate was the "Universal speed limit," ascertained by the physicists Lorentz and FitzGerald: particles cannot travel at, or exceed, the speed of light. The same science promising the fulfillment of so many fantasies of power and prosperity seemingly demolished an equal number focused on interstellar travel. But since Gernsback's idea of "scientifiction" was an extrapolation of existing scientific knowledge to the presumably more advanced technologies of the future, his writers learned to finesse the problem by creating ways to evade the speed limit. The typical pattern was set by "The Skylark of Space" series by E.E. Smith (1928). Nuclear power became a metaphor for the nearly magical fashion in which heroic scientists could overcome the inconvenient laws of nature and get spaceborne cowboys out to the endless frontier of intergalactic space.

As a metaphor, atomic energy filled SF magazines long before the Manhattan Project demonstrated the actual powers released by the split nucleus. Atomic power plants were propelling men from star to star as well as revolutionizing life on Earth. It was the central component of the belief that technological innovation was the principal revolutionary force in the world. Once nuclear energy gave promise of actually fulfilling dreams of unlimited power, boundless social changes could be envisioned. Eventually, this metaphor, enriched by an awareness of the new, real research into the nucleus which characterized physics in the 1930s, was combined with the demand for better and more realistic stories. This tendency marked the genre as a whole--and John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction in particular--and was a central motif in many SF works of the 1940s by authors such as A.E. van Vogt, Clifford Simak, and Robert Heinlein.

John Fekete

The Dispossessed and Triton: Act and System in Utopian Science Fiction

Abstract.--Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed and Samuel R. Delany's Triton, a matched set of brilliant works from the mid-1970s, are both designed to model possibilities and limits of social and individual life. Both construct and explore with admirable virtuosity the structures and dynamics of relatively libertarian societies that are cast into a distant tomorrow. It happens that both are situated on the moons of solar systems next to older societies which resemble our own and which are set on the planets themselves. In presenting their decentralized, anarchist social models, both books make an important contribution to renewing a direction of speculation that has surfaced only infrequently in the utopian tradition since the post-Renaissance rise (and alienation) of science and the rise of correspondingly authoritarian models of the future.

Both books take as their implicit starting point the pervasive discord and fragmentation in contemporary life. But in spite of this shared background of intolerable alienation, the two books are focused differently. Le Guin's interest is in the mergence of the liberatory novum, of individual initiative, of understanding and communication; she works at the ascendant peripheries of the situation and toward the classical utopian aspirations of Western philosophy: reconciliation in the potential harmony of all. Delany, by contrast, presents the dominance of dispersion, of compelling convention, of statistical typicality, of delusion and a systematic distortion of communication; he works at the centres of common experience and immobility. As I probe each work in turn, I shall eventually argue in a critical vein that in spite of their intended opposition, at their limits the two works both present closed systems and therefore both exhibit the ultimately entropic qualities of rationalist models (of moral rationalism in the one case, of structural rationalism in the other). At the same time, it is worth noting that both authors conceive of their formulations (as their respective subtitles indicate) as ambiguous. Gone forever are the unambiguous "design for living" blueprints of earlier utopists, the closed systems of a crude rationalism in whose terms the end of the process is always given from the beginning, and the possibilities and alternatives open to future generations of humankind are usurped, exhausted, or foreclosed. The ambiguity that Le Guin and Delany announce at the outset indicates a shift from the substantive to the methodological at the gravitational centre of their modelling. Through their chosen forms both authors seek to delineate significant structural and axiological vectors of an unfolding and conflict-laden process. In other words, ambiguity is not in and by itself an index of pessimism or failure; rather it involves a suggestion of a process relatively open to the future.

The Uncanny and Science Fiction

Abstract.--Although the fantastic and, in the majority of cases, the thrilling events described in SF are presented as natural occurrences, some SF stories play upon the fear of the supernatural--a supernatural which is, to be sure, outside and not above all reason, and which is thus felt to be uncanny rather than divine or holy (cf. Freud's Unheimliche). An uncanny effect is achieved when the fantastic event restores faith in prescientific attitudes banished by rational people to the realm of superstition.

In SF, the sufficient condition for the irruption of the uncanny is fulfilled by the presence of three prerequisites. First, a fantastic happening must, for a shorter or longer period of time, remain incomprehensible to all those affected. Second, the viewpoint of the narrator must be identical to that of his characters, or one of the characters must be the narrator. Third, the unexplained occurrence must awaken a doubt as to its fundamental explicability. In most SF narratives--in contrast to horror fiction, for example--the uncanny is ultimately dissipated by a cognitively rational explanation of the fantastic event before the end of the story.

This phenomenon is examined in a variety of SF works including Philip K. Dick's "The Imposter" (1955), Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers (1955), and especially Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1951).

"Aesop" and the Ambiguity of Clifford Simak's City

Abstract.--Clifford Simak's City provides a trenchant attack upon human brutality, power-hunger, and instability. Such condemnation is expressed directly by the doggish editor, by the robot Jenkins, and by Jon Webster. Man's evil and immaturity are also emphasized through contrast with the dogs, who steadfastly pursue their noble ideals of non-violence and animal brotherhood. However, the pro-canine and anti-human stance of Simak's novel in fact constitutes only part of its meaning. The development of City reveals that human and doggish civilizations both have their weaknesses and their strengths, and that each culture underlines the shortcomings of the other. The ambivalence which characterizes City is conveyed with particular skill by "Aesop," the seventh of the eight tales that compose Simak's novel.

Sylvia Pukallus, Ronald M. Hahn and Horst Pukallus

"Perry Rhodan" as a Social and Ideological Phenomenon

Abstract.--In this article, an attempt will be made to examine the phenomenon of the Perry Rhodan series. It is impossible to understand it as a purely "aesthetic" fact, or to analyze it as "literature" in the usual sense of literary history and criticism concerned with masterpieces of assumedly profound humanist significance. Nonetheless, Perry Rhodan is very important for SF and modern paraliterature: it is the bestselling SF series in West Germany and possibly in the whole world (ca. 120 volumes have so far been published by Ace Books in the US too). It is probably impossible to understand some crucial aspects of contemporary SF without understanding such a commercial success. We shall begin with a brief sounding into five selected novels from the first 100 books, continue with an examination of the sociological milieu commercially created in order to further the sale of the series, and end with a consideration of the series as ideology--the binding link between the novels' writers and promoters on the one hand and the fans and the readers on the other.

Jeanne Murray Walker

Myth, Exchange and History in The Left Hand of Darkness

Abstract.-- The theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss provide an access to understanding the workings of the myths in Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Among other things, the French anthropologist calls attention to the oppositional structure of myth and to its function in social exchange. He points out that myths are a particularly valuable key to the collective thought of a society because they offer an unusually clear code which classifies and interrelates the data of social experience of the peoples to whom those myths belong. They reinforce and verify the economic, cosmological, and kinship norms of a given society in compressed, almost algebraic fashion. The myths reflect, and reflect upon, the problems and contradictions which arise in practical, everyday life. According to Lévi-Strauss, such thought, inevitably, is highly structured. Myth incorporates in story form pairs of images which represent contradictions lying at the center of the society. The story then develops in such a way as to allow those oppositions common ground. It qualifies or mediates their differences. By mediating between opposites, as they cannot be mediated in real life, myth temporarily overcomes contradiction.

The myths present in Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness assert the impossibility of retreating from history and from human society. They insist that the goal of "keeping to oneself" in a fixed, temporal place is an impossible fantasy, a fantasy that must be sacrificed to the demands of communal exchange in history. Truth arises out of conflict; the only legitimate unity is fragile and momentary. So Le Guin rejects static, cyclical structures. In her myths, as in the myths which Lévi-Strauss interprets, the oppositions define human problems, particularly problems with exchange; their mediation creates or maintains community. That these myths are fundamental to the meaning of the book is evident in the fact that the patterns they define account for most of the plot in the historical sections of the novel. The novel thus locates significance not in some static, timeless place, but in history; and its myths reflect social ideals which continually--and with difficulty--emerge from that history.

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