Social Literature

Science fiction and Speculative Fiction

What is science fiction / speculative fiction? How is it relevant to social issues?

1. Robert Scholes’s definition of science fiction (1975):
   • “a fictional exploration of human situations made perceptible by the implications of recent science”
   • Not necessarily scientific, doesn’t substitute for science. It’s the fictional possibilities that matter
   • (Source: Robert Scholes, Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future (Indiana UP, 1975) 2.)
2. Darko Suvin (1979): Science fiction is ”literature of cognitive estrangement” (NOT realistic)
   • SF introduces a novum: a “strange newness” that has to sound possible, and as if real or realistic
   • “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.”
   • (empirical = what can be observed in the real world. Here, Sci Fi must be outside the empirical world of the author.
   • (Source: Source: Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (Yale UP, 1979), 4, 7-8.)
3. Gwyneth Jones (1999): Science fiction is a ”thought experiment”
   • Raises a question: “what if?”
   • Explores possibilities of that question in a scientific way like a laboratory experiment in controlled conditions
   • “The business of the writer is to set up the equipment in a laboratory of the mind such that the ‘what if’ in question is at once isolated and provided with the exact nutrients it needs.”
   • (Source: Gwyneth Jones, Deconstructing Starships: Science, Fiction and Reality (Liverpool UP, 1999) 4.)
4. Samuel Delany (science fiction writer of the 1960s-70s, and Octavia Butler’s writing professor)
   • Perspective on Science Fiction as set of reading expectations:
     • We read a sentence differently if we think it’s in a science fiction text:
     • Example: “Her world exploded.”
   • Science fiction offers a novum, as Darko Suvin claims. That novum is symbolic, because it corresponds to our world in some way, even while taking us beyond it

Science fiction: presents possible worlds, a hybrid of the realistic and the fantastic? * fantasy (presents something new/strange and not consistent with our experience * realistic: in presenting something possible according to a rational, scientific or pseudoscientific epistemology

Octavia Butler

• Background: https://www.inverse.com/article/46317-octavia-butler-5-science-fiction-works-to-read

Unusual approach to sci fi:

• strong emphasis on personal, subjectivity, characterization
• black women as lead characters
• Characters of color—race as a factor in identity
• changes fan base for science fiction

Parable of the Sower in context:

• First in Earthseed series re attempt to found a utopian community
• Next in series: Parable of the Talents

• Possibility of a third in the series—not completed

• Other series: Patternist (alternative history) alternative history—long-lived aliens on Earth disguised as aged human beings, over hundreds of years quietly shape human history)
• Xenogenesis (postapocalyptic sci fi) Group of people awake on a spaceship after earth’s destruction.
• Human / Alien interactions: relate to gender issues, plus racial and cultural conflicts of our world