The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 0819570923
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
As the world undergoes daily transformations through the application of technoscience to every aspect of life, science fiction has become an essential mode of imagining the horizons of possibility. However much science fiction texts vary in artistic quality and intellectual sophistication, they share in a mass social energy and a desire to imagine a collective future for the human species and the world. At this moment, a strikingly high proportion of films, commercial art, popular music, video and computer games, and non-genre fiction have become what Csicsery-Ronay calls science fictional, stimulating science-fictional habits of mind. We no longer treat science fiction as merely a genre-engine producing formulaic effects, but as a mode of awareness, which frames experiences as if they were aspects of science fiction. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction describes science fiction as a constellation of seven diverse cognitive attractions that are particularly formative of science-fictionality. These are the “seven beauties” of the title: fictive neology, fictive novums, future history, imaginary science, the science-fictional sublime, the science-fictional grotesque, and the Technologiade, or the epic of technsocience’s development into a global regime.
depend on placing untransformed language into transformed contexts, such as parable, comedy, and satire. Parable, for example, prefers common, straightforward diction that appears to be semantically transparent. Once the reader acknowledges the overarching figurative character of the parable text, the ostensibly unassuming terms acquire new meanings. Satire in particular thrives on the appropriation of conventional discourse for meanings it does not intend. Stipulating to the hegemony of
been shifted into the past. (Quoted in Alkon, Origins 14 –15) The past was separated from the present by its immutable gravity of memory and aura. The future had meaning only as entelechy, as the moment when developments originating in the past would be completed. Apocalypses occurring in the future would, by definition, abolish time itself, turning it, in retrospect, into the emptiness of mere expectation of its own annihilation. Several shocks had to occur for writers and publics to conceive of
fantastic: “Once it gets ‘off the ground’ into space all science fiction is fantasy, and the more serious it tries to be, the more naturalistic, the greater its failure, as it completely lacks the moral authority and conviction of a literature won from experience.”18 The point is just as valid when we change the terms from space to future time. As John Clute puts it, sf is “free history.”19 It may be persuasive, but it is always poetic and figural. The concreteness of the represented future (that
other fantastic cultural expressions. In postmodern technoscientific societies the archive of obsolete futures is growing to match the archive of remembered pasts. By disrupting the temporal logic of continuity with the present, alternative histories and parallel worlds appear to renounce the ethical seriousness of the revolutionary and evolutionary paradigms. If there is no connection, how can there be responsibility? On the surface, such dispersed worlds lack even the minimal gravity of other
formalizations can “lie” when they are used to validate real-world arguments — by either tacitly bracketing out important noisy factors or by using scientific tropes to cover ethical dilemmas52 — embedding extratextually validated scientific ideas in sf is also the most effective means of disguising the fictive rationalization that is sf’s stock in trade. SF’s discursive play does not undermine the truths of materialist/ mathematical science, which it can pick up and drop at will. It operates to