Darko Suvin -- The State of the Art in Science Fiction Theory 07/07/13 20:00

Science Fiction Studies

# 17 = Volume 6, Part 1 = March 1979

Darko Suvin
The State of the Art in Science Fiction
Theory: Determining and Delimiting the
Genre*
... a distinction is drawn by arranging a boundary
with separate sides so that a point on one side
cannot reach the other side without crossing the
boundary . . . . There can be no distinction without
motive, and there can be no motive unless contents
[on each side of the boundary] are seen to differ in
value. -If a content is a value, a name can be taken
to indicate this value. -Thus the calling of a name
can be identified with the value of the content. --
G. Spencer Brown, Laws of Form (1969)

The problem of any cultural domain as a whole

can be envisaged as the problem of limits to that
domain. -- Mikhail Bakhtin, Voprosy literatury i
èstetiki (1975)

It is often thought that the concept of a literary genre (here

science fiction, further SF) can be found directly in the objects
investigated, that the scholar in such a genre has no need to
turn to literary theory since he/she will find the concepts in the
texts themselves. True, the concept of SF is in a way inherent in
the literary works — the scholar does not invent it out of whole
cloth -but its specific nature and the limits of its use can be
grasped only by means of theoretical methods. The concept of
SF cannot be extracted intuitively or empirically from the works
called thus, as was usually tried until the 1960's and is still often
tried today by positivistic critics (especially frequent in Anglo-
American criticism, vast stretches of which are therefore
unrepresented in the following discussion). In such cases,
unfortunately, the concept arrived at is primitive, subjective,
and unstable. In order to determine it more pertinently and
delimit it more precisely, it is necessary to educe and formulate,
(1) positively, its specific domain, and (2) negatively, its
relationships with other literary genres and cultural
determinants among which it develops.

The following select list of criticism on the theory of SF is

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intended to suggest the state of the art in this field and to permit
a discussion of its achievements. The list includes items which
were available to me by the middle of 1976. In order to
concentrate on the crucial questions of a field in rapid
development, it has had to be restricted in several ways beyond
the usual selectiveness. First of all, it does not encompass
general theoretical works on literature and culture useful (even
supremely useful) for formulating SF theory, from Aristotle and
Curtius to Frye and Goldmann, Bakhtin and Brecht: it
encompasses only texts dealing explicitly - at least in part - with
SF. This also means that such fundamental works about literary
utopia as those by Barthes, Elliott, Frye, Marin, Ruyer or
Walsh, which tell us much about SF, are absent from the list. 1
Second and perhaps more important, the crucial questions
restrictively — but I hope not arbitrarily — chosen for
discussion are: (1) What are the necessary and sufficient
conditions or characteristics whose presence identifies a fictional
story as SF; in particular, this leads to the question: what are
the relationships between science and SF? (2) In consequence,
what are the limits of SF as literary genre which is to be
understood by differentiating it from the mimetic or mundane
("naturalistic") as well as supernatural or metaphysical
("fantastic") genres? These two main questions can be called
respectively (1) determination, and (2) delimitation, though the
very etymology of these terms shows that they are but the
internal and external approaches to the same theoretical
problem.

Third, the above means that this essay will not be dealing with
many general aspects of SF, and in particular not with criticism
contributing to the (certainly useful) knowledge of the motifs,
conventions, and sub-forms into which SF can be subdivided or
which go to make it up. Thus some extremely salutary
propaedeutic articles do not find a place in the list. 2 Fourth,
there are as a rule special semantic contexts to discussions of SF
theory in the USSR, and some very interesting Soviet texts have
been reluctantly omitted from the following list, since their use
of terms such as realism, romantic, utopia, fantasy, etc., would
necessitate separate discussion for which this is not the place.3
Fifth. my list is not homogeneous either by quality or by degree,
and the inclusion of an item does not indicate that I approve or
disapprove of it, but simply that it seemed necessary for a full
overview of achievements in the field (including some dead ends
or negative experiments which were sufficiently consistent and
significant). Finally, after a reconsideration of the subject-object
relation in scholarship, it has seemed to me that to leave out the
Suvin texts would be misleading and therefore less informative
than to include them; considerations under my immediately
preceding point hold for them too.

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The list is alphabetical, and the entries are as a rule by short

title and to the most available edition. A number of items were
first published in small magazines, including privately printed
fanzines, so that a proper chronology would be difficult to
establish; besides, this essay proceeds as a rapid overview of
main problem-clusters rather than of genesis (or of the finally
irrelevant scholarly "precedence"). Nonetheless, an overall
chronological breakdown is possible. Two marginal and more
or less symbolically representative items date from before
World War 2 (Trotsky and Gove), three still interesting but fast
receding ones from the 1950's (Brown, Schwonke, and
Heinlein); thus, even allowing for a more rapid obsolescence of
the texts before ca. 1960, it is clear that really sustained work on
SF theory began to be published in the 60's (9 items: Caillois,
"Atheling," Nudelman, Ostrowski, Zgorzelski, Delany, Handke,
Klein — all are pioneering but by the same token mostly
tentative or partial) and even more clearly in the 70's (24 items,
beginning with Lem's book with which one can say that SF
theory came of age). The most numerous contributions come
from the USA, Poland (some of them in English), and Canada;
this proportion in significant theory is rather different from that
of SF criticism in general, the bulk of which is, no doubt,
published in the USA, then in the USSR, and then in the UK.
The reasons for the smaller number of contributions from USA
and USSR have already been touched upon; accordingly, in the
following list there is a larger number of items from Europe
(inclusive of Russia) than from North America.

If one wanted to do a meticulous genetic survey of the first

questions -rather than answers — about SF, it would be
necessary to begin with its prominent practitioners, from Poe's
notes to Hans Pfaall about the necessity of verisimilitude,
through Lasswitz’s writings on "scientific fairy tales"4 and a
number of Wells's articles (such as the Preface to his Seven
Famous Novels in 1934) to the Soviet writers Beliaev and
Dolgushin, as well as Stapledon in Britain and a number of US
writers (of which I have retained only Brown and Heinlein). It is
interesting to note that out of the list's 38 items 8 are by
practicing SF writers (including Klein and Lem), which
indicates a very considerable self-consciousness and laudable
articulativeness on their part. Rather less euphoric is the state of
affairs concerning theoretical questions among the critics of the
genre, academic or otherwise, before (say) the mid-60's. As
Professor Philmus remarked of three books (and could have
remarked of practically the whole period), these early critics
"did not examine seriously the meaning of SF or ask whether
there may be meanings the genre is particularly and peculiarly
qualified to express."5 As late as 1971, the first academic
collection of essays on the genre contained only two which could
be said to possess serious theoretical interest, and both were by

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SF writers.6 I have retained Trotsky and Gove from such a

prehistory of SF theory as examples of path-breaking
discussion — albeit on the margin of SF — of, in the first case, a
historical genre (the imaginary voyage), and in the second case,
social perception in literature (Russian "cosmist" poetry).
Conveniently, they can also serve as examples of academic and
non-academic - one might perhaps say of formalist and activist -
criticism, two kinds or modes which will run parallel until the
1970's and show some tendency of fusing during these last years.

1. Atheling, William Jr. [James Blish]. "Science-

Fantasy and Translation."More Issues at Hand.
Chicago, 1970, pp. 98-116 (first publ. 1960 and
1963).

2. Bellemin-Noël, Jean. "Des formes fantastiques

aux thèmes fantasmatiques." Littérature No. 2
(1971), 103-18.

3. Britikov, A[natolii]. "Sovetskaia nauchnaia

fantastika," in L. Poliak and V. Kovskii, eds.
Zhanrovo-stilevye iskania sovremennoi sovetskoi
prozy. Moskva, 1971, pp. 308-50.

4. Brown, Frederic. "Introduction." Angels and

Spaceships. London, 1955, pp. 9-13 (first publ. 1954).

5. Caillois, Roger. "De la féerie à la science fiction."

Images, images. . . . Paris, 1966, pp. 11-59 (first publ.
1960).

6.Delany, Samuel R. "About Five Thousand One

Hundred and Seventy Five Words," in Thomas D.
Clareson, ed. SF: The Other Side of Realism.
Bowling Green OH, 1971, pp. 130-46 (first publ.
1969).

7. Eizykman, Boris. "On Science Fiction." Science-

Fiction Studies 2, No. 2, (1976), 164-66 (untitled
original in Les Nouvelles Littéraires 52, No. 2427
[19741, 7).

8. Foht, Ivan. "Slika covjeka i kosmosa." Radio

Beograd: Treci program (prolece 1974), 523-60.

9. Gove, Philip Babcock. The Imaginary Voyage in

Prose Fiction. New York, 1975 (first publ. 1941).

10. Handke, Ryszard. Polska proza fantastyczno-

naukowa. Wroclaw, 1969.

11. Heinlein, Robert A. "Science Fiction: Its Nature,

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Faults and Virtues," in Basil Davenport, ed. The

Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social
Criticism. Chicago, 1964, pp. 17-63 (first publ. 1959).

12. Hienger, Jörg. Literarische Zukunftsphantastik.

Göttingen, 1972.

13. Jameson, Fredric. "Generic Discontinuities in

SF," in R.D. Mullen and Darko Suvin, eds. Science-
Fiction Studies: Selected Articles on Science Fiction
1973-1975. Boston, 1976, pp. 28-39 (first publ. 1973).

14. Jameson, Fredric. "World Reduction in Le

Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative," in
R.D. Mullen and Darko Suvin, eds. Science-Fiction
Studies: Selected Articles on Science-Fiction 1973-
1975. Boston, 1976, pp. 251-60 (first publ. 1975).

15. Ketterer, David. New Worlds for Old: The

Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and
American Literature. New York, 1974 (first publ.
1971 to 1973).

16. Ketterer, David. "Science Fiction and Allied

Literature." Science-Fiction Studies 3, No. 1 (1976),
64-75.

17. Klein, Gérard. "Entre le Fantastique et la

Science Fiction, Lovecraft." Cahiers de l’Herne No.
12 (1969), 47-74.

18. Lem, Stanislaw. Fantastyka i futurologia. 2 vols.

Kraköw, 1970; rev.edn. 1973.

18a. Lem, Stanislaw. "On the Structural Analysis of

Science-Fiction," in R.D. Mullen and Darko Suvin,
eds. Science-Fiction Studies. . . 1973-1975. Boston
1976, pp. 1-7.

l8b. Lem, Stanislaw. "The Time Travel Story and

Related Matters of SF Structuring," in R.D. Mullen
and Darko Suvin, eds. Science-Fiction Studies ...
1973-1975. Boston, 1976, pp. 16-27.

19. Lem, Stanislaw. "Philip K. Dick: A Visionary

among the Charlatans," in R.D. Mullen and Darko
Suvin, eds. Science-Fiction Studies . 1973-1975.
Boston, 1976, pp. 210-22 (first publ. 1975).

20. Lem, Stanislaw. "Todorov's Fantastic Theory of

Literature." Science Fiction Studies 1, No. 4 (1974),
227-37.

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21. Nudelman, Rafail. "An Approach to the

Structure of Le Guin's SF," in R.D. Mullen and
Darko Suvin, eds. Science-Fiction Studies ... 1973-
1975. Boston, 1976, pp. 240-50 (first publ. 1975).

22. Nudel'man, R[afaill. "Fantastika i nauchno-

tekhnicheskii progress." Angara38, No. 4 (1968), 62-
67.

23. Nudelman, Rafaill. "Conversation in a Railway

Compartment." Science Fiction Studies 5, No. 2
(1978), 118-30 (first publ.. 1964).

24. Ostrowski, Witold. "The Fantastic and the

Realistic in Literature." Zagadnienia Rodzajów
Literackich 19, No. 1 (1966), 54-71.

25. Philmus, Robert M. Into the Unknown. Berkeley

and Los Angeles, 1970.

26. Philmus, Robert M. "Science Fiction: From its

Beginning to 1870," in Neil Barron, ed. The Anatomy
of Wonder. New York, 1976, pp. 3-16.

27. Price, Derek de Solla. "Science Fiction as

Science: Why Sci-Fi Zaps," The New Republic (30
Oct., 1976), 40-41.

28. Rabkin, Eric S. The Fantastic in Literature.

Princeton, 1976.

29. Russ, Joanna. "Towards an Aesthetic of Science

Fiction," in R.D. Mullen and Darko Suvin, eds.
Science-Fiction Studies . . . 1973-1975. Boston, 1976,
pp. 8-15 (first publ. 1975).

30. Scholes, Robert. Structural Fabulation. South

Bend and London, 1975.

31. Schwonke, Martin. Vom Staatsroman zur Science

Fiction. Stuttgart, 1957.

32. Suvin, Darko. "On the Poetics of the Science

Fiction Genre," in Mark Rose, ed. Science Fiction.
Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1976, pp. 57-71 (first publ.
1972).

33. Suvin, Darko. "Science Fiction and the

Genological Jungle," Genre 6, No. 3 (1973), 2 S 1-73.

34. A, B, and C [Darko Suvin]. "The Significant

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Context of SF," in R.D. Mullen and Darko Suvin,

eds. Science-Fiction Studies . . . 1973-1975. Boston,
1976, pp. xiii-xix (first publ. 1973).

35. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic. Cleveland &

London, 1973 (Introduction à la littérature
fantastique. Paris, 1970).

36. Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. Ann

Arbor, 1960, pp. 210-12 (Literatura i revoliutsiia,
Moskva, 1924).

37. Trzynadlowski, Jan. "Próba poetyki science

fiction," in K. Budzyk, ed. Z teorii i historii
literatury. Warszawa, 1963, pp. 258-80.

38. Zgorzelski, Andrzej. "The Types of a Presented

World in Fantastic Literature." Zagadnienia
Rodzaiòw Literackich 10, No. 2 (1968), 116-27.

1. How can the domain of SF be determined, on what does it

hinge as its theoretical axis? The answering is clouded by the
present wave of irrationalism, engendered by the deep
structures of the irrational capitalist way of life which has
reduced the dominant forms of rationality itself to something
narrow, dogmatic, and sterile inasmuch as they are the forms of
reasoning of the dominant class. Nonetheless, I do not see any
tenable internal determination of SF which would not hinge on
the category of the novum (Suvin No. 32, borrowing the term
from Ernst Bloch 7 ). A novum or cognitive innovation is an
important difference super-added to or infused into the author's
empirically "known" — i.e., culturally defined — world (Brown
No. 4, Klein No. 17); or, more usefully, it is an important
deviation from the authors norm of reality. As a consequence,
the essential tension of SF is one between the reader,
representing a certain type of Man of our times, and the
Unknown introduced by the novum (Nudelman No. 23). The
postulated innovation may be of quite different degrees of
relevance and magnitude - the latter runs from the minimum of
one discrete new "invention" (gadget, technique, relationship) to
the maximum of a scene (spatiotemporal locus), agent (main
characters), and/or relations basically new and unknown in the
author's and the implied reader's environment, which is testified
to and identifiable by the SF text's historical semantics, what
Rabkin No. 28 calls a "grapholect" marking "the writing 'voice'
as coming from a particular time, place and social group." The
postulation of the novum is based on and validated by the post-
Cartesian and post-Baconian scientific method. It would follow
that the opposition between science and the science-fictional
hypothesis or innovation is (pace Philmus No. 26) only
epiphenomenal and cannot serve to disjoin SF and science —

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though it can serve as a warning that a proper analysis of SF as

a literary genre cannot base itself on its "explanatory scientific
content" (italics mine). Indeed, Philmus No. 26 himself very
usefully distinguishes naturalistic fiction which does not require
scientific explanation, and fantasy which does not allow it, from
SF which both requires and allows it.

If the novum is the necessary condition of SF (differentiating it

from “naturalistic" fiction), the validation of the novelty by
scientifically methodical cognition into which the reader is
inexorably led is the sufficient condition for SF. Though such
cognition obviously cannot, in a work of verbal fiction, be
empirically tested either in vitro or in vivo - in the laboratory or
by observation in nature — it can be methodically developed
both against the background of a body of already existing
cognitions and as a "mental experiment" following accepted
scientific, i.e. cognitive, logic. The final reliance of SF on the
basic axioms of articulated and clear cognition leads to the
crucial necessity of distinguishing between the "really possible"
— that which is possible in the author's reality and/or according
to the scientific paradigm accepted in it — and the "ideally
possible" (Foht No. 8). Only in "hard" or "near-future" SF
does the story's thesis have to conform to a "real possibility";
on the contrary, any SF thesis has to conform to an "ideal
possibility" in the sense (as Foht No. 8 again notes) of a
conceptual or thinkable possibility the premises of which are
not in themselves or in their consequences internally
contradictory (as in, e.g., time-travel, or omnipotence and
similar metaphysical wish-dreams). It is intrinsically or by
definition impossible for SF to acknowledge any meta-physical
agency, in the literal sense of an agency going beyond physics
(nature), beyond the ideal possibilities of physics or any other
science. Whenever it does so it is not SF but a metaphysical or
(to translate this from Greek to Latin) a supernatural story. The
presence of scientific cognition — not only and not even
primarily in the guise of facts or hypotheses but as the
manifestation and sign of a method identical to that of the
philosophy of science - differentiates thus SF from the
"supernatural" genres or fantasy in the wider sense, which
include fairy tales, mythical tales, moral allegories, etc., over
and above horror or heroic "fantasy" in the narrower sense.

Thus, it is not sufficient to say that the narrative world of SF is

"at least somewhat different from our own", and that the
difference is "at least apparent against an organized body of
knowledge" (Rabkin No. 28): for magic too is an organized body
of knowledge, and a fairy tale is often more at variance with the
author's empirical world than SF. And of course the one
paragraph in Todorov No. 35 is quite insufficient for a serious
placing of SF, even within a system that is open to, as grave
doubt, as the other systems it so convincingly demolishes (cf. the

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critiques in Bellemin-NM No. 2 and Lem No. 20)8. With much

justice, science has been called the basic world-view of SF (Russ
No. 29, Lem No. 18, Nudelman No. 23), its "initiating and
dynamizing motivation" (Trzynadlowski No. 37). However, this
emphatically does not mean that SF is "scientific fiction" in the
literal or crass sense popular between the World Wars and still
found in Heinlein No. 11. Indeed, a number of important
provisos and elucidations ought immediately to be attached: I'll
mention three. First, "world view" (probably "horizon" would
be a less ambiguous term) is not identical to ideology. Our world
view or conceptual horizon is, willy-nilly, determined by the fact
that our existence is based on the application of science(s), and I
do not believe we can imaginatively go beyond such a horizon;
even a machineless Arcadia is today simply a microcosmos with
zero-degree industrialization and a lore standing in for zero-
degree science. On the other hand, within such a scientific
paradigm and horizon, ideologies can stand anywhere between
the full support and full denial of this one and only imaginable
state of affairs. Thus, anti-scientific SF is just as much within
the scientific horizon (namely a misguided reaction to the
repressive - whether capitalistic or bureaucratic - abuse of
science) as, say, literary utopia and anti-utopia are both within
the perfectibilist horizon. In other words, the so-called
"speculative fiction," e.g. Ballard's, clearly began as and has
mostly remained an ideological inversion of SF. No doubt, in SF
the "locus of credibility . . . must be extended from the scientific
rationale to [the significance of] the entire fictive situation — . . .
ultimately to the perception . . . of the reality that it displaces,
and thereby interprets," as Philmus No. 25 argued; but I would
add that the key to the interpretation is exactly the fact of its
being conducted within the scientific horizon. Second, "sciences
humaines" such as anthropology-ethnology, sociology or
linguistics (that is, the mainly non-mathematical sciences) are
equally based on scientific methods such as: the necessity and
possibility of explicit, coherent, and immanent or non-
supernatural explanation of realities — Occam's razor —
methodical doubt — hypothesis-construction — falsifiable
physical or imaginary (thought) experiments — dialectical
causality and statistical probability — progressively more
embracing cognitive paradigms — and similar; these "soft"
sciences can therefore probably better serve as basis for SF than
the "hard" natural sciences; and they have in fact been the basis
of all better opuses in SF (partly through the characteristic
subterfuge of the science in which hard nature and soft
humanities fuse — cybernetics). Third, science is since Marx
and Einstein an open-ended corpus of knowledge, and all
imaginable new corpuses which do not contravene the
philosophical basis of the scientific method in the author's times
but are continuous with existing science (e.g., the
simulsequentialist physics in Le Guin's The Dispossessed) can
play the role of scientific content and validation in SF.

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Cognitive novelty as the necessary and sufficient kernel or

"conceptual premise" (Lem No. 18B) of any SF tale implies a
number of things. Again, I shall mention only three which seem
to me to stand out, or to be deducible, from the writings in the
list. First, the novelty has to be cognitively explained in each tale
or group of tales in concrete (even if imaginary) terms, i.e. in
terms of the specific time, place, cosmic and social totality
within which it is acting, and especially in terms of its effects on
the (overtly or covertly) human relationships upon which it
impinges. Only thus can a novum become esthetically valid in a
fictional narrative (see already Heinlein No. 11 on a cue from
Reginald Bretnor). This means that, in principle, SF has to be
judged - in some ways like naturalistic fiction and quite unlike
the supernatural genres - by the density, objects, and characters
described in the microcosm of the text (Bellemin-Noël No. 2).
One could easily set up a Hegelian triad, where the thesis would
be naturalistic fiction, which has an empirically validated effect
of reality, the antithesis would be supernatural genres, which
lack such an effect, and the synthesis would be SF, in which the
effect of reality is validated by a cognitive innovation.
Obversely, the particular "essential innovation" of any SF tale
has in its turn to be judged by how much new insight into
imaginary but coherent and this-worldly, i.e. historical
relationships it can provide. Defining SF by means of an
irreversible and significant change for better or worse in its
world and people implies that the simple addition of adventures
(see also section 2 below), where plus ça change plus c’est la
même chose, is an abuse of SF for purposes of trivial
sensationalism and degrades it to clichétized fixed topoi; e.g.,
Lem No. 18B has shown this for time-travel paradoxes per se
(when they are not put to ethico-cognitive uses such as in The
Time Machine, I would add). No doubt, the easiest and
dominant way of driving a significant change home is to have
the hero grow into or with it, and most valid SF uses the device
of the "educational novel" with its protagonist who has to
understand the novum for himself and for the readers.

Second, an imaginary history each time to be re-imagined

afresh in its human significance and values may perhaps -
though it does not have to -borrow some narrative patterns
from mythography (mythological stories), but the "novelty" of
gods validated by unexplained super-sciences at the beck of the
Cambridge School's or von Däniken's super-mortals is a
pseudo-novelty, old meat rehashed with a new sauce. SF's
analogical historicity may or may not be mythomorphic, but it
cannot be mythopoetic in any sense except the most trivial one
of possessing "a vast sweep" or "a sense of strangeness/wonder"
(cf. Suvin No. 33). 1 think the conciliatory solution of Philmus
No. 26, postulating among other possibilities a "mythic" or
"metamythic" classification of SF with mythomorphic,

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mythopoetic, and demythologizing subclasses (although a useful

device in comparison to the undifferentiated use of the term
"myth" in Philmus No. 25), is not clear enough — witness its
proliferation of largely incompatible terms. As for Ketterer No.
15, its refusal to come to any grips with the novum and science
invalidates the book's thesis theoretically and insofar as it is
applied to texts irreducible to eschatological catastrophe
(Bellamy, London, Lem, Le Guin). However unclear the
postulate of a "mutation of desire" away from the existing class
values may still be (Eizykman No. 7), it seems to point in the
right direction. 9

Third, the novum can narratively be either a new

spatiotemporal locus, or a figure (character) with new powers,
or both. Furthermore, since the effect of the innovation is to
estrange the implied reader's familiar conventions, and SF thus
always reflects back to his world (Nudelman No. 22, Suvin No.
32, No. 33), the new "chronotopes" 10 and the new protagonists
will in all significant cases, in direct proportion to the narrative
potency of the tale at hand, imply and reinforce each other —
as do Wells's Time Traveller and the sequence of his visions, or
Le Guin's Shevek, his physics, and the planetary system of
Urras-Anarres (see Nudel'man No. 22, Britikov No. 3, Jameson
No. 14, Klein No. 17, Nudelman. No. 21). Elucidating such
relationships could probably function as a via magistra to a
literary analysis of SF which would be neither purely ideological
nor purely formalistic.

Mutation of desire; epistemological functionality equal to new

insight into historical human relationships; correlation of
chronotope and hero — all of these implications of the cognitive
novum as a kernel of any significant SF lead to the conclusion
that such SF is in fact a specifically roundabout way of
commenting on the author's collective context — often by a
surprisingly concrete and sharp-sighted historical comment at
that - even where it (sometimes strongly) suggests a flight from
that context. The escape is, in all such significant SF, one to a
better vantage point from which to comprehend the human
relations around the author. It is an escape from constrictive old
norms, a device for estrangement, and an at least initial
readiness for new norms.

2. The theoretical discussion so far seems to lead to the

conclusion that the scientifically validated, although sometimes
anti-scientific, novum is, within the admittedly vague limits of
fictional literature, the necessary and sufficient condition for an
SF tale. If this is so, it becomes easier to heed Spencer Brown's
stern epigraph to this survey and delimit SF against other types
of writings. No doubt, as Philmus No. 26 rightly reminded us,
one should always talk of historical genera as of classes with

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"identifiable, if not absolutely definite boundaries," but such

identification is quite enough for a generalizing theoretical
approach.

The first boundaries to be drawn were those most immediately

necessary - toward horror fantasy, naturalistic fiction, and fairy
tale. There was wide agreement here that both SF and fantasy
deal "with things that are not," but fantasy then deals with the
subclass of things "that cannot be" and SF with that of things
"that can be, that someday may be" (Brown No. 4). As Heinlein
put it, "[all fiction] is storytelling about imaginary things and
people"; fantasy fiction is "imaginary-and-not possible."
Though Caillois No. 5 does not testify to a good acquaintance
with overmuch SF, he first suggested some fundamental
distinctions in regard to horror fantasy and fairy tale; using
them, Klein No. 17 and Lem No. 18 elaborated on the duality
(nature vs. super-nature) and black intentionality of the
"fantasy" universe towards its figures, in stark opposition to the
singleness and the lack of intention in the universe of SF as well
as of naturalistic fiction. This interaction of physics and ethics
was then in Lem No. 18-18B enriched with a discussion of the
mythological tale, and systematized with some additions in
Suvin Nos. 32-33. Another interpretation of the by now almost
stiflingly canonic trichotomy science-fiction - merveilleux -
fantastique in No. 2 brings out some further stimulating points,
but suffers from a very narrow empirical basis for its
generalizations.

Other boundaries have been less clearly marked. Very few

students have followed the timely warning of Blish No. 1 against
hybrids such as "science-fantasy" - in his article exemplified by
some works of Merritt, Bradbury or Aldiss, but by now a large
pathological growth devaluing much of the field into what
Brecht called a branch of the bourgeois dope trade. In "science-
fantasy" - as Blish noted - "plausibility is specifically invoked
for most of the story, but may be cast aside in patches at the
author's whim and according to no visible system or principle,"
in "a blind and grateful abandonment of the life of the mind."
A further warning in the same place that the hybrid of SF and
detective tale leads, because of the incompatibility between the
detective tale's contract of informative closure with the reader
and the manifold surprises inherent in the SF novum system, to
a trivial lower common denominator of the resulting tale, has
been developed only by Nudelman No. 21. His article has
convincingly demonstrated the incompatibility between the plot
structures of the cyclical detective tale, whose conclusion
returns the universe "to its equilibrium and order," the linear
structures of simple additive adventure tale, and the spiral
structures of valid SF, whose plot alters the universe of the tale.
Further, Suvin in No. 32 has tried to clarify some relationships
of SF to imaginary voyage and pastoral, in No. 33 to adventure

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tale and popular science articles, Lem No. 18-18A to fantastic

allegories à la Kafka, Delany No. 6 to reportage, Russ No. 29
and Scholes No. 30 to didactic romance, and Price No. 27 —
very interestingly — to the scientific paper and monograph.
Nonetheless, much more work remains to be done on these and
a number of other genres. The latest survey on "SF and allied
literature," Ketterer No. 16, lists, beyond the above, problems of
relations to legend, historical fiction, other visionary worlds
from Dante to the Romantics, the "natural sublime," the hoax,
surrealism, and the nouveau roman.11 All of these juxtapositions
are apposite, but I find that the survey's incompatible mixture
of genres, aesthetic modes, literary strategies, and movements
would have to be supplemented by a poly-parametric
classificatory rigor of the Philmus No. 26 kind in order to be
theoretically enlightening. Possibly it will be found that all
generic contaminations of SF with fairy tale, detective mystery,
adventure thriller, and mythological tale happen at the expense
of developing the problematics of the novelty specific to SF, as
Lem No. 19 argues. But at present, except for the mythological
and the detective tale, we must, with some help from the notion
of generic discontinuity in Jameson No. 13, return the verdict of
not proven. In particular, nobody has dealt with the pressing
problem of relationships between SF and "high fantasy" of the
Tolkien-Dunsany-Le Guin type. We await further systematic
work, for which we have so far seen two kinds of very fruitful
approaches developing: the Lemian blend of cognitive, ethical,
and sociological analysis, and the Bakhtinian blend of ethical
and spatiotemporal analysis. This is provocatively supplemented
in Delany No. 6 by an only too brief excursion into the semantic
subjunctivity (relation of physics and semantics) differentiating
naturalistic fiction, fantasy, and SF in a way that - together with
Lem No. 18, Suvin No. 33, and Philmus No. 26 - helps to
overcome the clumsy defining of SF (cf. Caillois No. 5 and
Heinlein No. 11) simply as naturalistic or believable fiction laid
in the future. I close this section with such a reminder that SF is
first of all a "word-beast."

3. After all this, I can be mercifully brief on the vexed and by

now rather irrelevant subject of a precise definition of SF; all
the more easily as a number of points have been elegantly, if
sometimes a shade too agnostically, summarized and clarified in
Philmus No. 26. He goes through the definitions of Bretnor,
Bailey, Amis, Moskowitz, and Aldiss (and could have also gone
through Heinlein No. 11 and many others, not excluding Suvin
No. 32) in order to show that they are too wide or too narrow,
usually both simultaneously. Most importantly, these definitions
all use one parameter, e.g. Heinlein's imaginary possibility (only
Suvin No. 32 has two parameters, cognition and estrangement).
No doubt, the discussions in these and many other items on my
list have historically been very useful, in particular the rich and

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stimulating if often puzzlingly associational rather than

systematic insights of Lem No. 18. Yet after Philmus No. 26 it
ought to be clear that a pretence at fully explanatory definitions
should be restricted to popularizing handbooks, and that on the
theoretical level we should focus on discussing the necessary and
sufficient conditions for SF which have then in each case to be
blended with historico-sociological analysis in order to educe
specific realities from the generic potentiality. One ambitious try
at an 8-parameter definition in Ostrowski No. 24 has to be
mentioned here only to regretfully state that its 8 generating
matrices for all fiction (body and consciousness of characters,
matter and space of things, action, causation, purpose, time)
seem to me invalidated by the underlying confusion between the
ontology of empirical life and the ontology of fiction; nor does a
second grid of "authors’ attitudes to the fantastic" help to
overcome this mechanistic naiveté (which is to a lesser extent
present also in Zgorzelski No. 38). To return to Philmus No. 26,
it is not necessary to believe that its fourfold meta-classification
is any more sacred than Dante's fourfold allegoresis in order to
accept it as an important step towards further clarification. Of
its four meta-categorizations — topical, structural, modal, and
meta-mythic - I've already expressed some reservations about
the clarity as well as the justification of the "meta-mythic" one.
The "modal" meta-classification (serious vs. satirical key),
though unexceptionable, would seem to me properly located in a
general theory of literature, in which case it would not have to
be repeated separately for SF; with Lem No. 18 I would much
prefer to concentrate on the problem-solving or committed vs.
game-playing or ludic aspect, mode or pole coexisting in SF
works. About the "structural" meta-categorization (the title of
which seems confusing to me) I'd say that I do not find the
attempt in Philmus No. 26 to supplement the Suvin Nos. 32-33
division of the SF heuristic models into extrapolation and
analogy with a third model - nor the attempts in Jameson Nos.
13-14 - convincing. The trouble with the original dichotomy was
not that it contained too few but too many models, since it was
itself only an insufficiently radical reaction to then unchallenged
definition of SF as extrapolation (cf. Caillois No. 5, Heinlein No.
11, Zgorzelski No. 38, and even Delany No. 6); such a definition,
to which the title of a critical journal devoted to SF still
witnesses, should by now be decently and deeply buried. The
problem then is one of differentiation within the concept of
analogy: if SF tales are always some kind of analogy, how does
the implied reader respond to and deal with such an inverted,
reverted, converted, everted, averted, etc. Other to his Self (our
conventional world, dramatis personae, chronotopic
relationships, etc., which, as Hegel says, are clouded by their
very illusory proximity — bekannt but not erkannt)? And what
mutations does the scientific horizon bring about within the
historical topoi of alternative versions of reality, from Gilgamesh
through Cockayne to Lewis Carroll? For one challenging and

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crucial example, what are its language and semantic specificities

(cf. the discussion of grapholects in Rabkin No. 28 and
neologisms in Handke No. 10)?

4. No clear conclusion is possible in this survey of a still rapidly

developing field of studies, except for two provisional
indications. At the present moment, aided by a more generous,
non-elitist conception of literature and by the achievements of
the genre in the last 40 but especially the last 15 years, SF
theory is in full cry and seems to be flushing out some mysteries
such as the purposes, limits and devices of the genre. However,
a further development of the theory itself has come up against
the necessity of integrating socio-historical knowledge into the
formally aesthetic and generic one, and diachrony into
synchrony (cf. Suvin No. 34). Much can and ought to be learned
from the new tools of post-Goldmannian sociology of literature,
such as the implicit reader or reception aesthetics, as well as
from post-Proppian narrative analysis 12 — not forgetting the
old tools of both these approaches. In particular, a crucial
investigative locus would seem to be the rise of "lower" or non-
canonic genres into a special "para-literary" formation,
opposed but also twin to "high literature."13

NOTES

This article is one of the results of a research project, in which I

gratefully acknowledge the financial aid of a Québec Ministry of
Education FCAC grant.

1. For a brief account of the place of literary utopia according to

SF theory, with a number of further references, see my "SF
Theory: Internal and External Delimitation, and Utopia,"
Extrapolation 19 (Dec. 1977). Both that article and this one arose
out of a paper given at the 1976 MLA session. I am grateful to
Professor Alexis Aldridge, chairman of the special session on
Utopian-Dystopian Literature, for her encouragement, and to
Professor Irena Bellert at McGill Univ. for helping me to avoid
some logical fallacies.

2. For example, C.S. Lewis's "On Science Fiction," in Mark

Rose ed., Science Fiction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1976), first publ. in 1966; Joanna Russ, "Dream Literature and
Science Fiction," Extrapolation, 11 (Dec. 1969).

3. See the works of Chernysheva, Fainburg, Gromova,

Kagarlitskii, Neelov, Smelkov, and Zhuravleva in the annotated
checklist of criticism in my Russian Science Fiction 1956-1974:
A Bibliography (Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press,
1976).

4. See William B. Fischer, "German Theories of Science

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Fiction," Science-Fiction Studies, 3 (Nov. 1976).

5. Robert M. Philmus, "The Shape of Science Fiction," Science-

Fiction Studies, 1 (Spring 1973): 41.

6. I am referring to Thomas D. Clareson, ed., SF: The Other

Side of Realism (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University
Popular Press, 1971); the two essays are those by Delany (No. 6
on my list) and by Lem (superseded by No. 18 on my list).

7. The novum is a fundamental concept of this greatest

philosopher of open horizons and radical possibilities for
humanist change in our age, probably best explained in his
magnum opus Das Prinzip Hoffinung 1-11 (Frankfurt:
Suhrkarnp, 1959).

8. "It must be noted here that the best science fiction texts are
organized analogously [as Gogol’s Nose or Kafka's
Metamorphosis, i.e. their events are as real as any other literary
event, D.S.]. The initial data are supernatural: robots,
extraterrestrial beings, the whole interplanetary context. The
narrative movement consists in obliging us to see how close
these apparently marvelous elements are to us, to what degree
are they present in our life. "The Body," a story by Robert
Scheckley [sic, D.S.], begins with the extraordinary operation of
grafting an animal's body to a human brain. At the end, it
shows us all that the most normal man has in common with the
animal. Another story begins with the description of an
incredible organization which provides a service for eliminating
undesirable persons. When the narrative ends, we realize that
such an idea is quite familiar. Here it is the reader who
undergoes the process of adaptation: at first confronted with a
supernatural event, he ends by acknowledging its 'naturalness' "
(No. 35, p. 172). - It is difficult to know where not to begin
faulting this skimpy and intellectually infelicitous paragraph.
For one thing, in the stories mentioned - though one is cavalierly
unnamed - there are clearly no supernatural data (as described,
they are barely imaginary); and only inferior SF carries the
message that everything is essentially everywhere and always
the same as in our empirical normality, i.e. "natural." But then,
two stories can hardly tell us much about a genre lasting at least
one century in a dozen national literatures; even American SF
in the last half a century must be estimated as having produced
several thousand books.

9. I am not discussing in this article Eizykman's turbid and

prolix Science-fiction et capitalisme (Paris: Marne, 1974), as I
believe all of its relevant points are subsumed in the auto-
résumé cited as No. 7.

10. In his essay "The Forms of Time and Chronotopes in the

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Novel," in Voprosy literatury i èstetiki (Moskva:

Khudozhestvennaia lit., 1975), Bakhtin takes over the term
chronotope from Einstein and redefines it as "the essential
connection of temporal and spatial relationships, as shaped in
literary art." In it, "the characteristics of time are unfolded in
space, while space is given meaning and measured by time"; it is
therefore a given type of chronotope that determines a literary
genre (pp. 234-35, translations mine).

11. The suggestive article by Ulrich Broich, "Robinsonade und

Science Fiction," Anglia, 94, No. 1/2 (1976), reached me too late
to do anything more than note that the desert-island tale à la
Robinson Crusoe is certainly another form whose relationships
to SF deserve clarification.

12. For a first introduction in English to narratology see New

Literary History, 6, No. 2 (1975). Conversely — be it noted — SF
theory might be a privileged helper in the study of narrative,
since it is necessarily engaged in explicating the notion of a
"possible world" implicit in the very fundaments of narratology
— cf. the essay by Teun A. van Dijk, ibidem.

13. For a first approach to paraliterature see Marc Angenot, Le

Roman populaire (Montréal: Les Presses de l'Université du
Québec, 1975), with a rich bibliography.

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