July 20, 2020

Science Fiction Introduction Outline

Some notes for Ursula Le Guin’s Introduction to the Norton Book of Science Fiction.

1960s

• White, male (17); ethical
• change in sf - “dark mirror”
• anxiety - cold war; Viet Nam; dissidence
• increasingly explored failures, limits, ends, final things (18)
• playfulness and daring

“Hard sf” - descriptive and evaluative (18–19)

• hi-tech iconology
• strong scientific content
• solidly thought out and researched
• tough minded
• male-centered, essentialist values
  • politically right or militaristic
  • positive ethical values on violence
• explores implications of techno/scientific change
• rigorous, not rigid, intelligence (19)

sf

• genre (20) - popular entertainment, not literature
  • descriptive - community of shared interests and expectations
  • high point in tradition (21)
  • stock concepts and patterns, like the future, alien beings, mad scientists, etc. (22, 26)
  • formal tradition — iconology
  • archetypes, "iconic mode of thought"
• undefinable?
• field
  • employ assumptions basic to science, technology, and sometimes scientism (23)
• scientistic - science and technology as god/savior
• “commonly uses techniques both from the realistic and fantastic traditions of narrative to tell a story of which a referent, implicit or explicit, is the mindset, the content, or the mythos of science and technology” (23)
• science grounds, supports, and judges sf (24)
  • megatext - found in the assumptions and worldview of science and technology (23-24)
    • mythological - scientific and scientistic
• living art: concerned with the central ideas of a society
  • social and intellectual function (24)
  • moral - narrative tests
  • a literature of ideas (25)
    • aesthetic, not independent of intellect
• plausable extrapolations from current scientific knowledge
  • materialist cause and effect (26), not from the realm of the supernatural
• thought experiments
• harshly critical of science (27) cautionary
• Delany's "subjunctive reality": what has not happened (27)
  • extrapolative - predictive: what has not happened, but might
  • cautionary - what has not happened, yet
  • alternate world - what might have happened, but didn't - divergence at the very center (28)
    • realism - sf absorbs all reality, but not vice versa
    • tension between sf and fantasy
• avoids the supernatural, unlike fantasy
  • but they constantly overlap (29)
• realistic and rationalistic (30)
• literalization of metaphor - “absorbed in the landscape” (31)
  • questions reality and the assumptions about it (31)
  • open context - no authority - nothing taken for granted
  • "sense of wonder"