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Preface

Like any other writer, I am often asked about my current project. During the time that I thought of the following essay as my current project, I sometimes responded simply by giving the title. On other occasions, however, when a little more detail seemed to be called for, I usually employed one of two prepared responses. The short, playful response was to say that my thesis about critical theory and science fiction is that each is a version of the other. This, of course, is more aphorism than answer, but I remain rather attached to it as an aphorism. It seems to me to have some of the provocative elegance of a Möbius strip—a figure, indeed, that tends to turn up rather often in science fiction.

My longer, more serious response began by saying that my aim was to do for science fiction what Georg Lukács does for historical fiction in The Historical Novel. The comparison is immodest indeed, since, in my opinion, The Historical Novel remains, for all its imperfections and ambiguities, the finest literary-critical account of any particular fictional genre. Leaving aside, however, the question of to what degree I succeed in emulating the brilliance of Lukács’s achievement, there should be no question that the fundamental intention of this volume is strictly parallel to that of Lukács’s great work. Just as Lukács argues that the historical novel is a privileged and paradigmatic genre for Marxism, so I argue that science fiction enjoys—and ought to be recognized as enjoying—such a position not only for Marxism but for critical theory in general. Sometimes though by no means always a “popular” literature (like historical fiction), science fiction is of all forms of fiction today the one that bears the deepest and most interesting affinity with the rigors of dialectical thinking. Lukács demonstrates that a great deal of light can be thrown on the historical novel by studying it in conjunction with historical materialism. Likewise, I maintain that we can learn a great deal about the work of such science-fiction authors as Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Stanisław Lem, and Samuel Delany by studying it together with the theoretical production of writers like Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Lacan, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and Lukács himself. But there is no question of merely “applying” critical theory to science fiction, and I also argue that understanding these two modes of discourse together can reveal much about both. The equivalent of this position is perhaps not quite overt in Lukács’s own text, though I believe it is implicit in the general logic of his argument.

It may be useful to sketch out here how my general argument is advanced in the different components of the essay to follow. Chapter 1, “Definitions,” focuses on the two terms of my title. I define critical theory as something broader than Critical Theory in the Frankfurt School usage but not unrelated to it. I use the term to designate the traditions of dialectical and self-reflective thought initiated during the historical moment of Kant and Hegel. Insofar as twentieth-century work is concerned, I maintain a certain privilege for specific forms of critical thinking: Marxism above all, but also psychoanalysis and the best work of such postdialectical theorists as Foucault and Derrida. As to science fiction, here I lean heavily on Darko Suvin’s pathbreaking definition that science fiction is the literature of cognitive estrangement. Although this insight seems to me the starting point for any genuine understanding of science fiction, I do suggest some modifications and elaborations of Suvin’s account. I establish a distinction between cognition proper and what I call the literary cognition effect. I also insist that the category of science fiction, like any other generic category, is best used to analyze tendencies within a literary work rather than to classify entire works in one or another pigeonhole. Like Suvin, I make clear that the estrangements of science fiction need not be limited to the technological estrangements popularly associated with the genre.

Chapter 1, then, is concerned simply with establishing the two categories that dominate the volume. Chapter 2, “Articulations,” is concerned with setting these categories in motion, so to speak, with regard to each other. In the chapter’s first section, I offer some general theorizing on the nature of reading and canon-formation, arguing that every kind of reading implicitly or explicitly privileges its own canon. In the next three sections—which constitute the conceptual center of the volume as a whole—I move to my fundamental argument that critical theory, as a mode of reading, tends to privilege science fiction (though usually, so far, implicitly and even unconsciously). To prefigure here the core sentences of the entire book: I maintain that science fiction, like critical theory, insists upon historical mutability, material reducibility, and utopian possibility. Of all genres, science fiction is thus the one most devoted to the historical concreteness and rigorous self-reflectiveness of critical theory. The science-fictional world is not only one different in time or place from our own, but one whose chief interest is precisely the difference that such difference makes. It is also a world whose difference is concretized within a cognitive continuum with the actual—thus sharply distinguishing science fiction from the irrationalist estrangements of fantasy or Gothic literature (which may secretly work to ratify the mundane status quo by presenting no alternative to the latter other than inexplicable discontinuities).

The second, third, and fourth sections of chapter 2 make and substantiate this general argument in different ways. The second section operates on the micrological level of style, and attempts to demonstrate the affinity between critical theory and science fiction by analyzing the prose of Philip K. Dick. I necessarily engage the question of style in the novel generally, and bring to bear on it the work of Bakhtin, who provides what I take to be the most critically informed discussion of novelistic style to date. In the third and fourth sections of the chapter I turn from the micrological to the macrological level, and focus on the narrative structure of science fiction with regard to the latter’s affinity with critical theory. More specifically, in the third section I discuss this question by examining the relations between science fiction and historical fiction. To do so it is necessary to provide a historicizing account of science fiction itself and, of course, to offer a full-scale engagement with Lukács’s theory of the historical novel. In the following section I concentrate on science fiction and utopia, producing a narrative of the relations between science fiction and utopia as forms in the context of Bloch’s hermeneutic philosophy of utopia. Chapter 2 concludes with a brief fifth section in which I give a perspective on how the deep affinity between critical theory and science fiction has been largely occluded by what might be called the internal political economy of critical thought.

Chapters 1 and 2 operate on a quite comprehensive level. Though a great many individual works are briefly discussed, and though a few passages are analyzed closely, the overall aim of these two chapters is not to provide any detailed readings but to make a general argument about the relations of critical theory and science fiction. In chapter 3, “Excursuses,” I continue the argument through fairly extensive analyses of five major science-fiction novels. I deliberately employ the somewhat unusual term, “excursus” (which I take from a similar usage in Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno and Max Horkheimer), in order to emphasize that the readings are not intended to provide “proof” (in any empiricist sense) of the argument in chapter 2 but rather to extend the argument in a somewhat different way.

Each of the novels considered in chapter 3 resonates strongly with concerns proper to critical theory. In my reading of Solaris I explore how the text uses science fiction to foreground the problems of cognition and estrangement themselves, and to deconstruct positivistic science in order to stress the dialectical provisionality of all knowledge; I also argue that the crucial category of Otherness can be illuminated by comparing its treatment in Lem’s novel with that in Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the analysis of The Dispossessed that follows, I turn from a cognitive-epistemological emphasis to an ethical-political one. I consider how Le Guin’s achievement is nothing less than the reinvention of the positive utopia after many years of eclipse by negative versions of the Orwell-Huxley sort. I maintain that the novel’s insistence upon the unavoidable complexities and ambivalences of social organization coexists with a definite radical commitment, and that in many ways the text’s most consequential intellectual kinship is less with the anarchist thought of the author’s own political lineage than with the more critical, dialectical Marxist thought of Trotsky. Joanna Russ’s The Two of Them then provides the occasion for a consideration of feminism as a unique area of critical theory, one in which, as I suggest, theory and narrative bear an unusually close and complex relationship to each other. More specifically, I show how the novel radically recasts many of the masculinist conventions of pulp science fiction in order to demonstrate the special compatibility of feminist critical thought with science fiction. I then approach Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, showing how the text’s awesomely ambitious representations of cultural and biological difference can be understood in connection with the critical philosophies of difference constructed by Jacques Derrida and, even more, by Adorno. Delany is perhaps the living American novelist most personally familiar with the texts of critical theory, and his greatest work (which I believe Stars in My Pocket to be) may be the most intellectually impressive single achievement in current American fiction. Chapter 3 ends by returning to Philip K. Dick (for me the greatest of all science-fiction writers). Reading The Man in the High Castle, I revisit the problem of the relations between science fiction and historical fiction; I show how certain of the novel’s concerns are related to the Adornian concept of the dialectic of enlightenment; and I argue that the text critically interrogates (both implicitly and explicitly) the generic form of science fiction itself.

Finally, the book as a whole concludes with a coda in which I coordinate both critical theory and science fiction with the historical category of the postmodern in order to produce some speculations about the future of both modes of discourse.

Such, in outline, is what this essay sets itself to do. How original a project do I take it to be? Though the theoretically engaged criticism of science fiction in the American academy often feels like a lonely activity indeed—beset both by those who dismiss science fiction altogether and, more insidiously, by those who maintain a purely empiricist interest in it as an instance of “popular culture”—I am far from the first to insist that science fiction ought to be read with much closer and more alert attention than it usually has been. Indeed, for more than half a century there have been distinguished critics—not primarily associated professionally with the study of science fiction—who have on occasion bravely spoken out to make serious claims for the genre; I am thinking—to take just a few instances—of such diverse figures as C. S. Lewis, Raymond Williams, Robert Scholes, Leslie Fiedler, Fredric Jameson, and Donna Haraway. Furthermore, for about a quarter-century there has been a developing tradition of professional science-fiction criticism frequently (if by no means invariably) informed by the perspectives of critical theory; the two most important (and not unrelated) enabling events in this regard are the founding of the journal Science-Fiction Studies in 1973 by the late Dale Mullen (perhaps the most underappreciated hero of the serious study of the genre) and the publication in 1979 of Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. Because I depend heavily on Suvin’s work, and because I write frequently for Science-Fiction Studies and serve on the journal’s board of editorial consultants, it seems clear that it is in this evolving tradition (among other places) that the current volume places itself.

But I do not know that anyone else has yet attempted to make and systematically support claims for science fiction in quite the encompassing and explicit way that I do. I do not know that critical theory and science fiction have ever before been examined together with the same level of detail that I bring to both kinds of discourse. Though the general relationship between critical theory and science fiction is certainly well established, it is in my view insufficiently recognized and very inadequately understood; that is the situation that I mean to remedy. Thus, although the current volume plainly owes much to work that has come before (most notably the work of Suvin and Jameson among my own contemporaries), it has some claims to originality too.

I conclude these prefatory comments with a few pointers that I hope may be useful in orienting the reader about what can and cannot be expected in the pages to follow.

First, I emphasize as strongly as possible a point briefly suggested above: that the main project of this volume is not what the title would imply to many readers, namely, the “application” of critical theory to science fiction. Sometimes, of course, I do bring critical theory to bear on science fiction, just as sometimes I bring science fiction to bear on critical theory. Both operations are necessary moments in my general argument, but that argument centers on the structural affinities between the two modes of discourse. Even the readings of science-fiction novels in chapter 3 are designed to illuminate the work of Lacan, Trotsky, and Adorno, as well as that of Lem, Le Guin, and Delany.

Second, I therefore warn against the tendency to assume that, when a title contains two or more terms, the more or most specific term (which most readers, in this case, will take to be science fiction) conveys what the book is “really” about. This is a book about critical theory as much as about science fiction, and the order in which I have placed the two terms is not an accident. The following pages, after all, contain detailed discussions of critical theorists who never overtly concerned themselves with science fiction, and examinations of problems (such as the intellectual effects of socioeconomic modernity, and the nature and value of literary style) that are by no means limited, in their relevance, to science fiction. One practical issue here concerns my intended audience. I am sure that many readers who approach this text will have extensive familiarity with science fiction and the secondary literature on it. I hope also, however, to attract readers who are interested in critical theory but who have hitherto paid little or no attention to science fiction. My point, of course, is that they ought to be very interested in science fiction indeed.

Third, I want to stress the essayistic—as opposed to encyclopedic—character of this project. The joint terrain of critical theory and science fiction is so vast that a really exhaustive demonstration of my basic argument would fill a shelf of thick volumes. So I have had to practice a strict economy. One consequence is that a number of theorists (like Lenin, Sartre, Walter Benjamin, and Louis Althusser) and a number of fiction writers (like J. G. Ballard, Thomas Disch, and “James Tiptree, Jr.” [Alice Sheldon]) whom I would like to have discussed at length are mentioned only in passing. Nonetheless, I hope that I have made my general argument with enough rigor and lucidity to establish what Althusser would call a problematic—that is, a conceptual framework within which further research and analysis can be conducted. In the future I will probably discuss, in the spirit of this essay, more texts of critical theory and of science fiction. Perhaps others will too.

The vastness of critical theory and of science fiction means, of course, that the pertinent secondary literature is vast as well. And I have tried to be economical not only in the main text but also in the footnotes—partly for reasons of space, but also because of a long-standing dislike of the pseudoscholarly practice of citing works merely in order to suggest (truthfully or not) that one has read them. Obviously, genuine intellectual debts ought to be acknowledged as a matter of basic honesty, and this I have done to the best of my ability. But it should not be assumed (to paraphrase C. S. Lewis) that I must be ignorant or contemptuous of the articles and books that I do not mention.

Finally, I should like to state one affirmation that, I hope, clearly animates nearly every page to come. Despite all the immense difficulties and complexities, I do believe that both critical theory and science fiction have the potential to play a role in the liberation of humanity from oppression. That (to adapt a similar remark by Terry Eagleton) is why I have thought the book worth writing.