Analysis of the science fiction narrative has, in general, been restricted to the areas of themes or ideas, where it makes its claims to innovation and newness. Sf offers a large body of narratives. Its narrative forms, however, have yet to be systematically analysed. Indeed, it is only by examining how sf functions in terms of the system it shares with narrative in general that we can determine how, and in what ways, these new thematic situations generate significant structural transformations.

To suggest a way to examine sf in terms of the larger narrative system, we focus on one aspect of that system—the relation between narrator and narratee. Gerald Prince defines the narrator as ‘the one who narrates as inscribed in the text,’ and the narratee as ‘the one who is narrated to as inscribed in the text.’ In a narrative the process of telling can involve one or more senders of messages and one or more receivers. The sender is the narrator—one or many, declared or undeclared—who at the narrative instance has already witnessed, at a greater or lesser degree of ‘distance’ in space and time, the events and objects he recounts. This narrator addresses a narratee, the receiver of his discourse, who again may be declared or undeclared. But it is the distance or closeness between narrator and narratee, in terms of space, time, culture, learning, and so on, that seems to determine the kind and amount of information that is conveyed in a narrative. For example, the less familiar the narratee is with the world told by the narrator, the more need there is for the narrator to comment on actions and surroundings.

In fact, control of this distance between narrator and narratee appears to be the means by which the author of any narrative can convey, or refuse to convey, information about his fictional world to a reader. But who is this ‘reader’? It is not the real reader, for any given narrative has n number of these, who vary so widely in terms of spatiotemporal and cultural distance that an author cannot control them.