Science Fiction

The world has become science-fictional, to borrow a term from Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. (Seven Beauties 1). We are now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, living in a world that is harder and harder to grasp, that moves ever faster, transforms radically on a daily basis, and confronts us with situations that seem outrageously beyond the scope of our understanding. It is in this world, we feel, that sf has become not just a literary genre but a mode of response, almost an epistemological category:

Consequently, the science-fictional has become ubiquitous in much of our everyday culture, from newspapers and political discourse (see Barr) to the use of sf elements in global media ‘outside of traditional venues’ (Bould and Vint 202), and its proliferation in circles of high culture (formerly strongly opposed to ‘genre fiction’; see Rieder), as witnessed by science-fictional forays of novelists such as Philip Roth (The Plot Against America, 2004), Richard Powers (Galatea 2.2, 1995), or many of the authors Bruce Sterling grouped together in his coinage of the ‘slipstream’ subgenre (‘Slipstream’).

In an attempt to define what he means by science-fictionality, Csicsery-Ronay argues that it is linked to two ‘forms of hesitation, a pair of gaps’ (Seven Beauties 3): Firstly, the historical dimension of possibility – are we at this point in our technoscientific progress able to actually do this? Is this possible? And secondly, the ethical dimension of consequence – if we do this, what would the repercussions be and how would things change in accordance?