Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Content
- Speaking Science Fiction: Introduction
- Who Speaks Science Fiction?
- Science Fiction Dialogues
- Speaking of Homeplace, Speaking from Someplace
- Speaking Science Fiction—Out of Anxiety?
- Science Fiction as Language: Postmodernism and Mainstream: Some Reflections
- ‘Fantastic Dialogues’: Critical Stories about Feminism and Science Fiction
- Vicissitudes of the Voice, Speaking Science Fiction
- ‘A Language of the Future’: Discursive Constructions of the Subject in A Clockwork Orange and Random Acts of Senseless Violence
- Speaking the Body: The Embodiment of ‘Feminist’ Cyberpunk
- Bodies that Speak Science Fiction: Stelarc—Performance Artist ‘Becoming Posthuman’
- Science Fiction and the Gender of Knowledge
- Corporatism and the Corporate Ethos in Robert Heinlein's ‘The Roads Must Roll’
- Convention and Displacement: Narrator, Narratee, and Virtual Reader in Science Fiction
- Aphasia and Mother Tongue: Themes of Language Creation and Silence in Women's Science Fiction
- ‘My Particular Virus’: (Re-)Reading Jack Womack's Dryco Chronicles
- Aliens in the Fourth Dimension
- Freefall in Inner Space: From Crash to Crash Technology
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Freefall in Inner Space: From Crash to Crash Technology
- Frontmatter
- Content
- Speaking Science Fiction: Introduction
- Who Speaks Science Fiction?
- Science Fiction Dialogues
- Speaking of Homeplace, Speaking from Someplace
- Speaking Science Fiction—Out of Anxiety?
- Science Fiction as Language: Postmodernism and Mainstream: Some Reflections
- ‘Fantastic Dialogues’: Critical Stories about Feminism and Science Fiction
- Vicissitudes of the Voice, Speaking Science Fiction
- ‘A Language of the Future’: Discursive Constructions of the Subject in A Clockwork Orange and Random Acts of Senseless Violence
- Speaking the Body: The Embodiment of ‘Feminist’ Cyberpunk
- Bodies that Speak Science Fiction: Stelarc—Performance Artist ‘Becoming Posthuman’
- Science Fiction and the Gender of Knowledge
- Corporatism and the Corporate Ethos in Robert Heinlein's ‘The Roads Must Roll’
- Convention and Displacement: Narrator, Narratee, and Virtual Reader in Science Fiction
- Aphasia and Mother Tongue: Themes of Language Creation and Silence in Women's Science Fiction
- ‘My Particular Virus’: (Re-)Reading Jack Womack's Dryco Chronicles
- Aliens in the Fourth Dimension
- Freefall in Inner Space: From Crash to Crash Technology
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
The narrator must be a metasubject in the process of formulating both the legitimacy of the discourses of the empirical sciences and that of the direct institutions of popular cultures. This metasubject, in giving voice to their common grounding, realizes their implicit goal. It inhabits the speculative university. Positive science and the people are only crude versions of it. The only valid way…to bring the people to expression is through the mediation of speculative knowledge.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern ConditionCan't you see I'm making this up as I go?
‘It seems then,’ I said, ‘if pewter dishes, leaves of lettuce, grains of salt, drops of water, vinegar, oil and slices of eggs had been flying about in the air for all eternity, it might at last happen by chance that it would come a salad.’
‘Yes,’ responded my lovely, ‘but not so nice as this one of mine.’
Johan Keplar, Die Stella NovaeIn seeking to answer the question ‘Who Speaks Science Fiction?’, we should make some attempt at least to define this most knotty of categories and the assumptions underlying its usage.
As is well known, the ‘Father of Scientifiction’, Hugo Gernsback, envisioned his Amazing Stories publication in the 1920s as an outlet for ‘charming romance[s] intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision’. The emphasis on science (or at least, the illusion of science) and a shared set of assumptions surrounding this type of knowledge endured, crystallizing into a genre with its own codes and precepts for operation. For that initial heady mixture—the privileged will-to-knowledge previously unavailable, white-hot heat sandwiched between the tail-end of the Industrial Revolution and the imaginary landscapes beyond—seems to persist at the heart of much subsequent genre sf. This Golden Age represents an eternal adolescence, a bygone era when increased leisure was channelled into a few outlets, gleaming and magnificent in their singular devotion to a new evolution in thought. Its allure is understandable, perhaps even necessary, to our postmodern age, in which nostalgia and traditional values are pre-packaged as marks of authenticity in a secret-less world, a world without depth.
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- Speaking Science Fiction , pp. 214 - 232Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2000