Estrangement, cognition, the novum: these well-known terms of Darko Suvin's have borne the main burden of his attempt, declared at the beginning of his 1972 essay ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, to lay down a ‘coherent poetics of SF’. A ‘poetics’ is a construction of formalist or structuralist theory—it speaks to us, these days, of the age of Roman Jakobson and Northrop Frye—and (as is clear from the above quotation) it addresses only the synchronic aspect of literary texts. Literary history and the politics of the text are never absent from Suvin's writings, but in his poetics of science fiction they are apparently subordinated to the idea of an ‘imaginative framework’—elsewhere he calls it a ‘formal framework’— which is the historically continuous textual structure distinguishing one literary genre from another. In the case of SF, an imaginative framework specified by estrangement, cognition and the novum is said to be common to all true examples of the genre, which Suvin also provides with a ‘long history’ stretching back some centuries before the term itself was invented.

The resulting theory is offered as a ‘heuristic model’ for SF criticism and research, and it has been very widely adopted. But is the model actually coherent? Should a poetics of science fiction still be seen as a desirable and necessary construction? And what sorts of blindness accompany its insights? Suvin himself seems to have been disturbed by these questions. In a number of essays since 1972 he has revisited his poetics of SF, and it is a moot point whether this process of theoretical revision has shored up or tacitly undermined the foundations that he originally laid down.