Have you ever wondered how exactly to define “science fiction”? I’ve seen lots of opinions, none of which sounded right.  In an article in PMLA, though, Eric Rabkin pointed me in an interesting direction.  He said “Carl Freedman wrote that his ‘thesis about critical theory and science fiction is that each is a version of the other’.”  Intriguing — they certainly have lots of things in common, since critical theory is constitutionally incapable of staying in one lane, and so wanders from literature to politics to economics to sociology to linguistics and back again.  SF started out that way on purpose.  Maybe there’s something there.

Via inter-library loan, Carl Freedman tells me that Darko Suvin defines science fiction as “the literature of cognitive estrangement.”  Whoa!  Assessing the analytical validity of that assertion will take some thought, but my immediate reaction was that it’s a perfect description of science-fiction fans. Suvin has got to be onto something.  SF fans are not only cognitively estranged from the mundane world, they positively embrace that status. (I say “they” as if I’m not one of them, but I doubt anyone will be fooled.) We’re proud of how differently we think, and judge our ways superior.  Somewhere in a box around here is a button that says “Reality is a crutch for people who can’t handle science fiction.”  We give non-fans scornful names like “mundanes” or “muggles”.

That last word brought me up short. Though SF fans use it, it’s from fantasy. I’m looking for a way to distinguish SF from fantasy.  Fortunately, Darko Suvin actually said something rather different.

SF is, then, a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.

“Estrangement” is easy, and obviously correct.  SF is set in a world that is not our own (though it may look just like ours, at the start).

The word “cognition”, once you work through the jungle of academic prose, isn’t quite right. As Suvin eventually explains, it means that the writer isn’t trying to give authoritative statements about characters, relationships, or phenomena. The writer is trying to pose them as problems to be solved, to expose them to inquiry.

The reader’s response is equally important.  The reader of SF is expected to think about the story in the same way as a scientist approaches an experiment: “How does this work? What processes are happening here? What can I learn from this?”  Fantasy is read completely differently.  “What a wonderful/terrifying world! Can I go there?”  This distinction in reader response is what distinguishes SF from fantasy, and from all other genres of estrangement.  In fact, it may be what gives SF the right to have the word “science” in its name.  Science fiction is not “fiction about science”. When I look at Robert Heinlein, for example, it’s hard to find any science in any book he wrote.  All the characters are engineers, solving engineering problems.  But they are solving problems, and the readers are right there working alongside them.

(As an aside, it’s interesting that when C.S. Lewis invented reader-response criticism, he talked for a whole page about SF [p.110], and said things that make it clear that he knew all this, but he never actually said it explicitly.)

So this is useful, and I shall use it.  But now I’m wondering why the terminology shifted.  The term that grabbed me was “cognitive estrangement”, not “estrangement and cognition”.  And I’m not the only one. Here’s how the two terms have fared so far:

So I conclude that the road to scholarly fame runs through steps:

1. Think an intriguing and useful thought.
2. Give it a clunky name that uses the same words as a good bumper-sticker.
3. Wait for somebody else to slip up and say the bumper-sticker version.
4. Watch the citations roll in.

Obligatory Quantitative Appendix

• My citation of Rabkin is at the top of a blog post.
• Rabkin’s citation to Freedman is on Page 2 of his 18-page paper.
• Freedman’s citation to Suvin is on page xv of his book.
• Suvin’s concise statement is on page 7 of his book.

We don’t have to read far into a work of literary criticism to get all the good stuff!

Works Cited

Freedman, Carl. Critical theory and science fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 2000.

Lewis, Clive Staples. An experiment in criticism. Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Rabkin, Eric S. “Science fiction and the future of criticism.” PMLA 119.3 (2004): 457-473.

Suvin, Darko. “Estrangement and Cognition“, in Metamorphoses of science fiction: On the poetics and history of a literary genre. Yale University Press, 1979.

Mythmoot V is coming up, and the theme is “Fantastic Frontiers”. That’s got me looking at all kinds of boundaries, frontiers, and demarcations in speculative fiction.

Isaac Asimov once wrote this about how to write a science-fiction detective story (which his editor said couldn’t be done):

The writer must carefully explain to the reader all their boundary conditions of the imaginary society. It must be perfectly clear what can be done and what can’t be done and with those boundaries fixed, the reader must then see and hear everything the investigator sees and hears, and he must be aware of every clue the investigator comes across.

From the hundred-or-so Asimov stories I’ve read, I infer that this is a good rule for all SF stories if you replace “investigator” with “protagonist”. Readers are willing to make great leaps of faith to enjoy a story, as long as the boundaries are fixed [1] and we know how far the author wants us to jump.

There is one side, though, on which the boundary is fuzzy and permeable. That’s the side that faces the reader. Anything that’s familiar to us in our mundane world can be in a science fiction story. In fact, it’s almost essential to include a bunch of things from our world to keep from weirding the readers out.

It amused me to notice that the theater works the exact opposite way. The wall that faces the audience is the only fixed one, there. The other three walls are almost infinitely mutable. From one minute to the next they can be DUKE ORSINO’s palace, The sea-coast, OLIVIA’S house, A street, and Before OLIVIA’s house. The fourth wall can be broken, sure. When it is, the playwright is doing it consciously, in exactly the same way that a science-fiction writer might deliberately minimize the connections between the fictional world and the mundane to build a sense of alienation.

The theatrical version of boundaries seems to apply to television and movies, too. So when the subject of a movie is science-fictional, which one wins? Interestingly, it seems that all the rigid boundaries apply. A science-fiction movie is truly in a box.

[1] This is not to say the boundary is finite. Borrowing from complex analysis [2][3], I consider a boundary at infinity to be fixed.

[2] This concept is also useful in real analysis, but this is a humanities blog where the phrase “real analysis” can easily be misinterpreted, so I bumped it up a level.

[3] I’ve read so many Terry Pratchett stories that nested footnotes don’t look odd to me any more.