“In 1957, Roland Barthes illustrated how semiotic units are animated by forces outside of themselves by showing how the lack of a pure signifier means that any sign is subject to being taken up and deployed for multiple uses. Barthes used this modulation away from a sign’s apparent meaning — what Barthes referred to as myth — to articulate the ways in which ideology saturates language.”
“the situation is almost always one where the historical crises that make the story possible — global warming in WALL-E or healthcare in Big Hero 6 — are effaced in order to highlight how technology, posing as science (itself tied up with those historical crises), will save us in the end.”
“And this claim — the soteriological nature of technology — is always bound up with technology’s relationship to the human, to what it means to be human, with a certain humanism.”
““Science fiction,” says Malik, “includes the word ‘science’ for a reason: It is supposed to be largely about exploring the boundaries of knowledge.” The strength and weakness of this statement is that it can be true for science fiction, but isn’t always, nor is this literary activity solely the property of science fiction. Even while Malik claims that the subgenres included beneath science fiction are oriented toward knowing different “class[es] of knowledge,” confusion in the genre-structure, caused by and coupled with the ideological forces that animate both science and science fiction, articulate a sort of positivism, wherein all things are able to be known — explained, solved and saved — by science.”
“Ortiz renders a fiction that at once enables the reader to step back and take a look not only at the nature of knowledge (and science as a means of attaining it), but also of its historical politicization and the very real consequences of “science” as something that is done in — and to — the world. It is through the visceral and violent truth-effects of this narrative that the portion of the answer to the question of what science is — and what it actually has in common with science fiction — can finally be answered.
Science is an epistemology. It is a way of knowing the world and certain things in the world. Science fiction is genre fiction, and genre, too, is an epistemology. The things that science fiction and genre know in the world are different, as are the modes, methods, and determinations of each.”
“Science fiction contains the potential to abolish genre precisely because of its commitment to exploring boundaries. The imperative to explore limits is closely related to, if not always followed by, the knowledge necessary to transgress, and eventually abolish, those limits. Even ideology understands this. If science fiction is to do this, however, then the first step will be to jettison the term “science fiction” itself. While we still operate within a system that demands categories, “fantastic fiction” is the best possible working term, but only as an interim one that works quickly to efface itself and to make room for what comes next.”
“Tzvetan Todorov defined “The Fantastic” as located within “the duration of uncertainty” that occurs “between a natural and a supernatural explanation” for strange encounters within texts.”
“According to Todorov, once this uncertainty is surpassed the reader is met with either a world in which supernatural explanations are required — the marvelous — or one in which possible explanations are available — the uncanny.”
“By using Freud’s concept of the uncanny, Todorov establishes a logic that persists to this day: the fundamental dogma that texts are either realistic or unrealistic. Both concepts — both the uncertain space of the fantastic, where explanations elude the reader, and the dizzying fluidity of that which is both familiar and unfamiliar in Freud’s uncanny — work to divide the world of texts according to what we know to be possible.”
“But what is at stake here? And how might one articulate a new fantastic, one that values the sorts of possibilities that are actually produced by fantastic literature and fantastic readings of literature?”
“We can articulate a new fantastic, by rearticulating — retaining, but modifying — the logic of the fantastic, in order to say something like the following: The new fantastic is evinced by the ways in which something deviates from a normativity. When practically applied, this takes the form of a question: In what way does something deviate from a specific particular normativity?”
“This new fantastic would not be a theoretical foundation, nor would it be concerned with the establishment of a proper object of study. Its function, to borrow terminology from Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett, would be to enable “practical responses to changing conditions brought about by specific problems.””
“As a movement against this homogenizing force, a new fantastic could address the question of the relationship between what is at stake within the text and what is at stake outside of it.”
“For his part, Barthes was similarly unbothered by the inside/outside-the-text distinction. For him, “historical criticism” would be less “sterile” if it weren’t so scared of the “spectre of formalism,” which actually makes texts more “amenable” to historical criticism: “A little formalism,” he says, “turns one away from history,” while “a lot brings one back to it.” If this is true, then it must be possible to identify, in our inquiry into genre, analogical relationships to our present moment.”
““Men on the Moon” pulls apart the structure of science fiction as a genre while at the same time challenging the historical ideology which put it there in the first place.”
“Against the brittle givenness of those forces that continue to eclipse literary and political possibilities stands our beloved science fiction. It is in this sense that science fiction is good for the world because it seeks to not only explore, but also to transgress and abolish the boundaries and constraints that gave it form in the first place.”
“I feel as if it would be an especially tragic irony if science fiction were to never follow its own logic and overcome itself, precisely because it engenders the conceptual mechanics to do so.”
“Placing literary works at the nexus of a wide range of possible vectors along which its various fantasticities could be evaluated could open up a whole host of political, aesthetic, and critical possibilities. If we are able to make that happen, then we might be able to apprehend that which the act of establishing it as science fiction in the first place ultimately occludes: the possibilities that we won’t be able to see until we stop calling it science fiction.”