The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low”

My aim in this paper is to answer some questions about the characteristic language of SF as a genre: (1) What are the norms or expectations—the conventions—by which readers interpret the sentences of SF texts? How do they make sense of sentences (like the one in my title) which, in a “realistic” text, would be nonsensical?: (2) What techniques do SF writers use to create and fulfill those expectations? I begin with Darko Suvin’s definition of SF as “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.” The two crucial terms, cognition and estrangement, interact to produce the SF reader’s most fundamental expectations of the genre: (1) that the story happens somewhere else—that place, or time, or circumstances are significantly different from the reader’s own real world: and (2) that the “empirical environment” of the fiction is derived from the reader’s own empirical environment in some logical, and therefore cognitively discoverable, way: and further, that this new environment is bound by natural laws as our own is. These two expectations together create SF’s paradoxical relationship with reality—its “realistic irreality” as Suvin calls it — which in turn produces most, if not all, of SF’s defining literary characteristics. The next stage of the paper uses structuralist poetics and reader-response theory to explain how fictional texts convey the impression of reality, and then looks to see how SF adapts these techniques to make convincing the portrayal of an imaginary culture. The most crucial and characteristic technique is an obliquity of approach: rather than describing an alien culture frankly to an “earth” audience from the outside, the SF author typically writes from the standpoint of an inhabitant of the culture addressing a fictive audience of his or her contemporaries, who take for granted precisely those characteristics of the culture that the actual audience will find most unlike their own real experience. Another technique relies on the power of a few unfamiliar (invented) terms, properly grouped and sequenced, to suggest the existence of a whole class of beings or experiences of which these terms are part. The common factor in all these techniques of SF is that they depend upon the reader’s actively constructing an image of the culture being conveyed to her or him by indirect means, and hence interpreting the significance of details which the author narrator supplies but does not overtly explain. (KLS)

Art · Astronomy · Literature · Physics · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Digital Games and Media · Digital Humanities and Scholarship

• Made up Ground

  Open Access•Amy Butt•Architecture and Culture•2023

  Add to list