Farah Mendlesohn

Edward James

The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

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If sf were a genre, we would know the rough outline of every book that we picked up. If it were a mystery, we would know that there was ‘something to be found out’; if a romance, that two people would meet, make conflict and fall in love; if horror, that there would be an intrusion of the unnatural into the world that would eventually be tamed or destroyed. But Egan’s Schild’s Ladder offers all three of these outlines.

The sense of wonder is the emotional heart of sf. David Nye has described this reaction as the appreciation of the sublime whether natural, such as the rings of Saturn, or technological: a space station or rocket ship

“When I was ten years old, all I gave my sweetheart was a pair of projections that turned the group of rotations in four dimensions into principal bundles over the three-sphere.“

Cognitive estrangement is the sense that something in the fictive world is dissonant with the reader’s experienced world.

This is what makes Dune so insufferably didactic.

The technique common in early sf is known contemptuously as the ‘info-dump’: a character lectures a captive audience about something they could be expected to know but which we do not. It is a very difficult thing to avoid, and at the moment of conceptual breakthrough when the critical insight is won, and the world is revealed as bigger or different than one thought, it can be the only tool a writer has to convey information.

‘the reading of a science fiction story is always an active process of translation’

it is the layering, embedding and shorthand endemic to sf that rescues the genre from didacticism. 

No novelist in mainstream fiction would expect description to stand in for characterization, but sf, in making cognitive estrangement storyable, insists that the world be treated as character. […] Much of early sf mistook weirdness for landscape, but some authors have successfully elevated place to the level of character.

sf is perhaps the last real bastion of Romantic fiction: sf protagonists fall in love with the macrocosm.

It is this reversal of romance, the insistence that romance is out there rather than internal, that frequently results in non-sf critics judging sf deficient in characterization and emotion. At the very point of the novel where one might expect our protagonists to fall into each other’s arms, they decide not to bother. ‘Nothing could have lived up to four thousand years of waiting. Except perhaps an original theorem’ (p. 246) or ‘The seed for a universe, lying in the gutter’ (p. 248).

The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction quotes

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