Parabolas of Science Fiction

Parabolas of Science Fiction

( ( ( vii (Parabolas of Science Fiction Brian atteBery and Veronica Hollinger Our title refers to a term coined by Brian Attebery, in his article “Science Fiction, Parables, and Parabolas” (2005), to describe the inherently collaborative nature of the science fiction genre: more concrete than themes, more complex than motifs, parabolas are combinations of meaningful setting, character, and action that lend themselves to endless redefinition and jazzlike improvisation. In the first instance, we are interested in how the field of science fiction has developed as a complex of repetitions, influences, arguments, and broad conversations.This particular generic feature has been the source of much critical commentary, perhaps most notably through growing interest in the “sf megatext,” a kind of continually expanding archive of shared images, situations, plots, characters , settings, and themes generated across a multiplicity of media. In the second instance, we are interested in the question of how genres in general develop, and it is one of the aims of this volume to contribute to contemporary genre studies (with a couple of caveats as noted below). Although John Cawelti’s concept of fictional formulas revolutionized popular culture studies, there has been little advance on his method in recent years. The concept of the parabola—combining as it does Cawelti’s ideas with other key concepts in genre theory such as Philippe Hamon’s megatext and Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope, as well as a number of approaches specific to the study of science fiction—offers new perspectives on the ways in which all fiction is created and made meaningful.1 As has often been noted, science fiction (sf) is unusual among popular forms in that it has never developed a single fictional formula or reading protocol of the sort identified in Westerns and detective stories by Cawelti and in the popular romance by Janice Radway and others. There are many formulaic subtypes but noone recognized and controlling structure for sf. And the genre does not fit entirely within the categoryof popular fiction: examples range from video games to movie tie-ins and predict- viii ) ) ) ParaBolas of science fiction able “franchise fiction” to the very complex novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, Iain M. Banks, and Paolo Bacigalupi, and it has been utilized by many “mainstream” writers such as Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Lethem. The term parabola has often been borrowed from geometry to designate a narrative trajectory or story arc. Though people who use the term seem to have in mind the path of a bullet or the flight of an arrow, celestial mechanics offers a different metaphoric model. A parabolic orbit is one that, though it may at its sunward end be mistaken for an ellipse, opens out at the other end to infinity. A comet with a parabolic orbit will never come around again. Whereas fictional formulas govern a story from beginning to end, science fictional parabolas take us from the known to the unknown.The known elements usually include a location, an initial situation , a set of character types, and a problem. Once these are established, though, each writer is free to determine the outcome and meaning of the story. For example, the experiment-gone-wrong story, which goes back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), generally involves a laboratory, an ambitious scientist, someone to warn and oppose the scientist, bystanders who become victims, and a powerful new device or creature. The story is more or less guaranteed to generate issues of unpredictability and the moral responsibilities of researchers. Yet each writer who takes up the parabola can take the plot in unexpected directions, introduce new complications , and resolve the storycomically, tragically, or ironically. Lessons drawn can range from “There are some things humanity is not meant to know” to “It is better to fail greatly than not to try” to cyberpunk’s weary “We already know things we were not meant to know.” The word parabola is also the Greek form of parable. A familiar scenario alerts the reader that the ensuing story will combine human interactions with scientific ideas and technological innovations in a meaningful way. That meaning will be related to, but different from, messages from other similar fictions. From this perspective, there is a clear continuity from 1930s pulp magazine sf to the work of experimental postmoderns such as Joseph McElroy and David Mitchell. If there is no single formula defining the genre, a number of identifiable “tropes” or “motifs” recur across the literary spectrum of sf. For these reasons, the...