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3. Excursuses
- Wesleyan University Press
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I n this chapter, I offer substantial analyses of five major science-fiction novels. My aim is to demonstrate, in more detail than has previously been feasible, some of the different ways that science-fiction texts resonate strongly with concerns proper to critical theory. I do not attempt exhaustive readings, partly for reasons of economy, but also in order to warn against the imbecile empiricism that the notion of “practical criticism” often implies and the concomitant naïveté that holds the minute examination of particular texts to be the ultimate test or telos of literary theory. These readings are not proposed precisely as “examples” of the argument in chapter 2, and still less as proof (in any positivistic sense) of it. Rather, I am continuing the argument in a different register —the “molecular” register (as Deleuze and Guattari might say) of individual novels. I should say a few words about the principles of selection at work below. As we have seen in the final section of chapter 2, the contemporary era in science fiction—the era whose early years are roughly marked by New Worlds and Dangerous Visions—deserves a privileged position in a project like this book. It is in the past forty years or so that we have witnessed the production of the largest distinct body of work that strongly incarnates the generic tendency of science fiction and is explicitly and unambiguously published under the name of science fiction. Especially insofar as the American and British traditions are concerned, this great increase in the critical sophistication of science fiction as a named genre can be correlated with the more general increase in critical thinking—that is, in dialectical, historical, and utopian thinking—that characterizes the general cultural phenomenon known as “the Sixties.” Of the four American authors discussed below, only Philip K. Dick produced major work before the advent of the most fateful decade of the post–World War II era, and it is no accident that Dick became a science-fiction author largely because most forums for other fictional genres were closed to his subversive imaginings in the dreadfully conformist America of the 1950s. Furthermore, despite his important early work, Dick produced his best fiction during the 3. Excursuses Excursuses 95 / Sixties and immediately afterward; and Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and Samuel Delany are all literary children of the Sixties in an even more direct and obvious way. As will become evident from the detailed readings to follow, such radical currents of the Sixties as the civil rights and Black Power movements , the movements against the Cold War and the war in Vietnam, the youth counterculture, the environmentalist movement, feminism, gay liberation , and the various New Lefts generally supply the conditions of historical possibility for the major work of authors like Dick, Le Guin, Russ, Delany and their best colleagues and followers. If one were to seek a single descriptive historical phrase to characterize this body of science fiction, one could not do better than “the Sixties and after.” Accordingly, there is good reason that all the authors discussed at length below should belong to this—admittedly very large and diverse—cohort of current science-fiction writers. In fact, all but one of them are at this writing still alive, and any generalizations about their careers must be qualified by the recognition that they are still capable of somewhat redefining the overall shape of their own work. It seems obvious to me that all are among the most accomplished novelists of their—our—age. Though all belong to (very roughly) the same chronological group, I have made my selections on the basis of the importance of the particular novelistic texts, not with a purpose of picking five writers who might “represent” in any very specific ways the larger number of writers who could appropriately be discussed in this chapter. Nonetheless, it does not seem to me completely fortuitous that four of the five writers considered below are Americans and that two of the five are women. Probably these proportions do very approximately suggest some valid generalizations about where the critical and creative energy in contemporary science fiction is mainly coming from (though I do not mean to deny the continued importance of British science fiction nor the possibility that women writers may, by now, have achieved something like, or something better than, parity with their male colleagues). With regard to the particular titles I have chosen, the importance of at least three—the texts by Stanis...