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Reviewed by:
  • Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future, and: Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, and: Science Fiction: History —Science —Vision, and: The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, and: The Fantastic in Literature
  • Susan R. Gannon
Robert Scholes . Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future. South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975.
Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Rose. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976.
Robert Scholes and Eric Rabkin. Science Fiction: History —Science —Vision. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Tzvetan Todorov . The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1975. (Cornell Paperbacks)
Eric Rabkin . The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1976.

Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future is a revised version of four lectures Professor Scholes gave at Notre Dame in 1974, lectures intended as prolegomena to the serious reading of science fiction. The first piece is a commentary on the contemporary situation of fiction (and literary criticism of it) which makes a case for "fiction of the future." In the second of his essays Scholes discusses "The Roots of Science Fiction," and offers a set of useful critical definitions. He sees fabulation as "fiction that offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way." Structural fabulation is "simply a new mutation in the tradition of speculative fiction" which is "modified by an awareness of the nature of the universe as a system of systems, a structure of structures," and in which "the insights of the past century of science are accepted as fictional points of departure." In his third essay Scholes illustrates the range and quality of work to be found among modern structural fabulists, and his last piece is a close look at the achievement of one of these: Ursula K. LeGuin. Scholes devotes a good part of his essay, "The Good Witch of the West," to a discussion of the Earthsea Trilogy, which he admires very much. He reflects on a passage from A Wizard of Earthsea this way:

Is this magic? Religion? Science? The great gift of Ursula LeGuin is to offer us a perspective in which all these merge, in which realism and fantasy are not opposed, because the supernatural is naturalized—not merely postulated but regulated, systematized, made part of the Great Equilibrium itself. And of course, this is also art, in which the sounds of individual sentences are as cunningly balanced as the whole design, in which a great allegory of the destructive power of science unleashed, and a little allegory of an individual seeking to conquer his own chaotic impulses, come together as neatly as the parts of a dove's tail.

(p. 86)

Not all readers would agree with his comparative estimate of C.S. Lewis and LeGuin, but Scholes makes an interesting case for his position: LeGuin is the better writer, and her world-view is a deeper one. He also has some useful observations on what makes juvenile fiction juvenile, in his comparison of LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy with her work for more mature audiences.

Structural Fabulation is a short book. As Scholes says, it is "an essay, not a treatise, a series of lectures on a single topic, not an exhaustive investigation of that topic." But the book rests solidly on the theoretical foundations of his studies in The Nature of Narrative and Structuralism in Literature, and should be of great interest to anyone involved in the serious reading of science fiction.

Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Mark Rose, is a recent addition to Prentice-Hall's useful series of Twentieth Century Views. The history of science fiction is surveyed by Kingsley Amis, and Robert Conquest presents a thoughtful discussion of the critical and popular attitudes toward the genre. The editor has wisely chosen to include the essay from his recent book in which Robert Scholes develops his theory of science fiction as "structural fabulation." A section devoted to theory contains some of the best pieces in the...

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