Fantastic Mimesis: A Diamond in the Rough, Not the Philosopher's Stone

In the past fifty years, theoretical reflection about science fiction, both as a kind of art and as a way of perceiving modern life, has produced a rich, sophisticated body of work. Seo-Young Chu's Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation might be a significant, if problematic, contribution to that corpus. As stunning in its originality and chutzpah as in the shakiness of its reasoning, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? strives for nothing less than a reversal of the main currents of science-fiction theory. Chu argues that science fiction (SF) should be considered a literary mode, rather than a historical genre, and as such is the main cultural vehicle for representing inchoate and complex new realities (which is not a wholly new proposal) because it relies on the devices of lyric poetry (which is). The book's ambitions go further. Chu also proposes to reverse our traditional understanding of literary mimesis as the preserve of realistic fiction, replacing it with SF. Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? contains acute readings of a great range of texts and offers fresh ways of conceiving science fiction's relationship to modern experience. It also pushes excessively ambitious claims based on willfully naive assumptions about fiction and theory that may prevent it from being the game-changer it could be. Chu has discovered a rough diamond but claims it is the philosopher's stone.

The thesis of Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? comes in two strengths, moderate and strong. In the moderate version, SF plays a central role in contemporary culture because its poetic qualities, most notably the literalization of poetic figures, give it the power to make new, difficult-to-conceive phenomena— which Chu calls "cognitively estranging objects"—imaginable and intelligible, "available for representation." In other words, SF's repertoire of narratives and images is particularly well suited for representing the extreme and anomalous experiences and complex concepts associated with twentieth-century historical developments for which the devices of realism are inadequate. The strong version of the thesis extends this observation to the claim that SF is our only true form of mimesis. Because the important objects of our world resist representation, SF's power to coax elusive referents into articulation demonstrates that all forms of literary representation are essentially science fiction, regardless of their specific generic contexts. Science fiction is essentially lyric; all representations of complex, elusive phenomena are science fictional; and the representation of these cognitively estranging objects is what mimesis is all about.

The moderate thesis fits well among recent arguments that SF is less a specific genre than a way of thinking about a world that is continually saturated, shocked, upgraded, and deleted by technoscientific innovations. In this view—associated with writers as various as Bruce Sterling, Scott Bukatman, Brooks Landon, Veronica Hollinger, and Sherryl Vint¹—SF has become a mode of awareness about life conditions that traditional institutions and ideologies cannot fathom. Many of the innovations with the greatest impact on contemporary life were imaginatively tested and shaped by science fiction, while conventional, "mundane" art treated them as marginal. More and more thinkers have included allusions to works of SF to make their points, or even— in the case of philosophers like Jean Baudrillard, Donna Haraway, Daniel Dennett, Slavoj Žižek, and Franco Berardi—used concepts explicitly drawn from SF to ground their thought experiments. Many research programs in cognitive science and related fields are attempting to materialize phenomena that were once purely science fictional fantasies. Chu's important contribution to this project is to focus on the way SF's vocabulary of tropes has made new thinking possible and communicable. In particular, she has identified a core strategy of science fictional writing and explained how the use of this strategy inflects a great variety of works not strictly linked to the genre with science fictional meaning.

Chu maintains...