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Introduction Science Fiction and This Moment ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ “These are the days of lasers in the jungle.”1 SF has emerged as a pervasive genre of literature — and of film, video, comics, computer graphics and games — in the postindustrial North. Indeed, it elicits intense interest in the rest of the world. It is not so much that sf has grown into this position, as the reverse: the world has grown into sf. Gertrude Stein once pronounced the United States the oldest country on earth, because it was the first to enter the twentieth century. By the same token, sf is one of the most venerable of living genres: it was the first to devote its imagination to the future and to the ceaseless revolutions of knowledge and desire that attend the application of scientific and technical knowledge to social life. From its roots, whether we trace them to Lucian, Swift, Voltaire, Mary Shelley , or Hugo Gernsback, sf has been a genre of fantastic entertainment. It has produced many works of intellectual and political sophistication, side by side with countless ephemeral confections. Unlike most popular genres, it has also been critically self-aware. The fiction has inspired a steady production of commentary about what distinguishes it from other modes of expression. This body of critical work is rich in social diversity, and unparalleled in its allegiance to reimagining the world with a passion that has at times resembled the commitment to a political movement.2 The once-regnant view that sf can’t help but be vulgar and artistically shallow is fading. As the world undergoes daily transformations via the development of technoscience in every imaginable aspect of life, (and, more important , as people become aware of these transformations) sf has come to be seen as an essential mode of imagining the horizons of possibility. However much sf texts vary in artistic quality, intellectual sophistication, and their capacity to give pleasure, they share a mass social energy, a desire to imagine a collective future for the human species and the world. In the past forty years, not only have sf artists produced more artistically ambitious works than in the previous hundred, but works of criticism have 1 established the foundations for definition and self-examination characteristic of mature artistic movements. Major critical works — from Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) to Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity (1993), journals of academic scholarship and criticism (Foundation, Extrapolation , Science Fiction Studies, The New York Review of Science Fiction), and the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction’s second edition, which gave the first comprehensive overview of the history of the genre for scholars—have provided tools for thinking about the genre and its implications in sophisticated philosophical and historical terms. At this moment, a strikingly high proportion of films, commercial art, popular music, video and computer games, and nongenre fiction are overtly sf or contain elements of it. This widespread normalization of what is essentially a style of estrangement and dislocation has stimulated the development of science-fictional habits of mind, so that we no longer treat sf as purely a genreengine producing formulaic effects, but rather as a kind of awareness we might call science-fictionality, a mode of response that frames and tests experiences as if they were aspects of a work of science fiction. It is one mode of response among many others, and it influences people’s actions to different degrees. Some are inspired to create, as H. G. Wells’s novel The World Set Free inspired Leo Szilárd to imagine nuclear fission,3 or as William Gibson’s depiction of the cyberspace matrix and virtual reality in Neuromancer stimulated countless computer programmers.4 Some are drawn, in games and in life, to playing out roles they identify with in sf texts. Most people merely bracket difficult-toprocess , incongruous moments of technology’s intersection with everyday life as science-fictional moments. Increasingly, this sense of technosocial aspiration meshing with the limits and desires of concrete social life, often involving violent collisions of hard techniques with human and natural complexity, is the appropriate response to contemporary reality. Consider the daily news: the postmodern hecatomb of the World Trade Center; Chernobyl’s lost villages and mutant flora; CGI pop stars; genocide under surveillance satellites; the cloning of farm animals; Internet pornography raining down in microwaves; helicopter gunships deployed against stone-throwing crowds; GM pollen drifting toward the calyces of natural plants; Artificial Life; global social movements (and even nations) without...

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