Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

      

       Critical Theory and Science Fiction

       Critical Theory and Science Fiction

      Carl Freedman

      Wesleyan University Press

      Middletown, Connecticut

      Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459

      www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

      © 2000 by Carl Freedman

      All rights reserved

      Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3 2

      CIP data appear at the end of the book

      ISBNs for the paperback edition:

      ISBN-13: 978–0–8195–6399–6

      ISBN-10: 0–8195–6399–4

      Cover photograph by Piotr Uklanski, Untitled (Queens), 1998, © the artist. Courtesy Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York.

       To my mother and father

       And to the memory of Lev Davidovich Bronstein

      To change the world is not to explore the moon. It is to make the revolution and build socialism without regressing back to capitalism.

      The rest, including the moon, will be given to us in addition.

      —LOUIS ALTHUSSER

      Se vuol ballare,

      Signor Contino,

      Il chitarrino

      Le suonerò.

      —LORENZO DA PONTE

      A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

      —OSCAR WILDE

       Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Preface	xv
1. Definitions	1
Critical Theory	1
Science Fiction	13
2. Articulations	24
Genre, Theory, and Phases of Canon-Formation	24
The Critical Dynamic: Science Fiction and Style	30
The Critical Dynamic: Science Fiction and the Historical Novel	44
The Critical Dynamic: Science Fiction and Utopia	62
Science Fiction and the Canon	86
3. Excursuses	94
Solaris: Stanisław Lem and the Structure of Cognition	96
The Dispossessed: Ursula Le Guin and the Ambiguities of Utopia	111
The Two of Them: Joanna Russ and the Violence of Gender	129
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand: Samuel Delany and the Dialectics of Difference	146
The Man in the High Castle: Philip K. Dick and the Construction of Realities	164
Coda: Critical Theory, Science Fiction, and the Postmodern	181
Index	201

       Acknowledgments

      I have been working on this essay, in one way or another, for a long time. Indeed, in composing and revising the text I have often been struck by how much preparation was accomplished on occasions when I had no conscious notion that any