| This thesis defines a theoretical approach to science fiction and applies that approach to SF's creation of alien worlds.;The second half of the thesis applies this distinction to SF's two different methods of creating alien worlds: "conceptual" methods (objectively scientific) and "perceptual" methods (subjectively emotional). The second method requires the medium of characters in the story to express reactions to the alien world, while the first relies solely on physical measurements. I use these methods to explore conventional and experimental writing in several SF works, contrasting the conventional elements in books by Hal Clement, Poul Anderson, Piers Anthony, Larry Niven, Brian Aldiss, and Ray Bradbury, with the more experimental elements in novels by Stanislaw Lem, Fritz Leiber, Joanna Russ, J. G. Ballard, and Gene Wolfe (and I discuss the gradations that fall in between--no SF story is purely experimental or conventional). This analysis demonstrates how dialectical writing "turns around" onto the underlying causes--whether psychological or social--of particular types of alien worlds and examines those causes in the work itself. It shows the difference between those works which fill the universe with the assumptions of a particular society, or of a particular group in that society, or of conventional SF itself, and those other novels which question these same assumptions, which use their alien worlds not as ends in themselves but as means to the end of demonstrating how these assumptions are taken for certainties.;The first half of the study addresses the dualistic nature of SF, the seeming split between its "form" and its various "functions," the notion that what it is used for is perhaps different from what is is. I define SF's form as "fantasy posing as realism because of an apparently scientific frame," and designate its functions as either "conventional" or "experimental." In the conventional mode, SF is a publisher's genre, a popular literature whose assumptions form a collective and ideological future-scenario; it provides comfort and promise for those social groups who believe in the scenario's activities of technological progress, expansion into space, the solving of closed puzzle-like problems (usually technological), and the spreading of individualistic values across the galaxy (free will, domination and exploitation). In this mode, SF is best seen as a commodity, a product of the self-perpetuating circle of supply and demand which supports both the market and the image a social group has of itself. Contrarily, the experimental mode uses "dialectical" thought that examines the perceiving subject as well as the supposedly impartial object, that uses conventional SF topics as means to an end instead of as ends in themselves, that uses alien worlds or future societies as methods for social criticism, satire, prophetic warning, or extrapolation, and not just as the expectable objects of an entertainment medium. In those mode, SF is more of a tool for change and criticism than an enclosed and delimited genre, and is most closely compared to scientific theorizing and "thought-experiments." A major quality of this mode is "self-reflexivity," a turn-around onto the assumptions of SF conventions or of the societies and classes producing SF, and an open questioning of these assumptions in the work: a return from the escapist galactic thrust outward to contemporary problems of self and society. |
