Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

but was disproved in 1965; the planet, evidently, does rotate much more rapidly than it revolves, and all parts of it are at one time or another exposed to sunlight. In an afterword to one reprinting of the story, Asimov humorously complained, “I wish astronomers would get these things right to begin with,” and he refused “to change the story to suit their whims” (emphasis in original).²¹ Fortunately, the “whims” of astronomers have nothing to do with the cognition effect of the story (by an author, indeed, who is unusually consistent and insistent in producing the cognition effect), and there is no question of the story’s suddenly being reclassified as fantasy nine years after its initial appearance. Once the formal distinction is clear, however, between cognition and cognition effect, we should not exaggerate its practical significance: the readiest means of producing a cognition effect is precisely through cognition itself; that is, through rationality as the latter is understood from a critical point of view. Science fiction of Lewis’s or Lovecraft’s sort remains relatively atypical of the genre, while the solidity of the cognition effect in Russ or Asimov is by no means unrelated to the fact that Russ’s device may be cognitively legitimate, while Asimov’s once was. Science fiction is, overwhelmingly though not necessarily, a genuinely cognitive literature.

      The second difficulty with defining science fiction as the literature of cognitive estrangement is rather more complex; it may be approached by noting that, taken literally, Suvin’s definition suffers from an immense sacrifice of descriptive to eulogistic force. It is one thing to transcend philology by expanding the concept of science fiction far beyond the largely forgettable pulp texts for which the term was originally invented, and even beyond the texts written in direct succession to pulp. But cognitive estrangement as a definitional principle seems not merely to transcend but to overturn both philology and common usage, largely denying the title of science fiction to most of the pulp tradition while granting it to works produced very far from the influence of the latter. I do not think it can be fruitfully maintained that many very complex or interesting cognitive estrangements are produced in Doc Smith’s Skylark series, or in the Star Wars films, or in most of that vast galaxy of television programs, films, stories, and novels designated Star Trek. Can we really accept a definition by the logic of which such work is not science fiction at all but the plays of Brecht—to take the obvious instance—are? It is true, of course, that for Brecht historical materialism is not only cognitive but scientific in the strongest sense, and Marx just as much the founder of a science as Galileo. Nor is there necessarily any reason (and here an old Kantian problem resurfaces) why the natural sciences should be cognitively privileged over the human sciences—even leaving aside that much of the science fiction that seems most explicitly wedded to the so-called hard sciences (for example, much of Heinlein) often turns out, upon inspection, to involve not science at all but engineering. Nonetheless, Suvin does, in fact, seem to find Brecht a difficult case: well aware of the latter’s status as the preeminent theorist and practitioner of literary estrangement (Verfremdung), he remarks that estrangement is “used by Brecht in a different way, within a still predominantly ‘realistic’ context” (Metamorphoses 7). The assertion is surely false, for Brecht is in no sense a literary realist, not even allowing for the quotation marks—as Lukács angrily charged and as Brecht himself proudly admitted.²² In order to clarify the issues at stake here, it is necessary to clarify the dynamics of genre criticism itself.²³

      Genre has often been considered a suspect category because of the static, merely classificatory intellectual framework that it seems to imply: the various genres are understood as a row of so many pigeonholes, and each literary text is expected to fit more or less unproblematically into one of them (allowing, of course, for the inevitable ambiguous or borderline cases). But it is possible to conceptualize genre in a radically different and thoroughly dialectical way. In this understanding, a genre is not a classification but an element or, better still, a tendency that, in combination with other relatively autonomous generic elements or tendencies, is active to a greater or lesser degree within a literary text that is itself understood as a complexly structured totality. In other words: a text is not filed under a generic category; instead, a generic tendency is something that happens within a text.

      It is a priori likely that most texts display the activity of numerous different genres, and that few or no texts can be adequately described in terms of one genre alone. Genre in this sense is analogous to the Marxist concept of the mode of production as the latter has gained new explanatory force by being contrasted, in the Althusserian vocabulary, with the category of social formation—a term that is preferred to the more familiar notion of society, because the latter connotes a relatively homogeneous unity, whereas the former is meant to suggest an overdetermined combination of different modes of production at work in the same place and during the same time. Though it is thus impossible simply to equate a given social formation with a given mode of production, it is nonetheless legitimate to affirm that (for instance) the United States “is” capitalist, so long as we understand that the copulative signifies not true equation or identity but rather conveys that, of the various and relatively autonomous modes of production active within the U.S. social formation, capitalism enjoys a position of dominance. In the same way, the dialectical rethinking of genre does not in the least preclude generic discrimination. We may validly describe a particular text as science fiction if we understand the formulation to mean that cognitive estrangement is the dominant generic tendency within the overdetermined textual whole.

      Accordingly, there is probably no text that is a perfect and pure embodiment of science fiction (no text, that is to say, in which science fiction is the only generic tendency operative) but also no text in which the science-fiction tendency is altogether absent. Indeed, it might be argued that this tendency is the precondition for the constitution of fictionality—and even of representation—itself. For the construction of an alternative world is the very definition of fiction: owing to the character of representation as a nontransparent process that necessarily involves not only similarity but difference between representation and the “referent” of the latter, an irreducible degree of alterity and estrangement is bound to obtain even in the case of the most “realistic” fiction imaginable. The appearance of transparency in that paradigmatic realist Balzac has been famously exposed as an illusion;²⁴ nonetheless, it is important to understand the operation of alterity in realism not as the failure of the latter, but as the sign of the estranging tendency of science fiction that supplies (if secretly) some of the power of great realistic fiction.²⁵ Furthermore, just as some degree of alterity and hence estrangement is fundamental to all fiction, finally including realism itself, so the same is true (but here the limit case is fantasy) of that other dialectical half of the science-fiction tendency: cognition. The latter is after all an unavoidable operation of the human mind (however precritical, and even if clinically schizophrenic) and must exercise a determinant presence for literary production to take place at all. Even in The Lord of the Rings—to consider again what is perhaps the most thoroughgoing fantasy we possess, by an author who stands to fantasy rather as Balzac stands to realism—cognition is quite strongly and overtly operative on at least one level: namely that of the moral and theological values that the text is concerned to enforce.²⁶

      It is, then, in this very special sense that the apparently wild assertions that all fiction is science fiction and even that the latter is a wider term than the former may be justified: cognition and estrangement, which together constitute the generic tendency of science fiction, are not only actually present in all fiction, but are structurally crucial to the possibility of fiction and even of representation in the first place. Yet in more routine usage, the term of science fiction ought, as I have maintained above, to be reserved for those texts in which cognitive estrangement is not only present but dominant. And it is with this dialectical understanding of genre that we may now reconsider the apparently difficult cases of Brecht, on the one hand, and Star Wars on the other.

      Brecht is indeed an author in whose work the science-fiction tendency is often not only strong but dominant. Masterpieces like Mother Courage (1941) and The Good Person of Szechwan (1943) are essentially thought experiments that may well recall that most famous slogan of pulp science fiction during the Campbellian “Golden Age” of the 1940s and 1950s: the idea as hero. (Brecht might well have added, recasting one of his own most famous maxims: unhappy is the