Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

I have incurred many debts, to institutions, and to individuals. All I can do here is discuss, very briefly, some of the more obvious ones and extend my apologies to those who have accidentally gone unmentioned.

      My institutional obligations are relatively straightforward. Various sorts of financial or other support have been provided by the following: the Marxist Literary Group at Yale University from 1977 to 1984; the Center for the Humanities of Wesleyan University; the Department of English, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Office of Research, all of Louisiana State University; the Eaton Science Fiction Collection at the University of California at Riverside, and the annual conferences and critical anthologies sponsored by the Eaton Collection; the journal Science-Fiction Studies; and, last but certainly not least, the Wesleyan University Press. To all, my thanks.

      My debts to individuals are far more numerous and more difficult to keep track of; the following account is doubtless highly selective.

      In a sense, my first debt is to my father for introducing me to science fiction. When I was in my early teens, he recommended Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, which I read at once and enjoyed hugely. I proceeded to read through most of the rest of Asimov’s science fiction (and much of his nonfiction), and have preserved a special fondness for Asimov ever since. Relatively little is said about Asimov’s work in the main text, and he certainly does not loom nearly so large in my conception of science fiction as he once did; nonetheless I am glad of the chance to record my admiration for him.

      My adolescent enthusiasm for science fiction lasted only a few years. I returned to SF during my graduate student years, when I first began to think systematically about both critical theory and science fiction. My chief mentor in both instances was Fredric Jameson, to whose teaching and writing I am even more indebted than my frequent references to him will probably indicate.

      I am no less grateful to many graduate school colleagues with whom I discussed critical theory and science fiction almost endlessly. I have especially vivid memories of valuable conversations with the late Rena Grant, with Jonathan Haynes, with John Rieder, with Steven Shaviro, and, above all, with Christopher Kendrick, my old theoretical alter ego. More recently, Chris Kendrick provided me with a complete set of critical annotations of the manuscript as it was being produced; his comments were invariably intelligent and interesting, usually of direct use, and occasionally legible as well.

      Another complete set of annotations was provided by Carl Gardner, my friend of more than three decades, who read the manuscript not only as a lifelong aficionado of science fiction but also as a professional physicist and applied mathematician. Yet another complete set of comments on the manuscript was provided by Robin Roberts, my colleague at LSU, from whom I have also learned much in the undergraduate courses on science fiction that we have taught together.

      I have, indeed, taught many courses, graduate and undergraduate, on both critical theory and science fiction, and a huge collective debt is owed to my students. Special recognition is due the members of the best class I have ever seen: the students of my graduate seminar “Critical Theory and Science Fiction,” taught in the LSU English Department during the spring semester of 1997.

      Khachig Tölölyan has done me so many personal and professional good turns over the years that I have almost come to take his consistent generosity and support for granted. He has been important to my academic endeavors in more ways than I could particularize here.

      I mentioned the journal Science-Fiction Studies above. Although I have the highest praise for the members of its current collective editorship, I must here single out the former editor, Robert Philmus, during whose tenure I became formally associated with the journal. It was while working with Robert that I became a professional critic of science fiction; among many other good turns, he commissioned me to write the article “Science Fiction and Critical Theory,” out of which this book grew.

      Somewhat similarly, I must single out George Slusser as the curator of the Eaton Collection and the first guiding genius of the Eaton conferences; his support over the years is an instance of that disinterested academic integrity that leads him to sponsor and subsidize the expression of views (like mine) with which he strongly disagrees.

      My LSU colleague John Lowe read a draft of the concluding section on the postmodern, and contributed many careful and useful comments

      Suzanna Tamminen, the editor-in-chief of the Wesleyan University Press, has been a source of help and good humor, and her enthusiasm for this project from manuscript to hard covers has been a real inspiration to me. If Robert Philmus first taught me how much good editors of scholarly journals contribute to our intellectual culture, Suzanna taught me the same about good editors at university presses.

      Alcena Rogan has consistently provided astute criticism, generous support, and love. Of all the things she has done for me, I will mention only her most tangible contribution to this volume, namely, the preparation of the index. An index of concepts as well as of proper names can be vital to the reader of an essay like this, and it is brilliantly presented here.

      My greatest of all debts, however, is to someone too young to have made any direct contribution to this project: my daughter Rosa. Both critical theory and science fiction are ultimately oriented toward the future, as I will argue at some length, and Rosa is my main personal reason for being interested in the future. She will live to see the second half of the twenty-first century, by which time, I hope, the world will be more like what most of the theorists and novelists discussed in this volume would desire than like the late twentieth-century world into which Rosa was born.

July 1999

C.F.

       Preface

      Like any other writer, I am often asked about my current project. During the time that I thought of the following essay as my current project, I sometimes responded simply by giving the title. On other occasions, however, when a little more detail seemed to be called for, I usually employed one of two prepared responses. The short, playful response was to say that my thesis about critical theory and science fiction is that each is a version of the other. This, of course, is more aphorism than answer, but I remain rather attached to it as an aphorism. It seems to me to have some of the provocative elegance of a Möbius strip—a figure, indeed, that tends to turn up rather often in science fiction.

      My longer, more serious response began by saying that my aim was to do for science fiction what Georg Lukács does for historical fiction in The Historical Novel. The comparison is immodest indeed, since, in my opinion, The Historical Novel remains, for all its imperfections and ambiguities, the finest literary-critical account of any particular fictional genre. Leaving aside, however, the question of to what degree I succeed in emulating the brilliance of Lukács’s achievement, there should be no question that the fundamental intention of this volume is strictly parallel to that of Lukács’s great work. Just as Lukács argues that the historical novel is a privileged and paradigmatic genre for Marxism, so I argue that science fiction enjoys—and ought to be recognized as enjoying—such a position not only for Marxism but for critical theory in general. Sometimes though by no means always a “popular” literature (like historical fiction), science fiction is of all forms of fiction today the one that bears the deepest and most interesting affinity with the rigors of dialectical thinking. Lukács demonstrates that a great deal of light can be thrown on the historical novel by studying it in conjunction with historical materialism. Likewise, I maintain that we can learn a great deal about the work of such science-fiction authors as Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Stanisław Lem, and Samuel Delany by studying it together with the theoretical production of writers like Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Lacan, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and Lukács himself. But there is no question of merely “applying” critical theory to science fiction, and I also argue that understanding these two modes of discourse together can reveal much about both. The equivalent of this position is perhaps not quite overt in Lukács’s own text, though I believe it is implicit in the general logic of his argument.

      It may be useful to sketch out here how my general argument is advanced in the different components of the essay to follow.