The history of SF overlaps with the history of mimetic fiction; Samuel R. Delany calls it "paraliterary," making it comparable to westerns, mysteries, and comics (Delany, "Science and Literature" 9). Attempts have been made to give SF the respectability of pedigree, plus lists and lists of definitions, but a more fruitful approach may be to focus on how one recognizes a text as SF. A sentence may read quite differently when it appears in SF from the way it reads in "mainstream fiction (Delany, "Some Presumptuous Assumptions..." 49): try these examples and notice the shift in meaning for some of them.

To define SF by listing surface features is a reductive approach, gleaning from images (the spaceship, the robot, the monster) that appeared originally in "pulps" and were appropriated by films. Gwyneth Jones calls these images "iconic" because they are meaningful even outside their narrative contexts, and because they are also deeply evocative of the tensions between known and unknown or of audience anxieties about technology.

One useful definition: "A good SF story is a story with human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its science content" (Theodore Sturgeon).

"Mode" vs. "Genre"

On the way to protocols it is helpful to shift from the concept of genre ( a set of expectations developed across time) to the concept of mode (the way the story is written--as fantastic instead of mimetic). A few SF "icons" may create an exotic surface impression, but a credible SF world creates "imaginative at-homeness" (Seamus Heaney) as the narrative develops.

• In SF, the background or setting cannot be taken for granted; on the other hand, a murder mystery can with a few changes, be set in Victorian England, or medieval England, or ancient Egypt. The SF reader, faced with an unknown world, learns to pick up on the cues that answer the key questions about relationships of Word to World or Character to Context.
  
  
• SF tends to rely on one or more of Gordon R. Dickson's "anchors in reality" (299), but these are less important than the distortions of the known world that are the basis of SF (Delany 47).
  
  
• Narrative events must be so grounded in the "rules" of an SF Secondary World that they resist dismissal as "this is just [Shane or Gone With the Wind] in new clothes." The plot of Neuromancer is nullified if direct sensory access to the "matrix" is removed from the plot.

• Note: "sci-fi" is a term of opprobrium, referring to works that exploit the icons of SF purely as decoration with no concern for substance or narrative. "Space opera" is another term for this kind of ersatz SF.

Main

Defining SF

Defining Cyberpunk

SF and Postmodernism

The Motifs of Cyberpunk

A Short Bibliography