SF "Pretend" to Cognitive Rigor, Making Distinguishing it From Fantasy "Fuzzy"

Moreover, as Csicsery-Ronay points out, albeit in a different way, the “cognition effect” does not escape another problem Miéville points to. In the same piece, Miéville states that “A lot of science fiction that pretends it is about scientific rigor is actually predicated on a kind of a late Enlightenment model of the expertise of the scientist..., a kind of caste or class model that is, in a way, the Enlightenment’s betrayal of itself, since it says: do not ask questions because we have an expert here who will understand this stuff for us (and for the bourgeoisie).” Instead, Miéville states that the “boundaries between the impossible of the fantastic and Gothic on the one hand, and the impossible of science fiction on the other, are simply too fuzzy to be systematically maintained.” This conclusion can be taken a step further, too, for if SF “pretends” to a cognitive rigor in the same way the figure of the scientist does, then this “fuzzy” line between SF and fantasy, and between fantasy and the Fantastic, also follows Todorov’s definition of the Fantastic, wherein a “moment of hesitation” destabilises the line between fantasy and reality “itself.” In other words, cognitive estrangement requires the simultaneous maintenance and collapse of the division between realism and fantasy, cognition and estrangement, empiricism and faith.

Jason Haslam, Gender, Race, and American Science Fiction: Reflections on Fantastic Identities (2015)

• critical theory
• science fiction