Fantasy Authors Use Existing Cultures for Easy Consistency

Inconsistencies in any fictional world can be jarring to audiences and detract from the narrative; “lacking consistency, a world may begin to appear sloppily constructed, or even random and disconnected.”58 Since Secondary Worlds are increasingly likely to be inconsistent as they grow in size and scope, analogies to the real world are particularly useful to Fantasy authors because they provide a template in which not every detail needs to be either imagined or explained to the audience. G...

 Fantasy-as-Mode VS Fantasy-as-Formula

Scholarly engagements with the Fantasy genre tend to come largely from literary perspectives and to focus on genre as a body of texts, usually written. Definitions, as a result, are generally concerned with how to delineate its boundaries – which texts are in and which are out? Brian Attebery’s delineation of “fantasy-as-mode” and “fantasy-as-formula” from the Fantasy genre continues to be one of the most influential and useful approaches to that project. The “fantastic mode” ...

 Fantasy's "Unreality" Makes It Safer for Exploring Cultur...

Fantasy is a useful sub-set through which to explore popular culture not only because of its prominent position at the present historical moment,but because its inherently non-mimetic nature creates a space which is at least nominally not “the real world” and is therefore safer for cultural work around fraught issues such as – although by no means limited to – race. This is not to suggest that the imagined worlds of Fantasy are separate from reality, but rather that the inclusion of a...

 SF as the "Queering of Realism"

If, as I write in the introduction, SF can be read as the queering of realism, then it is as the dominant culture’s death drive that it does so: SF provides the speculative challenge to our primary definitions of reality, the first step necessary in the creation of fiction as such, even as its movement away from reality is a move away from the understandable, an anti-telos that denies the finality of meaning altogether. If SF is the limit case of reality, the limit case of SF is the truly a...

 All Utopias Are Conservative

Herbert’s critique of this seemingly countercultural utopia is precisely aimed at its conservatism. In necessarily rendering life static, the utopian vision must deny the instability of signification and that permits for change and development itself. In making this argument, I am aware that I am (or Herbert is) falling into what Kenneth M. Roemer calls that category of “muckrakers (or ‘stuckrakers’) preoccupied with exposing elements in literary utopias that tend toward changeless st...

 SF's Extension of Semiotic Possibilities in Language

Delany—in his equally famous and oft-cited definition of science fiction—argues that science fiction is characterised by an extension of semiotic possibilities in language: that is, he argues that words can simply mean more in science fiction than they can in realist fiction. Delany sees this as a function of the heightened realism of SF, and the materialisation of metaphor involved therein: he uses the phrases “Then her world exploded” and “He turned on his left side” to demonstr...

 SF "Pretend" to Cognitive Rigor, Making Distinguishing it...

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 w...

 Socrates' Criticism of the Written Word Echoes Those Agai...

En la época de Sócrates, los textos escritos aún no eran una herramienta habitual y todavía despertaban recelos. Los consideraban un sucedáneo de la palabra oral — liviana, alada, sagrada—. Aunque la Atenas del siglo V a. C. ya contaba con un incipiente comercio de libros, no sería hasta un siglo después, en tiempos de Aristóteles, cuando se llegase a contemplar sin extrañeza el hábito de leer. Para Sócrates, los libros eran ayudas de la memoria y el conocimiento, pero pensaba ...

 Interactive Fiction has "Potential Narrative"

A work of IF is not itself a narrative; it is an interactive computer program. A narrative is “the representation of real or fictive events and situations in a time sequence” (Prince 1980, 180); this can result from an interactive session but does not describe any IF work itself. Similarly, interactive fiction is not a story in the sense of the things that happen in a narrative, or more precisely, “the content plane of narrative as opposed to its expression or discourse; the ‘what’ ...

 The Screen Revolution is Breaking the Thread of Literacy

If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history. Our universities are at the front line of this crisis. They are now teaching their first truly “post-literate” cohorts of students, who have grown up almost entirely in the world of short-form video, computer games, addictive algorithms (and, increasingly, AI). Because ubiquitous m...