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SCIENCE FICTION AND NARRATIVE FORM
Edited by David Roberts, Andrew Milner and Peter Murphy
Bloomsbury, 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26754/nf6w6x26
MIASOL EGUÍBAR HOLGADO
Universidad de Oviedo
eguibarmiasol@uniovi.es
<https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7110-4873>
Academic engagement with science fiction remained steady from the 1970s until
the turn of the millennium, a period that saw the publication of remarkable
studies such as Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), Kathleen
Spencer’s essay on the stylistic description of science fiction (1983) and Carl
Freedman’s Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000). In the twenty-first
century, there has been a veritable explosion of texts, both from scholars and
authors of science fiction. Whereas earlier critical works were more concerned
with genre definitions, new contributions seek to explore the multiple possibilities
of science fiction, and thus the panorama of science fiction studies is changing
drastically and rapidly (see, for instance, Langer 2011; Ginway and Brown 2012;
Lavender III 2014; Lothian 2018; Schalk 2018; Brown Spiers 2021). Science
Fiction and Narrative Form is one more example of how science fiction seems to
be receiving more attention from academic institutions now than any other
moment in its history. In its opening paragraphs, co-author David Roberts
declares that “like the epic and the novel, science fiction is a literary form” (1).
Yet, it is hard to say whether placing science fiction “among the great narrative
forms” (1) succeeds in pushing science fiction studies in new directions. At times
it even feels as though it does the opposite, as the formalist approach seems to
neglect some of the most outstanding literary tendencies within science fiction
over the past two decades.
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The book relies heavily on notions of literary form derived from Georg Lukács’s
The Theory of the Novel, originally published in book form in 1920. Despite not
being one of his most widely cited works, the work contains ideas on literary forms
that are not entirely without value, and the three authors of Science Fiction and
Narrative Form make their case for approaching science fiction as narrative form
in a very refined and comprehensive manner. According to Lukács, the epic is a
pre-modern literary form and it transforms into the novel with the advent of
modernity. The difference between the two is that the epic belongs in a world that
is whole, self-contained, where meaning is integrated in that wholeness. The
modern individual, in contrast, is alienated from the world, and so the novel
constantly seeks, but fails, to retrieve wholeness and unity. As society develops,
Lukács predicted, there will emerge “a new form of artistic creation” (1988: 152)
to best suit the needs and ethos of that society. The premise of the authors in
Science Fiction and Narrative Form is that science fiction fulfills that role
prophesized by Lukács, of a narrative form capable of representing a complete
world once again. Although they are not the first to make such a claim —Timothy
Bewes argued something similar for the postmodern novel— the three authors do
provide cogent arguments and close analyses to illustrate their point.
In Part 1, David Roberts traces the transition from the epic to the novel, and then
from the novel to science fiction, the latter combining aspects of the former two.
Science fiction resembles the epic in that the imagined worlds of science fiction
(unlike in the novel) are self-contained totalities. But, like in the novel (and unlike
in the epic), the meaning of that world is not immanent to reality— it seeks
transcendence. In creating possible worlds, science fiction “poses at the same time
the question of the meaning of its hypothetical experiment” (58). The technology-
oriented, post-human societies that science fiction projects thus have predictive,
allegorical and didactic value. In the second part, Andrew Milner taps into the
potential of science fiction to construct future histories, following another of
Lukács’s incursions into literary theory, The Historical Novel (1937). In an
innovative move, Milner severs the now commonplace association between science
fiction and utopia in order to bring historical fiction to the equation: “the typical
subject matter of SF is future history, uchronia and dyschronia rather than utopia
and dystopia, its precursors therefore Scott and Dumas, rather than More and
Francis Bacon” (97). To illustrate this claim, the author conducts close analyses of
climate fiction texts set at progressively more distant points in the historical future.
In Part 3, Peter Murphy focuses on epic form through an extensive discussion on
epic science fiction, most notably exemplified by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.
Epic science fiction is capable of encompassing vast spaces and expanses of time, as
big in scale as the imagination allows. Thanks to these formal possibilities, it reveals
the full effects of historical/natural cyclic forces that transcend limited human
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actions and motivations. The epic scale of science fiction thus offers a different
perspective on social relations and the meaning (or lack thereof) of human life.
Finally, Part 4, written by Milner again, follows up on the premise that science
fiction relates closely to historical fiction. Current quasi-apocalyptic events such as
wars, pandemics, climate change and AI raise the question of whether history will
continue to advance at all, or if the end is indeed near. Science fiction, Milner
argues, reflects on the questions posed by these present-day threats and provides
possible answers.
While these arguments are intellectually compelling, they present severe limitations.
The theoretical underpinnings of the book, as developed mostly in the introduction
and Part 1, are not always easy to grasp, not least because the language used is
often obscure. One wonders how relevant Lukács’s theory of literary forms can be
in current times. Despite its high level of abstraction, the book seems to take a very
reductive approach to literature: the organic totality of the ancient Greeks vs the
godless, sinful modern world; the epic vs the novel. In its simplicity, it sounds
suspiciously like a grand narrative, with its concomitant problematic: a series of
theories articulated at a specific historical moment from a Eurocentric perspective
which are nevertheless taken as a universal explanation of what literature was and
is supposed to be about. And it is not only that the notion of science fiction as
literary form rests on these premises, but the theories about science fiction put
forward in this book are themselves constructed following the same totalizing
logic. That is, Lukács’s arguably dated ideas are not merely a point of departure,
but regulate and impinge on how science fiction theories are formulated
throughout the book. An example of this impulse of generalized abstraction is the
way the post-human is addressed. Roberts seems to take a transhuman stance
when he says that “The transcendence of man reverses into the armoured body,
the soldier into the killing machine […] the worker into slave” (75). In the face of
this predicament, it is science fiction’s role to find (or not) humanity in the post-
human. There is no mention of Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory (1985), nor is
there anything close to the post-anthropocentrism that Rosi Braidotti poses as the
basis of post-human thought (2013). Roberts’s analyses hinge on the
anthropocentric fear of lost humanity, a humanity that recoils in self-doubt when
confronted with the technological Other. Moreover, the works under study offer
a disproportionately Euro-Western and male-centered version of the human and of
science fiction. Aside from Mary Shelley, Margaret Atwood and very few other
exceptions, all the writers given any significant space of discussion are men. The
book thus follows the human-as-man in his teleological journey from epic to novel
to science fiction. Murphy’s exploration of Asimov’s Foundation, for all its
insistence that human volition and purpose are transcended in the epic, is largely
underpinned by colonization, imperialism and a preoccupation with the “rise, fall
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and rise of civilizations” (187). Finally, Milner’s contention that science fiction is
about future history and/or apocalypse ignores how science fiction is, for many
writers of color, much more about the past and the present than it is about the
future, not least because postcolonial/decolonial societies have already experienced
apocalypse in their histories, thus irremediably undoing Milner’s dichotomy (i.e.
the either/or of history and apocalypse).
All in all, the authors set off on their quest to canonize science fiction as a serious
literary form without taking into account any significant developments in the
theories and practices of science fiction from the last four decades: the rise of
gender and sexuality issues; the rapidly advancing area of co-futurisms, to which
Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism and Latinx science fiction (among others)
belong; the emergence of post-genre fantasy and new forms such as the New
Weird; non-anthropocentric accounts of posthumanism; the historical-materialist
approach to the genre spearheaded by John Rieder (2017); among others. In its
exploration of literary forms restricted to Lukács’s theories, the book is perhaps
overly specific and targets a very narrow corpus, yet it presents its interpretations
as universal tenets of science fiction. As far as argumentation and analysis goes,
however, the book is very consistent with the aims it purports to fulfill and it does
contain thought-provoking remarks, such as that in science fiction “the question
transcends the answer” (44), or that, today, science fiction “has supplanted religion
and prophecy” (194). Inasmuch as one can find a universalist notion of literary
forms appealing and relevant, this book certainly makes some interesting points
about the intersection between science fiction and narrative form.
Works Cited
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Received: 14/09/2023
Accepted: 12/11/2024
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
