Oct

17

Out Of The Shadows.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

October 17, 2007 |

The 2007 edition of the Yearbook of English Studies has devoted an entire volume to the subject of science fiction in literature. As guest editor David Seed says in the preface, “Over recent decades SF has moved from the margins of our culture to a position of centrality.” Part of this is because science fiction has either predicted or even influenced current technology. In one of my favorite books as a child, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Jules Verne imagined nuclear-powered submarines and scuba gear.

Perhaps nothing sums up the new centrality of science fiction as the seriousness with which some literary scholars treat it. While the some of the articles sound fairly straightforward, such as Some Things We Know About Aliens by Istvan Csicery-Ronay, Jr., others sound heavy with jargon even from their titles, such as (En)gendering Artificial Intelligence in Cyberspace by Sabine Heuser.

While science fiction is the general theme of this volume, each of the essays actually focuses specifically on the alien, although the definition is broad enough to include the creatures of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau and prehistoric humans, who Victorian writers assumed were brutal, brainless savages. The wild and morally superior imaginations of Victorians, in fact, have given us the stereotype of the Cave Man.

Science fiction used to be read covertly. Now it’s out in the open, part of the mainstream. We still don’t have flying cars and we haven’t (as far as I know) met any aliens yet, but where science fiction really excels is in using fantasy to gently (or sometimes not so gently) confront us with reality. How we respond to aliens ultimately tells us about ourselves because we are the aliens.


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