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The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction
❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍
THE
SEV E N BE A U T I E S
M M M
OF M M M
SCIENCE FICTION
M M M M M M M
❍
csicsery00fm_i_xii_correx.qxp:csicery 9/24/10 5:27 PM Page iv
Published by
wesleyan univers i t y pre s s
Middletown, CT
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
Copyright ©
by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.
All rights reserved
First Wesleyan paperback
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr.
The seven beauties of science fiction /
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8195-6889-2 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Science fiction—History and criticism.
2. Science fiction—Philosophy. I. Title.
pn3433.5.c75 2008
809.3⬘8762—dc22 2008029054
Preface ix
introduction
Science Fiction and This Moment 1
first beauty
Fictive Neology 13
second beauty
Fictive Novums 47
third beauty
Future History 76
fourth beauty
Imaginary Science 111
fifth beauty
The Science-Fictional Sublime 146
sixth beauty
The Science-Fictional Grotesque 182
seventh beauty
The Technologiade 216
Notes 267
Bibliography 295
Index 317
Preface
This book began with a pedagogical purpose. I had hoped to map out some
ideas about the historical and philosophical aspects of science fiction (sf), and
through these ideas to outline the concepts I felt were most useful for study-
ing sf as a distinctive genre. I had hoped to do it in language that would be ac-
cessible not only to specialists, but to readers outside the academy as well. In
time I understood that I was also writing it for my own small, dispersed com-
munity of literary comparatists. The great literary theorists of the twentieth
century from whom I learned the most — Georg Lukács, Erich Auerbach,
M. M. Bakhtin, Northrop Frye, and Edward Said — had little or nothing to
say about the genre to which I had devoted most of my professional life. Thus
I aspired to establish a place for sf in the historical continuum of literature
and art. Consequently, my approach is somewhat Old School. In the con-
stantly accelerating transformations of our technoscientific culture, many of
my vehicles are probably already receding in the rearview mirror. Consider
Seven Beauties then a work of steampunk criticism. I have not tried to be sys-
tematic or complete. Neither have I tried to debate, or to anticipate criticism.
The main purpose of this book is to inspire better ones, not to have the
last word.
My greatest challenge has been to design arguments that will account for
both refined artistic examples of sf and the popular commodity forms of
“sci-fi.” Theories concerned with the former tend to treat popular forms
with contempt. Populist theories tend to ignore or discount the most artis-
tically and intellectually interesting works: sf ’s contributions to elite culture.
I have tried to formulate categories that will account for sf in all its manifes-
tations. My goal is to understand science fictionality as a way of thinking
about the world, made concrete in many different media and styles, rather
than as a particular market niche or genre category. This book is only the
first step in that project, which still requires close study of sf in film, televi-
ix
sion, visual art, music, and new digital media. Although the Seven Beauties
appear in many different forms, they are attractors of all forms of science
fiction.
My title alludes to a revered medieval Persian poem. The Haft Paykar
(Seven beauties), a mystical epic by the twelfth-century Azeri poet, Nizami,
tells of the legendary King Bahram Gur’s discovery of a secret room in his
palace, in which he finds the portraits of seven beautiful princesses. He falls
in love with each of them, sets out to find them in the seven main regions of
the known earth, marries them, and builds a palace with seven domes for
them, ensconcing each in her own hall. Each of the princesses represents a dif-
ferent cosmic principle. He visits each of them for a night, during which they
tell him a rich allegorical tale of mystical love and moral enlightenment.
So is my title meant to evoke the image of a fantastic edifice with seven halls.
Each is rich and intriguing in its own right, and each contains the others. I am
not entirely sure how my “beauties” should be understood in rationalistic
terms. They are perhaps cognitive attractions, intellectual gravitational fields
that draw our attention. They are perhaps mental schemes, through which we
organize our thinking. They are perhaps tools for thought, so well made that we
admire their design at the very moment we are using them. Whatever else they
are, they compose a constellation of thoughts that sf helps us to become con-
scious of. Some readers will find seven an arbitrary number; others, a full set.
This book emerged out of dialogues with hundreds of students and most
especially with colleagues and friends, who alerted me again and again that
science fiction is more than a literary genre or a social passion. It is a way of
organizing the mind to include the contemporary world. There is much to
criticize in a genre that is dominated by entertainment industries and popu-
lar tastes. But there is also much to care about. SF is an art that delights in vi-
sion, intelligence, and the infinite possibilities of change. It calls into question
all verities, except curiosity and play.
❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍
Many friends and colleagues inspired and supported this work. I thank espe-
cially David Porush, Katherine Hayles, Scott Bukatman, Brooks Landon, David
Seed, Robert Philmus, and my colleagues in the English department of De-
Pauw University. My coeditors at Science Fiction Studies — Arthur Evans, Joan
Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Rob Latham, and Carol McGuirk — taught me
that sf is not only an object of study, but an occasion for love, care, and inspi-
ration. Most of all, I am grateful to my wife, Etti, and my son, Sacha, for
understanding what this book was truly all about.
x preface
I also thank DePauw University and the National Endowment for the Hu-
manities for fellowships to pursue this work. The chapter “Fifth Beauty” was
originally published in somewhat different form in Science Fiction Studies 29,
no. 3 (March 2002); a shorter version of the chapter “Sixth Beauty” appeared
in métal et chair/flesh and metal 4 (February 2002).
preface xi
Introduction
“These are the days of lasers in the jungle.” 1 SF has emerged as a pervasive genre
of literature — and of film, video, comics, computer graphics and games —
in the postindustrial North. Indeed, it elicits intense interest in the rest of the
world. It is not so much that sf has grown into this position, as the reverse: the
world has grown into sf. Gertrude Stein once pronounced the United States
the oldest country on earth, because it was the first to enter the twentieth
century. By the same token, sf is one of the most venerable of living genres: it
was the first to devote its imagination to the future and to the ceaseless revo-
lutions of knowledge and desire that attend the application of scientific and
technical knowledge to social life.
From its roots, whether we trace them to Lucian, Swift, Voltaire, Mary Shel-
ley, or Hugo Gernsback, sf has been a genre of fantastic entertainment. It has
produced many works of intellectual and political sophistication, side by side
with countless ephemeral confections. Unlike most popular genres, it has also
been critically self-aware. The fiction has inspired a steady production of com-
mentary about what distinguishes it from other modes of expression. This
body of critical work is rich in social diversity, and unparalleled in its alle-
giance to reimagining the world with a passion that has at times resembled the
commitment to a political movement.2
The once-regnant view that sf can’t help but be vulgar and artistically shal-
low is fading. As the world undergoes daily transformations via the develop-
ment of technoscience in every imaginable aspect of life, (and, more impor-
tant, as people become aware of these transformations) sf has come to be seen
as an essential mode of imagining the horizons of possibility. However much
sf texts vary in artistic quality, intellectual sophistication, and their capacity to
give pleasure, they share a mass social energy, a desire to imagine a collective
future for the human species and the world.
In the past forty years, not only have sf artists produced more artistically
ambitious works than in the previous hundred, but works of criticism have
1
established the foundations for definition and self-examination characteristic
of mature artistic movements. Major critical works — from Darko Suvin’s
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) to Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity
(1993), journals of academic scholarship and criticism (Foundation, Extrapo-
lation, Science Fiction Studies, The New York Review of Science Fiction), and the
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction’s second edition, which gave the first compre-
hensive overview of the history of the genre for scholars — have provided
tools for thinking about the genre and its implications in sophisticated
philosophical and historical terms.
At this moment, a strikingly high proportion of films, commercial art, popu-
lar music, video and computer games, and nongenre fiction are overtly sf or
contain elements of it. This widespread normalization of what is essentially a
style of estrangement and dislocation has stimulated the development of
science-fictional habits of mind, so that we no longer treat sf as purely a genre-
engine producing formulaic effects, but rather as a kind of awareness we might
call science-fictionality, a mode of response that frames and tests experiences
as if they were aspects of a work of science fiction. It is one mode of response
among many others, and it influences people’s actions to different degrees.
Some are inspired to create, as H. G. Wells’s novel The World Set Free inspired
Leo Szilárd to imagine nuclear fission,3 or as William Gibson’s depiction of the
cyberspace matrix and virtual reality in Neuromancer stimulated countless
computer programmers.4 Some are drawn, in games and in life, to playing out
roles they identify with in sf texts. Most people merely bracket difficult-to-
process, incongruous moments of technology’s intersection with everyday life
as science-fictional moments.
Increasingly, this sense of technosocial aspiration meshing with the limits
and desires of concrete social life, often involving violent collisions of hard
techniques with human and natural complexity, is the appropriate response
to contemporary reality. Consider the daily news: the postmodern hecatomb
of the World Trade Center; Chernobyl’s lost villages and mutant flora; CGI
pop stars; genocide under surveillance satellites; the cloning of farm animals;
Internet pornography raining down in microwaves; helicopter gunships de-
ployed against stone-throwing crowds; GM pollen drifting toward the calyces
of natural plants; Artificial Life; global social movements (and even nations)
without territories; the ability to alter one’s physical gender; the evaporation
of the North Pole. It is sf that has most assiduously imagined and explored
such collisions and transitions. It is from sf ’s thesaurus of images that we draw
many of our metaphors and models for understanding our technologized
world, and it is as sf that many of our impressions of technology-aided desire
and technology-riven anxiety are processed back into works of the imagina-
The genre of sf has been notoriously difficult to define; how much more so
a mode of thought like science-fictionality, which is neither a belief nor a
model, but rather a mood or attitude, a way of entertaining incongruous ex-
periences, in which judgment is suspended, as if we were witnessing the trans-
formations happening to, and occurring in, us. Nonetheless, let us make a ten-
tative approach. The attitude of science-fictionality is characterized by two
linked forms of hesitation, a pair of gaps. One gap extends between the belief
that certain ideas and images of technoscientific transformations of the world
can be entertained, and the rational recognition that they may be realized,
with ramifications for social life. This gap lies between the conceivability of
future transformations and the possibility of their actualization. The other
gap lies between belief in the immanent possibility (perhaps even the inexora-
bility) of those transformations, and reflection about their possible ethical,
social, and spiritual consequences. This gap stretches between conceiving of
the plausibility of historically unforeseeable innovations in human experience
(novums)5 and their broader ethical and social-cultural implications and reso-
nances. SF thus involves two forms of hesitation: a historical-logical one (how
plausible is the conceivable novum?) and an ethical one (how good/bad/
altogether alien are the transformations that would issue from the novum?).
These gaps compose the black box in which technoscientific conceptions, os-
tensibly unmediated by social and ethical contingencies, are transformed into
a rational recognition of their possible realization and implications. The re-
sulting fictions may be credible projections of present trends or fantastic im-
ages of imagined impossibilities. Usually, they are amalgams of both.
SF embeds scientific-technical concepts in the broad sphere of human in-
terests and actions, explaining them, mythologizing them, and explicitly at-
tributing social value to them. This embedding may take many literary forms,
from the exhumation of dead mythologies, pseudomimetic extrapolation, and
satirical subversion, to utopian transformation and secularized apocalypse. It
is an inherently, and radically, future-oriented process. Imaginary worlds of sf
are pretended resolutions of dilemmas insoluble and often barely perceived in
the present. The exact ontological status of sf worlds is suspended in anticipa-
tion. Unlike historical fiction (of which sf is a direct heir), where a less intense
suspense operates because the outcome of the past is still in the process of
being completed in the present’s partisan conflicts, sf is suspended because all
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