Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy
Book by Eric S. Rabkin, Robert Scholes, George E. Slusser; Southern Illinois University Press, 1983

Introduction
As studies of science fiction and fantasy proliferate, the boundaries of this field of investigation have expanded, perhaps overexpanded to formlessness. This volume hopes to establish basic coordinates for these two genres. By placing a number of important individual works in well-defined analytical contexts, it takes up some of the critical slack. What is more, because the essays in this collection address both science fiction and fantasy, they suggest in their interactive resonances new points of intersection between these forms of writing. We hope the establishment of clear coordinates will permit the reader to assess the critical act itself, and to judge the adequacy of any given attempt to bracket and fix the basic problems of science fiction and fantasy.

The lead essay, Leslie Fiedler "The Criticism of Science Fic- tion," sets the tone of the volume by offering a basic set of coordi- nates--that of "elitist" and "popular" standards. Using the examples of A. E. Van Vogt, Olaf Stapledon, and Boris Vian, he asserts that, when science fiction is measured by the norms of the traditional literary establishment, it does not fail the test but rather the norms themselves do. Fiedler's remarks apply equally well to fantasy when it too is considered a "lowbrow" form. In his eyes therefore, both science fiction and fantasy attract the reader not by their "architec- tonic skill or linguistic subtlety," nor even by their ethical or metaphysical insights, but by their "mythopoeic power"--their ability to provide easy access to the writer's unconscious "at the point where it meets the collective unconscious of us all." In a sense then, each subsequent essay in this volume is a reply to Fiedler's challenge that we revise or reject these traditional standards. Using a diversity of critical methods, all these studies strive not to refute the mythopoeic power of the two genres but, in cases where access to it may not be as easy as Fiedler suggests, to articulate it, to locate it on clearly defined coordi- nates and by doing so in turn challenge Fiedler's assertion that the simple presence of these two forms renders us "critic-pedagogues . . . a little redundant."

Eric S. Rabkin "semiobiological" study, The Descent of Fan- tasy, traces the mythopoeic appeal of this form--here broadly con- ceived to include works ranging from fairy tale to science fiction--from origins in the survival of the species, and by establishing this lineage directly equates the power of fantasy to the structural skill and linguis- tic subtlety with which a story is told. Defining fantasy as a special class of narrative "made of unfalsifiable events in part so that the report of these events can be exchanged long after particular reality changes," Rabkin suggests that "the telling of proper tales, well made and rhetorically interesting tales, in a social world so dominated by lan- guage exchange as is ours, signals social success and the likelihood of social position."

Rabkin's remark, that it is by well-made fantasy that homo sapi- ens shapes his world, suggests another complementary aspect of this literature's mythopoeic power--science fiction's much-vaunted capac- ity for "newness." In his essay How New Is New?, Prince Gerald places science fiction on three specific narratological and semiotic coordinates and concludes that as fiction it does not necessarily have greater potential for "newness" than its mainstream counterpart. Science fiction, Prince argues, first of all is fiction, and the materials of fiction (despite the designation "novel") are always old. Second of all, science fiction shares with mainstream fiction a reliance on narrative as its mode of organizing fictional experience, and narrative, as a predi- lection for meaningful order, can be reduced to a finite and predictable number of elements. Third of all, science fiction is constrained by what Prince calls its scientific "motivation," the need to account for any given distortion of reality or "newness" by an explanation that signals the logical, orderly premises of "science."

The remaining ten essays all focus, to one degree or another, on individual texts or authors. All seek to place the works or writers in question according to one of the critical axes suggested by Fiedler: structural, rhetorical, ethical, sociocritical, and ultimately metaphys- ical and, in the broadest sense, existential. The wide variety of works discussed--some of which seem at first glance to lie beyond the popu- lar parameters of science fiction and fantasy--suggests a heterogeneity of canon for the two forms that is matched only by the persistence of mythopoeic intention each of these various works displays. These studies then, converging from diverse critical angles through a com- mon center, form coordinates on which the broadest spectrum of texts can be examined.
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