robertoqs

[...] explore an image that is so ubiquitous in the genre that it transcends the label “icon” — the image of the barrier between known and unknown. Chapters Three through Five explore specific icons that science fiction has evolved concerning artificial or unnatural environments: the spaceship, which represents entry into the unknown; the city, which represents subjugation of the unknown; and the wasteland, which represents the reemergence of the unknown. Finally, Chapters Six and Seven shift the focus from images of the environment to images of humanity itself, first as reflected in technology through the icon of the robot, and then as reflected in the images of transformation that are represented by science fiction’s various treatments of monsters, aliens, and transformed humans. Obviously, many of these icons overlap and merge in certain works. The alien being becomes the robot, the robot becomes the spaceship, the spaceship becomes the city, the city becomes the wasteland: such transformations and combinations of the favourite images of the genre become like variations on a theme [...]

— Gary K. Wolfe, The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (1979).

From the homepage:

Science Fiction Studies is published three times a year (March, July, November) by SF-TH Inc. at DePauw University. The Science Fiction Studies website publishes abstracts of all articles, as well as the full texts of all reviews, historical documents, and selected essays appearing in the journal since its founding in 1973 by R.D. Mullen. Full texts of articles are posted only after an issue has been sold out.

The most recent issue, as of November 2023, is #151.

In this perspective, SF [sic] should not be seen (as I will argue at length in the theoretical part of this book) in terms of science, the future, or any other element of its potentially unlimited thematic field. Rather, it should be defined as a fictional tale determined by the hegemonic literary device of a locus and/or dramatis personae that (1) are radically or at least significantly different from the empirical times, places, and characters of “mimetic” or “naturalist” fiction, but (2) are nonetheless —to the extent that SF differs from other “fantastic” genres, that is, ensembles of fictional tales without empirical validation— simultaneously perceived as not impossible within the cognitive (cosmological and anthropological) norms of the author's epoch.

— Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979, rev. 2016).

In 1972 Darko Suvin defined sf [sic] as “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment”. By “cognition” Suvin appears to mean the seeking of rational understanding, and by “estrangement” something akin to Bertolt Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, defined in 1948 thus: “A representation which estranges is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time make it seem unfamiliar.” Perhaps the most important part of Suvin's definition, and the easiest with which to agree, is the emphasis he puts on what he and others have called a novum, a new thing — some difference between the world of the fiction and what Suvin calls the “empirical environment”, the real world outside. The presence of a novum is insufficient in itself, of course, to define sf, since the different and older tradition of fantasy likewise depends on the novum.

— Brian M. Stableford, John Clute and Peter Nicholls, “Definitions of SF”, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, eds John Clute and David Langford (4th edn, 2021).

Last modified June 2020.

Last modified December 2022.

The SFE's article about itself (last modified October 2021).

Now I'm crossposting from Lemmy to Mastodon, by tagging myself, @[email protected]. Lemmy's “Title” field produces, conversely, an initial separated line in the resulting toot.

Edit: But only a link to Lemmy is displayed in said toot, and not the post's “Body” field.

She didn't look forward to going out to meet her friend for lunch. It was two degrees, and wasn't the fire inviting?

She went, though, out of a sense of social duty, out of the knowledge that she should have friends of her own, out of the memory of a day last winter, when she had canceled the lunch, because of the cold, because of the fire. Her friend had not been amused, nor had the friend's co-worker been amused; abused, perhaps, they had felt abused in the lawyer's office, where there was no fire, and no lover reading it.

Over lunch they talked about her friend's project, a one-woman play using only selections of Emily Dickinson's letters. The question of a title came up: Emily Unplugged; A Taste of Emily (they laughed for the connotations of it). Papers. Emily's Papers. The friend said, “Vellum”, and she said, “That's it!” The friend said, “What?” “Vellum, Emily, that's it, Velemily, something. It's the word, it's the right word, better than Emily Verso and Recto — Vellum.”

The table erupted into textures. The napkins, suddenly, were thick and writable. It was a question of the bite of the paper; how lovely it seemed that paper should have teeth, that Vellum may have the strongest teeth to go with the sword of a pen. It was better than tongues of fire.

— From The Prose Poem: An International Journal, vol. 8.

One word is busy constructing the others. It is a carpenter creating props for a play. It takes a rock and makes it a hat. Thus there is now a rock-hat. This stuff becomes real. All that is real becomes props while all that's not becomes the play. And somewhere in the performance the words start whispering back to us a permutation we hadn't planned. Strangely, as we, the actors, speak our parts, we grow another body. It is suggested our other body is living under the stage, reciting words of another play which we are simultaneously enacting. And we can feel the floor of the stage about to collapse.

— Douglas Blazek, “The Metaphor”, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, vol. 8 (1999).

This is a recent poem, which is related to philosophical haiku II.

By playing we then develop,

develop to then apprehend,

apprehend what had been beyond,

soon, pragmatic means to an end.

End, truly, in understanding,

understanding what's essential,

essential as prerequisite,

as condition to make knowledge.

Knowledge to untake for granted,

granted, we were accustomed so,

so let's undeem formulations

as always following clear thoughts.

Thoughts, ideas we have of things,

things we have the need to create,

create and fully comprehend?

Very often in the same path.

Path-making by means of walking,

walking performed like a “passion”,

passion felt like a kind of urge.

The behaviour emerges thence.