ABSTRACT
How science fiction (SF) came to be accepted as a legitimate object of academic enquiry is a long and twisty tale, I have no intention of exploring its byways here other than to note that, to the extent that this acceptance does exist, it is in no small part due to the challenge presented to traditional literary studies by cultural studies and newer textual disciplines more amenable to critical theory. Arguably, SF has an exaggerated affinity with one of the basic precepts of twentieth-century critical theory: by naming and describing things which do not exist, are as yet unknown, and cannot (yet?) be known, it repeatedly emphasises a Saussurean conception of language as arbitrary and unmotivated, as a framework placed over the valueless, meaningless flux of existence. Such a framework enables us to make sense of the world by dividing it up into categories (e.g. big/small, red/blue, trousers/hat) which we internalise and normalise, failing to recognise that our experience of the world is always already mediated by language. Whereas fantasy and horror tend to name and describe the occasional non-existent or unknown, SF regularly elaborates such things in the most verisimilitudinous manner, underpinned by a scientific and logical rigour. The sports produced by fantasy and horror might trouble pre-Saussurean notions of language, but the tendency within SF to generate total worlds of non-existents and unknowns is rather more traumatic, demonstrating the lack of any necessary connection between signifying practices and 'reality'. 1 Such foregrounded textuality makes SF and post-Saussurean theory natural bedfellows, and in this whistle-stop 165essay I intend to outline some elements of their congress, particularly the ways in which SF and theory can illustrate and illuminate each other's problematisation of the subject. In order to do this, I shall draw upon examples from the following text-clusters:
