4 - Science Fiction: The Nexus of Utopianism, Futurism, and Utopian Fiction

Summary

THE TASK OF DEFINING what SF might be has exercised scholars for generations, and it has not produced definitive answers. Much depends on a given author's or critic's attitude to speculative fiction and the fantastic. Many literary scholars are perfectly happy to seriously engage with “realistic” fictions (realism), but they react allergically to SF, even though both types of writing require a willingness to suspend disbelief. Both can be read for entertainment, for aesthetic pleasure, for information about the world, and for insight into the human condition. The worst accusation leveled at SF is that it is escapist, that it detracts from the seriousness of the real world. I agree with Tom Moylan, who declared:

Indeed, the infamous “escapism” attributed to sf does not necessarily mean a debilitating escape from reality because it can also lead to an empowering escape to a very different way of thinking about, and possibly of being in, the world.

SF is well known for its ability to shrug off the tethers of theory, its practitioners never being happier than when confounding prescriptive categorizations of their work. And yet, in order to gain some firm ground for this study, and to identify the distinctiveness of German SF, it is necessary to briefly rehearse the development of SF theory. Tellingly, anglophone studies on SF have tended to ignore SF texts or films not produced in the United Kingdom or the United States, contending that both its key progenitors (H. G. Wells in Britain) and its early formative years (the pulps in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s) created a distinct genre with an Anglo-American label, while conveniently ignoring Jules Verne and Kurd Laßwitz, the respective “fathers” of SF in France and Germany. To be sure, there is a certain hegemonial pride with which Edward James speaks of “The Victory of American Science Fiction” or when American SF writer James Gunn declares:

To consider Science Fiction in countries other than the United States, one must start from these shores. American Science Fiction is the base line against which all the other fantastic literatures other than English must be measured. That is because SF, as informed readers recognize it today, began in New York City in 1926.

Anglophone Science Fiction theory has developed significantly in the last four decades but, it should be stressed, it depends almost entirely on a canon of anglophone texts. And yet, some of its conclusions are so general that they can be universally applied.