Counter-Projects: William Morris and the Science Fiction of the 1880s

Abstract

This essay is based on two of my books, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction and Victorian Science Fiction in the UK.¹ In the first, I argue at length for a theoretical and historical definition of science fiction as a fictional genre ‘whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, … whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment’, and which is narratively dominated by a hegemonic ‘fictional novum (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic’ (MSF, pp. 7–8, 63). I further argue that this means a feedback oscillation between two realities. The science fiction narrative actualises a different — though historical and not transcendental — world corresponding to different human relationships and cultural norms. However, in science fiction the ‘possible world’ induced by the narrative is imaginable only as an interaction between two factors: the conception which the collective social addressee of a text has of empirical reality, and the narratively explicit modifications that a given science fiction text supplies to this initial conception. The resulting alternate reality or possible world is, in turn, not a prophecy or even extrapolation but an analogy to unrealised possibilities in the addressee’s or implied reader’s empirical world; however empirically unverifiable the narrative agents, objects or events of science fiction may be, their constellation in all still (literally) significant cases shapes a parable about ourselves.