[DOWNLOAD] "Introduction: Making Science Fiction Histories." by Extrapolation " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

August 02, 2021

eBook details

Title: Introduction: Making Science Fiction Histories.
Author : Extrapolation
Release Date : January 22, 2010
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 165 KB

Description

In order to know something we first have to make it; or maybe better: we produce the things we know, that's how we come to know them.--(King xv) In coming to 'know' the various forms of the thing we call 'science fiction' (sf), sf critics, fans and readers have produced many objects, and many histories and taxonomies which attempt to tame them into a coherent set. Over the last 30 years many have argued that the boundaries of this making have spilled out into a thinking more generally about the world's historical situation, this being a contemporary globalized late capitalist society. The world appears to be sf, rather than the world containing within it a thing called sf. But if contemporary society at large is a science-fictional object of knowledge, how much harder is it to come to know it, let alone produce it? One answer might be to focus less on the creative producers than the critical ones, those who purport to classify and identify the genre. It is much simpler to define the identity of 'sf critic' than to defend the existence of the genre as such. If the world appears as sf, we then might think in terms of a sf-nal critical gaze as a way to characterise the cataloguing of what is at best a hopelessly multiple, diffuse organism or at worst a non-existent object. As Mark Bould declares in this issue (drawing on his work with Sherryl Vint), "There is no such thing as science fiction." To push this line of reasoning slightly, it is not that there exists a self-determining literary (or media) form with a particular history and set of characteristics that draws certain audiences and forms of critical attention. Rather, there is a certain brand of academic and non-academic cohort who possess a 'sf-nal critical gaze' that draws them to endlessly identify and create sf-nal objects to coalesce sf histories out of the mundane 'sci-fi' world.