By Patrick Parrinder
In exploring the connection among ingenious invention and that of allegory or delusion, the essays in Learning from different Worlds touch upon the field’s such a lot abiding matters and hire quite a few severe approaches—from highbrow background and style reviews to biographical feedback, feminist cultural reviews, and political textual research. one of the subject matters mentioned are the works of John Wyndham, Kim Stanley Robinson, Stanislau Lem, H.G. Wells, and Ursula Le Guin, in addition to the media’s reactions to the 1997 cloning of Dolly the Sheep. Darko Suvin’s regularly outspoken and penetrating afterword responds to the essays within the quantity and provides intimations of an additional degree in his lengthy and uncommon career.
This helpful compendium and spouse bargains a coherent view of technology fiction experiences because it has developed whereas paying tribute to the debt it owes Suvin, one in all its first champions. As such, it's going to entice critics and scholars of technology fiction, utopia, and fable writing.
Contributors. Marc Angenot, Marleen S. Barr, Peter becoming, Carl Freedman, Edward James, Fredric Jameson, David Ketterer, Gerard Klein, Tom Moylan, Rafail Nudelman, Darko Suvin
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Extra resources for Learning from other worlds : estrangement, cognition, and the politics of science fiction and utopia
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30 Frederick Andrew Lerner, Modern Science Fiction and the American Literary Community, pp. 34–35. Lerner gives no indication how he separates ‘Literary’, ‘Scientific’ and ‘ideological’ from each other. 31 Siegfried Mandel and Peter Fingesten, ‘The Myth of Science Fiction’: I am following Lerner, Modern Science Fiction, pp. 49–50. 32 John W. , ‘Science Fiction and the Opinion of the Unwise’. 33 Donald J. Adams, ‘Speaking of Books’. Quotation from 13 Sept. 34 Stanley Frank, ‘Out of This World’. 35 Clifton Fadiman, ‘Party of One’, Holiday, June 1952: 14–16, 146.
19 But cognition in science fiction is not, or not primarily, of this kind, since (as he writes in ‘SF and the Genological Jungle’) SF ‘shares with naturalistic literature, naturalistic science, and naturalistic or materialist philosophy a common sophisticated, dialectical, and cognitive epistemé’ (20). The question of how far Suvin’s theory is axiomatically dependent upon a philosophy of scientific materialism, which is revised or abandoned in his later writings, arises in relation to his essay on ‘SF and the Novum’ which rounds off the ‘Poetics’ section in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979).
The story’s cognitive logic is apparently a little muddled, since the narrator asserts that Funes has learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin without effort: we are not told how someone incapable of any kind of abstraction and generalization can be said to have learned a language. Since Funes has difficulty with a generic noun such as dog, how can he distinguish between the English and the French languages? If, within the narrative world of Borges’s parable, such questions can be dismissed as irrelevant nitpicking, that seems to make Suvin’s general point: ‘Funes, the Memorious’ is an allegory about cognition which does not try very hard for cognitive consistency.