If, however, this body of thought must be considered postdialectical rather than dialectical proper, it is not only because of the strategic distance that figures like Foucault and Derrida have usually maintained from Marx and Freud (and even leaving aside that, in the particular French intellectual formation relevant here, the names of Marx and Freud have often served as code words for Althusser and Lacan). More important, though not unrelated, is the suspicion that virtually all versions of poststructuralism have cast on the indispensable dialectical category of totality. This is the point of contact between poststructuralism and neoliberalism (or, sometimes, neoconservatism), a contact grotesquely illustrated in, for example, the editorial history of Tel Quel.17 Still, it must be stressed that much poststructuralism has remained faithful to the principle of relationality, which is a crucial component of totality as dialectically understood, and which is partly detachable from the issue of an overdeterminationist dynamic that would guarantee the integrity of totality as such. It should also be stressed that, in general, the attitude toward totality of thinkers like Foucault and Derrida is a great deal more complex than the vulgar slogans about “wars on totality” fashionable in much weaker varieties of poststructuralism. It is possible to maintain irreducible reservations about even the most rigorous versions of contemporary postdialectical thought while nonetheless appreciating the intellectual creativity and usefulness of the latter.
Such, then, is my understanding of critical theory—not exhaustive, of course (such an attempt would be preposterous), but sufficient to provide some conceptual mapping for the study that lies ahead. In what follows I shall be concerned with critical theory mainly in its cultural and, still more, its literary contexts. But any Procrustean disciplinary division is of course profoundly contrary to the spirit of critical theory itself.
Science Fiction
It is symptomatic of the complexity of science fiction as a generic category that critical discussion of it tends to devote considerable attention to the problem of definition—much more so than is the case with such superficially analogous genres as mystery fiction or romance, and perhaps even more than with such larger categories as epic or the novel itself. No definitional consensus exists. There are narrow and broad definitions, eulogistic and dyslogistic definitions, definitions that position science fiction in a variety of ways with regard to its customary generic Others (notably fantasy, on the one hand, and “mainstream” or realistic fiction on the other) and, finally, antidefinitions that proclaim the problem of definition to be insoluble. Indeed, not only the question of definition proper but even the looser matter of description—of deciding, even in the most rough-and-ready way, approximately which texts are to be designated by the rubric of science fiction—is a matter of widespread disagreement. We may begin the definitional task by considering the two poles of opinion in the matter of simple description.
Science fiction can be construed very strictly to refer only to that body of work in, or that grows directly out of, the American pulp tradition established in 1926 when Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories. This is, of course, an extremely narrow construction of science fiction, one that excludes even such close precursors as Mary Shelley, Poe, Verne, and H. G. Wells (works by the latter three were reprinted by Gernsback in his inaugural issue), not to mention contemporary British work by writers like Stapledon, C. S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley, as well as the rich Russian and East European traditions. Though obviously deflationary from the viewpoint of anyone, like myself, who wishes to make large literary and theoretical claims for the genre, the strict construction of science fiction does have two merits. One is popular currency. For the general public (as well as for the commercial marketing system employed by publishers, bookshops, and the vendors of the newer electronic media), the name of science fiction has always suggested the pulp tradition, today largely as the latter has been transmogrified into such filmic and televisional equivalents of pulp as Stars Wars (1977–onward) and Star Trek (1966–onward). The other merit, not unrelated to the first, is philological correctness. It is certainly true that the term, originally in the more cumbersome form of “scientifiction” and then as “science fiction,” was invented in the pulps (by Gernsback himself, according to some accounts), and that any wider use involves deliberate semantic change. Mary Shelley never heard the expression; Wells very likely never heard it; and even Lewis, who had some interest in and sympathy for the American magazines, hardly belonged to the world of pulp, instead taking his inspiration mainly from Stapledon and Wells directly (as well as from the entire tradition of Christian heroic and fantastic literature from Beowulf [c. 750] onward). Accordingly, whatever critics like myself may propose, it seems unlikely that the narrow usage will ever completely vanish.
Yet it suffers not only from general critical inutility but from immense self-contradiction: the list of authors who have directly and self-consciously succeeded Gernsbackian pulp includes (to pick only a small fraction of the names that could be adduced) Americans like Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, Walter M. Miller, Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Alice Sheldon, Samuel Delany, Joanna Russ, Joe Haldeman, Thomas Disch, Norman Spinrad, Kate Wilhelm, Vonda McIntyre, and William Gibson, and probably also such British figures as Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and Michael Moorcock. Accordingly—and unless science fiction is construed not only narrowly but defamatorily, so that by definition only bad fiction can bear the label—the body of work suggested by such names must be science fiction even by the strictest philological standards. But it is ludicrous to consider writers of such caliber as simply and solely the literary sons and daughters of Hugo Gernsback and E. E. “Doc” Smith, as we are logically obliged to do if science fiction is understood purely in terms of pulp. Mighty oaks may grow from tiny acorns, but novels like Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) or Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) cannot be understood as merely the fulfillment of a promise implicit in Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+ (1911) or Doc Smith’s The Skylark of Space (1928). There is here something of an analogy with the history of novel criticism in general. The latter was able to attain some real seriousness and rigor when it became evident, in the light of the major achievements of the nineteenth-century novel, that the form had a vital lineage—particularly, as Lukács and others pointed out, in epic itself18—that far transcended the relatively crude Renaissance prose narratives that supplied the name. Similarly, if the likes of Le Guin and Delany write science fiction, as they incontestably do, then it is clear that current Anglo-American science fiction draws on far more than the pulp tradition that constitutes one of its filiations; in that case it may well be both useful and legitimate to employ the term in a much wider sense than mere philology would allow.
Accordingly, we may consider a construction of science fiction as broad as the pulp-centered construction is narrow. The term can be taken to include—to pick just a few examples—the whole tradition of arealistic travel literature from Lucian to Rabelais, Cyrano, and beyond; the classic utopian line from More onward; a modernist and postmodernist tradition of work not actually marketed as science fiction, from Kafka and even Joyce to Samuel Beckett and Thomas Pynchon; and even such world-class epic poets as Dante and Milton. The latter two examples are especially worth pondering for a moment, not least because of their prestige value (a factor that will not be dismissed by anyone who has