*Note from Curator: Since I find it incredibly difficult to define sf myself, I have chosen to feature this post by John D’Aquino instead. John seems to have a clear understanding of the text by Rieder on the genre of sf, and he also seems to have real opinions on the matter. In general, I enjoy John’s writing style as well as his confident manner of discussing topics. In my opinion, this guest post was the perfect way to begin this collection of posts.

Texts Featured:

John Rieder, “On Defining SF, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed 

The text by Rieder is in my opinion, a great summary of everything we have gone over so far in the class. I think it’s apt that he points out towards the beginning that genre is a rather tricky thing to define. While “it” is not an actual thing that exists in the world, either tangibly or in an intangible, observational sort of way, it is up to us to both invent and define it.I am basically simplifying what I believe the point of his first two observations about sf are, but I think that because genre is a thing that people have invented and are also constantly working on and adding to, it becomes immune to one fixed definition. As Rieder states, we have the option to look at it in a tautological way and simply state that sf is whatever we deem to be sf. Tautologies, while seemingly useless as logical statements, actually have some merit here. If we start from the viewpoint of being able to name anything we like as sf, then we can take a more adaptive approach that causes us to run into less trouble than if we set up a rigid framework for definition first. One thing this has made me think of however, all jokes that have been made about this topic aside, is Star Wars. There seems to be some contention whenever the question is brought up of “is Star Wars real sf?”. But following many of the commonalities that have been associated with sf, I feel drawn to make the comparison. As for cognitive estrangement, I think this is accomplished perfectly, in a way that almost seems meta. Because admittedly, Star Wars does feel very different from most other sf that we have read or watched. Setting it in a time long before our own, in some obscure galaxy far away from ours does a number on the usual way we think of such stories. But a long time ago still means that the events occur on our timeline, and “far far away” still means they occur in our universe. To me there’s not much difference between a story of a far-off empire that has nothing to do with our world today and, say, the story of two planets with diametrically opposed political systems that have nothing to do with our own planet as we see in The Dispossessed. The most interesting comparison I’d like to draw though is towards the concept of the Novum. I don’t think Star Wars’ novum is the Force, or lightsabers, or even FTL travel. I think the ubiquity of technological advancement which can do seemingly impossible things, to the point where literally every character in the galaxy has access to some type of awe-inspiring power is the novum. Because in such a seemingly advanced world, its people still are subject to problems which are as old as civilization itself; corruption, religious superstition, war, poverty, and oppression are all parts of the story. This has been a long detour, but to bring it back around to a discussion of Rieder’s essay, I’d like to point out that the fact that I have just had to make and substantiate an argument for why a certain work is sf speaks to the amorphous nature of the genre itself. This accredits the notion that sf is what we say it is, and we can choose to apply any definitions that we think deserve it. There may come a day where sf is hardly recognizable from what it looks like today, just as works like the Netflix anthology Love, Death, and Robots is hardly recognizable from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.