40

Utopian Thought in American Literature

are apparently completely different. At first glance Heinlein's "Universe" has very
little in common with Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog." The former is set in
a colonizing spaceship which has undertaken a multi-generational journey to
another star system; the latter recounts the adventures of a self-sufficient adolescent

in a postholocaust world. But when we realize that both stories revolve about a basic
conflict between an alienated free-spirited individual and a comparatively closed
society, then we can identify the stories as having the same typologic identity — that
of the extrapolative dystopia — because they share a common dominant novum (an
estranged social order). Consequently, these apparently dissimilar fictions are

meant to be recuperated in a similar way, as examinations of the relation between
Self and Society. The model reveals that apparently different SF worlds can actually
share the same dominant novum and thus belong to the same SF type.

The real value of a literary theory rests in its capacity to describe and account for

the empirical phenomena which generated it and at the same time to supply "new
organizing perspectives for a field of study."

36

By taking the worlds of science

fiction apart, I hope to have accomplished those ends.

Notes

1 For excerpts from Reeve's argument, see Novelists on the Novel, ed. Miriam

Allott (New York: Columbia UP, 1959),pp. 45, 47, 86-87.

2 Thomas D. Clareson, "The Other Side of Realism," in Science Fiction: The

Other Side of Realism, ed. Thomas D. Clareson (Bowling Green, Oh.: Bowling
Green Univ. Popular Press, 1971), pp. 2, 3.

3 Gary Wolfe, The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction

(Kent, Oh.: Kent State UP, 1979), p. 4.

4 Quoted by Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and

History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1979), p. 78.

5 Lubomir Dolezel, "Narrative Modalities," Journal of Literary Semantics,

(April 1976), 9-10.

6 Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, p. 11.
7 Eric S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP,

1976), pp. 20-21.

8 Reprinted in SF: The Other Side of Realism, pp. 130-145.
9 Cf. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (1957; rpt. Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton UP, 1971), p. 49: "Science fiction frequently tries to imagine what life
would be like on a plane as far above us as we are above savagery; its setting is
often of a kind that appears to us technologically miraculous. It is thus a mode
of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth." Here Frye locates SF as
romance within his own theory of modes. I am using romance in its more
generalized sense, as a narrative form which presents the reader with a world
which departs in some way from the everyday, ordinary, prosaic world.

Malmgren: Theory of Science Fiction

41

10 Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969; rpt. New York: Ace, 1976),

no page; Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, p. 63; Robert Scholes,
Structural Fabulation: An Essay on the Fiction of the Future (Notre Dame, Ind.:
Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1975), p. 62.

11 Quoted in Patrick Parrinder, "Science Fiction and the Scientific World-View,"

in Science Fiction: A Critical Guide, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Longman,

1979), p. 67.

12 Parrinder makes a similar point in the essay cited above. See also Gerald Prince,

"How New Is New?'' in Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed.

George E. Slusser et al. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983), pp. 28-3O.
Prince argues that "scientific motivation" acts as an aesthetic constraint on
science fiction.

13 Alfred Bester, quoted in Paul A. Carter, '"You Can Write Science Fiction If You

Want to,'" in Hard Science Fiction, ed. George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin

(Carbondale: Southern Illinois UF, 1986), p. 143.

14 Cf. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature, p. 121: "What is important in the

definition of science fiction is not the appurtenances of ray guns and lab coats,
but the 'scientific' habits of mind: the idea that paradigms do control our view
of all phenomena, that within these paradigms all normal occurrences can be

solved, and that abnormal occurrences must either be explained or initiate the
search for a better (usually more inclusive) paradigm."

15 John Huntington, "Science Fiction and the Future," in Science Fiction: A

Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
PrenticeHall, 1976), p. 161.

16 I borrow the term from Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, p. 3.
17 Steven Marcus, "The Novel Again," in The Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism

(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 284.

18 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1975), pp.

141-145.

19 Quoted in Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, p. 54.

20 Mark Rose, Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard UP, 1981), p. 27.

21 Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, p. 4.

22 See, for example, L. David Allen, "Categories of Science Fiction," in his

Science Fiction: A Reader's Guide (Lincoln, Neb.: Centennial Press, 1973), pp.
514. 23 Other critics have used other terms to identify this mental process.
Suvin, in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, opts for "analogic" rather than
speculative, but it is not a term that lends itself to a verb form, and his definition

is redundant and unclear: "The analogic model of SF is based on analogy rather

than extrapolation" (p. 29). Stanley Schmidt, in "The Science in Fiction," in
Many Futures, Many Worlds: Theme and Form in Science Fiction, ed. Thomas

D. Clareson (Kent, Oh.: Kent State UP, 1977), pp. 27-49, subsumes all of SF's
thought experiments under the term "speculation" and uses the word