Hollinger and Gordon, Introduction: Edging into the Future (2002)

Hollinger and Gordon's introduction to their collection of SF critical theory begins with the well-worn truism that 'contemporary life in the West reiterates not the past but the future' (2). They point to the way that SF has become less about reflecting reality and has come closer and closer to being reality, explaining that 'science fiction has come to function not only as metaphor for the present but also, and increasingly, as literal description. These days it is both fictional genre and discursive field' (2). The 'now' moment of postmodernism 'teeters, then, on the edge of the future, neither there, nor, thought it seems impossible, here' (3). SF then, is both a symptom of the disjunctures, fractures, and gaps of our 'present' while also 'an expression of our desire to situate and give a shape to the moment' (3).

I like the sentiment because it colludes with many other theorists' point that SF or maybe utopia is more about making the present moment accessible.

Pearson, Alien Cryptographies: The View from Queer (2008 reprint)

Pearson starts by describing gay and lesbian activist groups arguing for the importance of lesbian and gay characters on SF shows - as some proof/representation that indeed the future means both the existence of and acceptance of these identities. Pearson argues that it is this particular representation that is desired by SF viewers, 'the vision of a future in which queerness is neither hidden nor revealed as difference, but is simply there' (15). She wants to argue that gay characters might not 'queer' an SF text, but indeed, queering of such a text might require something altogether different. Specifically, she points to the notion that it would take a move beyond 'inclusion' to a more radical shift in the show to question current sex/gender systems and socio-cultural institutions.

I think it is this understanding of queer as questioning the foundations and discourses by which subjects are shaped in a society that also allows her to bring SF and queer together, seeing them both as having the ability to create different (and potentially radical) foundations. She suggests that SF and queer theory in some ways occupy similar theoretical space: 'Queer, with its denaturalization of master narratives and its movement towards subcultural and subaltern understandings of texts, operates, by analogy, on some of the same levels as sf' (18). She sees in SF the potential to write queer subjects, given the genre's resistance to realism, and the ensuing risk of being at the service of 'common sense.' Further, she describes a long history in SF (beginning with Shelley) of questioning foundational systems of thought. Taking her cue from Earl Jackson, Pearson argues that in SF, there is rejection of the Cartesian subject and instead insistence 'that the subject is the effect of the system' (18).

Pearson first reads Campbell's 'Who Goes There?' (1938) thinking through the cultural anxieties about the invisibility of the homosexual during the era of WWII. The need to reassert heterosexual values was accompanied by intense demonization in films and stories, SF genre included, of the Other. Particularly anxiety surrounded how to identify the alien, the queer, from the rest. Pearson thus claims that Campbell's story 'serves as a near perfect example of the way in which the story of the alien who passes as human derives from the precise confluence of anxieties that serve to claim, at the same time, that homosexuality is always written on the body and that it is always able to pass' (21).

Next, Pearson turns to thinking about what she calls the other half of the story. While Campbell's story is concerned with 'passing,' Pearson now wants to think about that which remains invisible and unrecognized, what she calls a 'queer text.' I think in this instance she is trying to differentiate between her queer reading of Campbell's story and the potential to recuperate and recognize texts as queer. To think through this idea she turns to Reamy's 'Under the Hollywood Sign' (1975), a story which she believes can undergo a queer re-reading, clarified as not just being concerned with the text, but also 'of the heteronormative reading protocols that have constrained earlier readings' (28). She argues that this story is an unfaithful reproduction of the 'trope of the invisible alien' (28). Particularly, the story, in Pearson's reading, is concerned with the visibile invisibility - the fact that the aliens in the story are only visible to the narrator. Pearson argues that the story is concerned with three related issues: the question of visibility, the sexual identity of the narrator, and the identity of the aliens (29). However, the shifting and coded nature of these themes, argues Pearson, has meant that can be read as not being queer enough. Pearson argues that the story intervenes into the invisibility trope as expressed in Campbell's story in part because of this ambiguity, particularly with reference to the aliens' identities. Pearson explains, 'they fail to serve as warnings of the invisible "passing" Other.' The same can be said for the ambiguity around the narrator's sexuality through expressing a universal homosexual desire in the story and further suggesting that this alone does and cannot account for the narrator's desire.

Thus, Pearson reads Reamy's text as 'becoming queer,' once accessible only through hidden information, cryptography, but now containing markers that the 'modern subject' cannot avoid. She suggests that this incurs a shift from cryptography to cartography. Pearson argues for the queerness of the subject/text as 'an effect of a system that can be variously understood, depending on one's worldview' (33). This comes back to her earlier assertion that SF was a ripe arena for queer re-readings precisely because of its focus on the system over the individual. Being concerned with systems, the SF genre brings to the fore the importance of the system in the production of subjectivity. Thus, she concludes that the story's queer quality is less about the character being gay, and more 'in the way the text itself calls into question the very system which effects the narrator as a gay subject' (33).

Pearson, Hollinger, Gordon, Introduction: Queer Universes (2008)

In the introduction to this collection of writing on queer SF, they make the claim that if queer theory is indeed about 'imagining a world in which all lives are livable, we understand queer theory as being both utopian and science fictional, in the sense of imagining a future that opens out, rather than forecloses, possibilities for becoming real, for mattering in the world' (5). They basically situate the collection as one of the first attempts to bring together a comprehensive book of approaches to SF through the lens of sexuality - arguing that while gender has been an important lens, sexuality has not been as influential/widespread as an approach.

Suvin, On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre (1972)

Suvin famously argues for the definition of SF as 'the literature of cognitive estrangement' (372). Suvin connects the subject-matter of the genre to a human curiosity of the unknown, whether it be a new space or, as has been more frequently the case since the industrial revolution, a new time. Further, a defining desire of the genre has been the 'hope of finding in the unknown the ideal environment, tribe, state, intelligence, or other aspect of the Supreme Good' (374). Suvin explains that at all costs, the SF genre holds up the possibility of other systems (374). These other systems are postulated through a fictional hypothesis and developed in SF with scientific rigor (374). It is this combination of 'factual reporting of fictions' aimed at 'implying a new set of norms' that can be said to define the attitude of estrangement (374). In other words, that which estranges is must be familiar enough to be recognized but it also is strange enough to hint towards the creative. It is this particular quality, or formal framework, that Suvin argues distinguishes SF from other genres. Suvin clarifies that his use of the words 'cognitiveness' or 'cognition' emphasizes a reflection on reality and 'implies a creative approach tending toward a dynamic transformation rather than toward a static mirroring of the author's environment' (377). In other words, for Suvin, the category of the cognitive in SF is infused with a creative pull towards movement and change.

In comparison with other literary genres, Suvin argues that it is this mix of cognitive and creative that distinguishes SF. First, myth is opposed to the scientific, cognitive approach of SF because of the way it fixes human relations and offers explanations of essences. Suvin argues that SF, in contrast to myth, 'does not ask about The Man or The World, but which man?: in which kind of world?: and why such a man in such a kind of world?' (375). Second, SF is differentiated from the fairy tale precisely because the latter occurs in a world that is 'indifferent toward cognitive possibilities' (375). In other words, it does not use imagination to refer back to and understand reality. Third, the fantasy genre is aggressively opposed to the cognitive, 'committed to the interposition of anti-cognitive laws into the empirical environment' (375). Fourth, Suvin argues that of all the comparisons, the pastoral is closer to SF in the way it imagines worlds without money, urbanization, etc., and thus can distill to important human motivations: 'erotics and power-hunger' (376). However, Suvin prefers to think of the pastoral as an early but unsophisticated approach to SF.

Suvin also clarifies that each of these genres has a unique relationship to time that is not compatible with SF. 'The myth is located above time, the fairy-tale in a conventional grammatical past which is really outside time, and the fantasy in the hero's abnormally disturbed present' (378). SF, on the other hand, 'concentrates on possible futures and their spatial equivalents, but it can deal with the present and the past as special cases of a possible historical sequence seen from an estranged point of view' (378). So while Suvin asserts that SF is indeed oriented 'futurologically' (379), he does seem to be suggesting that this temporal orientation might be bound up with pasts and presents.

Suvin again and again asserts that the challenge of SF is precisely the mix of the cognitive and creative. It is this mix that distinguishes it from other literary genres as well as gives it its unique relationship to time, imagination, and science.

Jameson, Progress Versus Utopia (1982)

Jameson's argues against SF as a representational drama which accustoms its readers to the rapidity of our present moment. Instead, he argues that these visions of a dizzying, rapid technological future are themselves 'historical and dated' (151). He starts by characterizing this notion of the 'future' as 'merely the future of one moment of what is now our own past' (151). This, he suggests, requires a shift in understanding of the function of present-day SF. Rather than give us images of the future, Jameson argues that SF's structure is 'to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present' (151). Indeed, but for Jameson, our own present in SF is experienced not as present, but instead it re-installs our present in History itself. In Jameson's conception, the past is 'dead' and the future is 'unthinkable' (152). Further, Jameson argues that the present is 'unavailable to us in its own right because of the sheer quantitative immensity of objects and individual lives it comprises' (152). It is SF's future imaginings then that function to transform 'our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come' (152). In SF, we experience our present as 'some future world's remote past, as if posthumous and as though collectively remembered' (152). Jameson argues that this is not only historical melancholy, but that it is comforting to be able to recognize our present day as not the 'end of history.' Through enabling an apprehension of a historical present, SF is not about keeping the future alive but instead to 'demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future' (153). It is this that Jameson characterizes as the nature of utopia as a genre in our contemporary time.

On the utopian genre specifically, Jameson argues that its purpose is to 'bring home in local and determinate ways, and with a fullness of concrete detail, our constitutionally inability to imagine Utopia itself' (153). Jameson pushes for the importance of attending to the negative in utopian texts, as it is the place of that repression that will lead us to an understanding of the contradiction of utopian texts. This leads Jameson to his last claim, namely that if we accept that utopian narrative is about our inability to imagine Utopia, such texts then 'find their deepest "subjects" in the impossibility of their own production, in the interrogation of the dilemmas involved in their own emergence as utopian texts' (156).

To conclude, what I take from Jameson's article is that SF is about re-instating a sense of history in the present through enabling us to understand our present as a future past. Further, that the utopian genre specifically performs this inability to imagine a future utopia, but that it is this performance of failure that produces utopian texts.