The Poetics of Science Fiction

by Peter Stockwell

The Poetics of Science Fiction uniquely uses the science of linguistics to explore the literary universe of science fiction. Developing arguments about specific texts and movements throughout the twentieth-century, the book is a readable discussion of this most popular of genres. It also uses the extreme conditions offered by science fiction to develop new insights into the language of the literary context. The discussion ranges from a detailed investigation of new words and metaphors, to the exploration of new worlds, from pulp science fiction to the genre's literary masterpieces, its special effects and poetic expression. Speculations and extrapolations throughout the book engage the reader in thought-experiments and discussion points, with selected further reading making it a useful source book for classroom and seminar.

Genres: Science Fiction

264 pages, Paperback

First published May 2, 2000

About the author

BA English Language and Literature (Liverpool 1988)

PhD (Liverpool 1991)

FEA (Fellow of the English Association) (from 2012)

He works in literary linguistics; cognitive poetics; stylistics; applied linguistics; science fiction; surrealism. he maintains an interest in sociolinguistics and in language education both in the UK and across the world.

At the University of Nottingham he is the Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Global Engagement (Europe).

Reviews

[Gerhard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Time travel begins here. You are about to read the first chapter of The Poetics of Science Fiction. Perhaps you will read the subsequent chapters in their numerical sequence. You might jump backwards to the contents page now and again; you will in all likelihood travel forward to the references and index at the end. You might skip a chapter altogether, or dip into the stream of words at a variety of different points. Sometimes you will skim over the text; sometimes you might read each part very carefully. You might spend an hour in the book, or a few minutes scattered throughout the rest of your life. You probably won’t read it through like a novel. That is not what it is. You think this first chapter was written first? You’d be wrong. Of course, you are the book’s engine: when you close it, it cannot go on without you. The words require a reader. Above all, ‘a book is a machine to think with’ (Richards 1924: i).

Fascinating deep dive into a subject most casual readers of SF are likely to never touch upon: the language of SF. Yes, some of the factual content is certainly dated. Stockwell states that SF is “the most singly-identifiably popular genre of literature in the Western world” and uses 1990 UK and US sales statistics to back up his argument. Of course, I would think the initial statement is still valid, and perhaps even more so now, if you take Hollywood blockbuster SF into account.

I read this mainly for Stockwell’s take on Samuel R. Delany, whom he quotes early on as saying “A ‘genre definition’ is a wholly imaginary object of the same ontological status as unicorns.” It is part of Delany’s argument against the ‘easy’ identification of SF and, indeed, postmodernism. Instead, he states that the genre should be read, and treated critically, in its own terms.

Delany has famously described SF as a ‘way of reading’. It constitutes a textus comprising possible sentences, unrealised worlds, and existing intertextual connections. Rather than constituting a mystical contact with the nonverbal, SF is seen as ‘casting a language shadow over coherent areas of imaginative space’.

Stockwell goes on to examine how the many forms of SF evokes the textus, from individual acts of world-building to the global negotiation of imaginative space. He also discusses the symbolist strategies of surface and conceptual metaphor, focusing on the differences between SF and ‘prosaic’ fiction.

I read this for research purposes, and found it be quite an accessible introduction to the poetics of SF. Anyone with a scholarly interest in the genre or literary theory in general will find much value in it.

[RdWd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Certainly quite dated by today's standards, but this is a great primer for investigating science fiction literature using literary linguistics methods and approaches.

The first half caters to situating what we mean by sci-fi with chapters on genre, deixis, representation on language itself in sci-fi texts as well as a history of 'pulp style'. Whilst, the second half gives a range of tools for researchers to use when investigating a sci-fi through a linguistics lens. This half has chapters devoted to neologisms & neosemes, metaphorical usages and finally approaches from cognitive linguistics.

It's a shame that Peter Stockwell never produced another edition of this to include more aspects from film but as with many stylisticians, the focus is rooted in literature. It was written in 2000, and he makes some rather juvenile comments at the end about the linguistic capabilities of the then-infantile sci-fi videogame text. Oh how things have changed there! Would love to hear more of his thoughts in that field now.

[Andreea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very dull with some short burst of interesting comments drowned by irrelevant rambles about uninteresting linguistics concepts.