The Soft Machine: The Linguistic Anthropology of Science Fiction in the Mid-Twentieth Century

by Edgar Garcia

Ultimately, writers of science fiction did not turn their backs on the cosmic landscape that had “grounded” the genre since its inception. What, then, changed? I argue that the change occurred, at least to a significant degree, not at the level of the narrative apparatus but at the level of the morphemic linguistic sign, the word itself. Earlier in the century, Ferdinand de Saussure and Gottlob Frege had, in distinct ways, disentangled the linguistic sign from its ideational component and from its referent object. The intentionality and extensionality of words toward reality became an observable phenomenon and, therefore, a rich locus for examining the arbitrariness of identity formation and the significance of difference.

20 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 30, 2013