Revisiting Suvin’s Poetics

of Science Fiction

PATRICK PARRINDER
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SF in general—through its long history in different contexts—can be

defined as a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are
the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose
main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the
author’s empirical environment, and . . . it is distinguished by the narra-
tive dominance or hegemony of a fictional ‘novum’ (novelty, innovation)
validated by cognitive logic.1

Estrangement, cognition, the novum: these well-known terms of Darko

Suvin’s have borne the main burden of his attempt, declared at the begin-
ning of his 1972 essay ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, to lay
down a ‘coherent poetics of SF’.2 A ‘poetics’ is a construction of formalist or
structuralist theory—it speaks to us, these days, of the age of Roman
Jakobson and Northrop Frye—and (as is clear from the above quotation) it
addresses only the synchronic aspect of literary texts. Literary history and
the politics of the text are never absent from Suvin’s writings, but in his
poetics of science fiction they are apparently subordinated to the idea of an
‘imaginative framework’—elsewhere he calls it a ‘formal framework’—
which is the historically continuous textual structure distinguishing one
literary genre from another. In the case of SF, an imaginative framework
specified by estrangement, cognition and the novum is said to be common
to all true examples of the genre, which Suvin also provides with a ‘long
history’ stretching back some centuries before the term itself was invented.
The resulting theory is offered as a ‘heuristic model’ for SF criticism and
Copyright 2000. Liverpool University Press.

research, and it has been very widely adopted. But is the model actually
coherent? Should a poetics of science fiction still be seen as a desirable and
necessary construction? And what sorts of blindness accompany its
insights? Suvin himself seems to have been disturbed by these questions.

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 Revisiting Suvin’s Poetics of Science Fiction 37

In a number of essays since 1972 he has revisited his poetics of SF, and it is
a moot point whether this process of theoretical revision has shored up or
tacitly undermined the foundations that he originally laid down.3
To begin with estrangement, cognition and the novum: just as the poetics
of SF may in part be seen as a way of asserting the genre’s literary
respectability—a way, that is, of presenting it as a suitable object for criti-
cism and theory—the three terms defining its ‘necessary and sufficient
conditions’ partake of a translation process, mediating between the exist-
ing body of ideas familiar to SF writers and readers, and the philosophical
terminology of modern genre studies. Thus, estrangement, in the formal
sense of an ‘imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical
environment’, alludes to existing ideas about speculative fiction, fantasy
and scientific romance; but the term itself derives from the Russian for-
malists’ concept of ostranenie and Brecht’s Verfremdung.4 The interaction of
estrangement and cognition suggests the Gernsbackian idea of fiction with
a scientific explanation (scientifiction, science fiction), but Suvin opts for
the term ‘cognition’ because of its wider reference, roughly equivalent to
German Wissenschaft, French science and Russian nauka.5 Finally, the novum
is what H. G. Wells in a much-cited essay called the ‘fantastic element’ or
‘the strange property or the strange world’.6 Suvin’s use of the Latin term,
however, both invokes and reinterprets the utopian theorizing of the Marx-
ist philosopher Ernst Bloch.7 For anglophone readers these three faintly
exotic terms could be said to offer a microcosm of the process of ‘cognitive
estrangement’ that they exist to define.
In terms of systematic poetics, the co-presence of estrangement and cog-
nition represents one of four possible positions on a simple binary diagram
set out in Suvin’s 1973 essay ‘SF and the Genological Jungle’.8 Science fic-
tion belongs with myth, fantasy, fairy tale and pastoral in its possession of
an estranged formal framework that sets it apart from ‘naturalistic or
empiricist’ literary genres; but it differs from myth, fantasy and fairy tale in
its cognitive approach and function.9 The category of estrangement here is
supposedly uncontroversial, a matter of ‘formal frameworks’ merely;
though we shall need to remember that the Russian formalists showed that
the writing of a realistic novelist such as Tolstoy was full of estrangement
effects. For the time being, however, we shall focus on the category of cog-
nition, which is clearly highly controversial. Cognition, however defined,
will be found hard to separate from instruction which is one of the tradi-
tional goals of all worthwhile art; yet Suvin’s theory has the effect of con-
signing whole genres (not only myth, fantasy and fairy tale but what he
calls the ‘sub-literature of “realism” ’)10 to the non-cognitive position in his
genological system. A huge portion of the total literary output is, so to

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 38 PATRICK PARRINDER

speak, thus labelled as ‘Terra Noncognita’. Logically this is hard to justify,

which may be why Suvin in his 1972 essay, as well as in later works, rapidly
moves from quasi-neutral generic theorizing to the language of an ideolog-
ical crusade.
To be fair, his object is less the wholesale condemnation of other forms of
writing than the decontamination of science fiction itself. SF in its pure
form of cognitive estrangement is sharply distinguished from mixed, adul-
terated forms (‘science fantasy’), and good or significant SF is distin-
guished from the run-of-the-mill: the theory, as has often been observed, is
both definitive and normative. The sloganizing rhetoric of parts of his 1972
essay betrays Suvin’s anxiety to defend a normative view of SF. Science fic-
tion, he writes, sees the ideology of myth as ‘an illusion, usually [a] fraud’
(61); SF that retrogresses into fairy tale is ‘committing creative suicide’
(62); and critics who fail to distinguish between science fiction and fantasy
are perpetrating a ‘grave disservice and rampantly socio-pathological phe-
nomenon’ (63). In ‘SF and the Genological Jungle’ (1973) the ‘non-cogni-
tive’ genres of myth, fantasy and fairy tale are grouped together as
‘metaphysical’: the contemptuous dismissal of metaphysics here is remi-
niscent of the extremes of logical positivism. Moreover, in this essay Suvin
refers in a single paragraph to the ‘Great Pumpkin antics of fantasy’, ‘the
black ectoplasms of fantasy’, and the ‘parasitism and vampirism of fantasy’
(24–25). ‘Science fantasy’ is a ‘misshapen subgenre’ (20) in which ‘under
the guise of cognition the ancient obscurantist enemy infiltrates [science
fiction’s] citadel’ (25). What is most telling here is the apparent indispens-
ability, for Suvin’s purpose, of images and metaphors evoking the very gen-
res he is trying to condemn. Another recent critic, compounding this
process, has spoken of Suvin’s attempt to ‘vomit the fantastic out of the
body of SF’.11
It may seem obvious to retort that all science fiction is necessarily fan-
tastic and that fantastic images are frequently made to serve a cognitive
purpose: we shall see in due course how these very insights are present and
at least partially acknowledged in Suvin’s later essays. H. G. Wells, as has
already been mentioned, spoke of what Suvin calls the novum as ‘the fan-
tastic element’, and Wells’s 1933 Preface to the Scientific Romances (which
anticipates some aspects of Suvin’s theory) speaks fairly indiscriminately of
what we would now see as the distinct genres of science fiction and fantasy.
But Wells is notably guarded about the use of fantasy within fantasy. ‘Any
extra fantasy outside the cardinal assumption immediately gives a touch of
irresponsible silliness to the invention’, he writes.12 If we take Wells’s ‘car-
dinal assumption’ as yet another synonym for the novum, then it seems that
he, like Suvin, relegates the fantastic to the initial conditions or formal

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 Revisiting Suvin’s Poetics of Science Fiction 39

framework rather than to the pervading texture of the science-fictional nar-

rative. The latter is characterized by a kind of displaced realism, portraying
what Wells calls ‘human feelings and human ways, from the new angle that
has been acquired’.13 And this portrayal of human feeling and human ways
is outlined in terms implying a rigorous assertion of the super-ego, of
‘responsibility’ and intellectual maturity; its task is to exert supervision and
control over the fantastic elements which might otherwise give way to
childish silliness. At certain times in the history of science fiction it has
been suggested that the ‘scientific community’ might have some kind of
duty to exert control and even censorship of the fantastic. SF’s evident edu-
cational potential and juvenile appeal suggested to some that texts judged
to be scientifically sound should, at the very least, be specially recom-
mended to readers.14 Suvin’s theory, which substitutes cognitive status and
value for ‘scientific soundness’, has the effect of repatriating this task to the
literary community while, if anything, further increasing its urgency and
rigour. Control over the fantastic is crucial to his sense of SF as both liter-
ary genre and literary canon.
For science fiction to be cognitive, however, it must first be estranged: its
resemblance to myth, fantasy and fairy tale logically precedes its separation
from them. Estrangement, for the Russian formalists, was the effect of a
variety of stylistic devices designed to counter habitualization and to
remove objects from the ‘automatism of perception’.15 Later in the Brecht-
ian theatre it became a strategy for provoking audience-response and a
means towards the reader’s political education. For Suvin, by contrast,
estrangement in fiction is first and foremost a matter of choosing a plot that
is non-realistic in the sense that it is determined by the novum. To appreci-
ate what this change of focus entails for the category of estrangement, we
should recall that, since the formalists, estrangement has usually been
interpreted as a sign of experimental and Modernist art.16 Picasso’s paint-
ing of the head of a woman showing both eyes on the same side of the nose
is an example of what would commonly be called an estrangement effect.
What has popular fiction about spaceships to do with the dynamics of artis-
tic innovation using experimental shock tactics to defamiliarize perception?
Starting from Wells’s observation that in his kind of ‘responsible’ fantas-
tic fiction (with a ‘rigorous adherence to the hypothesis’), the source of the
interest is the ‘new angle that has been acquired’, we might indeed argue
for a resemblance between the fantastic plot and the Picasso painting. But
this line of argument has failed to convince those critics of Suvin’s theory
who hold that most SF is distinguished not by its estrangement but by its
‘domestication’ of supposedly strange and unfamiliar worlds. John Hunt-
ington, for example, describes popular SF as a conservative literature which

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 40 PATRICK PARRINDER

‘manages to domesticate the future, to render it habitable and, in spite of a

somewhat strange surface, basically familiar’.17 Either this represents the
failure of an aesthetic effect that true or ‘significant’ science fiction ought
to produce, or it presents a major objection to Suvin’s theory.
In fact, the objection is somewhat chimerical. All knowledge or cognition
works to domesticate the strange and to make it seem familiar; assump-
tions which remain incredible or implausible are progressively excluded
from the domain of knowledge. Science fiction emphasizing what is open
to cognition, rather than the irreducibly fantastic, is no more a conservative
genre than Copernicus and Galileo were conservative figures. There is,
admittedly, a lack of freedom about such fiction, a determination to insist
upon particular meanings; few if any science-fictional works can claim to
be the ‘writerly’ texts celebrated in some post-structuralist theory. A fiction
that is estranged in Suvin’s terms may, however, make us feel at home in a
particular future provided that it offers a new angle of perception and so
familiarizes us with a different view of the present. The problem with Hunt-
ington’s and similar formulations is that they confuse aesthetic failure (in
which the supposed new angle of perception is in fact already familiar and
conventional) with the kind of aesthetic triumph in which a genuinely
innovative device or novum produces a world that comes to seem habitable
to us. But estranged fiction needs to change our view of our own condition,
and not simply to momentarily dazzle us with a superficially unfamiliar
world.
This does not mean, however, that the theory of cognitive estrangement
emerges from this confrontation completely unscathed. If estrangement is
or should be a reflexive process countering the habitualization of the famil-
iar world, it is hard to see how this could be the automatic effect of a story’s
‘formal framework’, rather than involving (as the formalists believed) the
more subtle and intricate aspects of narrative method and style. Moreover,
to the extent that countering habitualization renews our understanding
and sharpens perception, genuine estrangement would seem to be an
inherently cognitive process. The potentially problematic aspect of Suvin’s
theory is thus not the bringing together of estrangement and cognition (as
many have thought), but rather the reverse of this. Since estrangement and
cognition are logically separate, it is tempting to think that estrangement
without cognition, or cognition without estrangement, are real categories
to which some literary or scientific works might actually belong. In struc-
turalism, we are accustomed to think of the sign as divisible into signifier
and signified, so that there can be floating signifiers and unsignified signi-
fieds: the same kind of perhaps dubious analytical logic dictates that cog-
nition must exist in both estranged and non-estranged forms, so that there

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 Revisiting Suvin’s Poetics of Science Fiction 41

is necessarily a Terra Noncognita waiting to be filled by literary works which

are formally estranged but incapable of promoting understanding. A
weaker version of the theory may be more acceptable, in which the
estrangement-cognition coupling is always preserved but there is a spec-
trum of ‘cognitive values’ (and presumably also of estrangement values)
ranging from a hypothetical zero to the boiling point of the best science fic-
tion. Suvin has occasionally suggested that his distinctions might be inter-
preted in this relative way, but he has not done so consistently, and the
evangelical fervour of his early writings has the opposite effect.18 His more
recent work, as we shall see, broadens out from the theory of science fiction
in search of a more fundamental understanding of estrangement and
cognition.

I have mentioned above that in ‘SF and the Genological Jungle’ (1973)
Suvin describes myth, fantasy and fairy tale as ‘metaphysical’ genres. His
implied distinction between the metaphysical and the cognitive may be bet-
ter understood as a secondary distinction within cognition, between (let us
say) the metaphysical and the rational, or between the metaphysical and
the empirically verifiable or falsifiable. Suvin in his later work explicitly
endorses the idea of non-rational cognition.19 But cognition in science fic-
tion is not, or not primarily, of this kind, since (as he writes in ‘SF and the
Genological Jungle’) SF ‘shares with naturalistic literature, naturalistic sci-
ence, and naturalistic or materialist philosophy a common sophisticated,
dialectical, and cognitive epistemé’ (20). The question of how far Suvin’s
theory is axiomatically dependent upon a philosophy of scientific material-
ism, which is revised or abandoned in his later writings, arises in relation
to his essay on ‘SF and the Novum’ which rounds off the ‘Poetics’ section
in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979).
The novum is the crucial element generating the estranged formal frame-
work or world of the SF text:
Now, no doubt, each and every poetic metaphor is a novum, while mod-
ern prose fiction has made new insights into man its rallying cry. How-
ever, though valid SF has deep affinities with poetry and innovative
realistic fiction, its novelty is ‘totalizing’ in the sense that it entails a
change of the whole universe of the tale, or at least of crucially important
aspects thereof (and that it is therefore a means by which the whole tale
can be analytically grasped). (64)
I will examine the proposed resemblance between science fiction and poetic
metaphor later in this chapter. At present we should note that the novum in
SF as opposed to fantasy is specifically ‘postulated on and validated by the

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 42 PATRICK PARRINDER

post-Cartesian and post-Baconian scientific method’ (64–65). It cannot be a

‘metaphysical wish-dream such as omnipotence’, since it is ‘intrinsically or
by definition impossible for SF to acknowledge any metaphysical agency, in
the literal sense of an agency going beyond physis (nature). Whenever it
does so, it is not SF, but a metaphysical or (to translate the Greek into Latin)
a supernatural fantasy-tale’ (66). This shows how restrictive Suvin’s defin-
ition can be: the barricades round the genre seem to be drawn tighter, the
Terra Noncognita beyond the barricades to be ever larger and more threat-
ening. For the prohibition of ‘metaphysical agency’ rules out not only the
blatantly supernatural fantasy-tale but more hybrid and playful forms of
fiction, whimsies and allegories which might have some claim to science-
fictional status but cannot, Suvin implies, be allowed inside a properly
defended citadel.
The question of allegory is particularly awkward here. Science fiction is
‘not orthodox allegory’ (75), but it is nevertheless an analogical mode
‘somewhere between a vague symbol and a precisely aimed parable’ (76).
The OED defines parable as ‘any saying or narration in which something is
expressed in terms of something else; an allegory’, but ‘SF and the Novum’
has the following confusing footnote about allegory, satire and SF:
Works avowedly written within a nonrealistic mode, principally allegory
(but also whimsy, satire, and lying tall tale or Münchhauseniade), consti-
tute a category for which the question of whether they possess a novum
cannot even be posed, because they do not use the new worlds, agents, or
relationships as coherent albeit provisional ends, but as immediately tran-
sitive and narratively nonautonomous means for direct and sustained reference
to the author’s empirical world and some system of belief in it. The ques-
tion whether an allegory is SF, and vice versa, is, strictly speaking, mean-
ingless, but for classifying purposes has to be answered in the negative.
This means that—except for exceptions and grey areas—most of the
works of Kafka or Borges cannot be claimed for SF: though I would argue
that In the Penal Colony and ‘The Library of Babel’ would be among the
exceptions. But, admittedly, much more work remains to be done toward
the theory of modern allegory in order to render more precise the terms
underlined in this note. (65n)
Plainly Suvin means to indicate that SF should have ‘a narrative reality suf-
ficiently autonomous and intransitive to be explored at length as to its own
properties and the human relationships it implies’ (71)—it is a ‘specifically
roundabout way of commenting on the author’s collective context’ (84)—
but the terms used are approximations and are recognized to be so by Suvin
himself.

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 Revisiting Suvin’s Poetics of Science Fiction 43

Some relevant examples will show what is being included in, and
excluded from, science fiction at this point. (Admittedly, Suvin himself
observes that ‘One of the troubles with distinctions in genre theory is . . .
that literary history is full of “limit-cases” ’ (69). Wells’s The Time Machine,
which is cited in ‘SF and the Novum’ as one of a group of works which are
‘primarily fairly clear analogies to processes incubating in their author’s
epoch’ (78), is a non-controversial example of an SF text involving a novum.
(But if the future degeneration of the human species in Wells’s text is both
a novum and a reflexive analogy—that is, the Eloi and Morlocks confound
Victorian expectations of progress—it is surely not the only novum in the
story. Perhaps an extended SF narrative needs two or three novums?) The
cognitive logic involved and the analogies to processes incubating in the
author’s epoch are spelt out in the text and have withstood more than a
century of critical scrutiny, although—like all of Wells’s science-fictional
novums—they are open to various potential logical and scientific objections.
Most readers would unhesitatingly confirm that the Time Traveller’s dis-
coveries among the Eloi and Morlocks meet Suvin’s criterion of a suffi-
ciently autonomous narrative reality.
I will now consider a short story by Borges, ‘Funes, the Memorious’,
which Suvin would presumably classify as a metaphysical fantasy. Funes, a
countryman from the Argentine cattle town of Fray Bentos, receives his
extraordinary gift of memory after being crippled in a horseriding acident.
He is capable of recognizing and distinctly comprehending every object in
the material universe, but this does not, so the narrator insists, make him
capable of thought. ‘To think is to forget a difference, to generalise, to
abstract’;20 all that Funes can acknowledge and give a name to are discrete,
individual entities. The story’s cognitive logic is apparently a little muddled,
since the narrator asserts that Funes has learned English, French, Por-
tuguese and Latin without effort: we are not told how someone incapable
of any kind of abstraction and generalization can be said to have learned a
language. Since Funes has difficulty with a generic noun such as dog, how
can he distinguish between the English and the French languages? If,
within the narrative world of Borges’s parable, such questions can be dis-
missed as irrelevant nitpicking, that seems to make Suvin’s general point:
‘Funes, the Memorious’ is an allegory about cognition which does not try
very hard for cognitive consistency. On the other hand, both Borges’s story
and (as was suggested above) The Time Machine involve differing amounts
of logical sleight-of-hand. We should perhaps see Funes’s remarkable mem-
ory not as a failed (Wellsian) novum but as a quasi-novum or pseudo-novum;
the term pseudo-novum is suggested on the analogy of a pseudo-concept, a
‘notion treated as a concept though it cannot be properly conceptualised or

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 44 PATRICK PARRINDER

grasped by the mind’ (OED), though Suvin in ‘SF and the Novum’ uses
‘pseudo-novum’ to mean, simply, a fake novum (81). The ‘novum’ in Borges’
story is not simply bogus, since the fact that Funes’s memory cannot be
properly conceptualized by the reader has in itself an instructive or cogni-
tive value. In other words, a story with a quasi-or pseudo-novum can serve
a cognitive function. If this turns out to be one of Suvin’s anomalies or
limit-cases, we may wonder whether the theory of cognitive estrangement
is not rather too generously productive of limit-cases. Is a parody of a sci-
ence-fiction story a science-fiction story? The question is pertinent since, as
Suvin himself has shown, much of the genre’s historical origins lie in par-
ody and forms of ‘Aesopian language’. Parody and satire thrive on analogy,
and Suvin regards SF, too, as an inherently analogical mode.
When he argues that ‘It is intrinsically or by definition impossible for SF
to acknowledge any metaphysical agency’, Suvin implies that the purpose
of SF is one of truth-telling. SF cannot acknowledge metaphysical agencies
because within the terms of the scientific epistemé such agencies are consid-
ered to be empirically false. Historically, the truth-telling modes of modern
SF emerged when writers of the positivist age decided to forgo satirical
fantasy in favour of technological extrapolation and prophetic anticipation.
Poe’s ‘Eureka’ and ‘Hans Pfaall’ and the Erewhon of Samuel Butler gave
place to the ‘futuristic present’ of Jules Verne and the futurological
warnings of Wells. Suvin sometimes plays down the satirical elements in
the works he discusses—in ‘SF and the Novum’ he dismisses Brave New
World and Nineteen Eighty-four, for example, as (untruthful) examples of
‘fashionable static dystopia’ without alluding to their status as avowed
satires (83) —but he also rigorously rejects any attempt to limit science fic-
tion to the functions of prophecy or extrapolation:

extrapolative SF in any futurological sense was (and is) only a delusion

of technocratic ideology—no doubt extremely important for the histori-
cal understanding of a given period of SF, but theoretically untenable . . .
extrapolation is a one-dimensional, scientific limit-case of analogy. (76)

If extrapolation is a limit-case of analogy, then all cognition which is not

strictly logical or arithmetical would seem to be based on analogy. Funes’s
inability to generalize, and the difficulty he had in grasping the concept of
dog, was a failure to draw an analogy between one dog and another.
This means that Suvin’s attack on extrapolation and prophecy in ‘SF and
the Novum’, as well as his treatment of SF’s relationships to allegory and
satire, is open to charges of inconsistency. Consider the following assertion,
for example:

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 Revisiting Suvin’s Poetics of Science Fiction 45

the cognitive value of all SF, including anticipation-tales, is to be found in

its analogical reference to the author’s present rather than in predictions,
discrete or global. Science-fictional cognition is based on an aesthetic
hypothesis akin to the proceedings of satire or pastoral rather than those
of futurology or political programs. (78)
To the extent that scientific extrapolation is a ‘one-dimensional limit-case
of analogy’, we must regard ‘futurology or political programs’, and not
merely satire and pastoral, as being validated by their analogical reference.
Since common sense tells us that the actual future cannot be predicted with
any certainty, we should have no difficulty in regarding futurological texts,
for example, as ‘heuristic models’ according to the definition that Suvin
gives in ‘SF and the Genological Jungle’: ‘A heuristic model is a theoretical
structure based on analogy, which does not claim to be transcendentally or
illusionistically “real” in the sense of mystically representing a palpable,
material entity, but whose use is scientifically and scholarly permissible,
desirable, and necessary because of its practical results’ (17). In other
words, the difference between futurology and science fiction lies not in the
presence or absence of analogical reference to the author’s present but in
that the former is intended to lead to practical results: futurological writ-
ings set out to counter ‘future shock’ and to warn against, or prepare their
readers to negotiate, the projected future. We are left with a rather uncer-
tain distinction between science fiction and futurology in terms of the ‘cog-
nitive value’ of each: one of the causes of uncertainty being that the notion
of cognitive value has also been used to distinguish SF from satire and
fantasy.
Suvin attempted to sort out these confusions and to patch up the poetics
of science fiction in his 1984 essay ‘SF as Metaphor, Parable and Chrono-
tope (with the Bad Conscience of Reaganism)’, reprinted as the conclusion
to Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (1988). Here he takes up his
earlier observation that poetic metaphor is a kind of novum, adding to it that
every metaphor must by definition possess a cognitive value. (It will be evi-
dent at once that this undercuts his distinction between ‘estranged and
cognitive’ and ‘estranged but non-cognitive’ fictions.) Quoting Paul
Ricoeur’s aphorism that ‘Metaphor is to poetic language as model is to sci-
entific language’,21 Suvin now vastly broadens the notion of a ‘heuristic
model’ to include not only acknowledged speculative instruments (such as
scientific hypotheses, literary theories and futurological scenarios), but
metaphors and fictional texts (which he considers as extended metaphors).
Every heuristic model must have a cognitive value. But to equate metaphors
and heuristic models as Suvin proposes quickly leads to a reductio ad absur-
dum, since most modern linguistic theorists would maintain that metaphor

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 46 PATRICK PARRINDER

is ubiquitous to and constitutive of language itself. In order to preserve

Suvin’s argument at this point we would need to argue that, in the case of
dead metaphors for instance, a cognitive value necessarily includes zero
value. Suvin’s own strategy, a variant of this, is to suggest that the charac-
teristics of a heuristic model apply to ‘true’ or ‘full-fledged’ metaphors and,
by extension, to ‘significant’ SF, with the rest being left in a cognitive limbo
(188). What follows from this is a highly original discussion of metaphor as
a ‘cognitive organon’ (189); but the further we follow Suvin in this, the
more inescapable seems his tacit abandonment of the idea of science fiction
as a special kind of narrative exhibiting cognitive estrangement. In Meta-
morphoses of Science Fiction, for example, the fact that in SF ‘the cognitive
nucleus of the plot codetermines the fictional estrangement itself’ is a con-
sequence of the genre’s status as a branch of the literature of ideas: in SF ‘a
cognitive . . . element becomes a measure of aesthetic quality’ (15). In the
later writings in which Suvin considers metaphor as a fundamental aes-
thetic and cognitive gesture, all aesthetic manifestations in the medium of
language seem to entail a cognitive element. Claiming that SF merely
exemplifies far more widespread aspects of the process of thinking and
making analogies, Suvin’s own analogical mode of thought expands his
‘poetics of SF’ well beyond breaking point. Recently, in ‘On Cognitive Emo-
tions and Topological Imagination’ (1994), he has argued that all human
creativity whether poetic or scientific, rational or emotional, conceptual or
non-conceptual, has cognitive potential. The purpose of such creativity, as
with the purpose of metaphor in ‘SF as Metaphor, Parable and Chronotope’,
is to ‘redescribe the known world and open up new possibilities of inter-
vening into it’.22
Revisiting Suvin’s poetics of science fiction, we thus find ourselves retrac-
ing the rejection of generic formalism in favour of a broad philosophical
enquiry into human creativity and cognition that has guided his prolific
output during the last two decades as a scholar and theorist of utopia, of
semiotics, of theatre and drama, and of the lessons of Far Eastern cultures,
not to mention his parallel movement from formal poetics to the theory and
practice of poetry. The common assumption in all this writing is that of a
necessary linkage between the cognitive and the aesthetic: the aesthetic is
also a cognitive category, and vice versa. In its broadest terms, this common
assumption puts Suvin on the side of Aristotle against Plato in the age-old
quarrel between poetry and philosophy:23 there is no reason for poets and
philosophers to differ, Aristotle and Suvin would claim, since poetry by its
very nature has philosophical value. But all such arguments need to reckon
with the fact that artists since the Romantic period have frequently ranged
themselves on Plato’s side, not Aristotle’s. The very artists who made

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 Revisiting Suvin’s Poetics of Science Fiction 47

estrangement and the novum an article of faith eschewed or parodied con-

ventional philosophical language. Theories—notably, in the twentieth cen-
tury, Marxist theories—proclaiming the unity of the cognitive and the
aesthetic are under suspicion of subsuming the aesthetic into the cognitive.
Can this charge be maintained against Suvin’s poetics of SF?
It seems to be axiomatic from Suvin’s point of view that the estranged
world of the science-fiction story cannot possibly be an end in itself; his
theory both affirms and denies aesthetic autonomy in the same gesture. For
Suvin, the interpretation of any science-fictional novum would seem to
involve the following necessary steps: relating the objects and figures in the
text to the world of the text as a whole; relating the objects and figures to
their corresponding or opposing elements in the author’s empirical world;
and relating the world of the text as a whole to the author’s empirical
world. This process of analogical interpretation serves to determine the
text’s significance and to establish its science-fictional quality, taking it out
of Terra Noncognita and revealing it as both estranged and cognitive. At the
same time, it turns the text’s function of ‘commenting on the author’s col-
lective context’ into the measure of aesthetic achievement. Significant SF
which ‘suggests—sometimes strongly—a flight from that context’ is,
Suvin writes at the conclusion of ‘SF and the Novum’, ‘an optical illusion
and epistemological trick’ (84). The reverse of generic formalism, this kind
of evaluation is prepared in the last resort to leave the text’s generic form
behind and declare it to be, if not worthless, simply illusory.

Looking back on an intellectual project begun in the 1970s, the editors of

the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction referred some years
ago to the growing complexity of their subject:
GENRE SF continues to grow and flourish, and its description remains
our central task; but genre sf more and more occupies a world which,
because of new category and marketing distinctions, is difficult to com-
prehend at a glance. Game worlds, film and tv spin-offs, shared worlds,
graphic novels, franchises, young-adult fiction, choose-your-own plot
tales, technothrillers, surrealist fiction, sf horror novels, fantasy novels
with sf centres, and so on—all contribute to a structure that hardly
existed in the 1970s. The world of sf is also harder to describe now—not
just because it has become more difficult, but because we have begun to
discover that it always was.24
The task of an encyclopaedia may be to summarize our knowledge of the
world as it is, but the task of theory is to simplify the world, to make it
thinkable and to outline basic principles. The imposing but chequered his-

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 48 PATRICK PARRINDER

tory of literary theory since the Russian formalists suggests that theoretical
illusions are more or less inescapable; what is important is not so much to
avoid them as to prevent them from taking root and persisting, weed-like,
long after they have ceased to challenge the automatism of perception.
Suvin’s candour, and the restless progression of his thought, represents the
best kind of defence against illusions of this sort, but his search for a poet-
ics of science fiction has always and deliberately been conducted against
the grain of SF as a mode of popular entertainment. Does this make the
poetics of SF as he envisaged it something of a mirage? In Reading by
Starlight (1995) Damien Broderick describes Suvin as ‘In very large degree,
. . . the implicit Newton or Lévi-Strauss of contemporary science fiction
scholarship’, and adds that: ‘Having articulated the terms within which
learned argument has tended to be elaborated, Suvin’s contribution has
been absorbed so generally that it can seem transparently given—often a
sign that a framework is due for drastic deconstruction, if not overthrow’.25
Broderick’s principal objection to Suvin’s framework, it would seem, is that
SF is not, properly considered, a genre but a mode.26 The generic model is
too limited. Others, going beyond the more or less exclusively literary
domain that Broderick no less than Suvin endorses, have argued that SF is
not a mode but a ‘field’.
Each of these constructions and categorizations of science fiction is open
to question. A ‘field’ may be a recognizable sociological or historical entity
but it is too broad and vague to have much relevance for the theoretically
minded. A ‘mode’ in its literary sense hovers uncertainly between pedantic
archaism (in terms of which the ‘science-fictional’ would have to be distin-
guished from the comical, tragical, satirical, pastoral and so on) and inde-
finable looseness. A ‘genre’, being the tightest of the three terms—and thus
the only one that can be experienced by writers and critics as challenging
and prescriptive—throws up too many hybrids and limit-cases. Modes
have the advantage of cutting transversely across generic boundaries.
Suvin originally offered his theory as a ‘heuristic model’ for criticism and
research, an emphasis underlined by the title of one of his most recent
essays, ‘Novum Is as Novum Does’.27 Despite his (and others’) second
thoughts, his poetics remains the most rigorous and illuminating attempt
to understand science fiction as possessing a core of generic identity—a
condition not easily separable, I suggest, from its possession of a core iden-
tity of any sort. From Suvin’s perspective SF offers itself for inspection as a
form of cultural intervention definable in terms of its cognitive values and
estrangement values—in other words, as something more than a shop
window full of fictional commodities concerned with ‘science’, ‘wonder’
and ‘space’. To ‘fix’ SF as cultural intervention, Suvin has had to emphasize

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 Revisiting Suvin’s Poetics of Science Fiction 49

the extent and nature of its control over the fantastic. Those who maintain
that literary fantasy is in fact uncontrollable will have to contend with H.
G. Wells’s principle (which Suvin must certainly endorse) that ‘Nothing
remains interesting where anything may happen’.28

Notes

1 D. Suvin, Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction, p. 66.

2 D. Suvin, ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, in M. Rose, ed., Science
Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 58.
3 In this chapter I have necessarily simplified the very complex chronology of
Suvin’s writings on SF (for which see the Checklist at the end of this volume). 1972
is perhaps an arbitrary point of origin for the essay ‘On the Poetics of the Science
Fiction Genre’, which appeared in College English in that year but is here quoted in
the form of the 1976 reprint which made it widely available to students of SF. With
respect to the later essays up to 1988, I give their dates of first publication but quote
the sometimes substantially revised versions that subsequently appeared in Meta-
morphoses of Science Fiction or Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction. The page
references in the text (apart from references to ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fic-
tion Genre’) are to whichever of these two volumes the context indicates. Essay
titles are given in the form in which they appear in Metamorphoses or Positions.
4 Suvin, ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, pp. 60–61.
5 D. Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, p. 13.
6 H. G. Wells, ‘Preface to The Scientific Romances’, p. 241; quoted by Suvin, Meta-
morphoses, p. 208.
7 Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, pp. 6, 13, and 63–64 respectively.
8 Ibid., p. 20.
9 Suvin, ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, pp. 57–58.
10 Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, p. 20.
11 D. Littlewood, ‘SF and the Fantastic: Siamese Twins?’.
12 Wells, ‘Preface to The Scientific Romances’, pp. 242, 241.
13 Ibid., p. 242.
14 In the 1950s the astronomer Patrick Moore called for scientists in each coun-
try to set up selection boards charged with conferring a seal of approval on SF nov-
els chosen for their ‘scientific soundness’. P. Moore, Science and Fiction, pp. 10,
186–89.
15 V. Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, pp. 12–13.
16 Robert Scholes goes somewhat further and asserts that estrangement has
been ‘the premise of all art since the romantic period’. R. Scholes, Structural Fabula-
tion, p. 46.
17 J. Huntington, ‘Science Fiction and the Future’, p. 166. John Clute has put
forward a very similar argument: see the joint article ‘Definitions of SF’ in J. Clute
and P. Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, p. 313.
18 Suvin in his 1972 essay speaks of a ‘spectrum or spread’ of literary subject
matter according to its degree of estrangement, and, in the context of a discussion

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 50 PATRICK PARRINDER

of the ‘analogic model’, he says that ‘as in all distinctions of this essay, one should
think of a continuum at whose extremes there is pure extrapolation and analogy,
and of two fields grouped around the poles and shading into each other on a wide
front in the middle’. The latter passage with its qualifying reference to ‘all distinc-
tions of this essay’ has been cut from the version of the argument that appears in
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, although later in the book he describes extrapolation
as a ‘limit-case’ of analogy. (This is characteristic of the textual complexities of
Suvin’s writings.) Suvin, ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, pp. 58, 68;
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, pp. 29, 76.
19 D. Suvin, ‘On Cognitive Emotions and Topological Imagination’.
20 J. L. Borges, ‘Funes, the Memorious’, p. 104.
21 Suvin, Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction, p. 194.
22 Suvin, ‘On Cognitive Emotions and Topological Imagination’, p. 191; cf. Posi-
tions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction, p. 189.
23 This ‘age-old quarrel’ is mentioned by Plato in Book X of The Republic.
24 Clute and Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, pp. vii–viii.
25 D. Broderick, Reading by Starlight, p. 32.
26 Broderick is more interested in considering SF as constituted by a particular
set of rhetorical strategies than by a generic framework, but (as his conclusions tend
to confirm) this is largely a difference of emphasis. Coherent rhetorical strategies
presuppose a generic framework; the choice of generic framework limits the rhetor-
ical strategies available. Most of the items in Broderick’s summary of SF’s rhetori-
cal components can easily be related to ‘cognitive estrangement’. See Broderick,
Reading by Starlight, pp. 156–57.
27 D. Suvin, ‘Novum Is as Novum Does’.
28 Wells, ‘Preface to The Scientific Romances’, p. 241.

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