Metamorphoses of Science Fiction

Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Print.

Although it is not currently in print, Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction is a seminal text that exerts a significant influence on current SF scholarship. In the first chapter of his book, “Estrangement and Cognition,” Suvin argues for “an understanding of SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement” (4). I found this to be his most useful idea toward theorizing SF and it is the one I explore in more detail here. Suvin defines “estrangement” in part by referencing Bertoldt Brecht’s “Verfremdungseffekt” (distancing effect). Brecht writes that “a representation which estranges is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar” (6). “Cognition” refers to the mental coherence with which a text represents its subject. Because fantasy can be perfectly mentally coherent, SF in Suvin’s sense must ultimately employ novums which are informed by science (broadly conceived).

Suvin develops a heuristic model of literary subject matter that allows him to position SF along a spectrum “which extends from recreation of the ideal extreme of exact recreation of the author’s empirical environment to exclusive interest in a strange newness, a novum” (4). Suvin differentiates SF and other estranged literary modes from what he terms “naturalistic” or “realistic” fiction. According to Suvin, “in SF the attitude of estrangement – used by Brecht in a different way, within a still predominantly ‘realistic’ context – has grown into the formal framework of the genre” (7). However, myth, folktale, fantasy, and other “estranged” literary modes differ from SF, according to Suvin, by their lack of “cognition” – “this term implies not only reflecting of but also on reality. It implies a creative approach tending toward a dynamic transformation rather than toward a static mirroring of the author’s environment” (10). He sharply differentiates SF from the fantastic genres when he writes, “As a literary genre, SF is fully as opposed to supernatural or metaphysical estrangement as it is to naturalism or empiricism” (7).

Suvin makes an interesting case for the use of the term science fiction, taking “science” in a general sense, “which [includes] not only natural but also all the cultural or historical sciences and even scholarship” (13). Suvin differentiates modern SF from its precursors such as utopian literature when he writes, “significant modern SF… presupposes more complex and wider cognitions: it discusses primarily the political, psychological, and anthropological use and effect of knowledge, of philosophy of science, and the becoming of failure [sic] as a result of it” (14). As a literary formula, cognitive estrangement reaches its most potent expression in twentieth-century SF. The cognitive element in particular differentiates SF-proper from its antecedents and related genres such as fantasy (which Suvin actually views to be inferior): “SF is, then, a literary genre whose distinguishing characteristics 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” (8).

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed provides a good example of cognitive estrangement. The society of anarchists on Anarres live within a radically-different social structure in which individuals do not own property, do not have to work (unless they choose to), do not get married, experience gender equity, and so on. Part of what makes Le Guin’s novel so successful is that it thoroughly imagines (“cognizes,” in Suvin’s sense) how such a society would shape the consciousness of its protagonist, Shevek. As the novel’s subtitle states, Anarres is also “An Amiguous Utopia”; Le Guin’s explores the unique challenges to such a society’s continued viability. She also contrasts Anarres with Urras, a capitalistic society which defamiliarizes (“estranges” us, in Suvin’s sense) and helps us see anew our own property-based culture.