Joanna Russ argues that science fiction is didactic and that it focuses on the collective rather than the individual hero while, Samuel R. Delany argues that science fiction is a distortion of the present. However, they both argue that science fiction must be learned, interpreted, and critiqued differently than other literary texts because it has its own unique conventions.
Joanna Russ’s argument that science fiction in didactic and that it focuses on the collective rather than the hero is in a plethora of works from Delany to H.G Wells. When specifically focusing on the idea that science fiction is didactic we can look at Einstein Intersection which, like most of Delany’s works, teaches us about racial/ethnic differences but, within this novel …show more content…
Delany’s argues that science fiction is a distortion of the present and this is seen in science fiction works across all media. We can see this distortion when watching The Twilight Zone “Time Enough to Last”. This episode focuses on a present in which the H-bomb actual hit. We can draw these conclusions from the newspaper article that the man is holding before he falls asleep and the radio broadcast which follows the scene. This directly relates to Delany’s argument because the dangers of the creation of H-bomb were making headway during the era in which this episode was produced. We also see this in the Star Trek “Doomsday Machine” episode which through further research we can see that this could be a distortion of the Cuban Missile Crisis era’s end and the consequences of this, as well as the focuses on the danger of these nuclear bombs (e.g. seven planets were destroyed because of this machine/weapon). Norman Spinrad, the writer of this episode, gives us evidence as he hints to these ideas with lines such as “It was only meant as a bluff,” and “So powerful it could destroy both sides.” Finally, we see that Goliah written by Jack London is a distortion of the Red Scare present. In the story he focuses on distorting what our world would look like if socialism controlled it. “For I tell you now that the time has come when mere food and shelter and similar sordid things shall be …show more content…
When it comes to interpretation Delaney believes that the failure isn’t just that people fail to imagine but more importantly they the fail to respond word by word to the text (4). For example, if someone was reading Einstein Intersection without having prior experience in reading science fiction one might have a hard time visualizing a bull with hands instead of hooves or humanoid being able to play a weapon as an instrument without touching it. They will not only have a hard time visualizing it but they will also see these ideas as being bizarre, which causes them to misinterpret and respond differently to the words. This is stressed by Delany as he says, “Readers used to mundane fiction, tend to lay the fabulata of science fiction over that given world and come up with confusion. They do not yet know that these fabulata replace, displace, and reorganize the elements of that given world into new worlds,” (6). Russ shares this view instinctively as well, “Persons to whom the findings of science seem only bizarre, fanciful, or irrelevant to everyday life, have no business with science fiction-or with science for that matter-although they may deal perfectly well with fiction that ignores both science and the scientific view of reality,”(115). They also agree that it must be