Self and Other in SF: Alien Encounters

Alien-encounter Science Fiction involves the introduction of sentient alien beings into the actantial system of the fictional universe; one or more of the actants are nonhuman or superhuman or subhuman. By staging a confrontation between an alien actant and a terran representative, alien-encounter Science Fiction broaches the question of Self and the Other. The reader recuperates this fiction by comparing human and alien entities, measuring the Self by examining the Other. Alien encounters can be discriminated according to the extent to which the alien actant adheres to or departs from anthropocentric norms; in simple terms, we can distinguish between human aliens and alien aliens. This article examines the nature of human aliens by analyzing Orson Scott Card\u27s Ender trilogy, a work which theorizes and surveys possible sets of relations between terran and alien actants. It explores the problematics of alien aliens by looking at appropriate texts by Lem, Benford and Clarke

Towards a Definition of Science Fantasy

Science Fiction and fantasy have a locus of intersection, science fantasy. an unstable narrative form which combines features from each genre. A science-fantasy world is one in which the characters or settings or events presuppose at least one clear violation of natural law or scientific necessity, but which explicitly provides an organized or scientific explanation for that violation and which grounds its discourse in a scientific episteme. Science fantasy, like Science Fiction, assumes an orderly universe with regular laws, but, like fantasy, contains at least one explicit reversal of current natural law. An examination of two science-fantasy texts, Fritz Leiber\u27s Conjure Wife (1953) and Stanislaw Lem\u27s The Investigation (1959), enables us to establish the boundaries and thematic concerns of this narrative form. The types of science fantasy can be identified by the nature of the violation of natural law. Four main types involve the time-loop motif, the alternate-present world, the counter scientific world, and the hybridized world. As a subgenre, science fantasy tends to interrogate science by calling into question basic scientific assumptions about the physical world. At the same time it explores fantasy by questioning the unreality of the terrors and desires that haunt the value-laden world of dreams. Like magic realism, with which it shares some features, science fantasy is experiencing a growing popularity, in part because in its counternatural worlds, the actual and the imaginary, the prosaic and the magical, the scientific and the mythical, can meet and interanimate, in part because these worlds provide us with such beauty, awe, or terror as the actual world does not supply (C.S. Lewis)

Self and Other in SF: Alien Encounters

Alien-encounter Science Fiction involves the introduction of sentient alien beings into the actantial system of the fictional universe; one or more of the actants are nonhuman or superhuman or subhuman. By staging a confrontation between an alien actant and a terran representative, alien-encounter Science Fiction broaches the question of Self and the Other. The reader recuperates this fiction by comparing human and alien entities, measuring the Self by examining the Other. Alien encounters can be discriminated according to the extent to which the alien actant adheres to or departs from anthropocentric norms; in simple terms, we can distinguish between human aliens and alien aliens. This article examines the nature of human aliens by analyzing Orson Scott Card\u27s Ender trilogy, a work which theorizes and surveys possible sets of relations between terran and alien actants. It explores the problematics of alien aliens by looking at appropriate texts by Lem, Benford and Clarke