Theorizing Science Fiction: The Question of Terminology

Abstract

In a controversial review in the January 1983 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Algis Budrys, a noted science fiction writer who had become one of the field’s most respected reviewers, claimed that ‘the formal scholarship of speculative fiction is, taken in the whole, worthless’.1 Quoting a passage from the distinguished Yale University scholar Harold Bloom in the volume under review, Budrys claimed it was ‘not directed at anyone outside a tight circle who all share the same vocabulary and the same library’. The would-be literary scholar, Budrys argued, is forced to read more criticism than actual literature, or would be in danger of losing ‘his grip on the nomenclature’. Budrys wasn’t the first professional science fiction writer to express scepticism toward the sometimes arcane-sounding language of literary scholarship; such concerns were expressed repeatedly during the 1970s not only by science fiction fans, but by professional writers and editors including Lloyd Biggie Jr, William Tenn, Ben Bova and Lester del Rey.2 And some of the leading academic scholars of the field also seemed to acknowledge that there was a problem; as early as 1976 R.D. Mullen, in the journal Science-Fiction Studies, reviewed a new academic study under the title ‘Every Critic His Own Aristotle’ — suggesting that nearly every author of a theoretical or critical study of the genre found it necessary to invent terms or assign new definitions to old ones as a means of staking a claim to originality3 — and in his acceptance address for the 1984 Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association (the longest-standing award for scholarship in the field), editor Everett F. Bleiler complained, ‘Our terms have become muddled, imprecise, and heretical in the derivational sense of the word.