Science Fiction as Social Science Discourse

Of particular importance to the genetic debate should be those science fiction stories that seek to explore man’s efforts to conquer nature, from Victor Frankenstein who searches for the secret spark of life to Michael Crichton's Dr. Wu who attempts to tame it. Much of the popular affection and serious esteem science fiction has come to enjoy since the 1818 advent of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein derives from its entertaining and colorful, though often gritty and blunt, forum for ethical debate and civic activism. Over the past two centuries, science fiction has foreseen the rise of lasers, lunar landings, nuclear disasters and the increased influx of artificial technology into the health science fields.

Before embarking on any survey of science fiction, it will be helpful first to establish an operationalized definition of science fiction. For the purpose of this study, science fiction is a literary mode in which the "techniques of extrapolation and speculation are utilized in a narrative form, to construct near-future, far-future or fantastic worlds in which science, technology and society intersect" (Thacker, 2000).

There are certain critical components that characterize science fiction. The first is the distinction between the methodologies of extrapolation and speculation. Generally, extrapolation is defined as an imaginative extension of a present condition, usually into a future world that is "just around the corner." By contrast, speculation involves a certain imaginative leap, in which a world (either in the distant future or altogether unrelated) markedly different from the present is constructed. As can be imagined, most science fiction involves some combination of these, culminating in worlds that are at once strange and very familiar.

It is this familiarity that allows the reader to relate to the new environment, but the foreignness that allows the social commentary to become isolated for closer inspection. More and more genre science fiction is coming to terms not just with technical concerns, but also with social, cultural and political concerns. As such, the use of extrapolation or speculation and the construction of ontological worlds move science fiction into a realm that involves thinking about the complex dynamics between technology and globalization, science and gender, race and colonialism, and related concerns (such as genetic politics).

Such a complexification of science fiction has been highlighted by critics such as Fredric Jameson as a critical function of its evolution. Jameson articulates two critical functions that science fiction can have (Jameson, 1987). The first is characterized by the development of "future histories" or ways in which science fiction places itself in relation to history. Discussing science fiction as the dialectical counterpart to the genre of the historical novel, Jameson suggests that one of the primary roles of science fiction is not to "keep the future alive" but to demonstrate the ways in which visions of the future are first and foremost a means of understanding a particular historical present.

A second role Jameson ascribes to science fiction is a more symptomatic one. Referencing the work of the Frankfurt School on the "utopian imagination," science fiction can form a kind of cultural indicator of a culture's ability or inability to imagine possible futures. For Jameson, writing during the high point of postmodernism, science fiction was an indicator of a pervasive loss of historicity and the atrophying of the will to critically imagine utopias. Thus, not only is each vision of the future conditioned by a historical moment in which it is imagined, but, increasingly, science fiction's main concern is with the contingency involved in producing the future, as well as interrogating the constraints and limitations that enable the capacity to imagine the future at all.

The Human Genome Project

Some Deeper Questions

Science Fiction as Social Science Discourse

Proposal and Preliminary Reading List

Annotated Bibliography: Research Readings

Annotated Bibliography: Preliminary Reading List