Michel Butor
SCIENCE FICTION:
The Crisis of Its Growth
I
If
the genre Science Fiction is rather difficult to define--dis–
putes among the experts afford superabundant proof of that-it is, at
least, one of the easiest to designate. It is enough to say: "You know,
those stories that are always mentioning interplanetary rockets," for
the
least-prepared interlocutor to understand immediately what you mean.
This does not imply that any such apparatus occurs in every SF story;
it may be replaced by other accessories which will perform a comparable
role. But it is the most usual, the typical example, like the magic wand
in fairy tales.
Two remarks are immediately relevant:
1.
There exists for the moment no interplanetary rocket.
If
there
ever has been one, or there is one now, the ordinary reader knows
nothing about it. A narrative in which a device of this kind occurs is
therefore a narrative of fantasy.
2. But we all believe quite firmly that such devices will soon exist,
that the question is no more than one of time-a few years of develop–
ment. The apparatus is possible. This notion is fundamental, and requires
some explanation.
It might be claimed that for the Arab storytellers, who believed in
the power of magicians, flying carpets were also "possible." But for most
of us, the possibility of rockets is of an altogether different order. It is
guaranteed by what we might call, by and large,
modern science,
a sum
of doctrines whose validity no serious Occidental dares to question.
If
the author of a narrative has taken the trouble to introduce such
a device, it is because he chooses to depart from reality only to a certain
degree, he wants to prolong, to extend reality, but not to be separated
from it. He wants to give us an impression of realism, he wants to insert
the imaginary into the real, anticipating results already achieved. Such
a narrative naturally situates its action in the future.
We can imagine, taking modern science in its broadest acceptation,
not only other devices, but technologies of all kinds-psychological,
