Three World Paradigms for SF: Asimov, Yefremov, Lem

Abstract

The best works of SF have long since ceased to be crude adventure studded with futuristic gadgets, whether of the ‘space opera’ or horror-fantasy variety. If SF is (as posited in MOSF) a literary genre of its own, whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the interaction of estrangement (Verfremdung, ostranenie, distanciation) and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the dominant motions about the implied addressee’s empirical environment, then such a genre has a span from the romans scientifiques of Jules Verne to the social-science­fiction of classical utopias and dystopias. Its tradition is as old as literature — as the marvellous countries and beings in tribal tales, Gilgamesh or Lucian — but the central figure in its modern renaissance is H. G. Wells. His international fame, kept at least as alive in Mitteleuropa and Soviet Russia as in English-speaking countries, has done very much to unify SF into a coherent international genre. Yet, no doubt, these three major cultural contexts — discussed in this essay — their traditions and not always parallel development in our century, have also given rise to somewhat diverging profiles or paradigms for SF. I shall here briefly explore those paradigms in the most significant segment of post-Wellsian SF development, that after the Second World War.