At the London event I was channelling Samuel Delany, a great writer of SF, who says that sci-fi is a metaphorical literature because it aims to represent the world without reproducing it.
The world of a science fiction novel will be recognisably our world in some respects, but it will contain new things – technologies, social relationships, possibilities – that aren’t in our world. SF, along with fantasy more broadly, sets out to extrapolate imaginatively from the world. I prefer the phrase mimetic fiction to realist fiction, partly because ‘reality’ is exactly part of the problem that science fiction investigates. Mimesis is the business of reproducing the world ‘realistically’. I’m drawing, I hope, a common sense distinction. Can you expand on that before we talk about some science fiction classics? In a panel discussion of science fiction in London not long ago, you described the genre as “a metaphorical literature, not a mimetic literature”. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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