Science Fiction as a Narratological Model

ABSTRACT The article conceptualizes science fiction (SF) as a practice of dialogizing forms of thought: science, philosophy, art, historical consciousness, ideology, nature. It elaborates Samuel R. Delany’s trivalent discourse of SF, and is influenced by the work of Deleuze, Guattari and Bakhtin. In this theory, SF is a collection of narrative operations that can be applied to world-constructs. The fantastic world makes it possible for the literary text to escape the tyranny of the “realist” representation of the world. Utopia is, therefore, implied in the model, as the trivalent flow of signifiers is nothing but the attempt to conjure other possible worlds. The article illustrates the interplay of the voices of SF via texts by Ursula Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson and Ted Chiang. Finally, it hypothesizes that any fictional text is trivalent to a degree, depending on the strategies employed to make the utopian drive less or more explicit in it.