دانلود کتاب علمی تخیلی – به سوی ادبیات جهانی

In this enormously ambitious posthumous volume, George Slusser conceives of science fiction in its grandest terms: as a world literature. With erudite discussion of French, German, British, and Russian science fiction, Slusser interrogates its origins with a powerful methodology. To see its advantages, we can compare his method with more conventional attempts. All too often, these begin with a contemporary sense of science fiction as a well-established genre, identify its characteristics, and then retrospectively seek to find the same characteristics in earlier texts. The problems with these typical approaches are multiple. By working backward, they import into the search assumptions that emerged at a later time, giving the erroneous impression that the trajectory from past to present was, if not exactly deterministic, at least smoothly coherent and predictable. Slusser, by contrast, looks not for a set of genre characteristics but rather starts from a far more interesting question: what ideational and conceptual formations made it possible to think the genre of science fiction? As he puts it, what are the “ideas and processes” that made science fiction a thinkable thought?