Hard Reading : Learning from Science Fiction

Tom Shippey

• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781781384398
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nella fantascienza

The fifteen essays collected in Hard Reading argue that science fiction has its own internal rhetoric, relying on devices such as neologism, dialogism, semantic shifts, the use of unreliable narrators. It is a "high-informationâ€_x009d_ genre which does not follow the Flaubertian ideal of le mot juste, "the right wordâ€_x009d_, preferring le mot imprévisible, "the unpredictable wordâ€_x009d_. Science fiction derives much of its energy from engagement with vital intellectual issues in the "soft sciencesâ€_x009d_, especially history, anthropology, the study of different cultures, with a strong bearing on politics. Both the rhetoric and the issues deserve to be taken much more seriously than they have been in academia, and in the wider world. Hard Reading is also a memoir of what it was like to be a committed fan, from teenage years, and also an academic struggling to find a place, at a time when a declared interest in science fiction and fantasy was the kiss of death for a career in the humanities.