Science Fiction’s Ethical Modes: Totality, Infinity, and the Unenglobable Literary Space [PhD thesis]

In this thesis, I argue that the assumptions and values that underpinned pulp science fiction (SF) from the USA predisposed it to totalising themes and modes of representation that influenced subsequent genre traditions. I contend, however, that SF from beyond this popular genre core, including Eastern European SF and certain US traditions following SF’s New Wave movement, has often demonstrated more ethical engagements with otherness, underpinned by non-totalising approaches to representation. Through in-depth engagement with the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I delve into ethical dimensions of US pulp SF’s approaches to representation, which would present the world, and other people, as fixed and knowable concepts, contrasting this to the more ethical approaches to alterity and unknowability demonstrated in other SF traditions. The relationship between literary form and Levinas’s ethics of alterity is illuminated throughout readings of Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Derek Attridge, while an understanding of the nature of the SF field and its dominant literary forms emerges from engagement with the genre theories of John Rieder and Andrew Milner, alongside other SF critics and authors, including Samuel R. Delany, Ursula Le Guin, and Joanna Russ. The final chapters of this thesis also highlight the relevance of these questions of ethics, politics, and literary representation given recent controversies and debates in SF fandom concerning genre boundaries and different approaches to otherness. I conclude that there is enormous ethical potential in SF through texts that, using inventive literary forms and content, stage the reader’s encounter with otherness and the inexhaustible interpretive potential of an infinite literary space. The study explores the ethical potential of SF through three key case studies. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (1951–1953; originally serialised 1942–1950) is taken as a reflection of the crystallisation of US pulp SF genre conventions in John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science-Fiction, including the assumption that the universe, and its inhabitants, can be known fully and finally, and that this knowledge can be communicated through writing. I argue that such an approach to the Other, underpinned by a totalising approach to writing that Barthes would characterise as readerly, can be recognised as unethical and violent, in a Levinasian sense, and ultimately contributes to a generic predisposition toward fascist politics. Next, a Levinasian reading of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), a milestone of Russian SF and the modern dystopian novel, demonstrates the potential of SF to engage in more ethical ways with the Other, including the disruptive face-to-face encounter and the idea of infinity, and realise this through a challenging and non-totalising literary form. Finally, a reading of Gene Wolfe’s “Seven American Nights” (1978), framed around an interrogation of the singularity of Wolfe’s challenging oeuvre and the critical responses it has received, further demonstrates the formal inventiveness that can be found in SF, the ethical significance of open writing (that Barthes would characterise as writerly), and the responsibilities of the reader in interpretation.