by Xiang Xiang Liew

Created on: December 17, 2009   Last Updated: December 18, 2009

Attempts to define the science fiction genre as a whole has often been fraught with difficulties. According to Spencer (1983), a consensus amongst critics regarding the definition of science fiction has not been achieved, most probably due to the great variety of narratives that can be categorized as science fiction. The ambiguity of the term science fiction as well as Octavia Butler’s extensive body of work in this genre might explain why certain readers identify her most acclaimed novel, Kindred, as a work of science fiction. I argue otherwise: Kindred is not science fiction and cannot be identified as such. I will draw on points presented in the first section of the article ‘“The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low”: Towards a Stylistic Description of Science Fiction’, by Kathleen L. Spencer, to provide support for my argument.

What is Science Fiction?

In the first section of her article, Spencer (1983) argues that, compared to attempting to list all the characteristics that a text in the science fiction genre is supposed to have, it is more useful to define the genre is in terms of ‘how the reader understands and interprets the text’ (35). She discusses genre from a structuralist perspective, stating that a particular genre can be defined by its conventions and the expectations that readers have about it, which create a ‘context’ by which the readers are able to interpret ‘elements’ of the work in question (35). She then goes on to analyze Darko Suvin’s definition of science fiction, one that is considered the ‘most satisfactory effort to date’, and breaks it down into two main conventions by which readers use to identify the genre, that is, estrangement and, most importantly, cognition, which is the element that separates true science fiction from related genres and on which my argument is based.

Estrangement refers to the cognitive process evoked in the reader as the result of the placement of the story in a location, period, or circumstances that differentiate the universe in which the story takes place from our own ‘empirical environment’(36) in a ‘crucially important’ way or ways (37). The readers' expectations are disrupted by these alien elements in the text, which results in the readers having to continually process new information, information that differs from their expectations, and use it to reconstruct the expectations by which they interpret

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