ABSTRACT
This study has argued for science fiction as a symbolist genre, one distinguished from other symbolist modes of literature by the fact that its symbols are deployed within a rationalised and materialist discourse, most usually that of ‘science’ and ‘pseudoscience’. The point of this symbolic medium is to connect the exploration of the encounter with difference to our experience of being-in-the-world. Gwyneth Jones argues that ‘what is needed’ with SF ‘is not a suspension of disbelief, it is an active process of translation’.
