ABSTRACT
In Philip K. Dick's 1953 short story The Preserving Machine, Doctor Labyrinth, inspired by an apocalyptic vision of global destruction, manufactures a device to transform musical scores into creatures who will survive the war and flourish in its aftermath. In this manner, the music he loves will outlive the suicidal folly of the race which created it. Instead of the hardy, fierce burrowing creatures he had envisaged, the machine produces an exotic array of mozart birds, beethoven beetles, schubert animals, brahms insects and bach bugs. How science fiction (SF) came to be accepted as a legitimate object of academic enquiry is a long and twisty tale. Arguably, SF has an exaggerated affinity with one of the basic precepts of twentieth-century critical theory: by naming and describing things which do not exist, are as yet unknown, and cannot be known. It repeatedly emphasises a Saussurean conception of language as arbitrary and unmotivated, as a framework placed over the valueless, meaningless flux of existence.
