ABSTRACT
If the 1950s represented the first “Golden Age” of SF, Jameson indicates the latter years of that decade also represented a “radical break or coupure” that would plant the seeds of postmodernism.2 This cultural shift would also eventually alter SF representation along with architecture and notions of home. While modernism, along with its foundation on rationalist and positivist scientific thinking, may have gained popularity in mainstream culture, the publication of Gadamer’s Truth and Method in 1960 added to a renewed interest in hermeneutics that would contribute to a shift in cultural representation, not the least of which were the projected aesthetics of the future. While there were a myriad of influences on the postmodern, including political, economical, and social evolutions, I hope to highlight how hermeneutical thinking, as a methodological alternative to natural science, provided a shift in the way architecture and SF were considered. It should also be emphasized that this transition to postmodernism is recognized as a gradual one that did not replace modernism as a “style,” which still thrives today, but that it has emerged as the “cultural dominant,” to borrow Jameson’s term, at various moments over the past thirty years.
