ABSTRACT
For a moment in the history of ideas, it was difficult to tell philosophy, theory, and sf apart. Philosophers were writing about the speed of light, mutation, and virtual reality, while sf writers were inspiring public debates about computers and the human condition. Postmodernism was at its zenith during the 1980s and early 1990s, irrevocably changing the humanities. In the same period, sf’s relationship to the public sphere also changed, as a media-saturated society recognized itself in the genre’s representations of technology and the future. The euphoria of postmodern criticism was generated amid this collapse of the boundaries between high and low cultures, the future and the present. Celeste Olalquiaga (1992) argues that postmodernism’s most enduring features are its destabilization of hierarchies and the versatility of its critical practices. In its self-reflexivity, postmodern criticism wants to interrogate boundaries and make presumptions unstable. So it was that while sf was infiltrating mainstream literature, criticism, and media, sf studies itself became more receptive to marginal practices. Postmodernism created a framework for the articulation of difference, whether feminist, black, queer, subcultural, or subnational. If sf is a privileged site for theorizing the present, this present had never before been so diverse.
