ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines of literary critical arguments that follow from certain theoretical approaches to language. Meyers, in the best discussion of the use of linguistics in science fiction, points out several howlers committed in the genre. Modern linguistics views using language in the same way as taking a photograph: the photographer has to stand somewhere in relation to the object through the lens, and this involves a choice, whether conscious or not. The folk-theory of language, together with this traditional objectivist view of science, produces a folk-theory of linguistics. The chapter has been concerned with texts which are stylistically experimental. Within the tradition of science fiction writing, the passages cited above are linguistically on another planet, but that planet had already been colonised by the modernist stylists of mainstream fiction. It discussing the work of science fiction writer and academic Samuel Delany, who has himself even been classed as a post-modernist science fiction writer.
