ABSTRACT
This chapter considers mapping, reading, science fiction, and mapping the reading of science fiction. The method of achieving all this is to integrate linguistics, cognition, and textuality into a rounded poetics of the genre. It concerned with the historical development of science fiction in a tradition. It has dealt largely with the textual and contextual side of poetics. The cognitive linguistic understanding of prototype effects as a useful way of considering the category of science fiction. Bex applied this notion to literature in proposing that institutional networks operate as generic reinforcement mechanisms. Ideological preferences have consequences for a pedagogy of science fiction. This notion is primarily odd, in that science fiction is there firstly to be read rather than taught. The use of logic and rationalism against faith and religion, the status of humanity in a technologised future, the nature of knowledge, progress and science are all dealt with in science fiction narratives.
