Four decades ago, Darko Suvin floated a scholarly approach to science fiction that largely still prevails, emphasizing the genre's reliance, stretching back beyond Jules Verne to Mary Shelley and beyond, on a technological “novum.”Footnote ¹ Suvin emphasized the capacity of science fiction to challenge readers’ conceptual norms by way of what (in a Shklovskyian vein) he called “cognitive estrangement.” Most critical debate in the intervening years has focused on his account of the “cognitive estrangement” itself: including Seo-Young Chu's recent provocative notion that “science fiction is a representational technology powered by a combination of lyrical and narrative forces that enable science fiction to generate mimetic accounts of cognitively estranging referents.”Footnote ²

However, recent taxonomic work points to ways that the genre's self-definitions and constituent elements have varied enormously over the past century—and helpfully highlights some of the problems entailed in Suvin's reliance on an explicitly or implicitly technological “novum” as the launching point for that estrangement.Footnote ³ Fredric Jameson's deceptively simple account of temporality in SF has implications that highlight the formal congruity, and the intertextual inheritance, that aligns science fiction with the various realist prose genres that it follows. Jameson even finds a compelling way to bridge the space between the Romantic-era historical novel and the “children of Wells” (that is, the early twentieth-century upsurge in technology-based “hard” science fiction that culminated in the largely American Golden Age of Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke). Jameson astutely argues that “the late nineteenth-century invention of SF correlates to Walter Scott's invention of the modern historical novel in Waverley (1814), marking the emergence of a second—industrial—stage of historical consciousness after that first dawning sense of the historicity of society so rudely awakened by the French Revolution.”Footnote ⁴ In other words, what Scott did for “historical time,” science fiction did not only for the geological deep time of Lyell and Darwin (for those who doubt, Elie Berthet's 1876 Parisian caveman romance, Romans Pré-Historiques, is worth a gander) but also, by the early twentieth century, the cosmic vastness of Einsteinian time.

Jameson and Roger Luckhurst's work may be the spark for a needed paradigm shift. The birth of both science fiction and prose fantasy as new (or newly refashioned) genres in Britain in the 1890s—along with the virtually simultaneous rise of a new sort of Lovecraftian horror writing—should prompt some reflection on the speculative genres’ Darwinian rather than Einsteinian roots: that is, the debt that fantasy and SF authors owe to the fin de siècle's vastly expanded conception of the interpenetration of the human and nonhuman realms. In the late nineteenth century, evolutionary theory and the emergent “epistemic virtue” of objectivity come to shape not only the deterministic logic of naturalism, but also the otherworldly permutations of fantasy and science fiction, which register a scalar shift in humanity's relationship to a more expansive space and time—and to human interiors suddenly accessible in a range of new ways.Footnote ⁵

Science fiction (initially styled “scientific romance” at the time of Verne and Wells, later “scientifiction” by the trendsetting American periodicals edited by Hugo Gernsback and turned into “science fiction” proper by successors like John W. Campbell) explores the nonhuman within human existence—it is a crucial bellwether of changing human relations to the object as well as the animal world. Like naturalism, fantasy and Lovecraft-era horror, science fiction offered one way to make sense of the chasm between events—nonhuman in origin, scale and duration—and human experience—i.e., meaning-making distinctively shaped by individual subjectivity. These post-Darwinian experiments are unified by their focus on the cognitive “contact zone” where nonhuman forces impinge on the limits of human reason or imagination. With their advent, a vernacular thing theory unfolded—the legacy of which persists even into the present day, subtly shaping various forms of “posthumanism” and “object-oriented ontology.”Footnote ⁶

Taken together, recent accounts of the rise of fantasy as a modern prose genre, of the early days of science fiction, and of naturalism's affective innovations and explicit inversion of Idealism suggest that each genre was grappling with the resistance of a nonhuman universe to prior anthropocentric mandates and ontological presumptions.Footnote ⁷ The science fiction of H. G. Wells (“Realist of the Fantastic” was Conrad's apt title for him) and his successors worldwide (but especially in Great Britain and the US) is a complex and subtly varied response to the uncomfortable late nineteenth-century realization that man can no longer be the proper measure, nor perhaps even the proper study, of mankind. Registering the immensity of alien space and time even within the putatively knowable human realm, sublimates or sublimely displaces ordinary human agency within a vaster cosmos.Footnote ⁸ Simultaneously, the new/old genre of prose fantasy (sparked by the strange world-making late romances of William Morris, and then theorized by J. R. R. Tolkien as “subcreation” or the making of “secondary worlds”) offers the marvelous as an exemplary subset of human life, life as it might be lived without the impedances of material actuality.Footnote ⁹ Naturalism, fantasy, and science fiction seem intuitively to be wildly disparate from one another—yet the fin de siècle efflorescence of enchanted and speculative tales is fueled by the same concerns about the insistent actuality of the material world as is disenchanted and determinist naturalism.