Science fiction and the Earthly Paradise: American construction of nature.

摘要

Science fiction preserves, and promotes, anxieties about nature that arose during the Scientific Revolution, yet strongly influence American culture today; indeed, science fiction constitutes a national mode of thinking that seeks to replace nature with a technological universe--paradoxically, in order to restore a mythical state of pastoral innocence, the American Earthly Paradise. Feminist science fiction, contrary to expectation, cannot reform science fiction's construction of nature as feminine, alien, and monstrous. This failure dramatizes aspects of feminism as American discourse, articulated within the national mode of thinking.;In Chapter One, I discuss how the Earthly Paradise myth reflects changing views of nature, from divine mother to dead matter, in the Renaissance romance, utopia, and science fiction. Science fiction's version, the "alienated" Earthly Paradise, expresses Cartesian anxieties about the boundaries of subject and object, man and nature. Although reacting against the modern world's "disenchantment", science fiction inherently requires a re-enactment of "the death of nature". Chapter Two explores America's historical identification with the Earthly Paradise, and American technological utopianism, in science fiction. Topics include: science fiction as the rhetoric of SDI; the American Adam and Earthly Paradise in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-5; the debate between Earthly Paradise and technological utopia in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court. Chapter Three relates "space fiction" to the myths of alchemy and of the American frontier. Readings of Dune and other tales show how space fiction's nature-myths promote an expansionist political myth that defines war as "natural". Chapter Four deals with feminist science fiction.