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- Title
The Beginnings of Fiction.
- Authors
Slusser, George
- Abstract
Fiction was far from being simply the French version of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Over the half-dozen odd years from its outset in 1953, the editors of the former sought to identify what French SF peculiarly was--and could be. This process of definition involved placing SF in relation to categories traditionally recognized by French culture: the fantastic, the uncanny, "mystery fiction." The result was both a sense of generic function without equivalent in the Anglo-Saxon SF worm at the time and a very particular, and traditional, sense of what SF is: a literature that explores alternate and parallel, rather than other, worlds; a literature that turns away from expansive paradigms to explore the inner worm of the imagining organ--the rational mind itself. To follow this process of definition step by step, this essay focuses on the work of two early Fiction critics: Jean-Jacques Bridenne and Gérard Klein. Bridenne seeks, in the early issues, to establish the nature of the French SF tradition by bringing to light a series of native precursors. Building on the direction this lineage sets. Klein analyzes the work of a number of new American "masters" in the light of a gradually forming French sense of the SF genre. As Klein comes ultimately to define it, this SF is Cartesian and surrealist in nature. Which means that it seeks a logical cultivation of dream worlds. And should do so in hopes of preserving the privilege of the cogito in relation to a material universe otherwise defined by Pascal's two infinities.
- Subjects
FRANCE; FRENCH periodicals; SCIENCE fiction; FANTASY fiction; AUTHORS; CULTURE; PRESERVATION of materials; MASS media genres
- Publication
Science Fiction Studies, 1989, Vol 16, Issue 3, p307
- ISSN
0091-7729
- Publication type
Article