Introduction: the Genre of the Non-Place: Science Fiction As Critical Theory 1. for Plato's “Allegory of the Cave,” See Th

Notes Introduction: The Genre of the Non-Place: Science Fiction as Critical Theory 1. For Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” see The Republic Book VII. 2. For a thorough analysis of science fiction’s origins, see Brian W. Aldiss and David Wingrove’s Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1986). 3. See William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), the Nova (Or Cut-Up) Trilogy (The Soft Machine [1961], The Ticket that Exploded [1962], and Nova Express [196 4]), The Wild Boys (1971), and the “Red Night” Trilogy (Cities of the Red Night [1981], The Place of Dead Roads [1983], and The Western Lands [1987]; Thomas Pynchon’s V (1963), Mason & Dixon (1997), and Against the Day (2006); John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy; or, The Revised New Syllabus (1966); Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985); Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (1986) and Empire of the Senseless (1988); Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1965) or Invisible Cities (1972); David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996); Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000); and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2003). 4. McHale derives this concept of “projecting worlds” from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1965). As Oedipa Maas begins to explore the potential existence of a secret mail system known as Tristero, she writes underneath the Tristero horn that she has copied off of a bathroom wall, “Shall I project a world?” (65). Here, Oedipa is contemplating the possible existence of an entire other pattern of reality of which she (and most of the world) remains unaware. 5. For Ferdinand de Saussure’s original theorization of the sign, the signified, and the signifier, see Course in General Linguistics. For Lacan’s earliest discussion of the bar (barre) that divides the signified and signifier, see his essay “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud.” In subsequent seminars, Lacan further develops his concept of the bar, and it becomes a part of his “algebra.” The bar is used to strike out the subject and the Other in order to designate the presence of lack that is instilled by language. 6. For the texts that influence Michel de Certeau, see Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and The Order of Things and Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice. 192 NOTES 7. For Nietzsche’s concept of the revaluation (or “transvaluation,” as it is sometimes translated) of values, see the second essay in On the Genealogy of Morals. 8. For just a few examples of such antinarrative cinema, see such avant-garde classics as Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet Mécanique (1924), Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un chien Andalou (1929) and L’Âge d’Or (1930), or Kenneth Anger’s The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954). Surrealism often intersects with science fiction in a variety of ways, and surrealist works undoubtedly create their own heterotopian spaces as they twist and reimagine our reality, often bringing the internal out into the open and creating fantastic vistas that often feel like the stuff of sci-fi novels. 9. Estrangement” was also theorized by Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky. See his essay entitled “Art as Device” (1917)—sometimes translated as “Art as Technique,” which was later collected in Theory of Prose (1929). 10. In his essay entitled “The Uncanny,” Freud develops his concept of unheimlich. Usually translated as “uncanny,” unheimlich more pre- cisely means “unhomely.” The uncanny occurs when one experiences an event that is both familiar yet profoundly strange and unsettling— Freud cites examples like the Doppelganger (or “the double”). The uncanny is an example of the return of the repressed and is usually connected to childhood traumas and anxieties. 11. Kant initially reflects upon the nature of space and time in On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World [Inaugural Dissertation] in which he argues that time and space are pure intuitions necessary for coordinating sensory perceptions. Kant expands upon his conceptualization of space and time in Critique of Pure Reason: space and time are pure a priori intuitions that must exist before the understanding can become capable of making judgments: “Time is the a priori formal condition of all appearances in general. Space, as the pure form of all outer intuitions, is limited as an a priori condition merely to outer intuitions” (A 34). Therefore, time is the immediate condition of our inner senses and space is the immediate condition of our outer senses, but time remains more fundamental because space must also pass through the inner senses, so time is the mediate condition for space as well. Hence, time functions as the ordering principle for all perceptions. I am indebted in this note to Howard Caygill’s A Kant Dictionary for helping me to easily assem- ble these references. 12. For René Descartes’s famous discussion of the statement “Cogito ergo sum” or “I think; therefore, I am,” see Meditations on First Philosophy. The famous phrase actually appears in the “Objections and Replies” section. 13. In Problems in General Linguistics, Emile Benveniste points out that “there are languages, like Hopi, in which the verb implies absolutely NOTES 193 no temporal modality, and others, like Tübatulabal (of the same Uto- Aztec group as Hopi), in which the clearest expression of the past belongs not to the verb but to the noun” (133). But any language provides the means of conveying narratives that involve temporality. 14. I take the term “manifold” from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. As Kant explains, “Now space and time contain a manifold of pure a priori intuitions, but belong nevertheless among the conditions of the receptivity of our mind, under which alone it can receive representations of objects, and thus they must also affect the concept of these objects. Only the spontaneity of our thought requires that this manifold first be gone through, taken up, and combined in a certain way in order for a cognition to be made out of it. I call this action synthesis. By synthesis in the most general sense, however, I understand the action of putting different representations together with each other and comprehending their manifoldness in one cognition” (Reason A 77). 1 Variables of the Human: Gender and the Programmable Subject in Samuel R. Delany’s TRITON 1. The novel was entitled simply Triton when it was first published in 1976. The novel’s subtitle is a reference to Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed (1974), which features “an ambiguous utopia.” Douglas Barbour mentions this connection and explains that Delany, in his titles especially, “is inclined to be ironic in his allusion to tra- ditional genre sf” (121). Le Guin’s novel deals with two different planets: Annares, which was settled by anarchist utopians from the capitalist system on the planet Urras. Which planet represents the actual utopia becomes the source of the ambiguity throughout this novel. 2. Equinox was originally published under the name The Tides of Lust. 3. Even though their plots are unrelated, Delany describes Trouble on Triton as the prelude to his “Return to Nevèrÿon” tales, a series of 11 “sword and sorcery” short stories, novels, and novellas that again function on the very limits of their genre. The “Return to Nevèrÿon” series is published in four volumes: Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), Neveryóna (1983), Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985), and Return to Nevèrÿon (1987). Triton is related to “Nevèrÿon” in two distinct ways. First, it con- tains the first two parts of a larger five-part, unclassifiable work entitled “Some Informal Remarks Towards the Modular Calculus,” a work that continues in various parts of the “Nevèrÿon” tales. The “Informal Remarks,” which Delany terms “a critical fiction,” consists of five parts, which span different genres: the first part is the novel Triton; the second part is Triton’s second appendix entitled “Ashima Slade and the Harbin-Y Lectures”; the third part is the first appendix to Tales of Nevèrÿon; the fourth part consists of the novel Neveryóna; and the final part is Delany’s story about AIDS entitled “The Tale of 194 NOTES Plagues and Carnivals” in Flight from Nevèrÿon. Secondly, as Delany explains in his afterword to Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand, Triton has a thematic link to his other works: Delany claims that his work from Dhalgren through the “Return to Nevèrÿon” series deals with “the fragmented subject as a ‘natural’ condition” (356). Across these works, Delany examines various, socially-constructed identifi- catory schemas and the ways in which fragmented subjects interact with them and grapple with their loss of unity. 4. For further biographical information on Delany, see Sandra Y. Govan’s “Samuel R. Delany”; Peter S. Alterman’s “Samuel R. Delany”; and the entry “Samuel R. Delany” in Contemporary Authors Online. 5. Delany, Triton 1. Hereafter, the abbreviation “T” will refer to the text of Samuel Delany’s Trouble on Triton. 6. See Sonya Andermahr, Terry Lovell, and Carol Wolkowitz’s “Gender,” in A Glossary of Feminist Theory. The authors take this information partly from Ann Oakley’s Sex, Gender, and Society (1972). 7. Such topics also crop up throughout many of Butler’s other works, includ ing The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997), Excit- able Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), and even her early book on Hegel entitled Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987). 8. The epigraph appears at the beginning of Appendix B, which is entitled “Ashima Slade and the Harbin-Y Lectures.” 9.

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