INFORMATIONIST SCIENCE FICTION THEORY AND INFORMATIONIST SCIENCE FICTION Master of Philosophy Thesis Bruce Long ©2008-2009 Copyright © Bruce R. Long 2009. All Rights Reserved. Printed in Sydney at The University of Sydney, Australia. Informationist Science Fiction Theory and Informationist Science Fiction / Bruce R. Long. Includes bibliographical references and index. Submitted for marking on the 27th August 2009. Marking and typographical ammendments completed 8th December 2009. High Distinction grade awarded. Award confirmed by Department 14th January 2010. 2 3 Contents Acknowledgments .................................................................................................................................................... 6 Chapter 1 – Informationist Science Fiction Theory .......................................................................................... 7 Informationism From Science to Science Fiction ....................................................................................... 7 Informationist Structuralism and Poststructuralism ................................................................................... 9 Informationist Science Fiction Theory Prefigured .................................................................................... 13 Informationist Science Fiction at the Multivariate Nexus ....................................................................... 17 Reading Informationist Science Fiction Texts: Meta-Informational Writing ...................................... 20 The Meta-informational Writing of Pynchon ............................................................................................ 22 A Reading of a Contemporary Meta-informational Science Fiction Text ............................................ 24 Chapter 2 - Information Theory and the Language of Science Fiction Texts ............................................ 30 Information and Meaning .............................................................................................................................. 30 Discrete Lexical Information Sources ......................................................................................................... 32 The Text as Message and Source .................................................................................................................. 34 Linguistic Information Redundancy and the Novum............................................................................... 36 Concepts and Information Synthesis ........................................................................................................... 38 Veridical Information and Pseudo-Information in Science Fiction Texts ........................................... 41 Linguistic Subjunctivity and Counterfactual Pseudo-Information in Science Fiction ........................ 48 Transrealism and Counterfactual Pseudo-Information ............................................................................ 52 Futurological Counterfactual Pseudo-information ................................................................................... 53 The Novum as Counterfactual Pseudo-Information ................................................................................ 57 Chapter 3 - The Fiction of Veridical, Counterfactual and Heterogeneous Information .......................... 63 Information Synthesis at Read-time ............................................................................................................. 63 Informationist Literary Theory: A Flawed Hybridisation ........................................................................ 65 Words Fail: Category Errors, Equivocation, and General Nouns ......................................................... 67 Informationist Science Fiction Theory, Texts, and the Mega-text ......................................................... 69 Information Types, Synthesis, and The Novum ....................................................................................... 72 Informationist SF Theory and Semiotics .................................................................................................... 74 Informational Heterogeneity: the Heterogeneous Information Profile ................................................ 76 Informationist Space Opera .......................................................................................................................... 78 Ontologically Object-Centric Materialist Fictionality ............................................................................... 79 Information and the Open-system Mise en scène ......................................................................................... 82 Artefactual Synthesis: The Discourses and Notations of the Sciences in SF ....................................... 85 Chapter 4-Informationist Science Fiction Aesthetics and Motifs ................................................................. 91 The Cognitive Aesthetic and The Informational Aesthetic of Complexity .......................................... 91 4 Informationist Space Opera And The Aesthetic Of Complexity ........................................................... 93 Meta-Informational SF Writing .................................................................................................................... 94 The Informational Ontologically Estranged Character-Novum ............................................................ 95 Science Fiction Texts as Anti-simulacra ...................................................................................................... 98 The Infomorph and Informational Ghosts .............................................................................................. 102 The Informational Natural God and ‗Godshatter‘ .................................................................................. 106 Hyperreal Pseudo-Information and the Simulated Universe Setting ................................................... 108 Science Fiction Nodal Points ...................................................................................................................... 109 Character Anti-Simulacra ............................................................................................................................. 111 Postmodernism, Informationism, Estrangement, and Uncertainty ..................................................... 112 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................... 114 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................................... 116 INDEX ................................................................................................................................................................... 120 5 Acknowledgments Thanks to Dr. Peter Marks for suggesting that information theory would provide a rewarding topic for this thesis. This facilitated the leveraging of my honours thesis in the philosophy of information theory. I I dedicate this thesis to my children Christopher, Katya, and Jesse, whose patience and support during the process of write-time synthesis was unsurpassed. Many thanks also go to Dr. Kate Lilley, Dr. Margaret Rogerson, Dr. Vanessa Smith, and again to Dr. Marks for their support while this thesis was being prepared. This thesis could not have been completed without a generous scholarship from the University of Sydney. Many thanks also to Mr Joshua Boxx and his colleagues in the Faculty of Arts. There are many others in The School of Letters, Arts and Media and The Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney whose patience and support was also greatly appreciated, but they are too numerous to list here. 6 CHAPTER 1 – INFORMATIONIST SCIENCE FICTION THEORY C h a p t e r 1 – Informationi s t Science Fiction T h e o r y INFORMATIONISM FROM SCIENCE TO SCIENCE FICTION The titles of this thesis and of this chapter are neologisms with high information values. This statement will be fully explained in chapter two, but basically it reflects the fact that, although structured according to the grammatical rules of English, the word informationist is not in any normative English vocabulary to date. Thus, out of all of the possible lexical strings that might appear where ‗informationist‘ does, it is one of the less probable selections relative to the vocabulary of the English language and an English speaker‘s knowledge thereof. Therefore, you as the reader were perhaps surprised to see it, and likewise perhaps to see the phrase ‗science fiction theory‘, which is not a semantically normative assemblage of these three words, conveying as it does a nascent concept. Mathematicians have coined another neologism to describe this property of the relative improbability of occurrence of such neologisms or neologised phrases: they refer to it as the surprisal value. Its origin is in the 1948 formula devised by mathematician Claude E. Shannon to provide a measure of information or entropy in a message. It applies to, among other things, words, concepts, realities, symbols, phrases, ensembles of functions, messages, and signs. We will have cause to return to the concept of the surprisal value or surprisal numerously henceforth1. Generally, criticism and literary theory as applied to science fiction are structuralist, poststructuralist or modernist – or some hybridisation of these. What