Melbourne’s Middle Future

Tom Shippey

  • The Sea and Summer by George Turner
    Faber, 318 pp, £10.95, August 1987, ISBN 0 571 14846 8
  • The Dragon in the Sword by Michael Moorcock
    Grafton, 283 pp, £10.95, July 1987, ISBN 0 246 13129 2
  • Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem, translated by Michael Kandel
    Deutsch, 322 pp, £11.95, August 1987, ISBN 0 233 98141 1

Science Fiction, it has been said, is always and necessarily a metaphoric reflection of some aspect of contemporary society. This sounds a depressingly goody-goody theory, the kind of thing which harassed critics make up in order to beat off supercilious remarks from colleagues in the common room. It is also all too clearly undisprovable. Even writers like H.P. Lovecraft have to have some contact with fellow humans, and therefore cannot quite keep contemporary society out of their books. The critic pointing at this with cries of justification may still be guilty of spotting the 1 per cent and letting the 99 go by. Is Science Fiction, then, always a metaphoric reflection of (or on) society? And what in this context might ‘metaphoric’ mean?

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