42.
...
¡Ah!, ¿siguen aquí? Para aquellas que lo requieran, a continuación les ofrezco una explicación más convencional.
Definiciones
Abreviaré los tecnicismos y dejaré de lado las referencias. La ciencia ficción es un género narrativo. Un género narrativo es un conjunto de atajos, expectativas y convenciones entre autora y audiencia.
Esta es mi definición práctica. Lo cierto es que hablar de géneros narrativos y literarios es un pantano disciplinar en el cual es fácil perderse y petrificarse; y la relación establecida entre audiencia y autor es a veces placentera, a menudo problemática, de cuando en cuando tóxica. Hemos matado a la autora y la hemos traído de regreso, hemos desestimado sus intenciones y las hemos colocado en un altar. Aquí caben discusiones (en las que no entraremos) acerca de la estructura de los textos, de los temas que tocan, del contexto en el que se insertan, de lo que hacen los lectores con ellos...
Un detalle más: cuando hablo de textos no me refiero sólo a trabajos escritos, sino a toda la gama de medios con los que contamos historias, cine, ilustración, videojuegos, etcétera.
Science fiction, speculative fiction. La pregunta “¿y qué pasaría si…?” es parte de los cimientos de toda la ficción, y es doblemente importante para la ciencia ficción. A continuación cito algunas reflexiones dejadas por algunas de las autoras que han participado de ella:
“Science fiction is social fiction. That’s the line from Mary Shelley through H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley and George Orwell to the politically committed writers of the sixties and seventies. It’s about using speculation as a tool with which to examine the contemporary condition. The closest it comes to prediction is in the provision of long-range weather warnings.”
“So much of science fiction speculates about technologies, societies, social issues, what's beyond our planet, what's within our planet. Science fiction is one of the greatest and most effective forms of political writing. It's all about the question, "What if?" Still, not all science fiction has the same ancestral bloodline, that line being Western-rooted science fiction, which is mostly white and male. We're talking Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Robert Heinlein, etc. So what if a Nigerian-American wrote science fiction? Growing up, I didn't read much science fiction. I couldn't relate to these stories preoccupied with xenophobia, colonization and seeing aliens as others. And I saw no reflection of anyone who looked like me in those narratives.”
“I will define science fiction, first, by saying what science fiction is not. It cannot be defined as 'a story set in the future,' [nor does it require] untra-advanced technology. It must have a fictitious world, a society that does not in fact exist, but is predicated on our known society... that comes out of our world, the one we know: This world must be different from the given one in at least one way, and this one way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society… There must be a coherent idea involved in this dislocation…so that as a result a new society is generated in the author's mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader's mind, the shock of dysrecognition. [In] good science fiction, the conceptual dislocation---the new idea, in other words---must be truly new and it must be intellectually stimulating to the reader…[so] it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification, ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader's mind so that that mind, like the author's, begins to create…. The very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create---and enjoy doing it, [experiencing] the joy of discovery of newness.”
“I said I liked to make a distinction between science fiction proper --for me, this label denotes books with things in them we can’t yet do or begin to do, talking beings we can never meet, and places we can’t go-- and speculative fiction, which employs the means already more or less to hand, and takes place on Planet Earth. I said I made this distinction, not out of meanness, but out of a wish to avoid false advertising: I didn’t want to raise people’s hopes. I did not wish to promise --for instance-- the talking squid on Saturn if I couldn’t deliver them. But some people use both terms interchangeably, and some employ one of them as an umbrella term, under which sub genres may cluster. Speculative fiction may be used as the tree, for which science fiction, science fiction fantasy, and fantasy are the branches. The beast has at least nine heads, ant the ability to eat all other fictional forms in sight, and to turn them into its own substance. (In this way it’s like very other form of literature: genres may look hard and fast from a distance, but up close it’s nailing jelly to a wall.)”
"I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible. Science fiction, again, is the history of ideas, and they are always ideas that work themselves out and become real and happen in the world. And fantasy comes along and says, 'We're going to break all the laws of physics.' Most people don't realize it, but the series of films which have made more money than any other series of films in the history of the universe is the James Bond series. They're all science fiction, too-romantic, adventurous, frivolous, fantastic science fiction!"
“When we look at what we can’t see, what we do see is the stuff inside our heads. Our thoughts and our dreams, the good ones and the bad ones. And it seems to me that when science fiction is really doing its job that’s exactly what it’s dealing with. Not ‘the future’.”
Estas reflexiones ya nos indican los patrones en común, las convenciones y las expectativas que atraviesan a las historias de ciencia ficción. Es común escuchar que es el espacio, o el futuro, o los robots, o los alienígenas, o los viajes en el tiempo lo que define si un texto es ciencia ficción. Pero según las citas presentadas, todos estos tropos e imágenes no son sino escenografía. No buscan hablar del futuro, sino del presente; especulan sobre lo que somos y lo que pensamos, y crean un espacio donde pueden experimentar con esto.
“Ω ∫Terra[X]n = ∫∫∫∫…∫∫Terra(X1,X2,X3,X4,…,Xn,t) dX1 dX2 dX3 dX4…dXndt = Terrapolis a X1 = stuff/physis, X2 = capacity, X3 = sociality, X4 = materiality, Xn =?? a (alpha) = not zoë, but EcoEvoDevo’s multispecies epigenesis Ω (omega) = not bios, but recuperating terra’s pluriverse t = worlding time, not container time, entangled times of past/present/yet-to-come Terrapolis is a fictional integral equation, a speculative fabulation, a “niche space” for multispecies becoming-with. Terrapolis is open, worldly, indeterminate, and polytemporala chimera of materials, languages, histories, companion species—not “post-human” but “com-post”an equation for guman, for humus, for soil.”
El corpus académico de Donna Haraway se caracteriza por su irreverencia con las definiciones, por jugar deliberadamente con las palabras y los conceptos para traer luz a temas sutiles y oscuros, interesándose en particular sobre las relaciones y conexiones entre ideas, historias y realidad. En su discurso de aceptación del premio “Pilgrim Award” de la Science Fiction Research Association, Haraway juega con una expresión matemática que describe a la ciencia ficción como un espacio, “mathematics of science fiction”, una formalización del todo emergiendo de la suma natural y cultural de las relaciones y conexiones que forman al mundo y una proyección hacia el futuro al que llevarán las condiciones dadas.
Es común ver a la ciencia ficción conectada con el horror y la fantasía; estos tres géneros especulan con lo que es a través de lo que no es; nuestros sueños, nuestros planes, nuestras ideologías se reflejan sobre el espejo de las historias para amplificar, deformar y destacar aspectos de lo real. Juegos de posibilidades.