SOURCE: Huntington, John. “The Myth of Genius: The Fantasy of Unpolitical Power.” In Rationalizing Genius: Ideological Strategies in the Classic American Science Fiction Short Story, pp. 44-68. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Huntington views the identification with power as a central theme in science fiction literature.

At the core of much SF fantasy is an identification with power. We see it rendered in recent SF by an exaltation in sheer size: empires war with ships the size of planets. A student once explained to me that SF was interesting and important because the weapons it imagined were capable of destroying a planet, even a universe. How trivial the cowboy's six-shooter was by comparison. Such an observation is not entirely naive. In this [essay] I explore how the genre indulges just such fantasies of giganticism. What I will primarily deal with, however, is...