SOURCE: Christie, John R. R. “Science Fiction and the Postmodern: The Recent Fiction of William Gibson and John Crowley.” Essays and Studies 43 (1990): 34-58.

In the following essay, Christie examines the elements of both traditional science fiction and postmodern experimental fiction in Gibson's Neuromancer and John Crowley's Engine Summer.

Is there a postmodern science fiction? To a question posed as broadly as this, the answer has to be, yes and no. Yes, because science fiction as a fictional genre is most often placed in a notional future, and therefore attempts to be ‘post’ whatever modernity happens to be current. And no, because it retains the conservatism of most genre fiction, slow to change or to break with the structures and formulae which bind alike the writerly goals and readerly expectations of generic performance and consumption.

There is additionally an issue of clarification to be undertaken for the term postmodern...