Malmgren, Carl. “Meta-SF: The Examples of Dick, LeGuin, and Russ.” Extrapolation 43, no. 1 (spring 2002): 22-35.

In the following excerpt, Malmgren discusses “the relation between the fictive and the real” in the “meta-SF” work of Dick.

Science fiction is less “about” science or the future than about fiction—world-making—and textuality—language, reference, interpretation.

George McKay, “It's not ‘about’ science, …”

Several critics have argued cogently for the appropriateness of the genre-name “science fiction” by focusing on the first term of the label. Science is the principal instrument through which we exert power over nature, and Scholes and Rabkin argue “above all else, science fiction has used its special vision and its unique knowledge to trace the history of human power over nature and to ask how that power ought to function” (191). Gregory Benford states that the science in SF “represents knowledge—exploring and controlling and semisafe” (13), and I have elaborated...