The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.

Instead of telling us how interesting retro-rockets, synthetic sex and time travel should be for anyone with a leftist feminist intellectual bent, Csicsery-Ronay tries to work out the brainy buzz of excitement that such novums generate. This focus on cognitive attraction marks the difference of Seven Beauties from the general run of ideological-historical totalisations of sf. These are aesthetic hesitations, as if Kant is drawing breath, and they enable Csicsery-Ronay to think about pleasure as the definitive component of the science fictional idea, a pleasure that lies in dwelling in the ambivalence of the fictional's relationship to the actual. A second argument describes this consciousness as the hesitation between the possible-plausible and the desirable-ethical, as the imagination speculates about the feasibility and goodness of this or that gizmo, the ramifications of this or that technoscientific future. The science fictional describes a technoscientific attitude that is both a feature of the generic imagination and a more general modality of contemporary consciousness. Csicsery-Ronay wants to think about sf not only in terms of genre but also as a kind of cognitive attraction. In the process, he takes a long and idiosyncratic tour of sf criticism and the genre's own classic texts, wanting to make two arguments that have to do with the pleasures of what he calls the 'science fictional'. outlines seven aesthetic ideas, from the neologism to the sublime. In the seven chapters of The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction.

The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.