Science Fiction and Other Minds

Abstract

This chapter examines various attempts to define ‘science fiction’ including one by Darko Suvin which gestures towards the importance of mind by insisting that readers of science fiction experience an oscillation between ‘estrangement’ and ‘cognition.’ This chapter builds on Suvin’s influential definition by insisting that science fiction invariably relies on the encounter between human and ‘other’ minds underpinned by issues stemming from theory of mind and empathy that have been important in science fiction at least as early as Voltaire’s ‘Micromegas’ (1752), but are dealt with in more depth in later science fiction, beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818), the subject of the next chapter.