Quiz 1: What Is Speculative Fiction?

Part I. Multiple Choice

Circle the letter of the best answer.

1. Jauss calls genre a “horizon of expectation.” On this account, genre lets a reader:

   1. Decode and appraise a new text through prior experience with similar texts. Answer
   2. Predict exactly how any story in the genre will end.
   3. Rank works by their degree of consecration.
   4. Separate literary fiction from genre fiction.

2. Darko Suvin defines science fiction by “the presence and interaction of” which two things?

   1. Science and technology.
   2. Wonder and terror.
   3. The past and the future.
   4. Estrangement and cognition. Answer

3. For most of its history, SF was not considered literature. What was it considered instead?

   1. High culture, subsidized by benefactors as “art for art’s sake.”
   2. Scientific writing, and therefore “non-literary.”
   3. Entertainment: mass-market, pulp, genre fiction, often for young readers. Answer
   4. A branch of High Modernism.

Part II. Key Terms

Define each term in two or three sentences.

4. Novum

   Model answer

   Latin for “new thing”: a device, especially in science fiction, that makes a fictional world recognizably different from the author’s own. The time machine in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) is the exemplary case.

5. Literature, as that word has been used since the late nineteenth century

   Model answer

   Imaginative writing (poetry, novels, plays), distinguished from scientific and informational writing, which became “non-literary.” In the twentieth century it was redefined as a kind of language (“literariness”), and by mid-century popular fiction such as SF was demoted to “genre” or sub-literary writing while High Modernism (e.g., Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner) became exemplary.

Part III. Short Response

6. Name two changes that led critics, scholars, and literary authors to take SF seriously.

   Model answer

   Any two of: SF became the dominant genre of popular narrative media (The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, superhero stories); the transition from a textual to a visual culture, which favors SF’s capacity for spectacle; the New Wave of the 1960s and 70s; literary authors writing within or adjacent to genre fiction (e.g., Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a ghost story).

7. What is close reading? How is it different from reading for fun?

   Model answer

   The predominant method of literary studies since the twentieth century. A close reader notices something in someone else’s words that seems to matter, pauses and rereads, finds that the detail reshapes their understanding of the whole work, and then explains that reading to their own reader, arguing that the work should be understood in light of this detail.