Abstract
The abstraction of the 'real' by way of the genres of fictional and scientific discourse, and its return in the contested, perturbative interval affected between them - one which, at the same time, threatens to envelope and subsume them both - acquires a particular historical focus at that moment when History itself is declared to be at an end. The liminal arrangement of these terms has, from its beginning, been orientated in the anticipation, projection and transcendence of precisely such ends.
Radically anachronistic, recursive and polysemic, 'science fiction' in its broadest ramification inaugurates - despite (or indeed, because of) its culturally diminished stature - a deconstruction of teleology, of instrumentalist reason, of techno-mysticism, of the ideology of mimēsis and of the metaphysics of presence. In its most incisive forms, it demands a thorough critique of those philosophies of the 'virtual' which had flourished at the close of the twentieth century, and of the 'return of the real' in those discourses of the Anthropocene that have dominated the twenty-first.