A Fracture
in Time
On the
Chronotope of Colonisation
in a
Science Fiction Novel
Tanja Kudrjavtseva
The purpose
of this article is double. Firstly, it is to demonstrate what
benefits Bakhtin s notion of chronotope can give to an analysis
of a text of science fiction. The Snail on the Slope (1965), a novel by Russia
s probably most known science fiction writers Arkady and Boris
Strugatsky, will be the object of my study. My second purpose
is to point at the specific assumptions around time and space
accompanying the text s colonisation motif. The notion of chronotope
stems from Bakhtin s essay Forms of Time and of the Chronotope
in the Novel (1981). He is primarily concerned with what he
calls historical time , but more specifically this form of time
as it is expressed in a literary text:
The process of assimilating the
real historical time and space in literature has a complicated
and erratic history [...] Isolated aspects of time and space,
however those available on a given historical stage of human
development have been assimilated, and corresponding generic
techniques have been devised for reflecting and artistically processing
such appropriated aspects of reality.
We will give the name chronotope
(literally, time space ) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal
and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.
(1981:84)
Time consciousness
changes as society changes, but it is documented in the novel
s generic form, argues Bakhtin. According to him, the novel is
always a mix of genres and thus preserves earlier chronotopes
in a hybrid construction. An ambivalence is evident between linear
historicity and this ability to preserve. This ambivalence, I
will argue, allows The Snail on the Slope
to map the topos of uneven development, employed in the rhetoric of colonisation.
Science
fiction is often seen as a literary effect of the colonisation
history of the world. When humanity ceases to fabulate about the
geographically remote regions the colonial territories both
"explored" and utilised fictional movement in time
allows for an accommodation of the fantastic spatially. Another
feature that distinguishes science fiction from the earlier conceptions
of the fantastic is that the fantastic elements in it have to
be explained in terms of scientific innovation. Thus, Darko Suvin
(1979:71) defines these elements as cognitive novelties, for which
he uses the term novum. The rhetoric and logic
of science have to be employed in order to make them plausible
in the text. Though the actual innovation will probably never
become possible, the promise of future scientific progress lends
it credibility in the text. According to Albert Wendland 1980),
it is not too far-fetched to assume that in some texts of the
genre the scientific gaze now becomes the colonial. In what follows
I shall argue that the specificity of The Snail on the Slope s chronotope allows
reflection over this neo-colonial stance.
Presentation
Suvin points out that
the novum has an immediate impact on fictional time-space constellation:
"... the novelty in SF can be either a new locus, or an agent
(character) with new powers transforming the old locus, or a blend
of both" (1979:79). According to Suvin, if a science fiction
text is not to come too close to the fairy-tale marvels, the protagonist
has to find a proper obstacle in the locus. This may explain why
in many science fiction novels the hero s main challenge is a
voyage in time-space. Bakhtin s classification of the chronotopes
(1981) is well suited for an analysis of the motion of the hero
s quest.
In
The Snail on the Slope, as is characteristic of science fiction, the quest is
organised around the chronotope of a road. The movements of the protagonists
Pepper and Kandid are followed in the course of the story. Their
paths never intersect, thus creating the novel s pattern of Pepper
and Kandid chapters. A chronotope of the threshold is the corollary of
the road, as thresholds are being naturally crossed during this
journey. I will suggest that the chronotope of threshold is also
transformed into a labyrinthine time space in the text, underlining
the protagonists attempts to comprehend the novum.
Not
only the novum, but the whole new locus containing it has to be
made plausible for the reader in a science fiction text. Thus,
Samuel Delany (1977) argues that the novum creates a fictional
world on its own premises. If we are to analyse the novel artefacts
in such a world along the lines of Barthes S/Z , they will generate
social connotations different from ours (1989). The chronotope
in a science fiction text will therefore contain conceptions of
time and place which characterise a whole fictive society.
In
The Snail on the Slope the reader encounters three fictional societies. The Directorate,
the first of them, is a research institution, carrying out experiments
on the forest, which is the text s novum. Pepper has come to
the Directorate in order to attain a permit to visit the forest.
Kandid, in his turn, finds himself in the forest suffering from
memory loss. He is one of the Directorate s biologists and has
been found by the forest s villagers after a helicopter crash.
The village is thus the second fictional society of the text.
Kandid
sets out to find a way back to the Directorate. On his journey
he meets the forest women who apparently have
found a way to biotechnologically manipulate the forest. Their
world is the third fictional society in the text. Self-sufficient
and governed by myth, the village brings to mind Bakhtin's idyll chronotope. The Directorate and
the Maidens, in their turn, aim to expand their territory in the
forest, and Bakhtin s chronotope of growth appears to be suited
for the analysis of these two worlds conceptions of time-space.
It remains unnamed in Bakhtin, and I will in this article call
it "the chronotope of expansion".
How
do these chronotopes co-exist in the overall hybrid chronotope
of the text? Coming back to Suvin s classification of the chronotopes
in the genre, a fictional scientific discovery for example Julies
Verne s submarine can transform what initially seems a realist
depiction of a contemporary world, or "the old locus".
Otherwise, his novum chronotopes can exemplify what Samuel Delany
(1992:338) terms as typical science fiction plots: the-future-views-the-present
or the-alien-views-the-familiar . The first plot involves
time travel between the old and the new locus, while in the second
the aliens are typical agents possessing new, transformational
powers.
The
Snail on the Slope contains, however, no signs of time travel devices or of
an invasion from another planet. Neither are the stages in the
scientific discovery by the Maidens chronologically explained
in order to make plausible the co-existence of a pastoral society
with a scientifically highly advanced one. The protagonists
mobile focalisers binding the chronotopes together nevertheless
connect the worlds in terms of development. This paradox of the
time-space of the novel foregrounds the idea of linear progress,
implied by the notions of scientific advancement and backwardness.
These notions are interconnected with the text s colonisation
motif. The developed/underdeveloped binary doubles itself into
culture/nature in the coloniser s rhetoric applied to the colonised
as a lesser being. As I will argue, the fractured linearity of
time in the text s chronotope fractures also the logic of this
representation.
Suspended Motion: Road,
Threshold, Labyrinth
The protagonists
of The Snail on the Slope, driven by the forest mystery,
are constantly on the move across the landscapes of either the
Directorate or the village. This movement parallels the movement
of the reading. New settings and new information is introduced
both to the protagonists and to the reader. The chronotope of
a road, in Bakhtin s (1981) definition a meeting place across
social and distance differences, is actualised in its clearest
form in Kandid s journey. Kandid is not content with the villagers
ignorance of the external interference with their world and
sets out on a journey which might enable him to understand the
novelties of the forest.
The
protagonist and his companion Nava meet deadlings stealing
women; having escaped from them they arrive in another village
and witness a frightening experiment on its population. Finally
they literally step onto the Maidenian track. Meeting the Maidens
makes Kandid realise that they are the ones in power in this forest
world and responsible for the above events. The road is a chronotope
going across thresholds, here between the village and the Maidenian
forest. It appears therefore also to be a form of the chronotope
of expansion: the perspective of the protagonist, and finally
his knowledge are expanded. In this way it parallels the movement
of reading, which is however not linear, as I will argue in the
following.
The
threshold line of forest between the Directorate, the Maidens
and the village spatialises and allows for a transition in time
within the space of the novel. Going into the forest Kandid travels
in time, as measured by a linear scientific development, simultaneously
backwards to the villagers and forward to the Maidens. According
to Bakhtin s (1981) definition, crossing the threshold is a moment
without duration , it falls out of the flow of time and indicates
a crisis in a protagonist s life. For Kandid crossing the threshold
of the forest has been exactly as Bakhtin defines it: instantaneous,
in a helicopter crash. The crisis for him has a physical dimension:
he is injured and suffers from a partial loss of memory: "Probably
I was thrown out of the cabin, he thought. Thrown out of the cabin,
he thought for the thouthandth time. Hit my head on something,
so I never recovered...." (92). The moment of crossing itself
thus literally falls out of the flow of time in his memory, exactly
as its chronological account is absent from the time of the text.
Kandid
s memory loss enables him to apprehend the world of the village
on its own premises, but it also causes a psychological crisis.
His few memories of the Directorate cannot account for what he
sees in the village. Mentally he moves back and forth between
the Directorate and the village in search of understanding, combining
the two epistemological worlds across the threshold. Moving abruptly
to the first Kandid chapter from the first Pepper chapter,
the reader has a similar experience of threshold memory loss
. The village gives an impression of a world totally different
from the Directorate. Swinging back and forth between the two
settings occurs both intradiegetically across the forest and
in the movement of reading across the blank space dividing the
chapters. Exactly like Kandid, the reader gradually learns to
see the connection between the two worlds. As Kandid enters the
Maidenian chronotope, his and the reader s horizons thus embrace
two worlds with different time and space assumptions the Directorate
and the village.
If
Kandid is a threshold character , the Directorate can be described
as a threshold city: it is situated between the Mainland and the
forest. Pepper, being held on the threshold the Directorate stays
in a never-ending moment of crisis. At the novel s starting point
he has given up hope to get into the forest. He visits the Directorate
s main quarters attempting to attain permission to get back to
the Mainland. The space of the Directorate s main building appears
labyrinthine when Pepper enters a room with multiple exits: "Beyond
the door lay a spacious polygonal hall, with a multiplicity of
doors; Pepper rushed about, opening one after another" (115).
Also this attempt to leave fail, but behind one of the doors he
finds a truck which accidentally takes him into the forest. Time
as Pepper experiences it in the Directorate is thus not a straight
line aimed at the future.
The
labyrinthine main quarters parallel metafictionally the space
of the text. The lack of explanation to, along with bureaucratic
secrecy about and suppression of the novum, creates blanks
in the informational structure of the text. Pepper s desired
linear motion across the space of the Directorate is always being
disturbed by absurd events caused by such informational gaps.
Since Pepper is the narrational focaliser in the Directorate part
of the text, the reader is also kept in a constant suspense of
resolution. The chronotope itself becomes hybrid: expansion and
suspense produce a labyrinth.
The
same suspended informational structure is characteristic also
of the Kandid chapters of the text, until his meeting with the
Maidens provides a kind of resolution. Kandid explicitly evokes
labyrinth imaginary in order to comprehend his own situation:
"I ve just got to get out of here, he thought, unless I
want to be like that machine in the maze.... We all stood around
and laughed as it busily probed and searched and sniffed....then
we filled a small trough in its path with water and it panicked
touchingly [...]" (158). The ever-changing space of the forest
which Kandid is moving across is here compared to the Directorate
s experiments. This space parallels the informational structure
of the text, making it labyrinthine.
Pastoral
The village which Kandid
finds himself in has the traits of a pastoral chronotope. In his
essay Bakhtin describes the chronotope of a genre he calls the
idyll . He distinguishes between its four types: the love idyll
(the basic form of which is a pastoral); the idyll with a focus
on agricultural labour; the idyll dealing with craftwork; and
the family idyll (Bakhtin 1981:224). As the term pastoral
is now more often used as a generic term synonymous with Bakhtin
s idyll , and not only meaning rural love story , it will
be used instead of idyll here.
Bakhtin
defines the main feature of this chronotope as follows: The mark
of cyclicity, and consequently of cyclical repetitiveness, is
imprinted on all levels of this type of time. Time s forward
impulse is limited by the cycle (1981:210). The cyclical chronotope
of pastoral is thus opposed to the chronotope of expansion. The
time of the village is marked by repetition: the villagers work
in the field, they make food, they gather to decide collectively
whether one of them is going to be married (Bakhtin s agricultural
labour-idyll).
Also
the villagers speech is repetitative, which annoys Kandid. When
Nava tells him the story of her mother being taken by the deadlings
during the Accession to her village (p. 43 and again on p. 92),
he says: "You re telling me that story again. You ve told
it to me two hundred times" (93). Deadlings and Accession
are mythical self-explanatory labels repeatedly used by the
villagers for the forest s intrusions into their life. This repetition
is partly motivated by wish to remind Kandid, who is new to the
village, of its history. However, repetition is also an aspect
the villagers ordinary way of speech. It underlines the pastoral
chronotope and emphasises the importance of storytelling and myth
in the villager s way of life. In addition, it helps to keep
within memory what is erased by the ever-changing landscape of
the forest.
Kandid
s mental flashbacks to the Directorate and modernity mark the
time of the village as static. It is disrupted by the deadlings
stealing the villagers women and by transmissions from the Maidenian
City ; but these disruptions are integrated in the natural circle
of the villagers time consciousness. Apparently they do not
seek other explanations for them than those offered by their animist
mythology. This little spatial world is limited and sufficient
in itself, not linked in any intrinsic way with other places,
with the rest of the world (1981:225), writes Bakhtin. Kandid
s wish to leave the village is provoked exactly by this feature
when he sets out in order to find explanations for novelties of
the forest.
Expansion
In the
course of the story Kandid finds out that the novum of the forest
is a biotechnological entity used by the Maidens in order to expand
into the space of the Directorate and the village. A common usage
of slogans by the Maidens in order to designate expansional activities
"Accession", "Struggle in the North and South"
bear witness to militant intentions. The Accession, the cause
of the never-ceasing changes in the forest surrounding the village,
designates their wish to posses all the forest landscape. The
village and the Directorate are considered to be an obstacle to
its utilisation. Yet also in the Directorate, the spatio-temporal
reaction this novum provokes is one of expansion, this time into
the forest.
The
Directorate is an ambiguous scientific institution, preoccupied
both with research into the phenomena of the forest and, simultaneously,
with its destruction. Its space is aimed at expanding into the
forest, the research object being subjugated by the researching
subject. Its technological means are, however, far less subtle
than that of the Maidens: "We oppose [the forest] with millions
of horsepower, dozens of landrovers, airships, and helicopters,
medical science and the finest logistic theory in the world"
(81). Expansion in space is tied to the direction of time, to
notions of future and progress, as the Directorate s employees
envisage the forest both as a future "concrete platform,
dry and level" (31) and "a symbol of progress"
(398).
Bakhtin
connects the chronotope which I have called here the chronotope
of expansion to the writing of Rabelais, noting that it has
roots in a folklore tradition of depicting the hero as giant.
The chronotope of expansion in Rabelais is characterised by Bakhtin
(1981) as connected to an intrinsic positive value:
This means that everything of value,
everything that is valorised positively, must achieve its full
potential in temporal and spatial terms, it must spread out as
wide as possible, and it is necessary that everything of significant
value be provided with the power to expand spatially and temporally;
likewise, everything evaluated negatively is small, pitiable,
feeble and must be destroyed and is helpless to resist this destruction.
[...] the category of growth is one of the most basic categories
in Rabelaisian world. (168)
Listing
Rabelais as one of the predecessors of the science fiction tradition,
Jurij Kagarlickij (1974) argues that his writings combine the
Renaissance principles of scientific credibility and continuous
perfectioning of reason with the utopian imaginary of a human
body not separated from cosmos. Accumulation of knowledge allows
this body to expand ever wider. It should be noted that according
to Bakhtin the materiality of body imaginary in Rabelais represents
a humanist critique of the medieval spiritual hierarchies. However,
as argued by the post-colonial theorists (Spivak 1988; Bhabha
1994), the humanist project has never included the natives, those
situated off the centre of knowledge, which now becomes power.
Instead, a new hierarchic imaginary featuring the native as an
Other of knowledge has been constructed.
The
expansion of knowledge can become a colonial legitimation, as
the villagers position in-between the two scientifically advanced
societies bears witness to. Typically of the colonisers, they
conflate the village with its territory and its natural resources,
which they wish to utilise. For example, the slogans "Harrowing"
and "Swamping" emphasise the territorial value while
designating a systematic drowning of the villages by the Maidens.
The project of conflation of the people with their territory is
interconnected with a legitimation of colonisation by a difference
in cultural advancement, or development. In this paradigm, the
savageness of the native justifies the colonisers inhuman colonisation
methods.
Thus,
swamps, peat and insects, all forest associations, mark the villagers
in a negative way in the following quote, which concerns the experiments
of the Directorate s Aid to Native Populations Group on villagers:
We built them convenient day houses
on piles. They fill them with peat and colonise it with insects
of some kind. We tried to offer them tasty food in place of the
sour filth they eat. Useless. We tried to dress them like human
beings. One died, two fell ill. Well, we re pushing on with our
experiments. Yesterday we scattered a truckload of mirrors and
gilt buttons in the forest....[...] For instance I suggest catching
the children and organising special schools. Unfortunately that
s linked with technical difficulties; human hands can t touch
them, special machines are needed....(107)
Elements
of nature are opposed to dry houses and clothes as elements of
convenience and culture. The vocabulary of the quote finally opposes
the villagers to what is considered human. Drawing directly on
the history of colonisation by mentioning mirrors and gilt buttons
, the text is ironic to this approach. Mirrors and buttons mirror
parodically the Directorate in its estimation of its own artefacts
importance to the colonised.
The
narrator here, a member of the group Beatrice Vakh, is perplexed
over the villagers reaction: As soon as our groups get near the
village, they leave their houses and go. You get the impression
they re absolutely uninterested in us (106). The colonisers
lack of self-insight is evident in this demand for the colonised
s attention. At the same time, the colonised s indifference
to the colonisers culture is perceived as a confirmation of
their status as inferior. Both reactions are typical for the colonisers,
as Bhabha argues in Sly Civility (1994). In order to justify
colonisation, a whole narrative of the native as an object, as
a complete Other of the coloniser s culture is constructed.
Paradoxically,
writes Bhabha, the colonised s status is now at the same time
different from the status of the object, the land. This is because
a demand of confirmation is addressed to them, a demand which
cannot be addressed in the same way to a territory, or to nature:
The narratorial voice articulates
the narcissistic, colonialist demand that it should be addressed
directly, that the other should authorize the self, recognize
its priority, fulfil its outlines, replete, indeed repeat, its
references and still its fractured gaze. (Bhabha 1994:98)
As revealed
by Beatrice Vakh s perplexity, the colonised refuse to confirm
that they are Others; they remain silent and, apparently, indifferent.
The project of their conflating them with nature, the underdeveloped
and backward, is thus never finally confirmed.
Exactly
because of this underlying narcissistic interdependence, the civilised
are afraid of any identification with the native. Therefore,
also Kandid s initial attitude to the village "vegetable
way of life" (92) employs nature s negativity as a sign
of their underdevelopment. He thus brings the Directorate s attitude
to the colonised with him into the village. Later, he himself
is subjected to the same metaphoric designation at the Maidens
, addressed by them as kozlik goaty (177). Their injunctions
Try for once in your life not to be a sheep. Try to imagine a
world without sheep.... (184) indicate that nature, taken as
as a sign of underdevelopment, motivates also the Maidenian elimination
of the village and the Directorate.
Kandid
participates in a discussion on biology with one of the Maidens
which reveals that they are apparently able to manipulate the
forest on the low-particle level. He also guesses that the deadlings
are robots made by the Maidens in order to make the village women
join them. After his meeting with the Maidens, the future hypothesis
is elaborated by Kandid through the whole of the last chapter
of the text:
To me it s terrible, revolting,
and all because to me it s alien, and perhaps one should say
not cruel and senseless driving of the forest over people ,
but a systematic, superbly organised, precisely thought-out drive
of the new against the old , a well timed and matured, abundantly
powerful offensive of the new against the rotten, hopeless, old
order.... (237)
Also Pepper
s meditations on the forest link it to the future: The hardest
part was to accept it was alien and familiar at one and the same
time, derived from our world, flesh of our flesh but broken away,
not wishing to know us. An apeman might think the same way about
us, his descendants, grieving and fearful... (31).
While
Pepper has earlier thought of himself as closer to the forest
than anyone else in the Directorate, his actual confrontation
with it makes him realise that its alienness is greater than he
has imagined. The forest is impossible for a man of his time to
understand, he decides, and should be left alone:
A good thing I m getting out of
here, he thought. I ve been here, understood nothing, found nothing
I wanted to find, but I know now that I never will understand
anything, that there is a time for everything. There s nothing
in common between the forest and me, the forest is no nearer to
me then the Directorate is. Anyway, at least I m not staying
here to be covered in shame. I m going away, I shall work and
wait. I shall hope for the time to come when....(140)
The end
of the passage is left ambiguously open. It indicates Pepper s
new awareness of the future as unknown, but, simultaneously, his
hope that this future will be somehow in accordance with his anticipation.
An extrapolation into the future through a notion of positive
development enables Pepper to hope to meet the forest again, this
time better equipped to understand it. He thus anticipates a distant,
but final explanation which will resolve his hesitations. This
paradox of the unknown, but knowable may be called the paradox
of science fiction itself, of Suvin s criteria for the novum.
As Lynette Hunter (1989) and Albert Wendland (1980) point out,
in order to persuade the reader of the existence of Otherness
it is bound to explain the novum to a certain degree, make it
known and intra-textually logical, albeit set in the future.
Despite
these speculations by the protagonists, the connection of the
Maidenian forest to the future of the two other worlds still appears
vague. The text contains no science-fictional time-travel devises.
Neither does it describe the stages in the scientific discovery
which the society of the Maidens is built upon. This blank
in the informational structure disrupts the chronology of the
narrative events. Elana Gomel (1995) argues that fractures in
the chronotope are atypical of proper science fiction. In it,
the properties of the other-worldly time and space has to be well-motivated.
Christine Brooke-Rose (1981) writes of high attention to chronology
as one of the features that science fiction shares with realism.
Consequently, this means that "science fiction proper"
has to be buildt around the assumption of linear time and progress.
Albert
Wendland (1980) disagrees that such assumptions should necessarily
be seen as basic in the genre, arguing that they make progress
appear neutral in terms of value. He notes that in some texts
of the genre the idea of linear progress corresponds to an accumulation
of greater possessions, and the radiant enlightenment doubles
itself into a colonisation of the whole universe. The solution
to this problem for Wendland is to underline the observer s own
expectations when confronted with a difference due to be scientifically
explored, and thus to include the observer into the observation.
To me, the absence of motivation to the chronotope foregrounds
exactly the values of the observers in the text. It appears to
be related to the ideology of uneven development , and, thus,
to the discourse of colonisation.
Not
only the protagonists redefinition of the Maidenian novum from
being a part of the present into being the future, but also the
Directorate s assumption of the villagers backwardness bears
witness to an internalisation of such ideology. Also the Maidens
redefine parts of the present the village and the Directorate
as backward and not worthy of survival, and thus consigned to
the past. The reason for this temporal displacement might be found
in what Schimanski (1996) writes on science fiction and the notion
of development:
Within modernity, however, the dominance
of progress as a figure for time moves the marvellous from geographically
distant but vaguely contemporary regions into the always deferred
future. In the post-colonial context, this means that spatial
relationships become temporalized previous colonies have become
backward within the ideology of uneven development and third
world and the post-colonialist answer has been to spatialize
time. (265)
The birth
of science fiction during the epoch of great geographic discoveries
is evoked here, an epoch which also initiated colonisation. Schimanski
argues that the science-fictional logic of a time jump has in
the post-colonial context become a normalised logic. In it, the
notions of advancement and backwardness, originally thought of
as forms of temporal division, have become spatially co-existent.
In The Snail on the Slope, where the transition between chronotopes
is not explained by a science-fictional logic of time-travel devices
or an alien intrusion, science fiction can be said to have moved
back to reality as formed by the discourse of co-existence
between advancement and backwardness.
A
projection of one s own past on the other of a negative self,
which is due to be overcome is part of the discourse of uneven
development. The village is such a negative self for the Directorate
and the Maidens. The concept of uneven development appears then
as paradoxical. On the one hand, it presupposes a linear and inevitable
continuation between the past and the future of the self, while
on the other it requires an active negative evaluation of the
past and a radical separation from it. It is such a separation
that the Directorate and the Maidens advocate. At the same time,
due to their spatial closeness, a likeness across the presupposed
temporal difference is all too obvious. The text foregrounds a
continuity between the Directorate s and the Maidens violent
approach to the village.
In
order to reveal the rhetoric of uneven development as colonising,
the spatial nature of these relationships should again become
obvious. The co-existence of the three different worlds in the
text offers such a re-spatialisation, and a fracture in the chronology
foregrounds a fracture in the colonial legitimation. A change
in Kandid s attitude towards the villagers in the final chapter
of the text is another instance of this re-spatialisation. The
protagonist s association with them adds new characteristics
to his being a threshold, or liminal, character.
Through
his experience in the village and in the forest he becomes able
to perceive his own Directorate from a marginal position: "It
s odd, it s never occurred to me before to look at the Directorate
from the side. And Hopalong never dreams of looking at the forest
from the side. Nor do those Maidens, either, probably. And it
s really a curious spectacle the Directorate, seen from above"
(243). Liminality is defined by Henderson
(1995)
as the possibility ... of standing aside not only from one s
own social position but from all social positions . Gainining
such an overview over the shared space of the three societies,
Kandid becomes able to contextualise the colonisation. As a result
he can no longer accept the accustomed definition of linear development:
"Natural laws are neither good nor bad, they re outside
morality. But I am not!" (243).
Primary
Sources
Strugackie, Arkadij
i Boris (1997): Piknik na obo!"ine, Otel´ U pogib£ego
al´pinista ,
Ulitka na sklone, Moscow: Izdatel´stvo AST/St.
Petersburg: Terra Fantastica.
Strugatsky, Arkady and
Boris (1980): The Snail on the Slope. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd.
Secondary
Sources
Bakhtin,
Mikhail (1981): The Dialogic Imagination. Eds. C. Emerson and
M. Holquist. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994):
The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Brooke-Rose, Christine
(1981): A Rhetoric of the Unreal. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Delany, Samuel R. (1977):
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press.
Delany, Samuel R. (1989):
The Straits of Messina. Seattle: Serconia Press.
Delany, Samuel R. (1992):
Triton. London: Grafton.
Gomel, Elana (1995):
The Poetics of Censorship: Allegory as Form and Ideology in the
Novels of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Science-Fiction Studies March.
Henderson, Mae G. (1995):
Introduction. In Borders, Boundaries and Frames: Essays in
Cultural Critisism and Cultural Sudies. NY: Routledge.
Hunter, Lynette (1989):
Modern Allegory and Fantasy. Rhetorical Stances of Contemporary
Writing.
London: Macmillan Press.
Kagarlitsky, Juri (1974):
€to takoe fantastika? Moscow: Xudo¢estvennaja Literatura.
Schimanski, Johan (1996):
A Poetics of the Border. Nation and Genre in Wythnos yng Nghymru
Fydd and other texts by Islwyn Ffowc Elis. Doctoral Dissertation. University
of Oslo.
Spivak, Gayatry Chakravorty
(1988): Can the Subaltern Speak? In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg
(eds.): Marxism and Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois
Publications.
Suvin, Darko (1979):
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. On the Poetics and History
of a Literary Genre. New Haven & London:
Yale University Press.
Wendland, Albert (1980): Science,
Myth, and the Fictional Creation of Alien Worlds. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press.
