Tales of Resonance and Wonder: Science Fiction and Genre Theory (Report‪)‬

In this paper I want to argue three theoretical points concerning popular genre, each with particular reference to science fiction: firstly, that genre is better defined in terms of its characteristic tropes and topoi than its media of delivery; secondly, that it is better understood as traversing, rather than being contained within, the binary opposition between supposedly 'elite' and supposedly 'popular' cultures; and thirdly, that the twin concepts of ideology and utopia, whilst certainly relevant to its analysis, nonetheless require supplementation by the cognate, but not identical, concepts of resonance and wonder. Before we proceed to these questions, however, I want to begin with a brief reconstruction, derived from memory and archive, of my own personal encounter with science fiction (henceforth SF). Memory is, of course, notoriously fallible, but it can be used as a kind of quasi-ethnographic source, nonetheless, if disciplined by access to an independently collated relevant archive, in this case the most extensive in Europe, that in the Science Fiction Collection at the University of Liverpool. (2) Medium and Genre