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Sometimes in literature voices are allowed to speak and other times they are silenced. This is particularly true when reading rape. Fiction frequently features an "aestheticized rape narrative" (Stockton 16). It becomes a mediated rhetorical interpretation of a fictitious event (Sielke 2). It is also a cultural representation constructing a particular view of rape (Bal 101). "[W]ho gets to tell the story and whose story counts as 'truth' determine the definition of what rape is" (Higgins and Silver 1). This is especially true in a text where dialogue and narration limit the reader's access to information. Alternatively literature provides an avenue for noticing the silenced voice. Authors write down the interrupted talk; thus, if we are reading carefully, they present the silences within the text.
Science fiction and fantasy literature, "anything outside the normal space-time continuum of the everyday world" (Swinfen 5), are popular at least partially because they "challenge the received notions of reality" (Armitt 7), allowing them to break expectations on a regular basis. An exploration of these genres' representations of rape are particularly apt for an examination of the voices of rape survivors, since science fiction and fantasy deal with "that which evades articulation" (Jackson 37) and rape often "exists as an absence or gap" (Higgins and Silver 3). Texts which employ rape as a plot device or for character development are dramatizing an event for their own purpose, but a discussion of what that agenda might be is often complicated by the fact that our approach to the texts often tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the works we are reading (6).
Though women are often "victimised, powerless and sexually threatened" (Gamble 37), in speculative fiction and other literature, "alternative readings of stock themes and preoccupations" (Armitt 7) are emerging particularly as more women are becoming involved in the genres as readers, authors, and critics. Since speculative tales offer a forum "for fictionalising frightening possibilities" (10), it is reasonable for rape to appear within the texts as a significant cultural artifact. Fiction, particularly speculative fiction, allows the authors and readers to participate in a discussion of sexual assault, looking at the concept of rape from both an outsider's point of view and that of the survivor,...