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Meillassoux, Quentin. Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction. Trans. Alyosha Edlebi. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2015. 93 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-1-93756148-2. $19.95.
Quentin Meillassoux's Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction, first published in French as Métaphysique et fiction des mondes hors-science in 2013, is a neatly conceived, philosophically rigorous, wonderfully comprehensible, and ultimately extraordinary work of genre theory that should be of immediate interest to scholars of SF and speculative realism. At only fifty-seven pages divided into four parts, it is followed by Isaac Asimov's "The Billiard Ball" (1967), an enigmatic tale about a possible murder involving a billiard ball that suddenly takes on a seemingly anomalous trajectory, an event which demonstrates, for Meillassoux, a metaphysically significant difference between SF and so-called "extro-science fiction" (XSF). Throughout this remarkable book, which is beautifully translated by Alyosha Edlebi, he develops this difference, in meticulous detail and with astounding verve, in order to singularize XSF as a subspecies of SF that nonetheless exceeds SF itself. It should be observed that Meillassoux's debut Apres la finitude (2006) has played an integral role in inaugurating the speculative turn in contemporary philosophy, while his Le Nombre et la sirene (2011) offers a wildly original reading of Stephane Mallarmé's infamously difficult Un Coup de Dés jamais nabolira le Hasard (1897). Both works challenge what Meillassoux has conceptually identified as "correlationism": the anthropocentric idea that there are no objects that are not a priori correlated with a subjective point of view. Science Fiction and ExtroScience Fiction, therefore, can be understood as being part of his larger project of demonstrating-via speculative forms of argumentation-non-correlational reality.
In the book's lucid first part, "Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction," Meillassoux rigorously analyzes the difference between SF and XSF. In SF, he claims, "[I]t is a matter of imagining a fictional future of science that modifies, and often expands, its possibilities of knowledge and mastery of the real" (4-5). In other words, in the worlds of SF, no matter how fantastic they may seem to us, experimental science persists and may even be able to explain the strange phenomena perceived in them. Yet, in the worlds of XSF, experimental science cannot, in principle, "deploy its theories or constitute its objects within them" (6). Motivating Meillassoux's ambitious attempt to singularize XSF is the...