Lost in science-fiction: the prelude to A. A. Attanasio’s Solis as a contemporary science-fiction reader’s guide

Abstract

This article is envisaging the question of how contemporary SF is dealing with the genre’s founding features – estrangement, cognition and the novum – in the preface to the novel Solis by the American writer A. A. Attanasio. We used to read SFto experience some preliminary estrangement before the feeling of loss got resolved through a cognitive process. This much still qualifies contemporary SF and has even been enhanced. Yet we will aim at demonstrating that the loss felt – and demanded – by the reader tends to be displaced on the metafictional level, characterizing the very condition the story itself is being told. Attanasio willfully plays on this in a puzzling text that can only be understood as a misleading attempt at fictionalizing its own genesis while muddling the novel’s initial plot.