Science Fiction: A Literary Analysis

Science Fiction as a literary genre has historically fused the mythology of the past with the scientific advancements of the future, creating a world that is both comfortable and frightening. The love affair of the hybridity of myth and science is elegantly displayed in Nnedi Okorafor’s “The Book of the Phoenix” as a young woman struggles to reconcile her veiled past with the uncertain future created by her technologically enhanced birth. The elements of the story are purposefully selected to highlight the interconnectivity of technological advances and evolving cultures, as the protagonist struggles to discover her origins and destiny. Okorafor expertly utilizes science fiction as a genre, Africa as a setting, and Phoenix as a female character

Science fiction is also deliberately anachronistic in the sense that it asks its readers to accept the relation between the time they inhabit and the future, and by doing so opens the reader to a plethora of possibilities. Literary critic Carol Brown writes that science fiction is a perfect vehicle of describing “the interplay of science [namely, the ‘real’] and myth” (Brown,158). As a genre science fiction continues to express the transformation of socio-economic realities in the wake of rapid change. Science fiction, then, presents a vehicle for articulating the social conscience because it maps potential consequences and attempts to resolve them (Carstens, 83). “The Book of the Phoenix” examines the repercussions that genetically modified reproduction has on not only the offspring of such experiments, but also the mother who carries this experiment without knowledge of the long term effects. Science fiction can be read not merely as a critical commentary on biotechnoscience, but as a mode of thinking with science about the future of (human) life (Idema, 38). A continuing theme of the story is the struggle of Phoenix to discover her true origins and the difficulty of unraveling the truth when science has distorted it beyond recognition. The true purpose of science fiction

(Toffoletti, 15). In “The Book of the Phoenix” Okorafor critiques the use of technology without a clear understanding of its effects on our humanity and culture. By using science fiction as the chosen genre Okorafor enables the reader to comfortably examine the effects of technology on human civilization by encouraging a feeling of cognitive estrangement: the feeling that a radically different fictional world is somehow akin to one’s own (Idema, 35). The use of Modern African Primitivism as a sub-genre allows the reader to see Phoenix thru the eyes of a culture permeated with mysticism, allowing us to examine the past and the future in a non-linear construct. Phoenix shows that even an Accelerated Biological Organism will seek its origins at the juncture of technology and culture, and that the internal struggle to find its roots will cause an inner turmoil that can prove deadly. Okorafor’s novel is a warning that unrestricted biotechnoscience research can lead to an uncertain future, and that our existence as a species may be threatened by the fruits of our