The Grotesque In Science Fiction Analysis

According to the editors of the Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, the term ‘sense of wonder’ refers to “a sense of awe” felt by an individual “undergoing vast transformative power(s) […] (and) the possibility of […] social and technological changes” (Evans et al. xvii). As the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction explains, it is a term originating from the 1940s, that at its basis, describes an experience that produces “rapt emotive fascination” over a particular subject or situation of focus (SFE) (OED). However, while a sense of wonder often entails the sublime—an experience that offers extreme feelings of “excellence, grandeur, or beauty”—and as such, appears positive, by privileging emotions it also has the potential to promote a sense

reflects on these negative effects of a sense of wonder—known as the grotesque—by discussing how “its implications of awe (can alternately) short circuit analytical thought” (71). Where a sense of wonder and the sublime directs the individual’s attentions outward, through the grotesque—as outlined in Csicsery-Ronway Jr.’s additional work, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (2008)—the individual’s senses are instead, “intensely arrested” (190). Csicsery-Ronway Jr. further argues that because the grotesque enables intense emotional fascination as a response to change, the individual consequently develops obsessive, non-rational behaviours that “violate cultural common-sense” and “bodies of order” (80, 81). So, the grotesque can be seen as a harmful sense of wonder to the individual as, by definition, it “is a force of awe that destabilizes one’s sense of a natural balance” (Csicsery-Ronway Jr. 190). With these reflections from Csicsery-Ronway Jr. in mind, this paper will attempt to contextualize and focus on this destabilizing sense of wonder as the destruction of rationality and order in the texts of The Concentration City (1957), by J.G Ballard, The Player of Games (1988), by Iain M. Banks, and Red Mars (1993), by Kim Stanley