摘要：In a 1979 talk delivered at Minicon, an annual gathering of science fiction and fantasy authors and enthusiasts, writer and scholar Samuel R. Delany observed that the academic study of science fiction, as it was then constituted, was marked by vexing ruptures. [1] After a long exclusion from the university, science fiction was in the first decade or two of being recognized as a significant field of literary and imaginative production. Scholars who had honed their critical skills on other literatures were beginning to take science fiction seriously, and to teach and write on its established and emerging canons. Delany admitted that this was a positive development for the field, but worried that the novelty of science fiction as an accepted subject for academic study might mean that new criticism would be disconnected from the long period of evolution that preceded it. (“The working assumption of most academic critics is that somehow the history of science fiction began precisely at the moment they began to read it — or, as frequently, in the nebulous yesterday of 16th and 17th-century utopias” [p. 99].) The new scholars, he complained, were often unaware of individual works or whole genres that had been crucial to the formation of the field. As important, they were also unaware of a substantial body of older critical thinking and writing. Science fiction has a significant (if varied and conflicted) history that is its own, Delany insisted, a history that has shaped its meaning and will shape its future. A rupture between an emerging practice of criticism and the established history of the field would diminish the field’s potential for genuine innovation. Critics need, he concluded, to take account of the presence of a history within their field if it is to develop effectively
