This piece follows on so closely from the last one that I have been able to cut out some of the opening few paragraphs. It was produced under rather different circumstances, starting off as the 1994 keynote address for the Lloyd C. E aton conference at the University of California- Riverside: by this time I had moved to America and taken the Walter J. Ong Chair of Humanities at Saint Louis University. The venue meant that the audience, all concerned with science fiction but not all of them academics, were definitely on my side, which accounts for a certain rah-rah element, especially towards the end.

The theme of the conference was ‘Contests for Authority’, and I stuck to the theme fairly closely. Still asking myself why there was so much critical hostility to and ignorance of science fiction, I answered that you could see from The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) that sf was likely to reject the authority of literary tradition. Moreau was like The Odyssey on the surface, but had turned the story round 180 degrees. Furthermore, Wells meant it. It was not that he thought writers like Homer were stupid, but knowledge is cumulative, science is based on knowledge – scientia is the Latin word for knowledge – and pre-modern authors like Homer or Milton or Swift just didn't know as much as Wells. No special credit to him, but a fact all the same.

So sf authors did not respect traditional authority, but they did respect rational authority, and both halves of this were likely to cause alarm in the literary world: the former for obvious reasons, the latter because the literary world, and especially practitioners of what by then was being called ‘literary theory’, had also got into the habit of continually challenging authority. But this was mostly ‘gesture politics’. Unlike sf authors, they didn't mean it. The authorities they were prepared to challenge were the outdated, defeated or unpopular ones, like hereditary class structures, belief in racial superiority, imperialism, or compulsory courses on Beowulf. Literary theory was not prepared to tangle with science, much less interact with it, and had developed an elaborate system for denying the existence of objectivity and the possibility of defining meaning.