This book as originally conceived was to be largely a gathering of essays of mine on science fiction and related matters. The seven which had already appeared in various venues over the past twenty-five years or so I reckoned would need rewriting, also with a view to clarifying at least some of their interconnections. That the project would involve substantial changes for the sake of cohesiveness I did not entirely foresee. Nor, for that matter, was I fully aware at the outset of the extent to which my recasting of previous essays would both direct and be directed by the drafting of the six entirely new to this book. In other words, I did not know from its start that this enterprise would itself prove to be revisionary in the sense which is fundamental to one of the theories recurrent in the foregoing chapters, and in a way which bears on re-vision's nexus to genre, the other principal subject-theory of this book as such.

Even those few essay-chapters which retain more than a titular resemblance to some previously published formulation will derive a different emphasis from their present context. In fact, that proposition qualifies as an anticipatory instance of the main point I make later on about the genre implications of any critical practice of textual association, and thus can draw support from my argument on that subject. So, too, both my general finding there – that meanings become apparent from certain (inter)textual connections while remaining invisible with others – and its particular application to the preceding chapters in their given arrangement, can be taken as corollary to a postulate which perforce holds true for literary criticism as it does for the subject of such: that what is being said is largely a function of how it is constructed. At the same time, the corollary I have just educed would open the ‘how’ of meaning not just to such ‘leading’ juxtapositions of texts, but to various (other) bibliographical, or intertextual, considerations, inclusive of those which I characterize as revisionary and/or generic. It would thus add to a by now long list of challenges to New Criticism's understanding of the principle which it can be credited with having discovered. On the other hand, I subordinate genre and re-vision to a text's governing conception.