Starboard Vineyard Tours 2: The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Csicsery-Ronay

We try to encapsulate all of The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., puts forward a collection of seven broad ideas for the discussion of science fiction, producing a rich survey of the genre and a very clear structure for this episode. While the Seven Beauties does not set out to present a single overarching theory of SF, we discuss the implicit throughline of play and playfulness that Csicsery-Ronay identifies, a ludic quality of SF that we at least have a lot of fun with. We also discuss which of the seven beauties we personally find most compelling, which leave us cold, and the relationships we can see between the beauties and the theorists of SF that Csicsery-Ronay is building on to frame them.Topics: fictive neology; the novum; future history; imaginary science; the science-fictional sublime; the science-fictional grotesque; the Technologiade; space opera; the singularityNext month, we will read a selection of essays by Joanna Russ collected in her book To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction: “Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction”; “Speculations: The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction”; “What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can't Write”; “Recent Feminist Utopias”; and “On 'The Yellow Wallpaper'“.