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precisely the historical, social, and technological constitution of human landscapes which conservative rhetoric tends to obscure. In this way the rhetoric of sf differs fundamentally from the rhetoric of “literature,” the conventions and tropes of which are organized around an entirely different focus:
    Despite the many meaningful differences in the ways of reading that constitute the specifically literary modes, they are all characterized—now, today—by a priority of the subject, i.e., of the self, of human consciousness. To a greater or lesser extent, the subject can be read as the organizational center of all the literary categories’ many, many differing expectations . . .
    Answering its own expectations as a paraliterary mode, science fiction is far more concerned with the organization (and reorganization) of the object, i.e., the world, or the institutions through which we perceive it. It is concerned with the subject, certainly, but concerned with those aspects of it that are closer to the object: How is the subject excited, impinged on, contoured and constituted by the object? 14
    The point is not merely that sf tends to be “about” the object in the sense of taking the object as its main topic of interest; it is, rather, that all of the conventions, tropes, and reading protocols that mark science fiction as science fiction are organized around a revelation of the object and its constituting context. And herein lies the potentially radical force of the genre:
    . . . even the most passing mention by an sf writer of, say, “. . . the monopole magnet mining operations in the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni,” begins as a simple way of saying that, while the concept of mines may persist, their object, their organization, their technology, their locations, and their very form can change—and it says it directly and clearly and well before it offers any metaphor for any psychic mystery or psychological state. Not to understand this object-critique, on whatever intuitive level, is to misread the phrase . . . (SW 188)
    By this rhetorical model, we can see that even the most conservatively inclined science fiction, if it is in any way sophisticated
as
science fiction, must keep a certain margin of imaginative space open for an apprehension of the historicity of objects, landscapes, and social institutions. By this model we can also see that science fiction differs from the essay inat least one of the same ways that it differs from literary fiction: for like literary fiction, the essay is rhetorically oriented toward a revelation of the subject, toward the presentation of a “spectacle of a single consciousness trying to make sense of the chaos.” The problem for both literary fiction and the essay is that the “chaos” of the modern world originates primarily as a chaos of the object, not the subject (SW 158)—which renders these forms, at least vis-à-vis the manifold problems of the object, conservative by default.
    Bearing in mind the notion of science fiction as object-critique, we can begin to see why a radical practitioner of the genre such as Delany might take an interest in such recondite analytical practices as Marxian critique, deconstructive criticism, and discourse analysis. All offer sophisticated ways of considering the relations of objects, texts, and social practices to their ideological, linguistic, and socio-historical surrounds, and all are in one way or another committed to the exploration of the
social
constitution of the individual subject, that is, “those aspects of the self that are closer to the object.” All, in sum, are ways of breaking myths—ways of scrutinizing things which may seem eternal, totalized, and systemic, and questioning their totality, interrogating their system-aticity.
    The obstacle to such analysis, on the one hand, is the pervasive influence of the discursive surround, the interpretive context