Science Fiction as Desublimation. The Case of the Anti-Dystopian City

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The article formulates an attempt to combine several theoretical models of the genre of science fiction (SF), making it possible to account for the seemingly contradictory tendencies of SF to be read both literally and metaphorically. The model ultimately ties SF to the practice of “desublimating” ideological fantasies and rendering them cognitively graspable. A central element in this operation is the SF chronotope and its dialogue with empirical reality and its texts. Finally, the model is applied to three contemporary SF literary works with similar chronotopes, еxamples of “the anti-dystopian cities.”