17 pages • 34 minutes read
Lisel MuellerThe End of Science Fiction
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Cultural Context
Lisel Mueller wrote and published “The End of Science Fiction” in 1996, close to the end of the 20th century. Mueller immigrated to the United States in 1939, at age 15, fleeing Nazi Germany with her mother and sister two years after her father received political refugee status in Italy in 1937. Her father was an early opponent of Nazi ideology, and he was fired when the Nazis came to power, after a four-day interrogation by the Gestapo. The relevance of Mueller’s personal history to a reading of “The End of Science Fiction” is significant, given her parents’ political outspokenness. While the medical experiments and weaponry science of the Nazi regime may not have been common knowledge to typical German citizens in the 1930s, her parents may have understood the Nazi rhetoric that embraced a chilling vision of the future. For anti-Nazi progressives, the language and ambitions of the party erased humanity by design.
In 1996, cell phones and the internet appeared as well as other technological factors that play into Mueller’s anti-tech tone. The dominance of the smart phone and a reliance on the world wide web was not yet a reality. However, in the past century, humans traveled to the moon and various nations around the world fought to establish extra-terrestrial presence via satellite. Countries far smaller than the former Soviet Union and the United States produced atomic weaponry and international corporations began to threaten local economies across the globe. In her poem, Mueller calls for a return to the narratives that tell humans about humanity, not only to prevent technology from dominating, but to secure a future in which humans can authentically exist.
Literary Context
“The End of Science Fiction” employs allegory to look toward a future in the way science fiction often does, but does not, in fact, do any world-building. Nevertheless, “The End of Science Fiction” is a speculative poem, in that it imagines a way of being that is not active in the present. It refers to ancient stories and myths to re-imagine the future, and that tactic allows the poem to avoid a strict futuristic label.
The poet uses allusions to Biblical stories, ancient epics, and Greek myth. Allusion connects the moment of the poem to older narratives and traditions. Rather than directly connect to the old stories, however, Mueller’s speaker implores the reader to “[i]nvent something new” (Line 13). The poet implies that people have forgotten the old narratives and supplies what is presented as fresh characters and story arcs. The poem does not present a future dystopia in the way science fiction often does, but instead illustrates the dystopia that is happening in the current moment. The speaker speculates a return to stories that center human emotion, and in this way imagine and invent a livable future. Other contemporary poets who write speculative poetry include Ursula K. Le Guin, Frannie Choi, Kyle Dargan, Cathy Park Hong, and Tracy K. Smith.
