Pos-impossible worlds. An approach to weird science-fiction

Abstract

The present article proposes the reading of three science-fiction works: Stefano Benni’s Terra!, Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Drawing from the theoretical concept of ‘impossible worlds’ we aim to explain the deautomatizing effect of these fictions, which leads the reader to a psychological state akin to Fisher’s ‘weirdness‘. With this perspective, we will explore the way in which the authors introduce unusual elements in the structural and semantic levels of the text to provoke in the audience an external incomprehension of the fictional universe and, thus, the inner evaluation of their cognoscitive system. In order to gain a deeper comprehension of how the actual world is structured, it shall be required to approach how we understand scientific endeavour, drawing a distinction between expert and non-expert conceptions.