The discipline of Science Fiction Studies is typically regarded as beginning with Darko Suvin’s 1972 article “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre”, in which he defined science fiction (SF) as the literature of cognitive estrangement. By this definition, SF is theorized as formally suited to estranging its readers from the norms of their reality: the work of interpretation, relying on the reader’s comparison of the textual world to their lived reality, makes the real world seem strange, new and, critical to Suvin, changeable.

SF Studies thus began with a focus on assessing the affective suitability of the genre’s formal and narrative features to foment political change. The history of the discipline since this point can be read as an unfinished attempt to grapple with the implications of this. Cognitive estrangement, in particular, has remained contentious, with criticisms including: the exact contours of ’cognitive’; the explicit political embedding in Marxism; and the fact that cognitive estrangement defines the genre by its potential effect on the reader, while paying almost no attention to real or conceptual readers.

This paper first establishes the state of the field with regards to cognitive estrangement, and then plots coordinates for expansion. It takes a step toward bridging the above gap by attending to a key variable in the experiencing of SF. It starts with a question: if symbols of the real adorn Realism in order to create a reality effect, what can we say of the nova, the unreal, that not only adorn, but enable, SF?

While all fiction introduces unreal elements to the reader, fantastic fictions hinge on the introduction of an entire ‘unreality’. The reading process in these genres is thus formally defined by a demand not only as to the localised unknowns of plot and character that define near every literary text, but by macrocosmic, ontological unknowns, which determine the possible lines of the text’s possibles and plausibles.

However, if the experience of reading SF is partially defined by the formal distancing of reality, it is likewise defined by genre’s ability to close this distance. Genre knowledge can, for example, act as a kind of ontological encyclopaedia that fills the gaps left by reality’s distancing. This paper thus lays out a new formal direction for SF: the unreality effect, which emerges from the generative tension between SF’s formal and generic capabilities.