The Transformation of the Public Sphere of Fiction into Cyberentics, Paranoia and Anti-Paranoia: An Inquiry into the Fabulous Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon

Abstract

Novelists who are influenced by nineteenth century British thought like Ruskin, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Tolkein and Mark Twain are among the earliest novelists who explore the conquest of social truth by the scientific method. They are convinced to develop the reflection of the general premises of man with the consequences of the power of science. And man has been considered the victim of ambiguous referentiality. Man can no longer conform to but must form and correspond a society by modeling it according to his own experience. But, the real beginning which technologizes itself in modern narrative direction in the twentieth century starts with Moore, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell whose negative utopian narratives are concerned not with the artifaces but with the artifacts of the imagination which are well elaborated to suppress the technology of the future. Yet in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, and Thomas Pychon and other science-fiction writers explore the growth, development, organism and the extreme irony for employing the machine in fiction. They attempt to answer simple stated questions in their narrative: Are we machines whose functions including the mental ones? Are we describable by a formal closed system of laws (algorithms)? Or are we transcendent and therefore free of our own mechanical descriptions? And they conform the view that the universe is uncertain in its non probabilistic causals and therefore is mechanistic. They conform the views of the circulation of texts and the processes of the negotiation means. They find that the machine does not work without the discoveries in physics and without the manifested threat to the author’s artistic imagination which is offered by paranoia, anti-paranoia and cyberentics which petrify the new literary technique. Therefore, the properties of the story elements systematize what they essentially see from the new technology by receiving and processing the new technological information about the new world.