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Popular Culture Review
narrative paradigms, most likely because they have become laden with
connotations associated with Space Opera: spaceships or aliens have been re
organized, not to say recycled, into a traditional narrative syntagm very akin to
the Epic and the Marvelous which has little or nothing to do with the original
intent of Science Fiction, for the genre has always been more about questioning
reality in a speculative or prospective manner rather than telling stories about
adventures in space and heroic battles against evil aliens.11
The doubts regarding the true nature of reality as we perceive it is not by
any means a new theme in Science Fiction, and we can find it, for instance, as
early as 1940 in Bioy Casares’ Morel's Invention, which tells the story of a
fugitive reaching an island populated by hologramic beings who re-create the
same scene over and over. The protagonist will eventually chose to join the
hologramic world which, in spite of its repetitiousness, offers an instant of
perfect harmony that would be impossible to live in the real world. Morel's
Invention thus introduces an important ontological issue by opposing reality to a
construct of reality and allowing the protagonist to choose the construct over the
real thing; the value of the objective world is challenged by technological
creation and artificiality triumphs over nature. By the same token, the very
existence of a possible divine presence is implicitly undermined: Morel was a
man who created a world, however simple and rudimentary it may seem, which
is in actuality preferable to the natural one. Morel is therefore a more successful
creator than the elusive divine entity behind a more elusive yet intelligent
design. In the logic of the story, and as far as the narrator is concerned, Morel is
the smart one, not God.
We find development of the same theme in Phillip K. Dick’s, Time out o f
Joint (1959) and in Daniel Galouye’s, Simulacron 3 (1964) which can safely be
considered as two great precursors of postmodern Science Fiction, for they share
a great deal of similarities with the narrative composition of The Matrix and are
thematically centered around the falseness of perceived reality. In both novels,
the protagonists slowly discover that they are living in a constructed reality, and
that everything they believe to be true is in fact a mere fabrication designed to
exploit them. Time Out Of Joint and Simulacron 3 can therefore be read as
metaphors of some of the most provocative post-structuralist propositions, for
both tell the story of a consciousness living an illusion while believing it is real,
prisoner of the simulacra, as described by Baudrillard, and of his own
epistemological constructions, as suggested by Derrida and his associates. The
protagonists of both novels eventually leam the truth; however, the revelation is
the result of an accident rather than the consequences of an epistemological
quest. There is no real hierarchy between the real and the unreal from the point
of view of their credibility, and nothing guarantees that what is presented as real
is not in itself a construction. Simulacron 3 further presses the issue by
presenting two different levels of simulated reality—that is, two levels of false
consciousness based upon an artificial construct—hence rendering the concept
of reality more slippery than ever.