The Sci-Fi Novelist Who Disappeared for Decades

The best science fiction shows us new ways to see our lives and our times by showing us how both might be otherwise. Characters who seem like us seek out alien worlds whose systems clash, or rhyme, with those we recognize. Characters who seem very unlike us—A.I.-infused cyborgs, plant people who photosynthesize, or humans from made-up societies—act on their feelings, and contemplate moral decisions, and we ask how their stories might inform our own. Critics call these effects cognitive estrangement: the term, coined by the scholar Darko Suvin in the nineteen-seventies, describes how science fiction’s worlds seem strange, yet also make sense, according to knowable rules in a fictional universe, and according to readers in our own.