Toward a Science-Fictional Interpretational Method: Reading Three Borges Stories

ABSTRACT: This article reconsiders Samuel R. Delany's theory of science fiction as a form of language in order to develop the notion that science fiction is a method of making meaning and reading texts. Three stories by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, "The Aleph," "The Library of Babel," and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," are read as science fiction to demonstrate how the method functions. Borges's ambiguous relationship with science fiction during his lifetime is well-documented, but no previous study of Borges as a science-fiction writer exists in English. The notion of science fiction as a way of reading enables a reading that treats the elements of textual playfulness that make Borges's texts so beloved throughout literary studies as science fictional, because they encourage the reader to reconstruct an alternate world around the text and create a comprehensive theory of how that world works.