LRB · Fredric Jameson · In Hyperspace

It is probably not immediately
obvious what interest a new theoretical study of science fiction holds
for the mainstream adepts of literary theory; and no doubt it is just as
perplexing to SF scholars, for whom this particular subgenre of the
subgenre, the time-travel narrative, is as exceptional among and
uncharacteristic of their major texts as SF itself is with regard to
official Literature. To be sure, so-called alternative or counterfactual
histories have gained popularity and a certain respectability; my
personal favourite is Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain, in
which John Brown’s raid succeeds and a black socialist republic emerges
in the South, as prosperous and superior in relation to its shrunken
rust-belt northern neighbour as West Germany was to the East in the old
days. And there remains the lingering mystery of what would have
happened had the time traveller not stepped on the butterfly: this is
from Ray Bradbury’s immortal ‘Sound of Thunder’, but the idea is
adaptable to any number of wistful daydreams – had Lincoln not been
assassinated, or Bobby Kennedy – or more sombre fantasies, like Philip
K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, in which Germany and Japan
win the Second World War and divide the US between them. But these
historical variants are not genuine time-travel narratives on the order
of H.G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895), which inaugurates the
standard narrative of the history of science fiction, to the detriment
of Jules Verne or that other increasingly popular recent candidate, Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).