Sense of Wonder - Definitions and Origins

Definitions and Origins

In Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction the term sense of wonder is defined as follows:

SENSE OF WONDER n. a feeling of awakening or awe triggered by an expansion of one’s awareness of what is possible or by confrontation with the vastness of space and time, as brought on by reading science fiction.

In the introductory section of his essay 'On the Grotesque in Science Fiction', Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Professor of English, DePauw University, states:

The so-called sense of wonder has been considered one of the primary attributes of sf at least since the pulp era. The titles of the most popular sf magazines of that period - Astounding, Amazing, Wonder Stories, Thrilling, Startling, etc. - clearly indicate that the putative cognitive value of sf stories is more than counter-balanced by an affective power, to which, in fact, the scientific content is expected to submit.

John Clute and Peter Nicholls associate the experience with that of the "conceptual breakthrough" or "paradigm shift" (Clute & Nicholls 1993). In many cases, it is achieved through the recasting of previous narrative experiences in a larger context. It can be found in short scenes (e.g., in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, it can be found, in a small dose, inside the line "That's no moon; it's a space station.") and it can require entire novels to set up (as in the final line to Iain Banks's Feersum Endjinn.)

George Mann suggests that this ‘sense of wonder’ is associated only with science fiction as distinct from science fantasy, stating:

It is this insistence on fundamental realism that has caused Verne’s novels to be retrospectively seen as of key importance in the development of SF. … -- people in droves came to the books looking for adventure and got it, but with an edge of scientific inquiry that left them with a new, very different sense of wonder. The magic of the realms of fantasy had been superseded by the fascination of speculation rooted in reality.

Mann later defines the term as “the sense of inspired awe that is aroused in a reader when the full implications of an event or action become realized, or when the immensity of a plot or idea first becomes known;” and he associates the term with the Golden Age of SF and the pulp magazines prevalent at the time. One of the major writers of the Golden Age, Isaac Asimov, agreed with this association: in 1967 commenting on the changes occurring in SF he wrote,

And because today’s real life so resembles day-before-yesterday’s fantasy, the old-time fans are restless. Deep within, whether they admit it or not, is a feeling of disappointment and even outrage that the outer world has invaded their private domain. They feel the loss of a “sense of wonder” because what was once truly confined to “wonder” has now become prosaic and mundane.

However, the editor and critic David Hartwell sees SF’s ‘sense of wonder’ in more general terms, as ”being at the root of the excitement of science fiction.” He continues:

Any child who has looked up at the stars at night and thought about how far away they are, how there is no end or outer edge to this place, this universe – any child who has felt the thrill of fear and excitement at such thoughts stands a very good chance of becoming a science fiction reader. To say that science fiction is in essence a religious literature is an overstatement, but one that contains truth. SF is a uniquely modern incarnation of an ancient tradition: the tale of wonder. Tales of miracles, tales of great powers and consequences beyond the experience of people in your neighborhood, tales of the gods who inhabit other worlds and sometimes descend to visit ours, tales of humans traveling to the abode of the gods, tales of the uncanny: all exist now as science fiction. Science fiction’s appeal lies in combination of the rational, the believable, with the miraculous. It is an appeal to the sense of wonder.

Academic criticism of science fiction literature (Robu 1988) identifies the idea of the sublime described by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant—infinity, immensity, "delightful horror" -- as a key to understanding the concept of "sense of wonder" in science fiction. For example Professor of English at the University of Iowa, Brooks Landon says:

Reference to this “sense of wonder,” a term appropriated and popularized by Damon Knight, appear over and over in twentieth-century discussions of SF and may at least in part reflect SF’s debt to its Gothic and Romantic forerunners.

Edward James quotes from Aldiss and Wingrove’s history of science fiction in support of the above suggestion as to the origin of the ‘sense of wonder’ in SF, as follows:

In the Gothic mode, emphasis was placed on the distant and unearthly … Brooding landscapes, isolated castles, dismal old towns, and mysterious figures … carry us into an entranced world from which horrid revelations start …. Terror, mystery and that delightful horror which Burke connected with the sublime … may be discovered … in science fiction to this day.

Paul K. Alkon in his book Science Fiction before 1900. Imagination Discovers Technology makes a similar point:

The affinities of science fiction and Gothic literature also reveal a common quest for those varieties of pleasing terror induced by awe-inspiring events or settings that Edmund Burke and other eighteenth-century critics call the sublime. A looming problem for writers in the nineteenth century was how to achieve sublimity without recourse to the supernatural. ... The supernatural marvels that had been a staple of epic and lesser forms from Homeric times would no longer do as the best sources of sublimity. ... writers sought new forms that could better accommodate the impact of science.

Alkon concludes that "science fiction ever since has been concerned as often to elicit strong emotional responses as to maintain a rational basis for its plots. Far from being mutually exclusive, the two aims can reinforce each other ...",

Edward James, in a section of his book entitled ‘The Sense of Wonder’ says on this point of the origin of the 'sense of wonder' in SF:

That the concept of the Sublime, a major aesthetic criterion of the Romantic era, has a close connection with the pleasures derived from reading sf has long been recognized by readers and critics, even if that word has seldom been used. The phrase that has been used, and which to a large extent corresponds, is ‘Sense of Wonder’ (sometimes jocularly or cynically abbreviated to ‘sensawunda’). The very first collection of sf criticism was Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder (1956).

James goes on to explore the same point as made by David Hartwell in his book Age of Wonders (and quoted above) as regards the relationship of the ‘sense of wonder’ in SF to religion or the religious experience. He states that,

… in doing so, it can create a rival sense of wonder, which acts almost as a replacement religion: a religion for those deprived of all traditional certainties in the wake of Darwin, Einstein, Plank, Godel, and Heisenberg.

As an example James takes the short story ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ by Arthur C. Clarke. He explains:

A computer is installed by Western technicians in a Tibetan lamasery; its task is in to speed up the compilation of all the possible names of God. This, the monks believe, is what the human race was created for, and on its completion the earth, and perhaps all creation, will come to an end. The technicians do their job, with some condescension, and flee back to civilization.

‘Wonder if the computer’s finished its run. It was due about now.’ Chuck didn’t reply, so George swung round in his saddle. He could just see Chuck’s face, a white oval toward the sky. ‘Look,’ whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.) Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

… what this reader (at the age of 13 or 14) learned from the story was the unimaginable size of the universe and the implausibility of some of the traditional human images of God. An almost religious sense of awe (or wonder) was created in me, as I tried to perceive the immensity of the universe, and contemplate the possibility of the non-existence of God.

It is appropriate that Edward James chooses a story by Arthur C. Clarke to make the point. One critic is of the opinion that Clarke "has dedicated his career to evoking a "sense of wonder" at the sublime spaces of the universe ..." Editor and SF researcher Mike Ashley agrees:

If there is one writer whose work epitomizes that sense of wonder, it is without doubt, Arthur C. Clarke. It's almost impossible to read any of his stories or novels without experiencing that trigger-moment when the mind expands to take in an awe-inspiring concept. ... It's there in his novel's Childhood's End, The City and the Stars, Rendezvous with Rama and his short stories "The Star", "Jupiter V" and "The Nine Billion Names of God" - possibly the definitive "sense of wonder" story.

Kathryn Cramer in her essay ‘On Science and Science Fiction’ also explores the relationship of SF’s ‘sense of wonder’ to religion, stating that “the primacy of the sense of wonder in science fiction poses a direct challenge to religion: Does the wonder of science and the natural world as experienced through science fiction replace religious awe?”

However, as Brooks Landon shows, not all 'sense of wonder' needs to be so closely related to the classical sense of the Sublime. Commenting on the story 'Twilight' by John W. Campbell he says:

... Campbell stresses how long seven million years is in human terms but notes that this time span is nothing in the life of the sun, whose "two thousand thousand thousand" risings ... As Campbell well knew, one sure path to a sense of wonder was big numbers."

Perhaps the single most famous example of "sensawunda" in all of science fiction involves a neologism, from the work of A. E. van Vogt (Moskowitz 1974):

The word "sevagram" appears only once in the series, as the very last word of The Weapon Makers; in its placing, which seems to open universes to the reader's gaze, and in its resonant mysteriousness, for its precise meaning is unclear, this use of "sevagram" may well stand as the best working demonstration in the whole genre sf of how to impact a sense of wonder.

Despite the attempts above to define and illustrate the 'sense of wonder' in SF, Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. argues that "unlike most of the other qualities regularly associated with the genre, the sense of wonder resists critical commentary." The reason he suggests is that,

A "literature of ideas," as sf is often said to be, invites discussion of ideas; but the sense of wonder seems doubly to resist intellectual investigation. As a "sense," it is clearly not about ideas and indeed seems in opposition to them; wonder even more so, with its implications of awe that short-circuits analytic thought.

Nevertheless, despite this "resistance to critical commentary," the 'sense of wonder' has "a well-established pedigree in art, separated into two related categories of response: the expansive sublime and the intensive grotesque." Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. explains the difference between these two categories as follows::

The sublime is a response to an imaginative shock, the complex recoil and recuperation of consciousness coping with objects too great to be encompassed. The grotesque, on the other hand, is a quality usually attributed to objects, the strange conflation of disparate elements not found in nature. This distinction is true to their difference. The sublime expands consciousness inward as it encompasses limits to its outward expansion of apprehension; the grotesque is a projection of fascinated repulsion/attraction out into objects that consciousness cannot accommodate, because the object disturbs the sense of rational, natural categorization. In both cases, the reader/perceiver is shocked by a sudden estrangement from habitual perception, and in both cases the response is to suspend one's confidence in knowledge about the world, and to attempt to redefine the real in thought's relation to nature. Both are concerned with the states of mind that science and art have in common: acute responsiveness to the objects of the world, the testing (often involuntary) of the categories conventionally used to interpret the world, and the desire to articulate what consciousness finds inarticulable.

Later in this same essay the author argues that "the sublime and the grotesque are in such close kinship that they are shadows of each other," and that "it is not always easy to distinguish the two, and the grotesque of one age easily becomes the sublime of another." He gives as an example the android (T-1000) in the second 'Terminator' film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, saying that "the T-1000, like so many liminal figures in sf, is almost simultaneously sublime and grotesque. Its fascinating shape-shifting would be the object of sublime awe were it not for its sadistic violation of mundane flesh