ALL THE WOR(L)D’S A GAME: PLAYING WITH THE RULES OF GENRE

Abstract

This thesis argues that the diegetic games played within Science Fiction and Fantasy texts commonly converge with and complement a different type of metatextual gaming, one that is played on multiple levels between author and text, reader and text, author and reader. In considering the activity of genre within the critical framework of a game, it further argues that the act not just of playing, but of playing with the rules generates a creative impulse that productively breaks epistemological and teleological frames that have been concretised, and are thus in danger of stultifying, within inherited narratives of SFF, thereby opening up new approaches to knowledge production and meaning-making within the genre. Chapter One analyses how the formal, social, linguistic, and political games played in Iain M. Banks’s novel The Player of Games (1988) serve to induce a recognition and reassessment of the rules embedded within the systems of thought held by the two opposing alien civilisations in the text. Chapter Two examines the works of Diana Wynne Jones, examining the use of fun and laughter in deflating, subverting, and collapsing the rules of literary games, resulting in a refiguring of the modes of knowledge production and meaning-making outside of those concretised by genre.