Abstract:

Science fiction poetry is a relatively new genre having emerged with the scientific and technological developments brought about by the Industrial Revolution. It is distinguished basically from the traditional poetry in that it alters traditional poetic forms and has a speculative content enriched by scientific and technological terms. Peter Payack’s “The Migration of Darkness,” Andrew Joron’s “The Sonic Flowerfall of Primes,” and Gene Wolfe’s “The Computer Iterates the Greater Trumps” are the examples of science fiction poetry that combine the elements of science fiction and traditional poetry. While Payack’s and Joron’s poems are discerned with their proselike lines having a science fictional content, Wolfe’s poem resembles more a scientific paper having numbers and formulas. Since the poems discuss mainly the relationship between science, human beings and machines, they are dominated by a speculative tone, scientific notions and images. Hence, they deviate from the norms of conventional poems that deal with the thoughts, emotions and experiences of individuals in a lyrical way. Nonetheless, the poems have an interaction with the traditional poetry as they use the conventional verse form and treat usual human emotions in a quasi-lyrical way. The aim of the present study is to show that the mentioned poems experiment with classical poetic and narrative forms and imageries to debate over the impacts of scientific and technological developments on human life.