Science Fiction Studies

 In Strong Opinions, Nabokov says "I hate science fiction, with its gals and goons, suspense and suspensories." Yet he also expresses "the deepest admiration" for H. G. Wells, naming as special favorites such works by Wells as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon, and "The Country of the Blind." He speaks elsewhere of Aleksey Tolstoy as "a writer of some talent" who "has two or three science fiction stories or novels which are memorable." Ada, for all its attention to"Antiterra" and to anagrammatic satire (Osberg for Borges), is not an anti-novel, though it is anti-. It may be studied as being of the genre of SF (even though it does not resemble SF), if the study centers on that SF element which I term "eversion." The term denotes a double-reversal or a turning-inside-out, and Ada’s eversion of time, earth, and sexual gender are here discussed, respectively, as "transtemporality," "transterrestriality," and "transsexual."