Even when we look at science fiction

Then there are the novels that are spun entirely, or almost entirely, out of the writer's imagination: Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull, say, or William Faulkner's Sanctuary, or Franz Kafka's The Trial, or Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. These are books about invented people and situations, in no way autobiographical except, perhaps, in the most
far-fetched metaphorical sense. Mann was never a slippery rogue of a con man; Faulkner was never a sinister gangster given to creepy sexual practices; Kafka was never suddenly placed under arrest and put on trial before a tribunal of unknown makeup and jurisdiction; Greene was never an
alcoholic Mexican priest. Like all writers, they drew on certain aspects of themselves, however transformed, distorted, inverted, to create these characters and situations. But those characters are very different from the writers who invented them, and what the writers are providing in their
books is depictions of realities that never existed, alternative realities that we find convincing and plausible because of the skill of their inventors.

What makes these books convincing is that the invented aspect of reality, the fictional dimension (Felix Krull's roguery, Faulkner's gangster's creepiness) is embedded in as careful a representation of existing reality, the actual quotidian world, as the writer could create. Note that I say a representation of reality. The desk in front of me as I write this has very solid reality. It's big and bulky, and when I slap it with my hand it responds with a loud noise, and its middle drawer contains real postage stamps, paper clips, and staples. I could write long paragraphs about my
desk, its shape, its color, the scars that time has inflicted on it, but no matter how eloquent those paragraphs were, they wouldn't constitute a desk. They'd just be clumps of words describing a desk. If I were to paint the most cunning depiction of my desk that was possible to paint, a dazzling trompe-l'oeil simulation, it would still be only a thing of two dimensions made out of pigment and canvas, useless for holding paper clips. Similarly, a map of California isn't California. A photo of Marilyn Monroe isn't Marilyn Monroe. Novelists try to construct, out of words alone, convincing imitations of the world about them, against which they set their invented
characters and let them move through the invented situations of their plots. The novel itself isn't the world about the novelist; it's a verbal recreation of it, what the semanticists used to call a first-order abstraction. Putting imaginary characters and imaginary plot situations into it jumps us up into a second level of abstraction, the alternative reality that all fiction, however grittily realistic it pretends to be, is delivering.

Even when we look at science fiction -- and we should, about this time, because science fiction is the subject on which I'm best qualified to discourse -- we find ourselves, usually, only one further level of abstraction up from the "realistic" novel, even though science fiction is commonly thought to be fiction about worlds that don't exist.