试题出自试卷《合肥工业大学2008年博士研究生入学考试英语试题》

Many people seem to think that science fiction is typified by the covers of some of the old pulp magazines; the Bug-Eyed Monster embodying every feature that most people find repulsive. This is unfortunate because it demeans and degrades a worthwhile and even important literary endeavor. The basic interest of science fiction lies in the relation between man and his technology and between man and the universe. Science fiction is a literature of change and a literature of the future, and while it would be foolish to claim that science fiction is a major literary genre at this time, the aspects of human life that it considers make it well worth reading and studying—for no other literary form does quite the same things.
The question is: what is science fiction? And the answer must be, unfortunately, that there have been few attempts to consider this question at any length or with much seriousness; it may well be that science fiction will resist any comprehensive definition of its characteristics. To say this, however, does not mean that there are no ways of defining it nor that various facets of its totality cannot be clarified. To begin with, the following definition should be helpful: science fiction is a literary subgenre which postulates a change (for human beings) from conditions as we know them and follow the implications of these changes to a conclusion. Although this definition with necessarily be modified and expanded, and probably changed, in the course of this exploration, it covers much of the basic groundwork and provides a points of departure.
The first point—that science fiction is a literary subgenre—is a very important one, but one which is often overlooked or ignored in most discussions of science fiction. Specifically, science fiction is either a short story or a novel. There are only a few dramas which could be called science fiction, with Karel Capek’s RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots) being the only one that is well known; the body of poetry that might be labeled science fiction is only slightly large. To say that science fiction is a subgenre of prose fiction that is to say that it has all the basic characteristics and serves the same basic functions in much the same way as prose fiction in general—that is, it shares a great deal with all other novels and short stories.
Everything that can be said about prose fiction in general applies to science fiction. Every piece of science fiction, whether short story or novel, must have a narrator, a story, a plot, a setting characters, language, and theme. And like any prose, the themes of science fiction are concerned with interpreting man’s nature and experience in relation to the world around him. Themes in science fiction are constructed and presented in exactly the same ways that themes are dealt with in any other kind of fiction. They are the result of a particular combination of narrator story, plot, character, setting, and language. In short, the reasons for reading and enjoying science fiction, and the ways of studying and analyzing it, are basically the same as they would be for any other story or novel.
1. Science fiction is called a literary subgenre because ______.

2. The view of science fiction encouraged by pulp magazines, while wrong, is nevertheless ______.

3. An appropriate title for the passage would be ______.

4. The author’s definition suggests that all science fiction deals with ______.

5. One implication of the final sentence in the passage is that ______.