Aristotle AKA greek science fiction's plotmaster general

[public domain]

Bibliography of Hellenic Science Fiction (from Lucian
to present)
by Nikos Ch. Theodorou and Christos D. Lazos,
Ioannina: Zosimaia Dimosia Kentriki
Bibliothiki Ioanninon 1998. 

Winston, D. Iambulus' Island of the Sun and
Hellenistic Literary Utopias," Science Fiction Studies
3: (1976) 219 227. 

http://uk.cambridge.org/literature/catalogue/0521771765/default.htm

The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western
Narrative
N. J. Lowe

Lowe includes an interesting chapter on "unclassical
plots," mapping alternatives to
the classical plot-economy. Whereas drama and novel
revise the epic paradigm,
some genres resist and reject it: cyclic epics,
narrative hymns, didactic and catalogue
poetry, and lyric and iambic poetry (rejecting
transparency, amplitude, and myth --
an automatic economy -- for authorial intervention,
mere moments of life, and
personal milieux). He mentions further exceptions,
namely fable, "Old Comedy" with
theme-driven and fantastic plots that turn out to be
thought-experiments, mime,
history, oratory, philosophical dialogues (94,
interesting discussion of Platonic
framing), and Callimachus' poetics and their
consequences (myth is dead or
"fossilised"). Despite historiography's admitted
Homeric repertoires, Lowe claims the
historians' texts admit preposterous folktales and
"disingenuous tragedising," while
containing no Muse or endings. His breathless survey
can be contradicted on most of
these points, especially the last. While Herodotus'
closure is unOdyssean, it is
demonstrably Iliadic with its pointing to further
inevitable conflict despite the close of certain
figures' and states' careers.




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