A sense of wonder (sometimes jokingly written sensawunda)[1][2] is an intellectual and emotional state frequently invoked in discussions of science fiction.
[3]: 179 Jon Radoff has characterised a sense of wonder as an emotional reaction to the reader suddenly confronting, understanding, or seeing a concept anew in the context of new information.
[4] In the introductory section of his essay 'On the Grotesque in Science Fiction', Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Professor of English, DePauw University, states: The so-called sense of wonder has been considered one of the primary attributes of sf at least since the pulp era.
One of the major writers of the Golden Age, Isaac Asimov, agreed with this association: in 1967 commenting on the changes occurring in SF he wrote, And because today's real life so resembles day-before-yesterday's fantasy, the old-time fans are restless.
[7]: 10 However, the editor and critic David Hartwell sees SF's 'sense of wonder' in more general terms, as "being at the root of the excitement of science fiction".
[9]: 18 Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove's history of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, also invokes Gothic horror and the concept of the sublime.
"[11]: 2 Edward James, in a section of his book entitled 'The Sense of Wonder' says on this point of the origin of the 'sense of wonder' in SF: That the concept of the Sublime, a major aesthetic criterion of the Romantic era, has a close connection with the pleasures derived from reading sf has long been recognized by readers and critics, even if that word has seldom been used.
He explains: A computer is installed by Western technicians in a Tibetan lamasery; its task is in to speed up the compilation of all the possible names of God.
[12]: 106–107 Others have opined that Clarke "has dedicated his career to evoking a "sense of wonder" at the sublime spaces of the universe..."[13]: 5 and cited his novels like Childhood's End and Rendezvous with Rama in that regard.
[5]: 71 Nevertheless, despite this "resistance to critical commentary," the 'sense of wonder' has "a well-established pedigree in art, separated into two related categories of response: the expansive sublime and the intensive grotesque."
Csicsery-Ronay Jr. explains the difference between these two categories as follows: {{quote| The sublime is a response to an imaginative shock, the complex recoil and recuperation of consciousness coping with objects too great to be encompassed.
"[5]: 76 Sharona Ben-Tov in her book The Artificial Paradise: Science Fiction and American Reality[16] explores science-fiction's (SF) 'sense of wonder' from a feminist perspective.
SF has "appropriated the qualities of abundance and harmony from the romance's Earthly paradise, banishing the figure of feminine nature from the man-made, rationalized world ...(22) ...
The SF ideology that Ben-Tov examines is rooted in the scientific revolution, in the changing view of nature—from living, feminine Mother, Nature becomes inert, dead matter.