The End of Science Fiction

Lisel Mueller’s “The End of Science Fiction” uses unrhymed free verse in four stanzas to elaborate on the first line of the poem: “This is not fantasy, this is our life” (Line 1). The speaker employs the first person plural point of view, implicating both the speaker and the reader with the use of “our” (Line 1) and “We” (Line 2). The speaker creates distance between reality and artifice, however, by framing the human subjects of the poem as “characters” (Line 2). In this stanza, people do not land on the moon; they “invaded” (Line 3) it. Computers, created by humans, function beyond human control, making humans “the gods” (Line 5) that can create and destroy.

In the second stanza, the speaker asserts that physical reality and time are beginning to lose meaning. Time is “stopped at noon” (Line 7), and the next lines suggest that humans have traded their corporeal selves for a more machine-like form: a “lightweight, aluminum” (Line 9) body, “stamped” (Line 10) with a number. What lives in that body—information, images—lives eternally, much like the data many readers input into cell phones and computers via the internet. Humans don’t speak, but “dial our words like Musak” (Line 11); language is not only over-familiar and anodyne, but unintelligible, as though heard “through water” (Line 12).