How Characters Function as Exploratory Instruments in Science Fiction and Enhance Readers’ Immersion in a Speculative Storyworld

Abstract

Drawing from narratological frameworks like those produced by Marie-Laure Ryan and Mieke Bal, this essay provides strategies for those seeking to immerse readers using perspectivised characters in Science Fiction. An emphasis is placed on how these strategies are applied in speculative storyworlds that feature ontological layering; a creative component which presents such a storyworld will accompany the text to demonstrate. The text experiments with form to represent the layered ontology of the world, contributing to a discourse on simulation and simulacra through an SF lens. The following is a summary for the creative component, The Soul Gauge, a speculative fiction: A museum tour guide enamoured by the past begins to lose track of his own. What has caused this loss of recent history? Perhaps the appearance of a doppelgänger might offer an answer to this, along with all of the problems and questions this double gives rise to. The Soul Gauge’s narrative of perception, deception and reflections (of many kinds) aims to lay out the opportunities and issues that digital simulations might present.