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MODANIZUMU AND SCIENCE FICTION: NAOKI SANJ?GO’S HENKAKU TANTEI SH?SETSU1 Rebecca Suter, Sydney University rebecca.suter@usyd.edu.au Detective fiction, science fiction, and modernism In his noted work Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale identifies the main distinction between modernism and postmodernism in the reliance on either epistemological or ontological doubt, and goes on to note that the relationship between the two mirrors that between detective and science fiction. While a questioning of the possibility of knowing reality, which he describes as a typical modernist feature, is also present in most detective stories, what he calls ontological doubt, i.e. the postmodernist tendency to interrogate the very existence of reality, is a central element in science fiction: “Science fiction, we might say, is to postmodernism what detective fiction was to modernism: it is the ontological genre par excellence (as the detective story is the epistemological genre par excellence)…” (McHale 16) th 1 This paper was presented to the 17 Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia in Melbourne 1-3 July 2008. It has been peer reviewed via a double blind referee process and appears on the Conference Proceedings Website by the permission of the author who retains copyright. This paper may be downloaded for fair use under the Copyright Act (1954), its later amendments and other relevant legislation. 1 The connection between modernist literature and detective fiction has been the object of several studies, and the journal Shinseinen, that established its reputation as a harbinger of detective fiction while also overtly situ