non-mimetic fiction

non-mimetic fiction (uncountable)

1. Fiction not based on reality; fiction set in a fictional fantasy world that does not exist.
   • 1976, Alexei Panshin, Cory Panshin, “The World Beyond the Hill”, in SF in Dimension: A Book of Explorations, →ISBN, page 50:

     In the nineteenth century, the sustained metaphors of sf—non-mimetic fiction—were reconceived with the aid of science, the same science that Arthur Miller quails before today.

   • 2007, Brian Stableford, Heterocosms, →ISBN, page 195:

     Instead of requiring to be persuaded that the heterocosmic construction is as perfect a simulacrum of the primary world as can reasonably be contrived, the readers of non-mimetic fiction require to be persuaded that world within a text is plausible and interesting in spite of its marked differences from the primary world: differences that might pertain, as a set, uniquely to the world within a particular text.

   • 2009, Sunand Tryambak Joshi, Junk Fiction, →ISBN, page 197:

     The first magazine solely devoted to horror was the long-running pulp Weird Tales (1923–54), where Lovecraft and his disciples published much of their work. their very appearance in this magazine has been held as a mark against them, but it was at this juncture that the supernatural (even in the form of the innocuous Christmas ghost story) became generally banished from mainstream periodicals, so that these writers had no other markets to peddle their wares. Whether the existence of the pulp magazines engendered this banishment, or whether changes in literary fashion triggered the scorning of non-mimetic fiction from mainstream magazines, is a question that has not been satisfactorily answered.

• See Thesaurus:speculative fiction

• mimetic fiction

• fantasy, horror, science fiction

• genre fiction