Overview

The sublime and the beautiful are two central categories of aesthetics, the study of art's essence and effects on human emotion (see Beauty). Frequently compared to and conflated with sense of wonder, the sublime specifies the profound feelings associated with extreme perception and exalted intellection— whether positive or negative, lovely or terrible.

Survey

Longinus, Edmund Burke, and Immanuel Kant offered three influential definitions of the sublime. Longinus's On the Sublime (c. 50 CE) addressed literary style and rhetoric, arguing that poems produce sudden, singular moments of ekstasis, "elevation" or ecstasy— transport outside the self, a vital if fleeting feeling. Despite this early articulation, the sublime only returned to prominence in the 17th century, Burke and Kant articulated elements of what would be called the romantic sublime, though neither were romantics. Burke's concern was sensation, especially the feeling generated in the mind by strong emotions responding to empirical objects or events; his principal example was terror or danger, which he linked to the concept of powerful feeling. Kant's concern was judgment, but, like romantic philosophers, he associated the sublime with nature; using examples like Mont Blanc, which Kant thought apt since it was really big. He linked physical grandeur to the conceptually grandiose, ideas like "infinity" or "God". But since the infinite cannot be captured by finite systems of language, painting, or music, sublime images "present the unpresentable", as Kant phrased it.
    These definitions agree that the sublime lifts us up, transports us to another state, and such moments of elevation structure large parts of science fiction and fantasy. In Solaris, Stanislaw Lem complies a veritable textbook on the sublime: Kelvin's terror at his dead lover's reappearance, the unpresentable dread of Snow's phi-creature, or Kelvin's dream-like encounter with the alien in the contact scene. The sublime names the moment when, in Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall" (1941) the stars appear or, in Arthur C. Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God" (1953), they vanish. The sublime names Sam's awe at the ethereal beauty of the elf Galadriel in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings; the narrator's epiphany, in Bod Shaw's "Light of Other Days" (1966), when he realizes he has seen the farmer's dead wife through slow glass; the dramatic irony of Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950) (see The Martian Chronicles); and Riddley's encounter with the terrifying gnosis of female divinity in Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (1981).
    The sublime names what William Gibson's Case (in Necromancer) or Bobby (in Mona Lisa Overdrive [1988]) feel by transport into the virtual reality of cyberspace. Indeed, in science fiction the technological sublime has been important since the 19th century. People were inspired by the grandeur and power not only of Mont Blanc and the Grand Canyon but als the railroad and the Brooklyn Bridge. Some natural objects became mechanical miracles: Niagara Falls became a source of the electricity that transformed America. The most current cognate of the technological sublime concerns special effects in film. When done well, they are spectacular, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey; when done poorly, they are ridiculous, like the fatuous attempt to represent "god" in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
    Because Burke emphasized the sublimity produced by terror, there are suitable applications to H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Clive Barker, and other writers of Gothic or horror. Some readers find the more subtle terrors expressed by Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym or Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray evocative of the sublime. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein demonstrates how the sublime follows either the ardor of intellectual breakthrough or the horrific consequences of radical change. Great scale can also delight and terrify, so grandiose projects like Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men or Star Maker capture qualities of the sublime. Sometimes stories of mannered or baroque metaphysical discovery, like David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, are said to produce the sublime, since they align emotion with the higher faculty of cognition. The term may also describe stories where a character or species evolves to a transcendent state, as happens in Clarke's Childhood's End.

Discussion

Two important matters merit additional discussion. First is the distinction between the true sublime and false sublime, which Longinus excoriates: the sentimental, pallid, or bombastic (a phenomenon common in "sci-fi" or sword and sorcery fantasy). The beautiful can be light or comic, delicate or sweet, emotionally moving but finally transient (only skin deep); the sublime— serious, indelibly deep, sometimes even grave— is not produced by the facile clichés or ephemeral thrills of commercial horror films. Instead, the sublime signals a severe disjunction with quotidian experience, of the sort represented when, in Yevgeny Zamiatin's We, the extraordinary power of the human imagination overwhelms D-503.

    The second regards correlations between the sublime and sense of wonder in science fiction or fantasy. Cornel Robu argues that, at least in science fiction, the sublime and sense of wonder designate the same faculty; science fiction's aesthetic pleasures are peculiarly sublime, a specificity matched only by tragedy. Robu thinks the key to understanding science fiction is to link its use of science and novel concepts to the sublime. When speaking of wonder or awe in fantasy, we address an important but not the only feature transporting us to ever higher qualities of contemplation.

Bibliography

Scott Bukatman, "The Artificial Infinite", Annette Kuhn, Ed., Alien Zone II
    London: Verso, 1999, 249-275.
Neil Easterbrook, "The Sublime Simulacra", Critique, 36 (Spring, 1995), 177-194.
Francis Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime, New York: Routledge, 1992.
Nancy Fredricks, "On the Sublime and Beautiful in Shelley's Frankenstein",
    Essays in Literature, 23 (Fall 1996), 178-189.
Steffen H. Hantke, "The Function of the Sublime in Contemporary Horror"
    Foundation, No. 71 (Autumn 1997), 45-63.
Dale J. Nelson, "Lovecraft and the Burkean Sublime",
    Lovecraft Studies, No. 24 (Spring 1991), 2-6.
Cornel Robu, "A Key to Science Fiction", Foundation, No. 42 (Spring 1988), 21-37.
— "'The Sense of Wonder' Is 'Sense Sublime'"
    Science Fiction Research Association Review, No. 211 (May/June 1994), 43-64.
Bart Thurber, "Toward a Technological Sublime", R.E. Myers, Ed., The Intersection of
    Science Fiction and Philosophy, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983, 211-224.

— Neil Easterbrook, in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
     and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders,
     Volume 2, Edited by Gary Westfahl,
     Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 2005, pp. 760-762