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that makes it possible), let me quote a typical SF situation, instantiated by many novelsand recently borrowed by a movie, Back to the Future.
Suppose a story where a narrative character (let us call him Tom1) travels into the future, where he arrives as Tom2, and then travels backward in time, coming back to the present as Tom3, ten minutes before his former departure. Here Tom3 can meet Tom1, who is on the verge of leaving. At this point Tom3 travels again to the future, arrives there as Tom4 a few minutes after the former arrival of Tom2, and meets him.
If we transform the story into a visual diagram (figure 4.3), it will be similar to a Penrose drawing. It is impossible to accept a situation where the same character splits into four different Toms. But in the course of the narrative discourse the contradiction disappears because of a simple linguistic trick: the Tom who says "I" is always the one with the higher exponent. When this story becomes a movietemporally organized like the verbal talewe always see the situation from the point of view of the "higher" Tom. Only through such linguistic and cinematic machinery does a text partially conceal the conditions of its referential impossibility.
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Figure 4.3
Self-disclosing metafiction shows how impossible worlds are impossible. SF, on the contrary, sets up impossible worlds that give the illusion of being conceivable.
7. Cooperative Good Will
Up to now, flexibility, and superficiality looked like cooperative qualities required for setting up scarcely credible states of affairs. However,

 
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