Scientific Metafiction and Postmodernism

This paper introduces the concept of scientific metafiction, developing it in relation to historiographic metafiction, which questions the truth of historical knowledge and highlights similarities with fiction. Scientific metafiction accordingly is marked by a refusal of the view that only science has a truth claim and by comparing science and fiction as discourses. Thomas Pynchon's novels are exemplary historiographic metafictions, and I argue that the growing importance of science and scientific metafiction is crucial to the development of the ontological dominant that, according to Brian McHale, characterises postmodernist fiction. Focusing on three novels from the 1970s to the twenty-first century, I demonstrate that the concept of scientific metafiction and its negotiation of concerns also discussed in science studies are central to Pynchon's work and crucial to its move beyond the epistemological questioning of historiographic metafiction and towards raising ontological concerns