A Brief Review of Themes in Science Fiction Micro-Narratives

Abstract

 Science fiction micro-narratives - flash fiction, microfiction, and other ultra-brief forms - compress speculative “nova” into minimal plots, generating concentrated cognitive and ethical effects. This paper reviews recurrent thematic clusters in SF micro-narratives and explains how extreme brevity reshapes the genre’s classic function of cognitive estrangement. Building on Suvin’s account of SF as a literature of cognitive estrangement, and on microfiction scholarship that theorizes narrative compression, the study argues that micro-scale SF amplifies (1) world-model shocks (the novum as instant premise), (2) ethical boundary cases, (3) temporal discontinuity and “future fragments,” and (4) linguistic/procedural irony.