I wasn't particularly interested in Murata Sayaka until last week, when I read this New Yorker profile on her that spends a good deal of time positioning her work in relation to the super-genre of science fiction. Previously I'd assumed that she was just another Quirky Alienated Japanese Woman (something that I think even Murata plays with, titling her stories things like “Breastfeeding” and “Boyfriends”) that the Anglophone litfic establishment seems to enjoy so much; but Batuman paints a picture of someone far more interesting and far more deranged.
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I thought that Space Viking by H. Beam Piper (1963) was going to be a pulpy, paint-by-numbers space opera. I was wrong, and quite delighted by what I got instead: a contemplative look at the nature of civilizations and the arbitrariness of human social organization.
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A discord interlocutor asked for some help the other day understanding Michael Saler's concept of "ironic imagination," a kind of process that occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries where the forms of modern, scientific literature were used to lend credence to fantastical and supernatural ideas: think books like Doyle's "The Lost World" and Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness", which ape the travelogues of researcher-explorers like Charles Darwin, or the linguistic/historic worldbuilding of Tolkien.

It dawned on me that recently I've seen something similar in the books I've been reading by authors like Lu Qiucha and Kusano Gengen, speculative fiction authors who occasionally include "reference" sections at the end of their stories with lists of books or scientific articles that, one would assume, were influential on the stories themselves.

Before, I just found these lists a bit quirky, but after discovering Saler's theory, it's hard not to read them in the same "ironic" vein. I'm not sure contemporary readers need ironic imagination to pierce the hardened shell of modernist thinking that prevents them from contacting the fantastic (I doubt it was actually necessary a century ago either); in fact, I don't know what the concrete "effect" of thinking about these works in this way even is. But it's a little wild how a theory that I learned about yesterday, through skimming an essay to summarise it for someone else, is now inevitably going to shape the way I read.