Mais ceci arrivera... il y a très longtemps : la complexité des temps verbaux en littérature de science-fiction

Science Fiction stories are often considered as more or less hypothetical accounts concerning the future of our world. For authors to express these worlds to come, one would expect that the verbal forms they should use would be those of the future and/or of the conditional. However, the study of the verbal forms present in Science Fiction texts reveals, that Science Fiction is not so much a genre bent on inventing future worlds, but one which draws its specificity from a particular rhetorical mode which exploits the grammatical conventions of language to create a vision of a future world as seen by a narrator of future times. Science Fiction thus plays with our usual representations of the past, the present and the future thanks to a perfectly controlled usage of verbal forms. The analysis of the verbal forms of contemporary Science Fiction also reveals that this is also the source of the structurally oneiric and satirical force of this literary genre.