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"I loathe science fiction with its gals and goons, suspense and suspensories" (ADA,117), quoted by Arthur Swanson in “Nabokov's Ada as Science Fiction” 

There are ways of asking questions that open new investigative paths into the work of an author, others lead us onto real or artificial quandaries.

Here is an example of inquiries that lead us into fresh assertions, new parallels and vocabulary but also to real and false quandaries. It begins asking “Can Ada be viewed as science fiction?” and it investigates if  “science…unblended with poetry transforms humans into insects” and turns “’real things’ (facts,logoi) into ‘ghost things’,”  now imposing the author’s own understanding of  “real things” by adding “facts, logoi” inside parenthesis. A.Swanson sees V.Nabokov’s novel as carrying a meaning that may disappear after being discovered. By ignoring the dimension of its “art” he will consider Ada’s survival “in its own concepts”.

"The question here has been "Can Ada be viewed as science fiction?" If the foregoing argument in the affirmative is accepted, other questions must follow: Why does Nabokov make use of science fiction elements? Does he consider science to be, when unblended with poetry, a form of incest which transforms humans into insects, as his insect-scient-nicest -incest anagram indicates? (85/§1:13) Does he consider that science ruins the towers and breaks the bridges it has built precisely because it has found the means to build them, that science turns "real things" (facts, logoi) into "ghost things" (abstractions, fictions, mists, mythoi) precisely because it has achieved the means of discovering "real things?" These questions and others like them must lead to other essays, and those essays in turn to further studies, until the meaning of Ada disappears because it has been discovered, and until the novel, like its inbred agonists, is survived by its own concepts."*
Science Fiction Studies # 5 = Volume 2, Part 1 = March 1975. http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/swanson5art.htm

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* excerpts: “…one has to risk Nabokov's contempt and his charge of stupidity in drawing up a critique to buttress one's opinions that Nabokov subscribes to Van Veen's concepts of time and that Ada may be viewed as science fiction. […] we could label almost all of Nabokov's narrative art as SF; but to do so would be specious and would obscure the point that Nabokov loathes, not SF, with which he clearly has an affinity, but routine SF […] [Ada] does not resemble SF, but it may be studied as being of that genre or kind, especially if the study centers on that SF element which, for the sake of convenience, we may term "eversion." The term would denote a double reversal or a turning-inside-out; and Ada's eversions of time, earth, and sexual gender can be called, respectively, "transtemporality," "transterrestriality," and "transsexuality. […] Broadly speaking, serious science fiction offers analogies to the first man and the last man from the paleontology and teleology of humankind; and it may compound this challenge to academic thinking, as Ada does, by everting the analogies or by subjecting them to other forms of ‘version’ […] In Nabokov's Ada human concepts, notably those of the first and last man and woman, are everted. The sense of this may be that man (the species) creates himself in his own concepts, that he gains an understanding of his own concepts by turning them inside out, that he uncreates himself by this turning-inside-out, and that he is ultimately survived by his own concepts, which, in themselves, are not destroyed by eversion […] The childless Ada and Van are survived by their concepts of their love on earth and in time. Nabokov's conspectus is that each human being is psychologically both male and female and is both physically human and spiritually divine: each human being is a Tiresian solipsism…”

All private editorial communications are read by both co-editors.

All private editorial communications are read by both co-editors.

All private editorial communications are read by both co-editors.

All private editorial communications are read by both co-editors.