Style and functions of secondary culture texts in sci-fi prose (case study on “Rekviem po pilotu” by A. Lyah and “Ya, Hobo: Vremena smerti” by S. Zharkovsky)

The article is devoted to the typical for sci-fi prose phenomenon of the secondary culture text. Such texts play the important role in creating alternative worlds in fiction, maintaining a balance between plausibility and estrangement and revealing the artistic content. Secondary culture texts are examined using such methods as stylistic and functional analysis, as well as the analysis of text types, which makes it possible to identify the features of the transformation of speech genres under the influence of the author’s intention and characteristics of the sci-fi genre and language means by which the transformation is carried out. Although all secondary culture texts are means of convincing the reader of the plausibility of the depicted worlds, it is important to determine the role of each such text in the narrative. Thus, the analysis of these texts is carried out at two levels - the level of the novel as a whole and the level of the individual secondary culture texts - which allows to reveal both their significance in the structure of the novel and the functions of individual texts that can serve to present the exposition, characterize and evaluate characters and their actions. Particular attention is paid to the problem of the relationship between the concepts of “secondary culture text” and “secondary text”. The author notes that the secondary culture texts are in a complex interaction with the culture of the fictional world and with the culture of the real one, while they are often intended to be perceived as “real” in the depicted world, and the adequate reception of many of them depends on the communicative competence of the reader, not the philological context. All this allows separating these concepts in the analysis of individual secondary culture texts. In the novels “Rekviem po pilotu” by A. Lyah and “Ya, Hobo: Vremena smerti” by S. Zharkovsky, secondary culture texts are used by the authors in different ways, but the study shows that they play an important role in creating the aesthetic effect of the novels and reveal the thematically relevant content.