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Science fiction is a literary genre based on scientific speculation (Suvin, 1979). Works of science fiction are usually full of imaginative ideas relating to the future effects of science on events and activities of human beings. Science fiction has three functions (Westfahl, 1999), narrative could provide “entertainment”, scientific information could furnish a scientific “education” and accounts of new inventions could offer “inspiration” to inventors (Westfahl, 1999, p. 189). Science fiction became prominent in the first half of the twentieth century, with its sweeping social changes and its unveiling threats of modern technology (Aldiss & Wingrove, 1988).

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From the 1940s to the 1950s, science fiction in America developed in maturity and complexity. Science fiction fans call this period “the Golden Age” of science fiction (James, 1994, p. 55). In this age, Roberts (2016) considered that Isaac Asimov “has a good claim to be the century’s most famous science fiction author” (p. 288) who was already sufficiently advanced in modern scientific study. Gunn (2018) highly praised Asimov’s work which “did much to establish science fiction’s thinking about man and machine” (p. 155). Among his large amounts of works, Asimov’s Foundation series is one of the achievements greatly beloved by many science fiction fans (Roberts, 2016). This series had cost Asimov over 40 years to finish. The variations of his writing style are worth exploring. Writing style variations has a wide variety of causes. Authorship and genre can affect texts, as well as historical period, register, theme, and subject matter (David L Hoover, 2017). Many of these variations across collections of text have been the subject of corpus studies. With the help of a corpus tool named the Multi-Dimensional (MD) analysis, this present study aims at exploring Asimov’s writing style in the Foundation series in detail.

1.2 Research Significance

This research is significant for two reasons. Firstly, it can add value to current science fiction analysis with a statistical approach. Hu (2019) argued that most of the previous literary studies mainly adopted the qualitative methods, and he considered that with the assistance of corpus tools, the multi-dimensions and multi-levels of the literary works could be recognized by researchers more objectively with the quantitative method. This indicates the need to combine quantitative and qualitative approaches together to make the fiction analyses. As a result, this research mixed the quantitative method and qualitative method to reveal the salient register features of science fiction.

In addition, this research can provide a statistical way to identify the variations of Asimov’s authorial writing style. Hoover (2007) noted that change must be expected in the style of any author with a career of spanning decades. The stylistic differences between the works of the Foundation series created by Asimov in the 1940s and the 1980s might be huge. It is worthwhile to explore the variations of Asimov’s writing style. In previous analyses of authorial style, Egbert (2012) argued that “most of them rarely considered the full set of 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。