Syncretism as a science fiction text's “dimension”: experience of systemic description

The complex phenomenon of syncretism has been a subject ofclose academic scrutiny in various aspects of humanities, social and natural sciences. In this paper, the study of syncretic features of science fiction texts fits into broader sociocultural context and relates to increasing complexityofmodern reality, science and fiction. Understanding a fictional text as a complex and multidimensional integral whole, the authors consider syncretism a typologicallymarked textual “dimension”, produced by a complex system of interrelated and interactive heterogeneous characteristics, fused intoa textual whole to realize the author's intention. To confirm the hypothesis, the authors explore the syncretic science fiction texts of the 20th - 21st centuries which create a unique fictional worldtoproduce a blended model of the traditionally opposedways ofhuman cognition: rational andemotional. Theauthors givea brief overviewofthespecifics ofunderstanding syncretism in different scientific disciplines; offer the definition of syncretism and the methodology of its description; distinguish three types of syncretism (syncretism of reality, of intention, and of language data); analyze heterogeneous textual characteristics as systemic manifestations of syncretism at different levels of textual organization: subject-and- thematic, lexical-and-semantic, and structural-and-syntactic. The mechanism ofcreating a syncretictext isconnected with the deautomatization of a reader's perception and with higher cognitive activity of the interpreter.