ARTICLE ABSTRACTS
Carol Franko
Working the "In-Between": Kim Stanley Robinson's
Utopian Fiction
Abstract.-- This essay treats four works by Kim Stanley Robinson: three Mars
narratives from the eighties--Icehenge (1984), "Exploring Fossil
Canyon" (1982) and "Green Mars" (1985)--and Pacific Edge (1990),
the ecotopian "conclusion" of his Orange county trilogy. In these science
fictions Robinson writes utopia not so much as an alternative social structure but as an
alternative historical process that emerges from the intersecting histories of subjects.
Like many contemporary feminists, Robinson portrays subjectivity as a largely opaque,
never-finished process that is constituted as much through a need to recognize the
subjectivity and difference of others as through a need for others to recognize one's own
(constantly changing) subjectivity. The author argues that Robinson inscribes a feminist
vision of subjectivity as intersubjectivity in his characterizations, imagery,
plots, and narrative strategies in general, and that this vision of the alterity of the
self and the subjectivity of the other is the enabling condition for his privileged but
alienated protagonists to act and to link their individual histories to utopia as
alternative historical process.
Kenneth Krabbenhoft
Lem as Moral Theologian
Abstract.--In his novels about Contact With Extraterrestrial
Intelligence (CETI), Stanislaw Lem investigates humankind's ability to understand the
nature and actions of alien Others. This essay explores the way Lem uses the language and
concepts of Christian theology to frame the ontological and moral implications of Contact.
Focusing on his most recently translated CETI novel, Fiasco, it argues that his
thinking about the possibility of peaceful Contact has changed significantly over the
years: where early novels like Eden and Solaris hold out the possibility
of communication, or at least stalemate, between humankind and alien, Lem's latest work
describes a violent escalation that begins with incomprehension and fear of the Other, and
ends in exocide. Lem's point seems to be increasingly that science cannot provide
meaningful guidelines for moral action in the face of the unknown. He illustrates this in Fiasco
by assigning the role of skeptic not to a scientist, as in his previous works (including The
Invincible and His Master's Voice), but to a Dominican moral theologian.
Carol McGuirk
NoWhere Man: Towards a Poetics of Post-Utopian Characterization
Abstract.--While topographical and topical (i. e., extrapolative)
considerations remain essential to analysis of "hard" and "soft" sf,
the primacy of topos in critical discourse has resulted in the neglect or misreading of
such visionary, post-utopian writers as Frank Herbert, Theodore Sturgeon and Cordwainer
Smith, whose work (emphasizing symbolic displacement, not topographical orientation) goes
against the grain of sf's utopian heritage. All good fiction in any of the sf subgenres
will be careful partially to defamiliarize the landscape; but visionary sf goes further,
insisting upon the utterly inexplicable or singular nature of the hero's experience
(his/her narrative "place"). Such post-utopian heroes as Paul and Virginia in
Smith's "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard"--a story set at a point in Smith's future
history where "eutopia" has been achieved but rejected--test the limits of the
rational and discover its tragic insufficiency. Smith's stylized language and ruminative
(not neatly extrapolated) narrative pacing show his rejection of the functional narrative
design of both hard and soft sf, where "heroes" serve to flesh out the topos,
serving transparently as incarnations or emblems of an author's intentions. (Two examples
from hard and soft sf respectively are Robert Heinlein's "Man" in The Moon
is a Harsh Mistress and Ursula LeGuin's "Ai"--"I"--in The
Left Hand of Darkness.) Beginning with discussion of a spectrum of sf approaches to
characterization--with hard and soft sf at one extreme and space-opera at the other--this
essay situates the post-utopian heroes of Frank Herbert, Theodore Sturgeon and Cordwainer
Smith at a dramatic and neglected midpoint, arguing that criticism (hampered by its long
obsession with topos) has not yet begun to do justice to sf's visionaries.
[A response by Darko Suvin, and Carol McGuirk's
reply, appear in SFS 65 (March 1995).]
Randy Schroeder
Determinacy, Indeterminacy, and the Romantic in William Gibson
Abstract.--Postmodernisms reject both realism/antirealism and determinism/
indeterminism as western ontological binaries. In this context, William Gibson can be read
for residual modes of thinking: his fiction invokes western ontological terms, in
conjunction with "romantic" patterns of depth and surface. Determinism and
indeterminism form a simple narrative binary. Romantic strains oppose both determinism and
indeterminism by affirming meanings outside the realm of signs, giving rise to a triadic
narrative pattern of opposition and overlap. At the same time, this narrative pattern
reintroduces traditional modes of representation, where "meaning" is finally
located within depth, ambiguity, and metaphor.
Ann Weinstone
Resisting Monsters: Notes on Solaris
Abstract.--Since its origination with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, sf
has served as an oppositional literature to science-as-colonialism, or science as the
quest for control over evolution, nature, and nations. In responding to 19th-century
dialogues about scientific man's mastery of nature and the imperialist thrust to maintain
subject races, Shelley created the first in a line of man-made monster offspring who
successfully resist destruction and servitude. Shelley's daemon resists domination by
refusing oversignification via either/or dualisms such as man/monster, insisting on both
his humanity and his monstrosity. In contemporary sf, resisting monsters, such as cyborgs
and aliens, take up the daemon's demand by refusing totalizing identities and by insisting
on their own multiple subjecthoods and the multiple perspectives these bring. Rheya, from
Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris, is just such a resisting monster. She is a
multiply constructed, ontologically vexed being, manufactured by a sentient, alien Ocean
from an image in the mind of her lover, Kelvin, a male scientist. By confusing boundaries
such as subject/ object, human/nonhuman, and biological entity/machine, Rheya resists
colonization via oversignification and builds her own subjectivity, escaping the bounds
set for her by her Ocean creator, by Kelvin, and by the text.
Donna Glee Williams
The Moons of Le Guin and Heinlein
Abstract.--Strong similarities and sharp contrasts exist between Robert
Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Ursula K. Le Guin's The
Dispossessed. Both books experiment imaginatively with anarchist societies that
develop from colonies of exile, on a moon in Heinlein's book and on a twin planet in Le
Guin's. In both cases, selective immigration, harsh new environment, and enforced
isolation from the decaying parent culture dictate new social patterns. Extrapolating
these new directions in which society might grow allows each author to create a model
based on chosen philosophical principles. For Heinlein, the principles might be described
as "masculine," individualist, libertarian, laissez-faire capitalist, anarchist,
and Christian. For Le Guin, the principles might be described as feminist, communal,
centrally coordinated, anarchist, and Taoist. In spite of plot similarities between the
books, the governing principles chosen by the two writers are often nearly diametrical in
their opposition. The one exception to this is anarchism, which both books seem to
espouse. Fundamentally, though, even this is a difference: Le Guin's anarchism is based on
faith in the cooperative nature of humans, while Heinlein's is based on belief in the
ultimate inability of large groups of humans to cooperate rationally. Like the adversarial
but inescapably linked societies represented by Le Guin and Heinlein, these two books
orbit each other, exerting strong mutual gravitational forces. Neither can be understood
alone.
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