BOOKS IN REVIEW
Chronic Adolescence
David Hartwell. Age
of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction. NY: Walker &:
Co., 1984. 205pp. $15.95
As he explains at the beginning of his book, David Hartwell has set out to provide:
...an outsider's guidebook and road map through the world of science fiction, pointing
out the historical monuments, backyard follies, highways, and backstreets of the SF
community--a tour of main events and sideshows, and a running commentary on why the SF
world is the way it is. I hope it will be particularly useful for the casually curious,
the neophyte reader, and of course the person who knows people in SF and wonders why they
are that way. (p. 4)
Hartwell never explains where that peculiar "of course" comes from, nor why
people in SF are "that way." What he does do, in 12 jazzily titled chapters, is
to comment breezily on everything from the appeal of SF to (moments from) its history,
from definitions of SF to the eccentricities of its fans, and from the variety of works
that can be described as SF to the "fantastic," "big, wonderful,
mind-stretching" ideas that are "made flesh" by its writers (p. 40). In so
doing, he writes carelessly, he contradicts himself shamelessly, and he glories in
mystifying what he might have been expected to clarify. His book can recommend itself only
as an example of how not to write about SF.
The first chapter, entitled "The Golden Age of Science Fiction is Twelve,"
appeared in a slightly different form in a 1982 issue of Top of the News, a
library journal for children's and young adults' librarians. (The reprinted issue, Reflections
on Fantasy and Science Fiction, was reviewed in SFS No. 32.) Here Hartwell discusses
the appeal of SF for adolescents and the indiscriminate tastes of those in the
"omnivorous" phase of their reading:
Publishers adore this phenomenon....One major publisher of SF had been [sic] heard to
remark that his books are supported by twelve-year-olds of all ages....[I]t requires
extreme ignorance and professional incompetence...to be unsuccessful when selling science
fiction to the omnivorous teenage audience. (p. 8)
Though Hartwell moves on to other topics soon enough, he never quite leaves those
12-year-olds behind. His adolescent enthusiasm for the genre never falters, except to
spill over--as in his discussion of John Varley's "The Phantom of Kansas," which
is peppered with "pow!" (p. 98), "of course!" (p. 98), and
"whew!" (p. 102)--into expressions of boyish delight and amazement.
Occasionally Hartwell advances an idea. In the context of a discussion of the
"underground world of SF," he mentions Thomas Pynchon's comment (in The
Crying of Lot 49) that almost everyone is involved in some sort of underground
activity; he then writes: "This kind of activity is so much a part of what everyone
does (without ever seeing the big picture) that if you pull back and look at it all, the
real world seems very different. This is, in one very real sense, what this book is
about" (p. 6).
The real world seems very different from what? What is this book about? Is it
about the "real" world? Is it about how the "real" world looks when
you're involved in any underground activity? An idea that could have been interesting is
virtually incomprehensible. It is never referred to again.
In his chapter on "Worshiping at the Church of Wonder," Hartwell makes much
of C.S. Lewis's An Experiment in Criticism, and especially of the chapter
"On Myth," which distinguishes between "the mass of the unliterary"
and "the lover of myth." Hartwell appears not to have noticed that Lewis's point
here is entirely at odds with his own view of the unliterary, who love SF no
matter how badly it is written.
Ineffective though he himself is in proposing and in discussing ideas, Hartwell thinks
the world of the ideas used by SF writers. Both his second chapter ("I Have a Cosmic
Mind--Now What Do I Do?") and his sixth ("Where Do You Get Those Crazy
Ideas?") explore the ideas expressed in SF stories, providing countless examples of
"crazy," "very old," "overarching," and especially (and
repeatedly) "big" ideas.
The only ideas he really does not want to hear about are any voiced by academics
("oh, sigh," p. 15) who presume to appraise, comment on, and define SF. In the
conclusion to his chapter on "Why 'Science Fiction' is the Wrong and Only Name For
It," Hartwell quotes Suvin's definition of SF (he does not, incidentally, give the
source of the definition; Age of Wonders is innocent of footnotes and
bibliographic material), and comments that:
it works all right for a number of critics, but no one in the field will accept or use
it since it does exclude some treasured conceptions held by most in the field for decades
(it doesn't mention 'science') and besides, it is academic and therefore suspect, if not
downright subversive, maybe even anti-American (Suvin is European and a Marxist critic).
It smacks of the academy, of the mummification of literary energy--dry, dry, dry. (p. 122)
Later on, though, in the penultimate chapter ("Let's Get SF Back in the Gutter
Where It Belongs"), Hartwell defends the academic theoreticians of SF (he
mentions Robert Scholes and Joanna Russ as well as Suvin) "who are doing the real
work of criticism" (p. 181). Bewilderingly, for a man who clearly understands and in
large part shares some of the writers' and fans' aversion to scholarly commentary,
Hartwell concludes this chapter by saying: "The most serious reassessment of science
fiction and the achievement of its writers is still to come" (p. 194).
The most confusing and contradictory sections of the book are those devoted to
Hartwell's own attempts to define SF. At times, following Damon Knight and Norman Spinrad,
he argues for a definition that does not define: "Science Fiction is every SF story
written or to be written, the sum total of science fictional reality past, present and
future--otherwise indefinable" (p. 129). Consistent with this anti-critical and
profoundly anti-intellectual attitude, his view of SF includes: "classic fantasy
(ghost stories, legends, tales); supernatural horror (two categories: classic--from Le
Fanu, Blackwood, and Machen to Stephen King and Rosemary's Baby; and
Lovecraftian...)," as well as "Tolkienesque fantasy," heroic fantasy, space
opera, etc. (pp. 14-15). He therefore has no difficulty at all including some recent works
that appeal to what is "more nearly a fantasy audience" of "young women and
men who will admit to a casual dislike of science and technology" (p. 73). But, as
even his wording here indicates, he also wants to insist that there is a difference
between fantasy and SF. At one point he writes that SF "always deals with ideas, as
opposed to fantasy, which almost always deals with morality, ethics, and the inner life of
characters" (p. 27). Much later he comments that "SF is not, hardly ever, about
science as theory or lab work; it's about technology, applied science, neat gadgets"
(p.117).
Not content merely to contradict himself, he then wallows in his unwillingness and
inability to say anything sensible about what SF is:
The mystery of what science fiction is, is therefore preserved from outsiders. For, you
see, one of the great unarticulated foundations of the SF field, perhaps the most basic at
the deepest level of the field's collective unconscious, is that the wonderful, inchoate
family of science fiction all know what SF is by intuition. Knight and Spinrad know, as
the gorgeous subjectivity of their own definitions orbits around them, that to the field,
further definition is unacceptable--disunifying, exclusive, potentially destructive of the
fragile elitism that bonds chronic reader to chronic reader to editor to writer to
illustrator to the most callow neofan. (p. 120)
The true, dismaying wonder is that this book, which purports to be a guidebook through
"the world of science fiction," glories in its mystification of the very meaning
of the term.
--Linda Leith, John Abbott College
Science-Fiction and Fantasy Film: Shadow and
Substance
George E. Slusser & Eric S. Rabkin, eds.
Shadows of the Magic Lamp: Fantasy and Science Fiction
in Film. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1985. 259pp. $19.95
This volume, part of the continuing "Alternatives" series on SF, fantasy, and
speculative fiction published by Southern Illinois University Press, is a useful addition
to the slim collections of serious critical works on fantasy and SF in film. The editors
selected the essays from papers presented at the Fourth J. Lloyd Eaton Conference (1982)
at the University of California, Riverside (the three previous Eaton Conferences led to
the volumes Bridges to Science Fiction, Bridges to Fantasy, and Coordinates:
Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy). Unlike some conference proceedings, this is not
a grab-bag but instead a unified collection addressing key questions of generic definition
and current directions in SF, fantasy, and horror films. The articles are of almost
uniformly high quality.
The opening essay, Leo Braudy's "Genre and the Resurrection of the Past," is
unfortunately one of the weakest. Braudy's essay is too wide-ranging for a short paper.
His argument, which is neither successfully unified nor wholly convincing, deals with two
subjects: the new generic self-consciousness and the fear of death in films. He is
persuasive in his assertion that the only pure film genre now is "the genre of
self-consciousness about genre" (p. 4) and in his explanation of the function that
formulate elements in film genres have, of providing for audiences the reassurance of
ritual. (Frank McConnell makes a similar point in the closing essay, "Born in Fire:
The Ontology of the Monster," when he claims that films about Frankenstein are
"cult observances, inverted Masses whose conclusion is preordained and all of whose
plot elements are...predictable" [p. 234]. On this point, also see Mark Siegel's
essay on Rocky Horror [SFS no. 22, pp. 305-12].) Yet Braudy's essay is vague and
unconvincing when he asserts that "motifs and themes of horror film" have
permeated films of quite different sorts (p. 10). This is a separate point that deserves
more than the sketchy treatment Braudy gives it here.
The second essay, Bruce Kawin's "Children of the Light," is more detailed and
persuasive than Braudy's in distinguishing between horror and other genres, particularly
between SF as appealing to the Conscious and horror to the Unconscious. Both "promote
growth," according to Kawin; only the horror film does it by showing us "what we
are not comfortable seeing but need to look at anyway" (pp. 23-25). (This notion too,
is echoed in McConnell's concluding essay: "What is monstrosity, after all, if not
the image of ourselves we have searched for and which, having once gazed upon it, we
cannot ever forget?" [p. 232].)
Like Braudy and Kawin, George Slusser approaches large generic questions in an
overambitious essay on "Fantasy, Science Fiction, Mystery, Horror." Like
Braudy, Slusser deals with the breakdown of genres and the way that SF has turned into
horror in such recent films as Alien and Poltergeist. Slusser
distinguishes between two modes he sees operative in fantasy, the
"investigative" and the "sentimental." The "investigative"
tends to question all human forms of perception and ordering (as in Antonioni's Blow-Up),
whereas the "sentimental" wants to place the human back in the center of the
picture (as in Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man). This is an
interesting distinction, except that I wonder if it applies solely to films with elements
of the fantastic or to all films. Slusser's essay also suffers from the worst case of
creeping jargon in the book: "Seen in this matrix of film as medium, the relation
between a dynamic that is transgeneric and aspirations that are transmimetic may come
clear at last" (p. 209). It never does "come clear."
Garrett Stewart's essay on "Videology," by far the longest in the volume, is
filled with new insights into many recent SF films; but it is also flawed, like Slusser's,
by its garbled prose. It is not jargon that defeats Stewart but awkwardness and verbosity:
"in a curious double crossing of temporal and spatial logic wherein the mechanics of
simulation intersect the odd mechanical laws of the rendered phenomenon..." (pp.
159-60). Run that one by me again? Like Slusser, Stewart has novel and interesting ideas,
but one has to slog upstream through tortuous prose to get at them. Stewart discusses
self-reflexive SF movies which contain within themselves images of present or future
cinematic or video technology, screens within screens. "Such screening within the
screen provides the chief site of a film's self-inspection" as well as rendering
"a critique of our present social uses of visual media, our 'videology'" (p.
174). He focuses in detail on dystopian SF films involving the use of video or film images
for surveillance or brainwashing, including Zardoz, A Clockwork Orange, Colossus: The
Forbin Project, Soylent Green, THX-1138, Fahrenheit 451, and The Man Who Fell to
Earth.
Albert J. La Valley's "Traditions of Trickery" is an extremely useful,
clearly written short history of special effects in SF films, all the way from Mèliës to
Lucas and Spielberg. La Valley cites Christian Metz's notion of all cinema as trucage, or
trickery; by that standard, SF films, which rely so much on special effects to make the
impossible seem real, are the film genre most dependent on trickery. He also refers to
Stephen Neale's remark in Genre that recent SF movies are about special effects
more than about anything else--advertisements for the state of the art. Such films (Close
Encounters is a good example) always lead up to an apocalyptic special effects
climax. La Valley distinguishes between two poles of SF film: the tendency towards
documentary realism and the tendency towards fantasy. He concludes by lamenting the
present "yearning for the real to disappear or for the imaginary to become the real.
Recent large-scale SF films move strongly toward fantasy" (p. 157). The constant
upping of the ante in special effects leads only to optimistic big budget films which
largely ignore social criticism and human psychology and hence tend towards pure escapism.
One critic who would disagree with La Valley's conclusions is H. Bruce Franklin, who in
"Don't Look Where We're Going" examines visions of the future in recent SF films
(1970-82) and sees them filled with doom and decay. (A version of his essay appeared in
SFS no. 29.) He finds these films to be either symptomatic of a terrifying decline or
warnings "not to follow the lead of a social structure that either doesn't know where
it's going or sees its own future as hopeless" (p. 85).
Another political critique of SF film is offered by Peter Biskind in "Pods, Blobs,
and Ideology in American Films of the Fifties" (familiar as part of his recent book Seeing
is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties [NY:
Random House, 1983]). Biskind categorizes SF films as "centrist" (either of the
corporate liberal or conservative stripe), right-wing, or left-wing. But some of his
pigeon-holing is too neat: depending upon their political predilections, critics have
chosen to see Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers as either an allegory
about Communist takeover or a fable about 1950s' conformism.
Vivian Sobchack, well known as a critic of American SF film for her The Limits of
Infinity (NY: A.S. Barnes, 1980), examines the sexual politics of the genre in
"The Virginity of Astronauts: Sex and the Science-Fiction Film." Here she argues
that women and biological sexuality are repressed in most American SF films, only to
re-emerge in condensed and displaced images of mutants, aliens, and phallic rockets
penetrating endless space. She attributes this repression to the tendency of American
culture to link "biology to women and technology to male" (p. 57). Thus the
heroes of SF films are often "virginal astronauts": "cool, rational,
competent, unimaginative, male, and sexless" (p. 46).
Other useful if more narrowly focused essays in the volume include two on medieval
romance by E. Jane Burns and Cyndia Clegg, both of whom consider the significance of the
nostalgic trend towards Arthurian romance in such films as John Boorman's Excalibur
as well as the problems of adapting the literary world of the romance to film. Another
problem of adaptation is dealt with in James W. Arnold's detailed essay on the musical
fantasy film The Little Prince. Arnold considers the difficulties inherent in
recreating the whimsy and spiritual concerns of Saint-Exupéry in the medium of film,
which emphasizes visual surfaces and serves technology and science. Nevertheless, he finds
that Stanley Donen's film, while flawed, is true to the style of Saint-Exupéry through
its use of special effects and dance.
Looking at fantasy from the point of view of its creator, Fred Burns discusses the
evolution of his animated film "The Burial of Natty Bumppo," in which he tried
to convey certain ideas about the 19th-century American industrial landscape by conflating
images of machinery and ornamental gardens. The notion seems an extension into art of the
ideas of such intellectuals as Herbert Sussman in Victorians and the Machine,
John Kasson in Civilizing the Machine, and Leo Marx in The Machine in the
Garden.
And in another consideration of the uses of the fantastic, Ben Stoltzfus analyzes
Robbe-Grillet's post-modernist, self-reflexive films as parodic and subversive. Like the
surrealist paintings of Dali, they use the conventions of realism to undermine realism by
"dramatizing the impossible" (p. 36). My objection to Robbe-Grillet's fantasies
is that they so frequently involve torturing and violating naked women. Stoltzfus
interprets the woman's body as "a metaphor for language" (p. 34), but a more
obvious interpretation is that Robbe-Grillet enjoys misogynistic fantasies.
All the essays in Shadows in the Magic Lamp--both those which consider generic
definitions and those which concern themselves with general trends or with a single
filmmaker or film-- show intelligence and insight. The editors have picked them well to
cover the entire field of SF and fantasy film. If I had to single out the most valuable of
a generally fine collection, I would mention in particular those by Kawin, La Valley,
McConnell, Sobchack, and Stewart (despite his prose style). My only complaint about the
anthology, aside from the opaque academic prose in a few articles, is the paucity of
decent illustrations. I recognize that the editors wanted to keep down costs and not
publish yet another SF or fantasy film picture-book, but those film frames which they have
reproduced are so tiny that they are often difficult to decipher. And some articles which
badly needed illustrations--e.g., the ones on Excalibur and The Little Prince--lack
them entirely.
--Andrew Gordon University of Florida,
Gainesville
Morris as Prophet
Peter Stansky. William
Morris. NY: Oxford UP, 1983. [Past Masters Series.] 96pp. $3.95
(paper)
This volume consists of a 90-page outline of Morris's life and work, followed by a
couple of pages of suggestions for further reading. A certain superficiality in dealing so
briefly with a figure as diverse and prodigal as Morris is inevitable--Stansky quotes
Walter Crane's assertion that Morris possessed at least six distinct personalities--but in
general Stansky's is a lively and informative introduction. He shows enthusiasm for
Morris's achievements as craftsman, architect, book designer, and political activist; but
his level of critical engagement drops disconcertingly when he comes to comment on
News from Nowhere and the late prose romances. Having quarried News as a
source for Morris's ideas, Stansky solemnly identifies a "lack of realism in Morris's
vision of utopia" (p. 76). When Guest reaches the end of his journey up-river, he
fades out, Stansky opines, "perhaps because he had never learned to wield a
scythe" (p. 77).
Notwithstanding some hints towards a political reading of the late romances, Stansky
prefers a bluff, commonsense perspective--designed to show in what respects Morris has
proved a true or false prophet--to the textual approaches of modern SF and fantasy
criticism. He concludes that even if Morris failed in his aim of reforming the world, he
has been central in changing our vision of the world, as such phenomena as communes,
preservation societies, environmental groups, and the "present emphasis on the
importance of leisure" (not exactly a Morrisian theme) all testify.
Oddly enough in a book on Morris, there are no illustrations.
--Patrick Parrinder University of Reading
Interpretatively Sound, Theoretically Weak
Natalie M. Rosinsky. Feminist Futures: Contemporary Women's Speculative Fiction.
[Studies in Speculative Fiction, No. 1.] Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984. 147pp.
$24.95
In her introduction Rosinsky explains that she intends to "illustrate the ways in
which contemporary feminisms have significantly influenced the development" of
speculative fiction. She then perfunctorily distinguishes "feminist androgyny"
(the proponents of which argue that women's and men's abilities are potentially equal)
from "gynocentric essentialism" (which holds that there are innate psychological
or spiritual differences between the sexes). While she acknowledges that none of the works
she examines is solely an ideological tract for either feminist viewpoint, she proposes to
analyze each of them in terms of a "continuum of beliefs" lying between those
two poles.
Given the centrality of this distinction to her study, the page or so that Rosinsky
devotes to its exposition is perfectly inadequate. Her two-page long Introduction is
woefully unsatisfactory in other ways too. It contains only the vaguest hint of her book's
claim on our attention: its focus on the forms of certain feminist fictions, not simply on
their themes; and it gives no indication whatsoever of how she will draw the many threads
of her analysis together. Instead of this disservice, she should have explained that Feminist
Futures explores the extent to which various contemporary works of speculative
fiction embody feminist theory in their forms and in their content, and thereby foster
feminist praxis.
The book is divided into four chapters. In the first, which is entitled
"Metamorphosis: The Shaping of Female Identity " Rosinsky discusses Lois Gould's
A Sea Change (1976), Rhoda Lerman's Call Me Ishtar (1973), Angela
Carter's The Passion of New Eve (1977), and June Arnold's Applesauce (1966)
as speculative "re/visions" of the theme of classical metamorphosis. She also
touches on the contemporaneous body and performance art movements and on Virginia Woolf's Orlando,
which Rosinsky argues is the ideological predecessor of the titles she concentrates on,
all of them fictions in which women become men, or vice-versa. Her analysis of these
allows her to demonstrate that their authors "range the continuum of feminist
ideologies--gynocentric essentialism to androgyny--that are currently being debated,
explored and experimented with in contemporary society" (p. 27). More interestingly,
in the process of discussing those contemporary fictions, she has been able to illuminate
some of their formal characteristics: complex, at times unreliable, narration; plot
devices and metaphoric systems that invert "fact" and "fiction"; and
discourse that questions the efficacy of conventional, patriarchal linear writing. These,
she argues, compel the reader to accept responsibility and authority for the final
construction of the text's meaning--an authority comparable to the control that feminists
currently seek to wrest from patriarchal convention and replace in freer women's and men's
hands (p. 28).
Chapter 2, entitled "Questors and Heroines: New Myths, New Models," analyzes
"feminist re/visions of the heroic quest and utopian model of a traveler educated
through experience in a strange land" (p. x). Its focus is on Dorothy Bryant's The
Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You (1971) and Mary Staton's From the Legend of Biel (1975),
works that Rosinsky compares favorably with Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.
Again the most interesting comments are on the writers' formal innovations (Staton is the
boldest in this regard) and on the connection, here established more convincingly than in
the first chapter, between these and the feminist politics of the texts:
By asserting that reading can be a political as well as a philosophical act, involving
the assumption of 'authority' by the conventionally passive individual (reader), Dorothy
Bryant and Mary Staton rebut Ursula K. Le Guin's self-deceptive separation of artistic
truth from feminist politics and poetics. (p. 63)
The third chapter, "The Battle of the Sexes: Things to Come," uses Joanna
Russ's The Female Man (1975), Sally Miller Gearhart's The Wanderground:
Stories of the Hill Women (1978), and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)
as examples of how different feminist ideologies affect theme and form. Rosinsky sees the
three fictions as being alike in their questioning, open-ended depiction of the future and
its possibilities for women's and men's non-sexist co-existence. She also sees them as
sharing a non-combative, humorous sensibility. In ideological terms, though, she argues
that Russ and Piercy affirm the androgynous concept of human potentiality, while Gearhart
emphasizes essential psychological differences between the sexes:
Despite these ideological differences, though, these authors do employ similar literary
techniques, including dialectical and associative narrative structures, atypically heroic
or multiple protagonists, and embedded discourse which emphasizes their particular
didactic aims both incrementally and contrapuntally. Demanding active reader involvement
to construct textual meaning, these techniques challenge the reader's traditional
passivity. In this encouragement of audience grass roots activism,' the narrative forms
(as well as the context) of these texts embody feminist theory and foster feminist praxis.
(p. 104)
In a short final chapter, "The Futures of Feminist Discourse," Rosinsky draws
from comments such as the foregoing some conclusions which seriously undermine her central
argument. While claiming that her study of diverse speculative fictions confirms her
perception of feminist androgyny as a literary force as well as a philosophical
construct, she also admits that she has found some ways in which this viewpoint and its
seeming ideological opposite, gynocentric essentialism, are allied through common
feminist praxis. Since her study has been based on precisely the distinction between these
two feminist viewpoints, her perceptions of unforeseen connections between them surely
should have prompted her to revise what she says in earlier sections.
The impression that she is finally confused about the ideological distinctions she is
working with is soon confirmed. Her statement that "the opposition of gynocentric
essentialism to feminist androgyny is, after all, yet another inherently misleading
symbolic model" (p. 107) does not sort well with the thesis (sketchily posed in her
Introduction) underlying much of the analysis in her three main chapters. A similar
contradiction appears in the concluding chapter itself. There Rosinsky avers that each of
the authors discussed, "[r]egardless of the particular feminist ideology she
advocates," employs narrative techniques that actively involve the reader in the
de/construction of textual meaning. Yet two pages later, Rosinsky is again writing about
what "fundamentally distinguishes feminist androgyny from gynocentric
essentialism":
the latter ideology, which merely inverts the ontological premises of androcentric
essentialism, remains a concept which still can 'be understood in terms of the previous
regime.' It is equally essentialist and still defines 'woman' in relationship to
biological 'man.' (p. 109)
This final chapter is in its own way as lame and unsatisfactory as the Introduction.
Both suffer dramatically in comparison with the three thorough and well-argued chapters
that form the mainstay of Feminist Futures. Even in those three, however, the
weakness of her theoretical and historical understanding of the genre comes through.
Though she has a nodding acquaintance with some scholarly criticism, she is not
particularly concerned to distinguish the works of SF from the fantasies that she also
discusses. Nor is she able to compare the formal innovations of the contemporary feminist
writers she is interested in with those of any other writers of SF. At crucial junctures,
moreover, she is, as I have indicated, disturbingly unsure of the implications of her
own arguments. At her best, though, Rosinsky is a good reader of texts, and she has
succeeded in illuminating feminist politics and poetics in some works of contemporary
speculative fiction.
--Linda Leith John Abbott College
A Descent into Respectability?
Frederick Andrew Lerner. Modern Science Fiction and the American Literary Community.
Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1985. xviii + 325pp. $26.00
The subject matter of this book is most succinctly expressed by the title of the
Library Science dissertation from which it derives: "Modern Science Fiction and Its
Reception by the American Literary and Educational Communities, 1926-1970." Although
the book extends coverage to 1976 and expands the number of writers taken account of from
94 to 102, it seems unlikely that this affected Lerner's essential finding. What one
learns from his exhaustively researched account (almost half of the book consists of
reference material: "Chapter Notes," "Sources Consulted," "Book
Reviews Examined," "Articles and Stories Examined") is what one might
expect: slowly but surely SF has gained in status and acceptability. In other words, this
is a dissertation that might more appropriately have been boiled down into an article.
As it is, we are treated to the recovering of a lot of familiar ground. A chapter
entitled "What is Modern Science Fiction?" is followed by five others describing
the development of modern SF in the years of its birth (1926-45), during the atomic age
(1945-50), during a period of ideological sensitivity (1950-57), after Sputnik (1957-69),
and since Apollo (1969-76). Perhaps surprisingly, the last two scientific and
technological achievements seem to have had little positive influence on the reception of
SF.
Four more chapters detail the fortunes of SF at the hands of the scholars, in the
classroom, in the library, in relation to futurology; and these culminate in a fifth, a
redundant summarizing chapter entitled (in imitation of a statement made by Paul A.
Carter) "The Descent into Respectability." Unfortunately, Lerner's ploddingly
predictable presentation serves unwittingly to underline the element of
"descent." This is not to deny that Lerner does indeed marshal a good deal of
useful out-of-the-way information, particularly in the chapter on "Science Fiction in
the Library," where genuine new ground is broken. However, in a study notable for its
scrupulous documentary scaffolding and its general absence of typos, the Englishman Arthur
C. Clarke might be surprised to find himself included among "prolific American
science fiction writers" (p. 123).
--David Ketterer Concordia University
One Man's Canon
David Pringle. Science
Fiction, the 100 Best Novels: An English-Language Selection, 1949-1984. Foreword
by Michael Moorcock. London: Xanadu Publications, 1984. 224pp. £3.95
David Pringle's credentials for a work of this kind are more than acceptable. He is
editor of the British SF magazine, Interzone, and of the critical journal, Foundation.
In addition, he is the compiler of J.G. Ballard: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (Boston:
G.K. Hall, 1984).
The structure of this present work is reassuringly straightforward: Pringle introduces
it with a ten-page essay which explains and qualifies his own ideas about what constitutes
SF ("Science fiction is a form of fantastic fiction which exploits the imaginative
perspectives of modern science" [p. 9]), provides the reader with a thumbnail history
of the genre, and concludes with a defense of his nominees for the 100 best SF novels
written in English over the past 35 years. After listing a brief bibliography of secondary
readings, Pringle proceeds to treat each of his 100 choices to a two-page discussion,
including information about first and current editions. The bibliography is useful and
informative, except for its neglect of the American journal, Extrapolation. Each
of the brief analyses is clear and informed; together they build up a broad context for SF
into which each individual work can be placed.
It is obvious that Pringle's notions about what SF is and is not will have an
unavoidable effect upon what is and is not included in his canon. In the final analysis,
his last line of defense is the tautological "I know that science fiction is not a
'thing,' but I must assert that sf is these hundred books, and these hundred books are sf" (p. 17). While this is reminiscent of Norman Spinrad's comment that "science
fiction is anything published as science fiction,'' Pringle does not hesitate to include
works which do not fall into Spinrad's category, such as William Burroughs's Nova
Express (1954), J.G. Ballard's Crash (1973), and John Calvin Batchelor's The
Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica (1983--published by Penguin Books as
part of its "Contemporary American Fiction" series: no mention of SF here). Thus
there will be some inevitable controversy over the admissibility of certain entries in
Pringle's book--which is part of the pleasure of such works.
Another pleasure which results from a work like this is the controversy over which
novels really deserve to be called the best. The first reaction of most readers will be to
test their knowledge of the novels listed and then to get down to the serious business of
purely subjective agreement and disagreement. Pringle's British background is reflected in
the compilation of his canon. A North American undertaking the same task would probably
not have included two novels by John Wyndham or four by J.G. Ballard, nor are many US or
Canadian readers familiar with the stylish works of Angela Carter, whose wonderful Heroes
and Villains (1969) is also mentioned. Pringle's British leanings do not prevent him
from recognizing the importance of Bernard Wolfe's Limbo (1952), an American work
which he rightly claims as a neglected masterpiece. On the other hand, it must be arrant
subjectivity which drives him to include no less than six novels by "the late great
Philip Kindred Dick" (p. 75). Between them, Ballard and Dick account for ten percent
of Pringle's canon.
The severest limitations under which Pringle's work labors are the restrictions he has
himself imposed upon it. While his focus upon recently published works is a legitimate
one, his decision to confine himself to novels, and to novels published only in English,
has had several unfortunate side effects. In the first place, it excludes such important
writers as Harlan Ellison and James Tiptree, Jr, whose best work has appeared in
short stories. Second, it reflects an overwhelmingly white, male, middle-class authorship, for
much the same reasons. Third, there is no recognition of the vast amount of good SF
written in languages other than English. Moorcock does call attention in his foreword to
the first two points, but recognition of such limitations does not overcome them.
--Veronica Hollinger Concordia University
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