Science Fiction Studies

A room of one's own, or a bloody chamber? The new role model for women may seem to deny them the literary gift of privacy. But it is sad that so gifted a writer as Angela Carter, who died of cancer in February at the early age of fifty-one, will not be continuing to explore and define her new worlds in fiction.... [T]hey say that wise children know their fathers, and she certainly knew hers, while rejecting any concept of patriarchy. Jane Austen and the Virginia Woolf of Orlando and The Waves would have recognized her as one of themselves and been greatly interested by her books, although they might have missed in them the privacy ... the more secret style of independence, which they valued as much as good writing, and which is the supreme gift to us of their novels. Carter's achievement shows us how a certain style of good writing has politicized itself today, constituting itself as the literary branch of militant orthodoxy. (11)

Bayley's concluding comments are patronizing as a description of Angela Carter, but they may apply to some of the Carter critics under review here.

The question remains: how might criticism of Carter constitute itself beyond an orthodox litany of themes suitable for the correct classroom? For one thing, criticism could cherish equally Carter's rebellion and her constructiveness, acknowledging her scandalous heterodoxy, which is on ample display in the one true dazzler among these volumes. Shaking a Leg, a new collection of the author's reviews and occasional writings, ranges from theory (reviews of Barthes, Bataille) to travel (some brilliant meditations on Japan), and from cooking and popular fashion to "The Art of Horrorzines." She was equally at home with French New Wave cinema (essays on Godard and Bertolucci) and British New Wave sf (reviews of Ballard and Moorcock).

"What can put you off Grace Paley's stories," Carter says in a 1980 review of Paley's The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) reprinted in Shaking a Leg, "is their charm. [Yet] ... the charm turns out to be a stalking horse, a method of persuasion, the self-conscious defensive/protective mechanism characteristic of all exploited groups, a composite of Jewish charm, Black charm, Irish charm, Hispanic charm, female charm. It is part of the apparatus of the tragic sense of life" (516-519). In that leap that so few writers would make--that swift progression from sentimental "charm" to gender/ethnic identity-politics to "the apparatus of the tragic sense of life"--we see Carter's customary acrobatic swoop from the surface (charm) to the heights (the tragic sense). When her critics can themselves convey or perhaps to some degree acquire this risky talent for flying with superb confidence across categories, we may finally get a body of scholarship worthy of Angela Carter.

WORKS CITED

Bayley, John. "Fighting for the Crown." New York Review of Books (April 23, 1992): 9-11.

Behn, Aphra. "The Rover" and Other Plays, ed. Jane Spencer. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.

Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1947.

McGuirk, Carol. "Drabble to Carter: Fiction by Women, 1962-1992." In The Columbia History of the British Novel, eds. John Richetti et al. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 939-960.

Rushdie, Salman. "Angela Carter, 1940-92: A Very Good Wizard, a Very Dear Friend." New York Times Book Review (March 8, 1992): 5.

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Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.

The Global Province

James Gunn, ed. Around the World: The Road to Science Fiction, Volume 6. White Wolf (800-454-9653), 1998. 656 pp. $14.99 paper.

Franz Rottensteiner, ed. View from Another Shore: European Science Fiction. Liverpool UP (fax: 0151-794-2235), 1998. xvi + 256 pp. ,22.50 cloth; ,11.95 paper.

In sf, as in US culture generally, the 1970s and early 1980s were a period of heroic, aggressive internationalism. The Baby Boom had reached college, and the Civil Rights and anti-war movements inspired in them an almost romantic solidarity with other cultures. Publishers felt that not only European but Latin American and even Japanese and African literature had markets. In sf, too, there was a mini-translation boom. Macmillan was committed to publishing several Soviet sf novels, and it seemed that the whole Strugatsky oeuvre might soon appear in English. Seabury, and later Avon, published Lem as though he were the Polish Borges. As the new branch of sophisticated sf inaugurated by the British New Wave became established in the US, it appeared that literary sf from Europe and the USSR would come to share in its glory.

But even then there were troubling lacunae. Where were Japanese and Chinese sf, which we knew existed but seldom saw in translation? Was there no sf in the Third World? Anthologies of Japanese and Chinese sf did finally appear in English, but they are the last such gatherings listed by James Gunn in his introduction to the new global sf volume of The Road to Science Fiction. The past ten years have seen a drastic decline in US publication of "foreign" sf, and looking back from 1989, there hadn't actually been that much non-Anglo sf published in English after all. Aside from the Strugatskys, Lem, and the Macmillan Soviets, what was the tally? In terms of novels (by then the main medium for sf), a few by Gérard Klein, another few by Michel Jeury and Pierre Boulle and Robert Merle, a handful by Wolfgang Jeschke and Herbert Franke, one by Sakyo Komatsu (abridged), Kobo Abé's Inter Ice Age 4 (1959; US 1970), and perhaps a few others. Some classics were re-translated (Verne, Čapek, Zamyatin, Bulgakov) or appeared for the first time from university presses (Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Alexander Bogdanov). But that was it.

The state of the art in 1999 is wretched. Almost all the international anthologies and stand-alone novels are out of print and/or inaccessible. Gunn's volume 6 of The Road to Science Fiction, entitled Around the World, and Franz Rottensteiner's reissue of View from Another Shore, originally published in 1973, are recent attempts to keep non-Anglo voices alive in English. Each book has its virtues, but ultimately each merely underscores how completely Anglo sf has consolidated its dominance over the genre.

Gunn's anthology is an interesting addition to his big project of collecting exemplary stories from every period, and now every major region, of sf. Its superlatively classy cover displays a list of some of the most illustrious writers ever associated with sf: Abé, Borges, Calvino, Čapek, Carlos Fuentes, E.T.A. Hoffman (sic), Kafka, Lem, García Márquez, the Strugatskys, Verne, Ye Yonglie. The selections inside are arranged according to regions: France (Verne, Albert Robida, J.-H. Rosny Aîné, Boris Vian, Philippe Curval, and Gérard Klein, with Elisabeth Vonarburg representing Québec), Germany (Hoffmann, Kurd Lasswitz, Kafka, Herbert W. Franke, Wolfgang Jeschke, Erik Simon), Scandinavia and Finland (Svend Åge Madsen, Sam J. Lundwall), Eastern Europe (Capek, Lem, Josef Nesvadba, Alexandr Kramer, Ovid S. Crohmalniceanu), Russia (the Strugatskys, Kirill Bulychev), Italy (Dino Buzzati, Tommaso Landolfi, Italo Calvino), Spain and Latin America (Teresa Inglés, Borges, García Márquez, Fuentes), India (Laxman Londhe), China (Zheng Wenguang, Ye Yonglie), and Japan (Abé, Komatsu, Tetsu Yano)--with an appended biographical mini-essay by Elisabeth Vonarburg. Obviously, it is an impressive gathering, but the ultimate effect is of a well-intentioned mélange of pre-, proto-, para-, and pulp sf that has little theoretical or practical coherence.

But what should the purpose of an anthology of "international sf" be? Should it show that other, more literary traditions produce works of science fictional beauty? Should it show that "foreign" writers write sf distinctive of their language-cultures? Should it show that sf is a global phenomenon, that the pulp formulae travel everywhere, and that Sturgeon's Law is universal? How should one define "international sf" when the most popular and prolific forms come from a single culture, and the rest of the globe constitutes the periphery?

Whatever criterion an editor might use, the sad fact is that non-Anglo sf does not sell. Gunn offers cogent reasons for this commercial failure; the main one, curiously enough, cuts across his gallant intention "to recognize other traditions and, by bringing them together into a kind of gestalt of foreign SF, to provide a corrective to the illusion that all SF is American" (10). The problem is that Gunn's overall conception of the field seems almost calculated to justify true fans' distaste for "foreign" sf, since the "truth" is it's not really sf at all.

In every volume of The Road to Science Fiction, Gunn offers a most elegant definition of the genre. Sf for him "deals with the effects of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or to distant places. It often concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or the community; often civilization or the race itself is in danger" (16). For sf the world is knowable; human existence is an evolutionary outcome; and, armed with that knowledge, human beings are capable of influencing their further evolution. These qualities explain, to Gunn's mind, the great aesthetic and cognitive differences between sf and "mainstream" literature--or, as it eventually becomes, literature itself. "Mainstream" literature is preoccupied with the present, and concentrates on social interaction as if "the only important ... aspect of existence is the way in which people relate to each other" (20). In the course of his argument, Gunn imperceptibly elides his definition of sf with "American" sf--with its characteristic pragmatism and problem-solving--and his sketch of "mainstream" literature with European, and ultimately all non-Anglo, sf. The latter are "other" than US core-sf because they have been tied to the "literary" tradition rather than the pulp tradition that constitutes the distinctive formative environment of US sf. Non-US literature of the "serious" kind was congenial to the fantastic of all types, even sf, and so sf in more traditional literary cultures could not free itself from the constraints of archaic values that dominated traditional literature. Gunn cites good historical reasons for this (uneven development, the social fallout of the great wars, etc.)--but the fact remains that sf outside the US has been unable to develop those qualities that define "real" sf. It is more prone to social concreteness, to present-centeredness, to stylistic affectation reflecting psychological or literary complexity, and to a fatalism in the face of history. Though Gunn does not want to state it, the conclusion is clear: the American sf fan cannot enjoy that "foreign stuff" because it isn't the real thing.

And of course he may be right. Most of his selections certainly do nothing to refute this idea. By choosing to organize the stories exclusively by region, Gunn avoids confronting the fact that most of his examples require a broader definition of sf--as, say, a class of fantasy writing that uses scientific ideas and fictive inventions for a myriad of metaphorical purposes, and of which the problem-solving heroism of the American pulps and Soviet socialist-futurism is a mere subset. Gunn could have chosen only sf texts consistent with his theory; instead, he collects several fine examples of literary fantasy that clearly elude narrow generic boundaries. Some writers, such as Borges, García Márquez, Kafka, Abé, and even Calvino, might be considered writers of anti-sf--rational fantasists who reject and deprecate the moral and aesthetic conventions of Gunn's problem-solving genre. There are also some examples of inventive, original sf by anyone's definition (such as Curval's "An Alien Behind the Wine Bottle," Jeschke's "Loitering at Death's Door," and Tetsu Yano's lovely, lyrical "The Legend of the Paper Spaceship"). Organizing by regions and countries is merely a convenience--Gunn does not consider how the languages of national literatures might affect sf, and literatures for him run together as a sort of monolithic pre-scientific institution. So the only thing that national divisions can reflect in his scheme is a vague sense of "history." Accordingly, the historical examples--Verne, Robida, Lasswitz, Rosny Aîné, Hoffmann--might be useful, but only if they are placed specifically in the context of historical antecedents of sf. Moreover, such a collection would have to include more texts of obvious historical (as opposed to literary) significance: e.g., works by Konstantin Tsiolkovksy, Alexander Bogdanov, Alexei Tolstoy, Maurice Renard, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Imre Madách, etc.

RTSF 6 does not purport to be a purely historical anthology, nor even a theoretically consistent one. Still, "gestalts" don't just happen; they emerge from history and theory. As a result, Gunn's anthology is a grab bag of texts with different relations to both sf and "the world," selected to fill certain niches--nation, generic history, literary status--that do not really complement one another. In the end, Gunn never does provide a rationale for why these stories, and not others, should have been included.

Perhaps even more distressing than this theoretical confusion, the bibliographic apparatus (limited to an "Acknowledgments" page) is a mess. Sometimes translation dates are given, but not original publication dates; sometimes original publication venues are given, sometimes not; publication sites are absent altogether. Occasionally some of this information is supplied in the introductory comments before each selection, more usually not. In some cases, no information at all is provided about the translations (e.g., the selections from Verne, Robida, and Kafka). The edition from which Gunn has culled the translation of Hoffmann's "The Sandman" is given, but not the name of the translator. Because of this bibliographic chaos, it is also unclear how many of the selections were translated specifically for this volume. I can guess that all the entries "reprinted by permission of the author" and lacking English publication dates were commissioned (but what about Kafka's "The Hunter Gracchus," which is not listed at all in the "Acknowledgments"? Could Gunn have actually commissioned a new translation of this canonical Kafka story without mentioning it?). Another clue is that these particular stories (by Franke, Jeschke, Simon, Madsen, Nesvadba, Crohmalniceanu, and, yes, Kafka) were all "adapted by James Gunn"--though there is no explanation of what this "adaptation" entailed.

Elisabeth Vonarburg's short biographical appendix, "US, SF and Us," details her creative journey from an initial exposure to sf via the French Fleuve Noir series, through her increasingly fraught relationship with Anglo sf, complicated by her emigration to Québec. It is a rich and interesting story, but Vonarburg's ideas are surprisingly confused. For Vonarburg, sf, like science itself, "transcends cultural barriers"--partly because these barriers are breaking down under global Americanization, but also because the genre has a universal thesaurus of concerns and themes. She rejects the notion that authors or works of sf can have "cultural specificity" (654); yet on the next page, she speaks of the "fundamental originality and uniqueness of each writer's voice in her or his own language" (655). Language--how different languages and literary norms can define the boundaries of what a culture is used to imagining, and the challenge of making sense against those norms--is the factor that does not come up in Gunn's speculations, or for that matter in Vonarburg's. She does make it clear that all non-Anglo sf writers must adopt a complex attitude, working both with and against the dominant Anglo tradition. Yet she is very sketchy about how French and French-Canadian writers specifically work within fraught cultural traditions. The main problem, it seems to me, in Gunn's--and the US sf establishment's--approach to the question of non-Anglo sf is that they do not think very deeply about language and how it may affect thought. This is a perfectly understandable (if lamentable) attitude on the part of the new lingua franca, Satellite English, as it drives other tongues to extinction.

Franz Rottensteiner is well aware of this anglophone juggernaut. In his revised introduction to an old collection, Rottensteiner updates the condition of European sf since the fall of the Soviet order. The once-dignified (and subsidized) Eastern European alternatives to US models have been swept away by the tidal wave of inexpensive translations of American pulps. Publishers there (as here) know that there is no money in the native product, and the object of desire is whatever works in the US market. But if Rottensteiner's goal in 1999 is the same as it was in 1973 when this anthology originally appeared--i.e., to demonstrate the quality and vitality of European alternative-sf--it is poorly served indeed by republishing essentially the same selection of stories as in the original edition. Only a single story has been added, Wolfgang Jeschke's 1986 tale "The Land of Osiris"--significantly, one of the volume's finest selections. What other recent gems did Rottensteiner see fit not to include? It makes little sense that one of the leading editors and anthologists of European sf should not have found equally good or better stories written during the past twenty-five years. Far from demonstrating vitality, the book seems to say that European sf remains frozen in a sort of Golden Age. The stories are generally of much higher quality than those in Gunn's volume, but they do not represent a living tradition of European sf.

More bothersome than the apparent nonchalance of Rottensteiner's (non-) selection of stories is his introduction. After providing a solid explanation of sf's changed social situation in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism, the piece degenerates into a nearly ad hominem attack on Stanislaw Lem. The 1973 introduction had praised Lem highly (Rottensteiner was Lem's agent at the time for the anglophone regions), but now this praise has been replaced by scorn, perhaps reflecting the bitter controversy that has divided the two men in recent years. Rottensteiner blasts Lem on so many fronts that a reader coming to the subject for the first time would be simply clueless. What's the sense of expending several valuable pages trashing a writer whose reputation as a major artist few can contest, a reputation few have done more to build than Rottensteiner himself? Nothing in Lem's art has changed, no matter how grave his personal flaws may be, or how misanthropic and misogynistic his world-view. Nor does it make much sense to offer the Strugatskys as virtuous countermodels--especially since there are no Strugatsky stories in the collection.

Even with its rancorous introduction, its limited scope, and its anachronistic selections, View from Another Shore is still a better read than Gunn's anthology; but it does nothing to establish whether current European sf is a vital and evolving body of literature. Indeed, both anthologies show us only this: that there was once a branch of scientific-rational fantasy that national writers pursued in their own way, without anxiety about the power of American sf to control the world's science-fictional imagination as its political economy dominates the nations. But the real question of the moment is: how are the world's scientific fantasists responding to metropolitan American sf (diffused through the multinational film industry in the "international style" of sf-spectacle production) as it saturates once-national public cultures? What we really need to know is the state of the art in the global provinces, right now. On this crucial question, Gunn and Rottensteiner are mum.

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David N. Samuelson

Frankenstein Unwound

Jon Turney. Frankenstein's Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture. Yale UP (203-432-0964), 1998. x + 276 pp. $30 cloth.

David J. Skal. Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture. Norton (212-354-5500), 1998. 358 pp. $29.95 cloth.

History has found Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Mary Shelley's overdetermined opus, foresightful in ways the author could never have imagined. She could not, of course, have known what biological researchers would invent or discover in centuries to follow; indeed, we have no reason to believe she intended to "predict" anything at all, other than her fear that Western scientists would ignore the consequences of their quest for knowledge. The impact of her cautionary tale is so widespread, however, that its elements are immediately recognized in and beyond literature and film; allusions to her creatures (both the scientist and his monster) prompt institutional guardians of biology to take reasonable precautions against such risks as can be anticipated. Biology, innately more personal than physics, is also more subject to fantasies of panacea and disaster. Even today, the fear of Frankenstein provides a psychological obstacle to be overcome by public relations experts, as we see once again in the international trade flap over genetically engineered foodstuffs.

These two volumes of "cultural criticism" detail the propagation of the Frankenstein myth over two centuries of popular culture. Jon Turney, former science editor of the Times Education Supplement and now senior lecturer in science communication at University College London, examines film, fiction, and advertisements as well as news stories in the mass media. Also using some literary sf, David J. Skal draws his evidence more from film and electronic media. Both books address the overarching "sf imagination" that shapes the popular reception of scientific breakthroughs and technological developments.

Both authors connect sf to the human fascination with biomedical innovations of varying plausibility, and both books address commercialization and hype--selling if not keeping promises. Both follow a rough chronological order, suggesting development if not evolution of themes that mix and match. Turney's task is the more sober one, charting a trail of broken dreams in which sf sometimes prompts and usually memorializes "real-world" events. Skal's more garrulous book includes gossip about the movie business, its technology, its makers, and its appetite for what sells, tied to journalistic and social science reports. For him, the Frankenstein complex covers all kinds of "mad science"--both real and imaginary research of a threatening nature. Differing in argumentative method and overall credibility, the two books complement each other, showing the wide range and reach of science-fictional concepts.

Frankenstein's Footsteps surveys how public images of biological science over the past two centuries have been keyed to Frankenstein, "the governing myth of modern biology" (3). Like the myth itself, Turney describes the public's ambivalence toward developments that affect images of bodily integrity and human propagation. Discussing Shelley's novel, he cites its predecessor myths and the state of biological knowledge in her time, with which she had acquaintance through her father and her husband. Unlike Goethe's Faust, a legitimate contender as a symbol of Western over-reaching, Shelley's Frankenstein looks forward to biological research, rather than backward to magic and superstition. Recognizing that her novel can be interpreted in many ways, Turney believes all readings should include "a creation myth based on science as a substitute for God, a surprisingly realistic composite picture of contemporary science, and a refracted image of the dark side of science, and especially medicine, practiced at the time" (23). Despite some negative reviews, the book saw several reprintings in Mary's lifetime, as well as theatrical stagings that emphasized gothic elements far more than she had. Its afterlife included many plays in the nineteenth century and films in the twentieth, even before James Whale's 1931 adaptation turned the story into big business. If none of these remakes respected the artistic integrity of the novel, they did maintain the elements of science and the quest for creation, even up to Mel Brooks's spoof, Young Frankenstein (1974), and Kenneth Branagh's mistitled Victorian update, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994).

According to Turney, as the public emblem of biology progressed from the skull to the petri dish to the DNA print (progressively more abstract and distant from public access), the image of the biological scientist fragmented. The medical doctor maintained a comforting connection with the magician, healer, confessor, and friend; the biologist grew to be seen as cold, unfeeling, manipulative, and interested in knowledge for its own sake (Wells's Moreau is the extreme version). Claiming animals could not feel pain, Descartes had given license to vivisection, a cause célèbre in the nineteenth century; eugenics and Social Darwinism were also promoted in the name of biological materialism. By 1836, Andrew Crosse had made specious claims for the "creation of life" by electricity, and others followed. Paralleling lurid press reports, the tales of Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Moreau--along with fictions by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, and others--perpetuated a problematic image of the biologist. Two Rockefeller Institute researchers after the turn of the century lent plausibility to such views. Jacques Loeb's chemical fertilization of sea urchins was routinely called artificial creation, something he did little to discourage. Alexis Carrell was not the first to preserve cells from a chicken heart in the lab, but a Nobel Prize drew attention to the claim that he kept a "heart in a jar." Skeptical and sensational journalists duly reported these claims with references to Frankenstein, playing upon public fears.

As molecular biology actually got started, British thinkers produced a remarkable series of "nonfiction" documents concerning its potential, notably J.B.S. Haldane's Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1924) and Bertrand Russell's Icarus; or, The Future of Science (1924), which Brian Stableford has identified as important texts in The Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950 (St. Martin's, 1985). Their speculations triggered a more influential reaction from Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World (1932) gave a broad reading audience a summing-up of--and a reaction to--biologists' speculations during the 1920s. Building on Čapek's R.U.R. (1920) and Lord Birkenhead's The World in 2030 A.D. (1930), Huxley's book may have been criticized as art but it swiftly entered into the popular lexicon and iconography. His forecasts of cloning and psychopharmacology complicated the popular image of biology but made it no less ambivalent. On a less elevated level, pulp fiction and especially film recycled Huxley, Faust, and Frankenstein, spreading ignorant concern with "mutations" in the wake of the atomic bomb.

The idea of a "Biological Revolution," both technological and political, got underway in the 1960s, as molecular testing of mechanistic principles finally became possible, a decade after DNA's structure was unraveled. Already an sf staple, genetic engineering, organ transplants, and kidney dialysis were popularized through coverage in such nonfiction magazines as Life. Gordon Rattray Taylor's The Biological Time-Bomb (1968), the most popular non-fiction book on the subject, reiterated gothic readings of potential developments, highlighting fears of the loss of personal control over one's body and the dissolution of the traditional human image. The birth of the first "test-tube baby" in 1978, however, was the turning point in Britain, defusing the widespread outrage over in vitro fertilization, as audiences came to sympathize with the child's parents and the utter normality of her birth. In arguments over recombinant DNA experiments, the Frankenstein myth was driven further underground. The debate turned on technical rather than moral factors--i.e., whether gene-splicing was safe and could be contained, rather than whether it was an abomination to be banished from the laboratory, if not the planet. Wider awareness of modern biology has tended to mute the myth, Turney concludes, shifting the Frankenstein theme into the fields of Artificial Life and the cyborg (areas excluded from his history). The traditional fear of the unknown remains and the myths are still retold, but audiences are better educated and today's debates are more self-evidently between competing "futuristic fictions" (217).

Science fiction plays two important roles in Frankenstein's Footsteps. Sf and proto-sf texts punctuated the myth's development, while "nonfiction" (some of it scantily based in fact) borrowed the trappings of fiction to communicate an image inevitably distorted by racy iconic and storytelling elements. Turney shows more than a nodding awareness of sf, citing texts by Brian Aldiss, John Brunner, Louis Charbonneau, Edmond Hamilton, Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Julian Huxley, Pamela Sargent, Nat Schachner, and "John Taine" (a.k.a. Eric Temple Bell), as well as scholarship by I.F. Clarke, John Clute, H. Bruce Franklin, Mark Hillegas, Frank McConnell, Patrick Parrinder, and Brian Stableford. But his coverage of the field is obviously limited. He cannot, of course, be faulted for not producing a comprehensive survey of sf with biological themes, when his main concern is with well-known authors whose work lined up with popular media coverage to help shape the attitudes of general audiences. Lacking the recognition of Frankenstein, Brave New World, or even Jurassic Park (1993), most genre sf is probably a very poor index of popular sentiment.

If Turney is sanguine about the Frankenstein myth, David J. Skal is anything but sanguinary in Screams of Reason. Eschewing scholarly rationality, he goes for the emotional underbelly, showing the myth as not contained within a rational discourse. If Turney sees (or wants to see) the myth waning in its effects on public consciousness, Skal sees (or wants to see) its expansion on the unconscious level. Riffing freely, he mixes personal memoir with persistent digressions (on Einstein, the Rosenbergs, and the Unabomber, for example), covering some of Turney's territory, but with a different animus. A clockwork woman outside a funhouse introduces the book, its author, and the issue of soulless materialism, and the text throughout exudes an earnest moral fervor.

Like Turney, Skal traces the history of the Frankenstein story, but he is after bigger game, deconstructing Western civilization or whatever is left after science transforms it. To demonstrate the modern age's obsession with mad science, he parallels symbolic readings of stories and films with minimally supported generalizations about culture. Quoting out of context Barry N. Malzberg's statement that sf is "hostile to ideas," Skal discounts any significant distinctions between it, surrealism, and horror, as aesthetic forms reflecting cultural malaise. He acknowledges that outré visions may not compel rational belief, but says they indicate cultural acceptance of the "mad science" all around us, from the electrical experiments of Nikola Tesla (the archetype of the mad scientist) and the Strategic Defense Initiative to the pacemaker and the modem that permits Stephen Hawking to "talk." In their early days, even the telephone and the cinema had a "mad" side to them, paralleling the visions and disembodied voices of occult experience or schizophrenia. Treating on the same level alien abductions, artificial body parts, and cannibalistic doctors, Skal makes them all symbolize legitimate fears about what science is doing to "us."

Introduced via a discussion of the Heaven's Gate cult and R.U.R., Frankenstein is presented as a modern "creation myth," originating "in the nineteenth century Romantic rebellion against scientific rationalism" (33). Based on Mary Shelley's sources and her later modifications to the novel, Skal depicts her as virtually a blank slate on which the myth wrote itself, as a futile warning against ethical radicalism and the breaching of sexual and scientific limits. The "problematic" scientist of nineteenth-century writers yielded in the twentieth century to an evocation of "wizards" such as Edison; and popular film offered up various versions of The Golem and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as Metropolis (1926) and countless incarnations of Frankenstein. A sometime writer of sf, author of four previous books on gothic cinema, and co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Dracula (1997), Skal is in his element describing minutiae about actors and directors, makeup and film rights; he rhapsodizes over Melies' mixture of magic and science and the iconography of Fritz Lang (Rotwang's laboratory, artificial hand, and female robot). Recording the spate of Frankenstein sequels and imitators--in a discussion loosely tied to Brave New World, Hitler, the World's Fair of 1939, and World War II--the book moves on to mutations, aliens and UFOs, cyborgs, and apocalypse. The 1950s' Promethean monster was atomic energy, reflected in movie monsters and secluded mad scientists, but also in the election of Dwight Eisenhower over the more intellectual Adlai Stevenson, and in movie ads prominently displaying women's breasts as "the technological teat" (179). Paralleling the Rosenbergs with fantasies of alien invaders is a stretch, but less so than restricting to a specific time period both the hoary practice of hyping films and books (even sf magazines) with a false promise of sexual titillation and the long history of anti-intellectualism in American culture.

Ostensibly sequential in time, the final four chapters in fact range over the last century and more. In them, the "morality" of mad science seems more pressing, as Skal shows a greater concern with what is actually happening in the world rather than with artistic expressions of it. Taking his cue from a rash of flying saucer sightings in the 1970s (including his own) and tales of alien abduction from John Grant Fuller's The Interrupted Journey (1966) to The X-Files, Skal defines them as a "shadowy projection of the technology-obsessed self" (201), and pursues them in selected episodes of The Twilight Zone, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and other popular texts. If abducting aliens represent a critique of intrusive science, on a more mundane level today's "faceless" medicine also projects an "alien" quality to people longing to be healed; and popular culture, anticipating and extending the Nazi perversion of medicine, has spawned an endless series of horror films depicting demonic doctors. Unlike Turney's view of physicians as healers, Skal sees them, at least in terms of recent cinematic portrayals, as vampires, cannibals, traffickers in body parts, and authority figures claiming godhood. Plagues in contemporary films, moreover, borrow from or relate to the history of AIDS, the world's "first postmodern disease" (261), for which research and treatment have been driven largely by patients and politics. The many avatars of Frankenstein may now have yielded to the bizarre fantasies of David Cronenberg.

Labeling total separation of brain from body as the "maddest science of them all," Skal depicts Stephen Hawking with his physical disabilities and disembodied voice as the public face of the cyborg. Further refining his initial vision of the carnival lady, Skal cites Hoffmann's "The Sandman" (1816), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Bernard Wolfe's Limbo (1952), William Hjortsberg's Gray Matters (1971), and dozens of other texts as fictions depicting the separation of mind from body and creation from the womb. Tying scientific creation as depicted in film to mortification of the flesh, Skal sees the exaggerated brains of scientists and their creations' stiff movements as evidence of the repression of their softer "feminine" sides, as well as of "natural" biological creation. Real science is usually boring, Skal concludes, and the mad scientist caricature ironically emphasizes the humanity of its practitioners, bringing passion, drama, and catharsis to bear as necessary correctives to science's assault on the self. Real science is dangerous, too, not just because it is misunderstood by outsiders, but because of its exclusive claims to knowledge, which media reporting largely underwrites. Popular culture contextualizes for the masses science's atheistic materialism and hubris, its denigration of other methods of knowing, its fraudulent claims to perfection, and its modern-day mysticism, in indirect attempts to make sense of the power and primacy of science in the modern world.

Skal's scattershot use of "evidence" points up an endemic problem of cultural criticism: where to stop or draw the line. His style is racy and his argument rarely straightforward, sliding from point to point by adventitious links, such as coincidences in time, name, and imagery. His reasoning is often tenuous and his evidence stretched too far, ignoring or tacitly discounting countervailing examples and longstanding cultural resonances in pursuit of momentary connections. Psychological readings of texts (including films and even history) are always suspect, since subjective reality can neither be proven nor disproven, and like many studies of popular culture, Skal's often infers the attitudes of audiences from sheer numbers. It is tempting to dismiss Screams of Reason on the basis of its sloppy thinking and organization, but its loose arrangement and one-size-fits-all paranoia virtually embody the author's thesis that mad science is everywhere and cannot be contained within rational parameters. Erratic and undisciplined Skal's method may be, but it puts into interesting perspective our blasé acceptance of outlandish things that actually happen.

Neither the best nor the worst examples of cultural criticism, both books display its advantages and disadvantages. Were science fiction limited to overtly fictional literature since 1926, they would be peripheral indeed. Neither author engages in literary criticism per se, since overtly aesthetic concerns are largely irrelevant to their arguments and traditional literary genres (poetry, fiction, drama) only part of their field of study. As cultural critics, they mark nearly everything linked to the Frankenstein "mythos" as "text," to be read in terms of the rules and themes and self-reflexiveness that mark communication in general. Both show a postmodern fascination with the communication process as well, and how familiar images shape production as well as reception of information. In this context, it is science fiction literature that is on the periphery as just one of many cultural indices. I'm not sure what we can say about interrelations between science fiction and the real world, however, if history and science are themselves viewed as science fictions. The Frankenstein myth has the reality of neither, nor of the verbal productions we call literature; but its persistent presence is undeniable, even if neither author fully under-stands its scope. As efforts to explain its reach, I can recommend both books with reservations. Read them as pieces of a larger puzzle and correctives of each other's excesses. For a reasoned commentary on the interplay of sf and biology, read Turney. For a wild ride over similar territory, with few rules or limits, surf Skal.