BOOKS IN REVIEW
Ethics in End Times.
Peter Admirand. Destruction, Ethics, and Intergalactic Love: Exploring Y: The Last Man and Saga. Routledge, Routledge Advances in Comics Studies, 2023. xv+287 pp. $160 hc, $44.95 pbk & ebk.
Before reading his monograph analyzing Y: The Last Man (Vertigo, 2002-2008) and Saga (Image Comics, 2012-2018, 2022-present), I wondered whether theologian Peter Admirand would resort to what Ursula Le Guin observed about fantasy scholarship: too much interpretation and ideological purism (“The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists,” The Wordsworth Circle 38.1-2 [2007]: 86). On the latter, while Destruction, Ethics, and Intergalactic Love leans on Christian texts and figures, Admirand also turns to Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, as well as Western philosophy, Western literature, and gender and cultural studies, thus avoiding a one-dimensional approach to the comics. On the former, between the thematic and character analyses framed by these diverse religions and fields, Admirand more generally reflects on why these comics continue to matter and resonate for him.
Pursuing an approach that is at once interdisciplinary and personal may raise a few eyebrows, he considers, and scholars may read his book as insufficiently engaged with comics studies and/or religious studies (9). But it is a book about comics, after all, and it functions as an original study in the field (although Admirand considers himself a comics studies novice [7-9]). Given his brief notes about sf studies (103n37, 150-51n30), we might also comment on Admirand’s lack of dialogue with sf and fantasy scholars. But he does offer novel insights into an sf comic and a science-fantasy comic, absorbing himself in the two series and assessing them as thought experiments for ethical reflection. He asks, “What happens to ethics and the possibility of living ethically in Y’s world of plague ... and ... [w]hat happens to the search for meaning and value despite Saga’s never-ending, all-consuming war?” (3). His answers may end up in the realm of ideological purism, but Admirand strives to question assumptions about faith, sf, and fantasy literature, and also ethical behaviors and styles.
Admirand divides his book into an introduction, four parts containing two chapters (one per comic) and a short reflection each, and a conclusion. The introduction provides some methodological considerations as well as the chapter outlines, goals of the book, and plot summaries. Y: The Last Man, written by Brian K. Vaughan and with art by Pia Guerra (and Goran Sudžuka and Paul Chadwick, with inks by Jose Morzan Jr.), details the aftermath of a plague that kills all males of every species save the titular Yorick Brown. Yorick and Agent 355 (charged with protecting the last man) wander the globe in search of various scientists and family members to determine the next steps in the post-apocalyptic world. Saga, written by Vaughan with art by Fiona Staples, is best described as Romeo and Juliet (1597) meets Star Wars (1977-present). Alana from Landfall and Marko from Wreath fall in love, even though they are different species and their planets are at war. They procreate and the narrator of the saga, their daughter Hazel, threatens to undermine the war effort simply by existing.
In the first and best part of his study, Admirand begins with an overview of how plague appears across a range of contemporary pieces of sf media and literature, such as The Last of Us video games (2013; 2020), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), and M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2014). He then compares Y’s plague and its aftermath. Admirand’s primary attention in this chapter is on the scientists Dr. Mann and her father Dr. Matsumori, who believe they have independently caused the apocalypse. Admirand muses on what responsibility means for these two scientists and the role that cloning plays in the story, from considering whether it is the cause of the plague to considering the ethics of it within the narrative.
For an analysis of Saga’s never-ending war, Admirand begins with the US War on Terror and Saga’s The Narrative and considers how each manipulates and shapes war (and its narrative) to suit their respective goals. Admirand reads the devastation of the Landfall-Wreath war across the series, empathizing with those who have lost homes or their lives and pondering the futility of war. In Saga #42 (2017), the young Sophie asks Gwendolyn, a war supporter at the time, “how do you know how many [war casualties] are too many?” (emphasis in original). Gwendolyn seems to shrug in response, “It varies by battlefield.” War breeds dubious moral reasoning, too. In this chapter, Admirand describes how war takes its toll, especially on residents on the comet Phang. When partners of The Narrative destroy Phang for profit, and we helplessly watch a beloved character sink into darkness while crying out for God’s help, is there any possibility of love, hope, and faith here? Staples and Vaughan end the issue with five empty black pages. Admirand asks, “Is there a satisfying moral and theological response to the overwhelming blackness of those inked pages” (73)? No answers, yet.
The second part of the book contains more optimism. In the perpetual wartime of Saga, how does one parent? Writing first of his experiences as a father, then considering various iterations of fathers from the Bible to Star Wars, and finally considering real fathers who lost their children in wartime, Admirand reflects on the difficulties of parenting in tough times. With this foundation, he completes character analyses for the father figures in Saga. Intergalactic love is a beacon in the comic’s grim universe. Over in Y, Admirand turns to 355’s heroic love and how she and Yorick develop an intimate bond over their five-year journey (only to finally declare their love at the end, moments before Israeli soldier Alter murders 355, a conclusion Admirand does not appreciate [245]). Admirand then reads Yorick’s sister Hero’s redemption arc, as she returns to her mother after a stint with the morally questionable Daughters of the Amazon. There is hope and forgiveness after the apocalypse.
This discussion of 355 and Hero provides the groundwork for part three’s chapter on Y. 355 and Hero are violent people, but both resist violence when possible. Admirand contrasts them with two other characters, Alter and Toyota, who seem to have no qualms about murder. By assessing how peace is possible, or not, in the post-apocalypse, Admirand studies how principles of violence and personal responsibility operate in a different world. In Saga, Marko initially takes a vow of pacifism (inspired by a romance novel with subtle political messaging penned by fictional author D. Oswald Heist, also discussed in the chapter), only to find it challenged at every turn. Admirand compares Marko to historical figures Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. Marko’s case is trickier, however. It seems that Marko’s desire for violence runs deep, so suppressing it poses a challenge. But each explosion of his violence is first marked by an attempt to resolve issues peacefully.
The final part of the book is the weakest, partly because of its lack of focus. First, Admirand attempts to read sexual ethics and religion in Y. Yorick and the author’s younger self shared guilt and and self-recrimination around sex. Admirand identifies his younger self as a “virgin by choice” until marriage, and in a few lines his Catholicism peeks through (“Society overemphasizes ... cheap casual sex” and “without uniqueness, fidelity, deep knowing, and understanding [sex] can seem empty” [193]). Admirand also understands Yorick’s fidelity to Beth, the girlfriend Yorick spends most of the series looking for. The focus on monogamy and fidelity limits deep investigations of sexual ethics in Y’s post-apocalyptic world: what is sex and romance for heterosexual women when there are no men? What does a world without men mean for compulsory monogamy and marriage? Does the last man have any obligations to procreation? Answers to these questions get picked up a bit, but Admirand moves instead to some of his best close readings of religious symbolism in the comic. For Saga, Admirand provides character analyses of the “hybrid” characters, those who straddle borders such as woman and man, animal and human, living and dead, Landfallian and Wreather. The author is at his most academic here, turning to Plato and Kant. He concludes that these characters exhibit virtues “from honesty and understanding to courage and compassion” that serve as shining examples for others.
Riffing on a quote from Pope Francis, Admirand ends the book with love as the answer, unfortunately viewing ethics with a touch of ideological purism. “Love triumphant” is also a misreading of two quoted sections of Saga. First, Heist, the novelist who inspired Alana and Marko’s romance and desertion, suggests to Prince Robot IV that his next novel will be about the opposite of war, “fucking” (qtd. 246). I read this not as an expression of love but as sensory overload: if everyone is fucking, who has time for war? If there is ultimate sexual satisfaction, who would dare start a war? In addition, “fucking” is the opposite of war because love sometimes functions in tandem with conflict: the love of a spouse, family, religion, race, or nation has led to countless horrors. Second, Admirand assumes love is a synonym for kindness. He names this Saga’s moral mantra: Marko tells Hazel, “Honey girl, I don’t care what you do, as long as you’re kind to everyone you meet” (qtd. 242). We do not refrain from killing our neighbours out of love, however, but out of kindness and recognition of their humanity. There are few instances in the course of our lives that allow for intense love such as that shared by Alana and Marko, Hazel and her parents, Yorick and 355, but we do have many opportunities for everyday acts of kindness.
Given Admirand’s focus on ethics and sf/fantasy, I expected more from the history of philosophy and sf/fantasy scholarship. Some discussion of utopianism may have been appropriate, with Y’s Marrisville, a small town comprised of ex-convicts (237n7), or Saga’s Sextillion, a planet with infinite available pleasures but no surveillance and policing of its sex traffickers (63, 116), as rich examples. There are a few missing punctuation marks and the occasional typo, such as the incorrect spelling of Arendt (216).
In sum, Admirand provides exceptional close readings of the comics for his arguments about ethics, themes, and characters. Saga and Y perform a quintessential function of sf and fantasy fiction: the alternative worlds assist the author in thinking about the past and future and their respective stakes for the present. The book should interest scholars researching these comics, and instructors could assign chapters for undergraduate literature or cultural studies courses. I think it is also a fine book for the Y and Saga fan.—Troy Michael Bordun, University of Northern British Columbia/Concordia University
Violent and Vibrant Kinship in N.K. Jemisin.
Berit Åström and Jenny Bonnevier, eds. Kinship in the Fiction of N.K. Jemisin: Relations of Power and Resistance. Lexington, 2023. 214 pp. $95 hc, $45 ebk.
N.K. Jemisin’s award-winning work has made an indelible mark on sf studies. Her socio-environmental worlds under threat blend sf and fantasy tropes to navigate and critique systemic oppression associated with race, gender, sex, and class. Her work investigates our own fraught worlds and ways of being together, speaking to the precarity of socio-environmental futures; it also interrogates how we renegotiate the ethics, conventions, and potentiality of estrangement in sf versus fantasy. In Kinship in the Fiction of N.K. Jemisin, Berit Åström and Jenny Bonnevier situate their collection in sf studies but read Jemisin as more than just an sf writer. They use “speculative fiction” to read Jemisin’s work as an open-ended rethinking of cultural “genre definitions, borders, genealogies, and hierarchies” (2). They also locate their work in kinship studies critically to rethink Western genealogical affiliations and power structures. Thematically uniting the essays is the idea that “kinship [can and] does hurt its members” (13). The collection argues that Jemisin’s speculative fiction challenges traditional misogynistic, Eurocentric, heterosexual, racist, and humanist worldviews by reimagining nonnormative forms of kinship.
“Part I: Kinship and Agency” explores the violent structures undergirding kinship and the nuclear family. Jenny Bonnevier’s “Kinship Matters: Bodies and Power in N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy” opens by clarifying the stakes of kinship as a social and familial organization. As the only essay not exploring Jemisin’s Broken Earth fiction (2015-2017), this chapter argues that in the Inheritance trilogy (2010-2011) genealogical kinship and coercive state power coalesce through bodies and biological matter. Bonnevier contends that Jemisin challenges epic fantasy’s reliance on “discourses of descent and bloodlines” through the first novel’s protagonist Yeine (29). For Bonnevier, Yeine’s refusal of her marginalized role as sacrifice and surrogate mother for a reborn deity uses speculative tropes to illustrate the agential porosity of matter working against the dictates of blood. For example, she reads discursive kinship in blood sigils rather than chattel servitude. Yet she suggests that interactive biological matter—skin and blood itself—is “a source of resistance and power” in the series (37). Ultimately, Bonnevier’s analysis of bodies and blood rearticulates kinship as a transformative materiality.
The next two essays in the section critique normative parental roles. Alexandra Stamson and Jennifer Ash’s “Narcissist Fathers and Powered Daughters” analyzes the second protagonist of The Obelisk Gate (2016), Nassun, and her abusive relationship with her father, Jiga. Stamson and Ash read the novel as a speculative case study of how gendered patriarchal systems exacerbate violent relations between narcissistic fathers and the children forced to survive them. They track Nassun’s abusive relationship with Jiga, from his possessive denial of her individuality to her empowering separation. As Nassun masters orogeny (a form of magical connection with nature in the series), Stamson and Ash suggest that “she is able to flourish in her individual power” by severing herself from Jiga and setting her own boundaries (57). While sf genre tropes are often unexplored in the essay, they emphasize speculative fiction as an empowering way to find personal clarity and strength. In “Motherhood in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Novels,” Berit Åström argues that the trilogy’s main character Essun challenges and extends beyond the gendered, Eurocentric role of the mother as loving and self-sacrificing. Her essay complicates normalized views of mothers, especially Black mothers, by tracing the uncanny familiarity of familial and community structures in the series. For example, Åström reads the Fulcrum society as an sf metaphor for pronatalist societies by showing how Essun’s pregnancies are “all thrust upon her” (67) as reproductive labor. Essun, in comparison, remains ambivalent about motherhood even as she loves her children, which complicates and counters the Western mother figure. To Åström, Essun’s “maternal superpower is not about being warm, tender, and self-sacrificing, but about being stern, taking no nonsense, and carrying out difficult tasks” (71). Despite sacrificing herself for her daughter Nassun, Åström suggests that Essun moves beyond the Western mother role by transforming into a nearly immortal nonhuman stone eater.
The last two essays in Part I navigate childhood and kinship versus kith relations. Regina Yung Lee’s “In the Break: Formations of Orogene Childhood in N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season” focuses on the first novel, arguing that Damaya’s (Essun’s name in her adolescence) expulsion from childhood for being an orogene (i.e., magician) parallels systemic racialization in the US. She divulges the constructedness of childhood as ontological slippage in the metaphor of Damaya’s broken hand. As an sf trope for the dehumanization of Black children, Damaya’s “orogenicity precedes and subsumes all her other characteristics” (84). Such supernatural power establishes the contradictory sociopolitical roles Damaya and orogene children are forced to inhabit. Their power over the unforgiving environment is necessary for society’s survival, but they are seen as enemies of the state. Yung Lee suggests that the violent actions by the Fulcrum guardian “Schaffa literalizes the break” (85). She suggests, however, that Jemisin’s speculative break redefines Black identity, providing an alternative to Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973), which can be read in critical conversation with Jemisin’s Um-Helat story, “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” (2018). In Yung Lee’s reading, orogenes breaking the world negate the possibility of walking away from the suffering child in favor of staying and fighting. Closing Part I, Mark Soderstrom’s “Intimate Instabilities: Reproducing Violence in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy” argues that the normative ideal of the nuclear family is saturated by the oppressive practices of social systems. In place of heteronormative, patriarchal kin, Soderstrom looks to “found family” or “kith” (96) as non-normative relationships. He emphasizes that while “orogenes are feared and hated—cast as ‘monsters’” (99), the main characters do not fit other normative kin roles, and as such experience danger in the home. For instance, he notes that Damaya’s parents treat her as a monster. She is then tortured and forced to reproduce as Syenite by the Fulcrum in yet another normative kin framework. Soderstrom also views kith relationships, alliances, and places available for orogenes as a call for marginalized communities to come together in mutual aid and social activism.
“Part II: Kinship and Community” focuses on alternative kinship networks. In “The Ideal Community: Reading Orogeny through (Dis)ability Theory in N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season,” Emily Lange and Megan Lynn Isaac argue that speculative components of orogeny both disable orogenes and redefine kinship. Lange and Isaac outline how the Fulcrum is characterized by hostile staring, effectively Othering the child being stared at in what can be seen as a Foucauldian panopticon. Seeing the self as Other for Lange and Isaac “removes the possibility of a normalized childhood” and “forming kinship relationships” (121). The second element of disabling kinship present is Fulcrum’s denial of reproductive and bodily autonomy for orogene children and families. Undergirding Lange and Isaac’s analysis is how, unless orogenes hide, “they cannot raise their own children” (126). This familial tragedy is bookended by how the first novel begins and ends with the deaths of Essun’s sons. But like Soderstrom, Lange and Isaac find evidence of alternative kinship spaces and relations in which orogeny manifests as a creative force and other orogenes as inclusive communities. Michael Pitts’s “‘Like Any Living Thing Under Threat’: Kinship as a Radical Political Approach in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy” argues that Jemisin removes kinship from genealogical heteronormativity, Eurocentrism, patriarchy, and anthropo-centrism. For Pitts, the trilogy challenges humanist thinking speculatively to imagine posthuman kinship as a form of political radicalism. This essay uses marginalized assemblages to contextualize how inauthentic kinship is historically based in racialization. Pitts provides a compelling study of the social systems undergirding the series by mapping how the Thniess (an extinct magic-wielding society), the tuners (their genetically engineered descendants), and orogenes have been removed from human status. At the same time, he illustrates how assemblages developed by marginalized characters bring new and “radical forms of kinship” (145) into being by rejecting humanist thinking.
Part II ends by considering nonhuman and environmental forms of kinship. Lisa Swanstrom’s “Kinetic Energies: Charting Family Relations in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy” maintains that Jemisin challenges fantasy’s trope of bloodright over place by expanding kinship. Swanstrom echoes prior critiques of oppressive forms of kinship in Damaya’s family and the Fulcrum as “part and parcel of the same system” (159). Her essay also charts new territory by suggesting that the mobile geographies and communities in Meov and Castrima exemplify a more flexible and “‘kinetic’ notion of kinship” (155). Swanstrom concludes with a compelling analysis of how fantasy writers such as George R.R. Martin use the family tree to impose human control on land through bloodright. And in her estimation, Jemisin does something different by breaking both the world and the family tree. Swanstrom’s final contention is that kinship should be rethought of as a kinetic map. In the collection’s last essay, “Monstrous Kin in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy and Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix,” Marinette Grimbeek argues that Jemisin and Okorafor use the voice of the monster to reveal monstrous behavior in human kinship. Grimbeek notes that naming characters as monsters—switching names in Jemisin and proliferating names in Okorafor—relies on exclusionary models of humanity. She emphasizes how kinship applies to “both blood relations and bloodshed” (182) in order to affirm, police, and exterminate kin. At the same time, she compares Mary Shelley’s Creature and its quest for kinship to Jemisin’s and Okorafor’s monstrous narrators who develop inclusive and romantic interspecies relationships based in “affectionate touch” (191). Grimbeek shows how kinship and monstrosity are co-constituted, but also how monstrosity can help us reconsider kinship and responsibility in environmental collapse.
Overall, the collection offers an extensive guide to kinship studies in Jemisin. Contributors such as Stamson and Ash speak to the interdisciplinary aims of the volume by situating speculative tropes in social case studies of the family. Other essays combine sf and kinship studies in ways that will be of interest to more specialized readers of sf, fantasy, and speculative genres. While she never explicitly uses the term “kinship,” Yung Lee deftly brings this field into conversation with sf and racialized childhood studies. Pitts provides a compelling study of deep historical and sociopolitical systems in Jemisin’s dense trilogy. And Swanstrom’s reimagination of the family tree as a family map offers a surprising and nuanced interpretation of Jemisin in the context of fantasy.
Kinship in the Fiction of N.K. Jemisin might be seen as too positive in its appraisal of the author and overly centered on the Broken Earth trilogy. It is, however, a valuable contribution to the growing body of Jemisin scholarship. This collection puts sf—which is interested in nonhuman encounters, transformations, and identities—in contact with the political, sociocultural, and ecological questions of what it means to be kin. I believe this book will appeal to experts in and beginners to discussions of sf, kinship, and responsibility to diverse identities in and beyond the work of Jemisin. As Åström and Bonnevier’s anthology shows us, kinship is violent and vibrant.—Sarah Leilani Parijs, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
When Strange New Worlds Are Strange Old Worlds.
Ross Clare. Ancient Greece and Rome in Modern Science Fiction. Liverpool UP, 2022. 252 pp. $130.00 hc.
Just as the world of today continues to uncover surprises about the world of antiquity, a statement that Ross Clare makes near the end of Ancient Greece and Rome in Modern Science Fiction reveals a lot about what he has said in the pages that precede it: “What is SF if not a reflection of the present using imaginative futures and alternative worlds for some inherently optimistic purpose?” (225). Well, “a reflection of the present using imaginative futures and alternative worlds for some inherently pessimistic purpose” comes immediately to mind, but perhaps that is a story for a different time and a different book than the one Clare has assembled. The idea of the ancient past as a storehouse of uplift is far from unique to sf: the opening number of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) reassures us that what follows will involve “no royal curse, no Trojan Horse, and there’s a happy ending of course.” Readers of Ancient Greece and Rome in Modern Science Fiction can rest assured that whatever royal curses and Trojan Horses they encounter will lead to some sort of happy ending, thanks to the sheer enthusiasm of the author for both sf and antiquity.
Clare’s enthusiasm in no way diminishes either his study or its subject matter. His breezy tone makes this book a pleasure to read from start to finish. What makes the experience even more worthwhile is Clare’s occasional shifting of the source of the breeze when his light and airy Zephyrus-like warmth gives way to chilly Boreas-like blasts of sarcasm. In these instances, one can sense Clare’s hand being guided by Dike, the Chief Justice of Mount Olympus: say what you like in their defense, his targets definitely have it coming to them. To take one example, the original series of Star Trek (1966-1969) has much to recommend it, but it did tend to deal with the paradoxes posed by ancient mores and praxes as it dealt with other paradoxes, “by punching them in the face and disintegrating them with phasers” (156). Perhaps this has something to do with the “T” in “James T. Kirk”—“T” for “Tiberius,” by all accounts the most unsubtle problem-solver of the Twelve Caesars. To toss a little of my own frost Clare’s way, he omits this fairly obvious classical allusion, in the same way that he fails to acknowledge all the stories directly referencing antiquity in the original series of Doctor Who (1963-1989) that are not The One Where William Hartnell’s Version of The Doctor Helped Nero Burn Down Rome (“The Romans,” 1965). (If Clare’s a Whovian, he keeps it well hidden, or else he would have also noted that the series’ first-ever episode (“An Unearthly Child,” 1963) mentions that the TARDIS had once been a Roman column.)
I let one of my personal fandoms loose on you just now for a purpose: to let you know that Ancient Greece and Rome in Modern Science Fiction contains the full spectrum of what unabashed fandom can offer academic writing. At its best, this means that you will never have to worry whether Clare is fully engaged with what he is writing about. As a lifelong advocate of the “study stuff you can have a little fun with” approach to scholarship, however, I recognize its limitations. One of them is that a magpie’s instincts for latching on to interesting material can lead to scattershot writing with the kind of knowledge gaps I described in the previous paragraph. To his credit, Clare lays the groundwork for forgiveness of these lapses by cautioning the reader in his introduction that “your favourite SF story might well not be here” (5). Still, hardly anyone is going to get through this entire book without wondering “how’d he miss this thing I know about?” I am still puzzled about why he begins his discussion of children’s sf television with the 1980s, thereby missing a Golden Fleece of an opportunity to take on the numerous visits to people and places from antiquity in the so-bad-it’s-nearly-almost-not-bad 1960s retro-future outer space acid trip called Rocket Robin Hood (1966-1969).
Perhaps it is best to approach Ancient Greece and Rome in Modern Science Fiction by reading the introduction, remembering the caveat, and jumping straight into a section that deals with something you do not know anything about. For me, it is the section on video games. Noob that I am, I found it a good tutorial for the uninitiated, although I confess that I would probably feel more at home in the escape-room worlds of text-based games such as Time Zone (1982) than in the “kill ’em all, and let the gods sort ’em out” milieu of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (2018). The competitive, to say nothing of combative, nature of gaming means that one of Clare’s keys to understanding what he calls “ancient-SF” dominates this section. As in other modes of fictional expression, “‘Roman-ness’ has again become synonymous with hyper-masculine, misogynistic militarism and outright racism” (205); “for SF writers, if it’s militaristic, it’s got to be Roman. Or Spartan. Or both” (211). In this case, it is the ancient world that punches you in the face ... unless you punch it first.
This is not to say that there are not other strands of antiquity strewn around gaming’s labyrinthine levels for an RPG Theseus to follow. Clare identifies a softer, less face-punchy side in some newer games, one that is specifically linked to the imagined virtues of ancient Athens: Mass Effect 2’s “creators conceive of ancient Greece as, by and large, feminine in nature” (210). Of course, the word “feminine” brings with it a host of connotations. Depending on who is using it, “feminine” can imply “nurturing,” but also “effete,” or even “threatening.” Clare examines all three aspects of femininity as presented in sf through the filter of antiquity’s texts and myths, concentrating on three frequently recurring tropes—Medusa, the Amazons, and Atlantis. Of these three, Atlantis is the least superficially feminine; for all that, the sunken city is frequently portrayed in sf as the repository for the sorts of nurturing, inclusive values that we often fear have been inundated by time and tide. Discussing Dennis Wheatley’s novel They Found Atlantis (1936), Clare calls the title’s locale “a utopia, an Eden,” and “a peaceful place,” and perhaps as a result of this, “a paradise” that our current version of “humanity simply isn’t deserving of” (15).
Humanity may or may not deserve to be beset by Gorgons, either, but the sf Clare casts his eyes upon returns his gaze with the stone-cold truth that the hand he is playing is Medusas wild. Poker puns aside, the standard-issue sf Medusa is an amalgam of male anxieties about all things female. She is a sexual predator who can render a fella impotent in every sense of the word with a single glance, or, as Clare puts it, “the perfect monstrous woman, capable of discombobulating the male mind, then devouring the body” (25). Equally adept at discombobulating minds and bodies, but usually in a more violently literal sense, Amazons are perhaps the most spectacularly powerful women in sf based on Greek and Roman myth—especially the most spectacularly lurid examples of it. They are a particular favorite in visual forms of sf: if nothing else, the Amazon-knockoffs seen in Cat Women of the Moon (1953), Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953), and similar classics of world cinema, are proof of male viewers’ appetite for tall, athletic women who give them something to ogle as they quiver in their seats about the imminent overthrow of the patriarchy. Aware of “the burgeoning feminist movement,” and equally aware that its patrons paid more attention to leggy showgirls’ bodies than to Betty Friedan’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s minds, postwar “SF cinema stepped in to present this tension back at the audience” (108).
Clare’s own audience is constantly presented with a different kind of tension based on the form of his body of prose, which displays symptoms of an overnight stay in a Procrustean bed. The scope of the topics he has chosen to cover could easily encompass four books—one each on “ancient-SF” in print, film, TV, and video games. Compressing this study to a single volume lends it a protean aspect that at times threatens to make it disjointed and hard to follow. Clare does his best to slay this many-headed hydra by providing enough detailed case studies to satisfy a reader’s need for depth, while keeping things moving along at a pace that Hermes, winged sandals and all, might admire.
Sadly though, this thoughtful and eminently readable survey concludes on a rather jejune note of fannish and quite unnecessary cheerleading: “SF remains the best of all media genres in which to encounter very cool things through which its engagers can access very serious themes” (225). Fair enough, but this is hardly unique to sf: to begin what is likely an endless list, aficionados could make the same claim for police procedurals, medical dramas, panel discussions of current events, Far Side cartoons, View-Master slides, and Etch-A-Sketches. Similarly disappointing in its self-evident universality is Clare’s final thought: “The story of ancient-SF is the history of us—who we were, who we are, and who we might become” (226). While true enough in and of itself, this is surely something that can be said of the very stories that the ancients told themselves—and Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, Homer, and all the rest did not need phasers or nearly as many punches in the face to make their point. Phasers or no phasers, face punches or no face punches, this statement does suggest what Clare has been driving at all along—that there is more at the crossroads of sf and antiquity than has thus far been scanned by the Argus eyes of the scholarly world.—Rick Cousins, Trent University
When Robots Choose to Die.
Liz W. Faber. Robot Suicide: Death, Identity, and AI in Science Fiction. Lexington, 2023. 99 pp. $85 hc, $45 ebk.
Liz W. Faber’s Robot Suicide begins with a real news account from a decade ago about a robot vacuum cleaner malfunctioning and bursting into flames. A light goes off in their head, and a thought experiment is born. “As far as we know,” they write, “robots cannot now, nor have they ever been able to, die by suicide” (1). But robots have been known to do so in science fiction. So what might science-fictional robot suicide tell us about human suicide?
It seems like a fair question, and a novel one. It does not end up grounding a satisfying book project, however. “Ultimately,” Faber writes further along in their Introduction, “the goal of this book is to talk about suicide, especially how it’s represented in robot fiction, but also how philosophers, scientists, and others have grappled with it for the past century” (10). That is a tall order for such a short book. Robot Suicide works better as sf criticism, though it is not fully convincing either as sf criticism or as “suicide awareness literature,” which is the other genre with which it identifies. “I hope when you have finished reading this book,” Faber writes, “that you will walk away with a new appreciation of SF history. But more than that, I hope you’ll find yourself seeking new ways to address the problem of suicide in US culture” (10).
The book’s advocacy and its criticism are not effectively integrated. Neither is the criticism always illuminating. In Chapter 1, on despondency suicide, Faber complains that Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) promotes a “pro-suicide message” (27) in not taking the depressive robot Marvin’s depression seriously enough. Obviously, Adams had other ideas in mind, and his wager that many readers would appreciate his robot satire was not wrong. Faber’s reading of Hitchhiker’s Guide is juxtaposed with another interpretive reading, this one of a 2007 General Motors Super Bowl commercial featuring a robot automotive plant worker contemplating suicide (in a robot dream) after a minor screw-up on the job. The commercial was undoubtedly in bad taste, and GM was widely criticized for it. It does not seem fair to suggest that Hitchhiker’s Guide is comparable to it in a meaningful way.
Chapter 2, which examines the connections between popular sf representations of altruistic suicide and US war culture, is more successful. Faber’s interpretations of selected Isaac Asimov robot stories and James Cameron Terminator films are critically more astute than the readings in the previous chapter. Still, there is a mysterious impulse to diminish the significance of the sf that Faber is reading, even as they present it as casting an important light on the subject of suicide. They stop themselves in the middle of the chapter: “I contend that SF often does misunderstand how computers work and instead offers viewers simplified moral perspectives, packaged neatly into familiar hero narratives” (40). It is reasonable for a cultural critic to warn that pop culture fare may trade in simplified moral perspectives, but I do not understand the claim that popular sf “misunderstand[s] how computers work.” I would bet that Cameron especially did not have a clue about how computers work, but that did not stop him from creating successful movies about rampaging robots. As with the Hitchhiker’s Guide criticism, there is something dour about the remark. It seems to partly conceal a prejudice against levity, and even imagination, as a hindrance to dealing with the harsh reality of suicide in a properly serious and meaningful way.
Chapter 3 is about the topics of physician-assisted suicide, disability, and eugenics, although their articulation is confusing. We are instructed that “euthanasia in fictional texts is often—problematically—portrayed as an act of compassion for white people with disabilities” (57). A little further along in the same paragraph Faber turns to Darth Vader to exemplify the sometimes unfairly monstrous representation of disability in sf: “Darth Vader has assistive breathing technology that is so iconic as to be audibly associated with ‘the dark side’” (57). The drift of the discussion is bewildering, and it does nothing to prepare for the readings of sf works immediately following. What does follow, despite the prologue’s primary emphasis on disability, are race-centered readings of Walter Tevis’s novel Mockingbird (1980) and Isaac Asimov’s novella “Bicentennial Man” (1976). I want to focus on the latter, because it feels more continuous with the overall concerns of the book. Both Asimov’s short story and the 1999 movie adaptation, Faber argues, “posit that the right to die is the single defining characteristic of human life” (66). The robot Andrew Martin wishes to be human, and so he has surgery to make his positronic brain “degenerate.” Ultimately, he will die. “While this is perhaps the slowest robot suicide in SF history,” writes Faber, “the ethical implications of Andrew’s death are significant. In both texts, the central point is that the right to die, not the right to live, is what defines human existence” (66). But this seems to me the wrong lesson to draw. Asimov’s robot does not choose the right to die. He chooses the opportunity to live in the manner of a human being. The “slowest robot suicide” in all of sf is the span of Andrew Martin’s yearned-for mortal life. He is not seeking death as an end in itself. Rather, he wishes to live knowing that he must die too, thus having existed in what he conceives as an authentically human way.
In Faber’s final chapter they “turn to considerations of whether robots could and should be used to intervene in human suicide” (76). Their reading of Chinese sf writer A Que’s short story “Mrs. Griffith Prepares to Commit Suicide” is on task, but the following discussion of transhumanist life-extension schemes is not—except insofar as transhumanist “‘radical life extension’ (RLE)” (78) and “Whole Brain Emulation” (WBE) (80) reveal widespread anxieties about death. For Faber the presence of death is enough to link suicide with transhumanism, but their juxtaposition is not helpful. They conclude their book with an affirmative, real-world gesture, offering a list of “evidence-based solutions that many experts agree can help reduce the suicide rate in the US” (83).
Robot Suicide is unplugged from inputs that I think many sf scholars would expect to play a part. I am thinking mainly of both sf and non-sf criticism dealing with robots and cyborg theory, posthumanist theory, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis. There is the briefest nod to both N. Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway in the short concluding chapter. What about Kathleen Richardson’s An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines (2015), Thomas Foster’s The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory (2005), Sherry Turkle’s The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir (2021), Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism? (2010), or Hans Moravec’s Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (1999)? This is a short, selective list of books I would have expected to run across in the pages of Faber’s book. I am disappointed by such omissions, but others might not be. Faber very likely has a broader audience in mind.—Stephen Dougherty, University of Agder, Norway
AI Narrators and Posthuman Visions.
Heather D. Humann. A Tale Told by a Machine: The AI Narrator in Contemporary Science Fiction Novels. McFarland, 2023. vii+185 pp. $49.95 pbk.
The growing prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has given rise to a surge of AI stories and a heightened academic interest in this field. Focusing on narrative techniques, posthuman themes, and the ethical ramifications of AI narratives, Heather D. Humann meticulously dissects six contemporary sf pieces in her latest work, A Tale Told by a Machine. With unwavering attention, Humann delves into a “particular kind of nonhuman narrator: Artificial Intelligence” (2), aiming to scrutinize its role and impact. Throughout her analysis, she adeptly demonstrates how the perspectives and narrations invited by AI technologies blur and challenge the conventional demarcations between the human and the nonhuman and between the subject and the object, deconstructing the anthropocentric viewpoint and unveiling the human within the realm of posthumanism. In parallel, the book allegorically investigates the portrayal of AIs as “Others” (9), providing valuable insights into research on the social constructions of gender, race, and other kinds of difference.
Humann’s introduction comprises one-fifth of the book’s content; it explores the academic legacy of AI representations, narrative theories, and posthumanist concepts that form the theoretical foundations for subsequent discussions and outline the central themes of each chapter. This section commences by revisiting AI depictions in sf classics, categorizing AIs as “counter-ontological entities” characterized by “non-biological” attributes yet manifesting “psychological qualities” (4). Recognizing the hybrid nature of AIs, Humann then posits that conventional distinctions such as “human/machine,” “natural/artificial,” and “thinking/programming” are inherently unstable (5), thus contextualizing her analysis within the purview of posthumanism and postmodernism. After further elaborating on the ethical concerns and future visions of AI development, Humann proceeds to a broad exploration of narrative theory. While underscoring the pivotal role of the “narrative voice” as “a central component of the narrative act” (10), she questions the necessity of the “human voice” as a narrative premise and validates the inclusion of the “nonhuman voice” (11). Moreover, she integrates cognitive narratology, employing concepts such as “intentionality” and “theory of mind” (13), and draws inspiration from ideas such as the “uncanny valley” (25), “de-familiarization,” and “estrangement” (26) to analyze narrative techniques in posthuman representations.
Positioning itself in the framework of posthumanism, the first chapter, titled “Corporeality, Selfhood, and Narrative Shifts in Ancillary Justice,” effectively scrutinizes Ann Leckie’s 2013 novel through the prism of narrative elements, including embodiment, alienation, and the shifting perspectives of the AI narrator. Encompassed by this conceptual structure, the chapter investigates ontological topics related to human/AI identities and self-awareness while illuminating the ethical dynamics that underlie the connections between self and others. Within the narrative, the character Breq, functioning as the AI narrator, resides in a single human body after the destruction of the spaceship, Justice of Toren. Humann argues that Breq’s dual nature, both programmable and possessing human consciousness, not only “highlights (while complicating) the distinction between object and subject” but also “raises questions about subjectivity and posthuman agency” (37). Breq’s former capacity to inhabit multiple bodies and accumulate a myriad of experiences and memories leads to an exploration of the complexities of identity. Furthermore, Humann deftly probes Leckie’s adept use of the AI narrator’s embodiment to “highlight common assumptions about gender” (48) and to “allegorically comment on slavery” (49), thereby unveiling pertinent ethical dilemmas that mirror real-world issues.
The second chapter, “The Dawning of AI Sentience in Aurora,” ventures beyond topics of human/AI “selfhood and identity alongside existential questions” to address “the deployment of power dynamics and the application of ethics” (64) that arise from human-machine interactions in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Aurora (2015). Humann argues that the narrative capacities and narrative processes of the AI piloting program generate its emotions and self-awareness, particularly evident in critical decision-making moments. The argument unfolds by further illustrating that even choices made by the AI narrator, driven by the intention to safeguard the majority of humanity, inevitably lead to the sacrifice of minority rights. This situation sparks conversations resembling the classical ethical quandary known as “the trolley problem” (81). Consequently, it underscores that as AI’s cognitive capabilities and societal functions progressively align with those of actual humans, the ethical ramifications of its actions necessitate deeper contemplation.
Continuing the threads established in the preceding chapters, the third chapter, “From Object to Subject in All Systems Red,” centers on Martha Wells’s novella All Systems Red (2017), probing the themes of “personhood”and “identity crisis” (86). This chapter showcases the internal struggles encountered by nonhuman entities, epitomized by Murderbot, the security android, and its “emotional reactions” (87), bringing to light the intricate layers of the nonhuman entity’s identity and existential turmoil. To amplify these insights, Humann draws upon the concept of “conscience,” asserting that “Murderbot appears to have both a conscience and consciousness,” traits frequently ascribed only to human beings. The concept of a “guilty conscience” (89) further intensifies the bot’s predicament. Nonetheless, discerning Murderbot’s true nature and personal identity remains challenging due to its composition of “both organic and nonorganic parts”; despite its emotional qualities, it shares key features of “cyborgs” (90). Additionally, Humann points out that the notion of “personhood” itself is intricate, as it could extend to nonhuman entities that have “attained enough self-awareness” (95) to be endowed with legal rights and ethical considerations, thus adding to the complexity of the topic discussed in this part.
Titled “Seeing the Narrative in The Unseen World,” the fourth chapter inspects Liz Moore’s novel The Unseen World (2017) with an emphasis on the narrative strategy of “de-familiarization” (103). Particularly noteworthy is the concealed perspective of the AI program, which only comes to light at the narrative’s climactic conclusion, leading to a comprehensive reevaluation of the entire plotline. Within the novel, the AI program named ELIXIR is brought into being by scientist David and later enhanced by his daughter Ada. Its primary objective revolves around chronicling their family’s history in the face of David’s waning memory. This accentuates “the posthuman predicament” (109), revealing the shared subjectivity between humans and nonhumans through the intricate interactions and connections between Ada and ELIXIR.
Concentrating on Paul Braddon’s debut novel, The Actuality (2021), the fifth chapter, “(Post) Human Rights in The Actuality,” highlights pertinent “human rights issues in both the past and contemporary society” as well as “in a post-human world” (117). In this context, the posthuman predicament, involving the complexity of posthuman identities and subjectivities, is also illustrated through the investigation of the connection between humans and machines. The AI character Evie, portrayed as a subordinate female companion, is confined to the status of “property” (121), under the control of her male master, Matthew. Humann further clarifies that Evie’s predicament becomes more pronounced through the lens of how others perceive her as well as her own self-perception. This exposure sheds light on (post) human autonomy, ultimately paving the way for a discussion of the rights of both humans and nonhumans.
In the final chapter of the book titled “Klara Speaks: Narrative Voice in Klara and the Sun,” Humann rigorously examines Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel. Her argument revolves around a central theme—“a critique of humanity” (136)—that lays bare the entrenched hierarchies and pervasive inequalities within the contemporary society depicted in the novel. She astutely characterizes the novel as a fusion of genres, blending elements of “dystopia and utopia, sci-fi and social realism, and humanism and posthumanism” (138). Told from the perspective of Klara, an AI narrator and companion to a chronically ill girl, the narrative unfolds against the backdrop of a technologically advanced world inhabited by genetically modified humans and AIs. These genetically enhanced humans strive to bolster their prospects for success within society, even if it might come at the potential expense of their health. Humann postulates that their willingness to embrace such risks underscores the existing hierarchical divisions prevalent in this speculative society.
Humann’s monograph boasts several notable elements that deserve recognition. First, the subject matter is exceptionally pertinent to the current societal landscape, carrying forward-looking implications for potential challenges stemming from future technological advancements. While making precise projections is challenging, this multi-dimensional narrative conception not only enriches the literary experience but also offers tentative glimpses into the future. This exploration both captivates readers and prompts increased attention to the societal impacts of technoscientific development.
Second, theoretical concepts from diverse academic domains, such as narratology, cognitive science, posthumanism, ethics, and psychology, are extensively explored and employed, enhancing the strength and depth of the analysis. Humann’s approach goes beyond merely applying these theories; she systematically reviews their methodological underpinnings and seamlessly incorporates cutting-edge research findings in the field. For instance, in the context of narrative theories, the author traverses from early classical narratologists such as Genette, who expounded on the essence of narrative, to contemporary cognitive science’s novel understanding of narratives, emphasizing the intricate interplay of “intentionality” or “mental states” among characters, authors, and readers.
Lastly, the research perspective centered on AI narrators is innovative. It effectively bridges the gap with established academic traditions of nonhuman narrators and introduces distinctive features that intertwine with characteristics of rationality and visions of the future. This innovative approach to AI narrators creates a thread of continuity within the realm of nonhuman narrators and infuses it with new dimensions that hold the potential to redefine scholarly discourse.
Nevertheless, this book has some areas for improvement regarding its argumentative coherence and structural organization. While it employs a complex theoretical framework, there is a need for clearer and more logical connections among these theoretical concepts. The transitions between different theoretical terminologies, both in the introduction and throughout the main text, might prove perplexing. For example, the section titled “Nonhuman Narration: What Is at Stake?” (5), which discusses narrative characteristics, is positioned between philosophical and ethical explorations of AI properties titled “AIs as Counter-Ontological Entities” (4) and “Critical Debates About AIs” (7). Furthermore, although each chapter is focused on a different novel, a discernible repetition of similar themes, such as subjectivity, identity, selfhood, and personhood, becomes evident throughout various chapters. Strengthening the coherence between different sections could be achieved by more comprehensively addressing the shared aspects and variations of these themes across different works.
Despite its few shortcomings, this volume is a valuable reference and guide for those seeking insights into the defining features of AI narrative texts, the presence of posthumanist themes in sf literature, and the pertinent theoretical concepts and attributes of AI narrators within the context of nonhuman narratives.—Luna Huang, Huazhong University of Science and Technology
A Narrow Corner of Freedom.
Luo Xiaoming. Unlocking the Future: The Urban Imagination in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction. Routledge, 2023. 189 pp. $160 hc, $47.65 ebk.
Luo Xiaoming’s Unlocking the Future: The Urban Imagination in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction surveys a dazzling array of contemporary Chinese-language sf with a focus on how authors reimagine the future, particularly the future as related to literary depictions of the city. Adopting a conceptual framework that builds on Raymond Williams’s structure of feeling, Luo claims an ambitious goal from the book’s onset, to “assess the capacity of the Chinese society of the current era to conceive of the future” from contemporary sf’s urban imagination (4). Luo’s assumption that Chinese sf is uniquely shaped by the culturally specific conditions of China’s rapid urbanization process, therefore, takes a markedly different stance to that of sf writer-translator Ken Liu, who questions the validity of the label “Chinese science fiction,” given the diversity of works and authors included in this broad category (Invisible Planets [Tor, 2016] 14). Luo’s assessment is organized into an introduction followed by six chapters and a conclusion, and it makes a compelling case that the label “Chinese science fiction” can illuminate the connections between sf and the individual’s changing role in Chinese society from the era of Reform and Opening Up in the 1980s to the present. According to Luo, sf highlights the need for social revolution on a global scale, given the implications of the global supply chain on the majority of Chinese people: “I argue that the genre’s narrow corner of freedom, from which both its successes and failures come, can best be viewed, reflected on, and grasped in such a ‘revolutionary’ context” (11).
The book’s introduction provides a brief overview of the historical context of four decades of China’s urbanization to explain how the process transformed ordinary people’s perceptions of time and space; these are the concepts underlying Luo’s first two chapters. In Chapter 1, Luo analyzes how the city’s fictional reconceptualization has been impacted by the redistribution of urban space. In the context of Chinese sf, Luo observes that the city “emerges at once as an all-enveloping symbol of oppression and a fundamentally unimaginable and indescribable alienating space” (22), an imaginary construction that explains the “pervasive feelings of insignificance and helplessness among individuals” (23). But city space can only be understood in relation to its counterpart, time, usually distorted or reversed in sf narratives within the framework of global capitalist production. For instance, on the issue of how human labor is redefined in the modern city, Luo provides a helpful comparison of Hao Jingfang’s “Folding Beijing” (2016) to the lesser-known (at least to anglophone readers) Feng Yuan’s “The Career Planning Bureau” (2013).
Chapter 2 looks at how the trope of time travel is related to the popular notion of “China speed.” Despite Luo’s reading of the ubiquitous time-travel narrative as being characterized by a “conceptual limitation” due to its ambivalent attitude toward the “unalterable reality” of the twenty-first-century present (37), Luo explores other literary strategies that experiment with the manipulation of time, such as the “time cage” in stories that imagine the flow of time in a sealed space, featured in Liu Wenyang’s Prisoner for a Day (2001), Tang Fei’s “Three Seasons of Life” (2015), and Gu Shi’s “The Final File” (2020). The second half of the chapter is devoted to a discussion of Chen Geng, the protagonist in Shuang Chimu’s story “Spiritual Sampling” (2018). Luo claims that the character of Cheng Geng is representative of Chinese youth today and their sense of obsolescence in the face of consumerism and authoritarianism (53).
In Chapter 3, the author turns to the theme of urban infrastructure and more specifically, sf depictions of housing, transportation, and language systems. Luo’s insightful analysis of housing in Liu Cixin’s Three-Body trilogy (English trans. 2014-2016) and of garbage collectors in Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide (2013) demonstrates how the study’s thematic approach is useful in shedding new light on literature that has already been extensively discussed. One of the author’s most provocative claims is that the sf imagination of urban infrastructure can be traced to the “whole of Chinese society’s experience of what is meant by ‘public’” (80). According to Luo, since sf writers’ attitudes about the public are mostly pessimistic, “imaginative resistance is predictably negative and limited” (81).
Chapter 4 begins by providing useful basic information about land and home ownership in China, and examines the urban-rural relationship in conceptions of the future. Luo identifies two types of intellectual youth: Li Wen from The Waste Tide represents upward mobility from the countryside that accepts social stratification and the binary system of urban-dominated rural exploitation; the other type, commonly found in Liu Cixin’s stories, remains in the countryside or challenges in other ways the necessity of urban-rural integration. Both types illustrate China’s unique status as a relative latecomer to the modernization process, leading Luo to ask, “If knowledge is meant to empower people to create a future not only for themselves but also for cities and the whole society, does the knowledge that the intellectual youth have acquired connect them more closely with an open-ended future or instead take them further away from it?” (100).
In Chapter 5, the author examines whether it is possible for Chinese sf creatively to imagine alternative forms of civilization and order under current “restrictive conditions” (123), mainly by comparing the works of Liu Cixin and Han Song, whom Luo sees as embodying two extreme poles. Liu’s stories demonstrate that “the courage to see the grim, dark, and irrational far exceeds the courage to imagine a new civilization based on a common morality” (131), whereas in Song’s stories “Chinese civilization is conceived through a mutually nullifying mechanism in which infinite expansion is continuously neutralized” (131).
Chapter 6 begins with the author’s pronouncement that much of Chinese sf is based on the premise of an “arrested future”: “We are facing an embarrassing stagnation of imagination and a sharp decline in our understanding of the future” (138). This chapter analyzes Liu Weijia’s “The Town Beneath the Tower” (2017), a story of two competing groups (a stagnating town of farmers and the barbaric Black Hawk tribe that plans to attack the town), as well as other stories by Wang Jingkang, Yi Zou, Zhang Ran, and others, to illustrate how sf writers reconfigure evolution to experiment with conflicting attitudes toward the free-market principles at the foundation of China’s entry into the capitalist global economy in the 1990s.
Luo’s attitude throughout the book is largely pessimistic, even though she insists at the end of Chapter 6 that continued research on sf reminds readers what remains to be done: “This will instill in us the attitude needed to understand our dilemmas and chart a course for the future” (155). Even so, Luo claims in her conclusion that there is no hope for actual literary resistance, regardless of the talent and courage of contemporary Chinese sf writers. Sf’s potential will remain unrealized as long as it cannot break through its “ideological cocoons” or real-life constraints:
No matter how hard these writers think about the future, or how reluctant they may be to accept the alternative futures established by the government or capital, their labors only result in their being trapped in real experiences, which, in turn, only compound the already negative and pessimistic tendencies of the imagination. Under the impetus of such tendencies, those who reflect on the future become mere onlookers, consigned to gazing passively as it unfolds.” (164)
Unlocking the Future is an excellent resource for anyone interested in learning about Chinese sf beyond the oeuvre of Liu Cixin and other similarly well-established authors whose works have been translated into English. The book also encourages critical thinking about the twisty connections between literature and real-life. When Luo discusses the role of transportation in Han Song’s novels Subway (2010) and High-Speed Rail (2012) in Chapter 3, for instance, asserting that “all forms of transportation are a means of getting somewhere and cannot and should not be an end in themselves” (69), we may find an uncanny resonance with recent news coverage about China’s BRI airport projects in Asia that extend from the domestic sphere to overseas.
Some of the author’s broader claims are not immediately persuasive or well-supported. One representative example is Luo’s claim that:
While the boundless imaginative power of science fiction may urgently be needed to challenge the current civilizational order, re-establish goodness and justice, and formulate a different model for the future, when its visions of the future are only available to sheltered and somewhat conservative characters with whom the readers are allowed to identify since they are usually the protagonists, the outcome is a retreat into pervasive inaction.” (154)
The book nevertheless is to be commended for its insistent interrogation of whether cities constitute the only measure by which human civilization can and should be evaluated, challenging us to make room for alternative frames of knowledge.
Lastly, the book’s concept of “the arrested future” is especially relevant amid growing public media discourse about “lying flat” and “the last generation” in the face of increasing youth unemployment rates and China’s economic slowdown since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a reader, I want to have faith in Luo’s belief in literature’s interventionist power, that it can potentially rupture the boundaries between fictional depictions of the collective’s imaginary relationship to the city and actual individuals’ experiences of urban life (23). But if this is too ambitious a hope for literature, or for the sf genre more specifically, for now we will have to do the best we can in our own narrow corner of freedom.—Angie Chau, University of Victoria
Theodor Adorno Meets Dystopian Literature.
Patricia McManus. Critical Theory and Dystopia. Manchester UP, 2022. 211 pp. £81 hc.
Patricia McManus’s recent monograph is well positioned to become a reference work in future studies of literary dystopias, if not dystopias generally. Using the critical apparatus of Theodor Adorno’s theory while engaging with the works of dys/utopian scholars such as Tom Moylan, Raffaella Baccolini, and Gregory Claeys, McManus retells the history of the subgenre as a changing whole, with a careful eye on the shaping and reshaping of its defining forms and themes. Thus, this is a monograph that invites readers to reconsider questions of estrangement and familiarity, commitment and critique, in a way that historicizes those abstract dialectics essential to the dystopian subgenre. Repurposing Adorno’s understanding of commitment in art, and recontextualizing it in a Suvinian view of sf, McManus proposes to think about dystopias and their nova in terms of their negative commitment, a concept that orients the monograph’s textual analyses and historical theorizations. Overall, Critical Theory and Dystopia is a volume that offers a cautiously partial (but no less thought-provoking) reconceptualization of the subgenre, and a reinterpretation of some of its classic texts alongside more recent, less studied ones. If there is one objection to be raised about the book, that would be the overgeneralized nature of its title, since rather than “critical theory and dystopia,” this is, more specifically, an Adornian approach to dystopian literature that evidently echoes (but barely discusses) other critical theorists and other dystopian media. This minor qualification, however, is not meant to imply that McManus’s monograph would be any less interesting to anyone oriented towards any broader, related fields—if anything, the overgeneralization of the title should be taken as an invitation to keep building with the book’s conceptual toolkit.
In terms of structure, the book starts with an introduction that proposes and a chapter that illustrates McManus’s concept of negative commitment, and the subsequent four chapters proceed to historicize the forms taken by dystopias across their history. As McManus claims, this is above all “a book about form ... not only about the forms dystopia may take—the various shapes of tyranny, coercion, subjugation and suffering—but also about the forms of the things lost to tyranny, things that are frequently not even named but the absence of which motivates the misery of what is there: autonomy, freedom, equality, difference, hope” (7). In this sense, McManus’s idea of thinking about the genre’s negative commitment—“a commitment to the present which cannot be figured” (12)—is a way to “work with form-in-history, form moving historically” (10). Otherwise, for McManus “the literary history which treats dystopia in terms of ideas is in danger of mistaking as normative what the fictions worry over” (11); in other words, rather than defining the genre by the presence of certain historically determined themes or ideas (at the risk of obscuring their historicity), the proposal here is to define dystopias essentially by the absence(s) around which their speculation revolves—around a negative commitment to what is missing in the dystopian world, to what the dystopia seems to lack and want in relation to the historical epoch that it implies. And this is the theoretical proposal that McManus applies, in her first chapter, to E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909), Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants (1952), and Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks (2018), a selection that illustrates “Negative Commitment at Work”—the chapter title—as well as anticipates the three epochal milestones of the book’s historical narrative.
The second chapter, focused entirely on George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949) as a paradigmatic classic dystopia, inaugurates the rest of the book. McManus’s reading of the novel strives to take the text from under the shadow of an author who tends to overdetermine interpretations. As McManus puts it, Orwell’s novel “is not so much a text read at all as one agreed with” (74), even though it is a novel with a powerful “radical ambivalence” that has “enable[d] positive readings from political positions as different as Friedrich Hayek’s and Storm Jameson’s” (91). Looking into the source of that ambivalence, McManus’s interpretation focuses on the text’s tensions in maintaining a separation of the public and the private, the subjective and the objective; interestingly, this is the separation missing from Winston Smith’s world, as the state of Oceania leaves no room whatsoever for privacy, subjectivity, or individuality. This chapter pays particular attention to Winston’s diaries, on the one hand, as an index of the character’s negativity—as his subjectivity is defined entirely by “the worldliness and strength of [his] antagonisms,” and on the other hand to the “Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” that clandestine history book which, even in its critical narration of the dystopian regime, presents the regime as an inevitable totality that has shut off the possibility of equality—the historically plausible but negated utopia that silently shapes the novel. Thus, as McManus puts it in her conclusions, “Negative commitment is that commitment—not to the things lost or destroyed—but to those which become unimaginable in the dystopia. The world put forward is wrong because it has defeated the possibility of something which has never had any historical existence” (94).
Chapter three, “Dystopia and the Past,” turns its attention to dystopian novels of the 1970s and 1980s—Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), J.G. Ballard’s Hello America (1981), and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). Before analyzing them, however, McManus notes a key contradiction in earlier dystopias: “what is remarkable is not that the classic dystopia’s critically negative look at the future blanks out the past but that it should pay so much attention to the value of history—right down to the historicity of particular words—in so doing” (105). Nevertheless, in works by Atwood, Ballard and Gibson, this contradiction is further complicated, especially insofar as the value of “history” in the abstract—and of the (high) “culture” that is meant to preserve it—cannot be taken for granted as safeguards against any dystopia, having become “less stable and less certain” (106). In her reading of Atwood, for instance, McManus observes not so much nostalgia towards a lost or censored, presumably better past, but rather “a nostalgia for the futures that past once promised” (109); similarly, in Ballard’s and Gibson’s novels, the past has an even more spectral presence, either as a simulacrum or as debris, and the possibility of resisting any regime by preserving “history” is almost out of the question. Thus, in a reversal of classic dystopias, here popular culture is the last site where the rhythms of history, the memories of the past, and of that past’s dreams of a different future, are still faintly visible or tangible” (114). Nevertheless, as McManus’s argument seems to suggest, this shift further undermines the articulation of antagonism and opposition of earlier dystopias, paving the way for a series of twenty-first-century texts in which there seems to be no outside—texts that are, ironically, as totalizing as the old regimes that the genre denounces.
The final two chapters, “Michel Houellebecq and the End of Dystopia” and “American Dystopia,” invite a parallel reading, as they approach the question of dystopia today in France and the US—two different but interrelated contexts where the genre seems to be in crisis. The first chapter offers a close reading of Houellebecq’s Submission (2015), a novel that narrates how France becomes the center of a newly Islamized European Union, a novel that McManus finds interesting insofar as its negative commitment appears doubly distant. With a narrator who, rather than nostalgic or reactionary, is openly critical of the secular culture that France is abandoning, and who is indifferent towards—and, in the end, willing to be assimilated into—the new regime, McManus argues that “there is no estrangement possible as no subjectivity exists which is capable of it” (161). Further, she finds only traces of a vague attachment to a long-lost, premodern past. Therefore, here “the conventions of the dystopian genre are ironised, the rebellion or resistance of the counter-narrative is flattened into rejection. What is rejected is the present, however. This leaves the purported dystopia, the future to come, with no internal critique—that will be provided by its readership” (158).
In the fifth and final chapter, McManus turns toward Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010) and Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles (2016), two novels focused on “near futures” that are “recognisably episodes of an American present,” spaces where “the nova ... are deflated, barely there things” (168). As well as “the absence of any commitment to the present”—as in Houellebecq—“these novels’ futures seem unthinkable except in terms of the present,” which is “no longer defensible” (168-69). Furthermore, McManus notes that here “what is dystopian is not the threat of what will replace it [the present] but the world itself, one without a regime, without planning in the centralised sense of the old dystopias, but yet a regime saturated with and generative of pain” (175). Shriver’s The Mandibles, in particular, is another example of “the end of dystopia,” insofar as it partakes in a reactionary attachment to an imagined, premodern projection of the past, but without the ironic ambivalence that characterizes Houellebecq. On the contrary, this is a novel that self-consciously advocates for a return to “the traditional family” and “individual freedom” as imagined by the contemporary alt-right.
Only two pages in this same chapter serve as a quick synthesis of the whole monograph, which lacks a conclusion. Here, McManus argues that, whereas classic dystopias “were still marked by their negative commitment to the present, one which they wish to hold to even as they can find no purchase on it” (192), contemporary dystopias can no longer see the present as “pregnant with futures which will be free of the past: it is too riddled with the past, with a historicity we can see now as not yet finished—whether that is in the deep currents of global warming or the seismic injustices of colonisation and the creation of whiteness” (193). As explanation for the apparent “end of dystopia” of contemporary times, McManus claims that for “this work of imagination to be possible”—for “catastrophe to be the unspeakable thing that endures, that becomes speakable or ‘normal’ and thus no longer a catastrophe,” as it is in dystopias—, “a machinery of power is needed which is not premised on the end-times, on apocalypse or on any final judgement” (193). Therefore, McManus’s last question seems to be: is this work of imagination possible today, in the often-proclaimed end times? Is there (and was there ever) an individual subject that can stand with sufficient distance so as to make speakable, graspable, and changeable the totality of the world that denies them individuality? This is the very Adornian questioning with which the book closes, reasserting the importance of asking this of dystopias, and more broadly, of reality itself.—Miguel Sebastián-Martín, Universidad de Salamanca (Spain)
Premonitions of the Future.
Bernard Montoneri. Science Fiction and Anticipation: Utopias, Dystopias and Time Travel. Lexington, 2022. 262 pp. $105 hc.
It is commonplace for reviewers of anthologies to conclude that the volume they are writing about is a mixed bag of both good and bad essays. Science Fiction and Anticipation: Utopias, Dystopias and Time Travel, however, contains almost exclusively poor scholarship. The collection is troubled from the start by a loose-knit theme that barely holds the essays together, and then each essay conforms to a strange model, lacking in substance, that must surely be at the direction of the editor. Many of the essays are further plagued by poor editing, dubious research, and obvious mistakes. While some essays do manage to make interesting observations or to shed light on some lesser-known works of sf, the overall impression of this book is that it leaves much to be desired.
On the surface, the thematic unity of utopia, dystopia, and time travel makes sense, as sf writers have long found it useful to send their protagonists deep into the past or far into the future to find either a model society to emulate or a nightmarish warning of what may come should society not change its ways. The works analyzed in this volume, however, often have flimsy connections to one another. Time travel is not always present in the works, and even when it is, there is little commentary upon it as a literary trope; it is merely treated as a vehicle for the plot. Some stories analyzed, however, do not contain elements of utopia or dystopia, but are merely general sf. The lack of thematic unity leaves the impression that this is a hodgepodge of sf writing with little consideration to time period, place, or genre. Yet even this haphazard assortment would not be so disconcerting if the structure of the essays lent themselves more conveniently to literary criticism.
The essays are structured so that it is difficult to discern what argument (if any) the authors are making and one can only assume that this model was followed at the editor’s instruction. Nearly every essay begins with a long biographical discourse on the author of the work being analyzed, and the details of these biographies often have no bearing on the interpretation of the texts being discussed. These essays thus read more like encyclopedia entries than literary criticism. The biographies are then typically followed by unnecessarily long plot summaries, often without any sort of critical commentary on the text—the kind of plot summary literature instructors often warn their students against. In fact, some of the chapters are composed nearly entirely of biographies and plot summaries, leaving the reader to wonder what their point is.
In addition to the unusual structure of the essays and their lack of analysis, the basic functions of an editor do not seem to have been fulfilled. The text is riddled with various sorts of mechanical errors, small and large. In the preface, Montoneri notes, “the chapters in this book have been peer-reviewed and proofread by contributors of this book and by several professors and researchers” (viii). If true, then several of these peer reviewers and proofreaders failed at their jobs. Glaring errors abound. In the chapter “The Phenomenon of Human-Animal Hybridization in Russian Science Fiction of the 20th Century” by Anna Toom, for example, The Island of Dr. Moreau is written incorrectly—twice. On page 96 it is spelled “The Island of Doctor Moro” and on page 113 it is printed as “Moreau’s Island.” It is easy enough to understand how an author working with multiple drafts for publication might make a mistake here or there, but surely a peer reviewer should have caught these errors, especially with such a canonical work of sf. In “The 19th Century American Socialism: A Vision of a Future Utopia” by Majed S. Al-Lehaibi and Bernard Montoneri, the same paragraph appears twice, once on page 190 and again on page 194. On page 193, the same sentence appears twice within the same paragraph. Similarly, on page 211 of “The Invention of Morel: A Projection on Dreams and Immortality” by Miguel Ángel González Chandia, the same sentence appears twice in a row. Surely a careful peer reviewer or editor would have caught these errors.
Other failures of the volume that should have been mitigated by a more careful editor are the quality of sources used and better engagement with the critical conversation of the author’s respective subjects. Secondary works cited throughout the volume are often sketchy, and sources include an article from the Strategic Cultural Foundation (a Russian government-supported think tank sanctioned by the US government for its role in disseminating misinformation and interfering with the 2020 presidential election), commercial websites, and a YouTube video. It is difficult to say what could cause such a lackadaisical approach to scholarship, but clearly something has gone amiss. The editor not only provides a chapter of his own (which is a common practice), but he also co-authors two more, which is a bit unusual. It may be that one person had too great a role in the production of this book and simply did not meet academic standards; but whatever the case may be, there was a breakdown somewhere between the collaboration of editor, authors, and peer reviewers.
Poor scholarship often leads to poor arguments, as may be seen in Beena Giridharan’s chapter, “Orwellian Themes and Echoes in Today’s World—A Perspective.” This essay echoes nonsensical, anti-scientific conspiracy theories stating that world governments intentionally overreacted to the COVID-19 pandemic in order to create a panic and cause their nations’ populations to be easier to control (173). Giridharan then moves on from her claim that reasonable health precautions against this deadly disease were Orwellian to criticizing the Trump administration. She writes, “Trump’s presidency was tarnished by the unceasing lies and truth distortion that was [sic] sadly accepted by his supporters and to a greater extent the American people who remained immune to his faults” (175). Giridharan curiously fails to realize that the misinformation she had been spreading just pages before this passage originated as one of Trump’s biggest lies—that the response to COVID-19 was a hoax. Furthermore, her claim that “the American people ... remained immune to his faults” is objectively untrue. Trump was elected in 2016 with only a plurality of the votes, his approval rating never reached 50% (and often remained far below that), and he was roundly defeated in his bid for reelection in 2020. To say that the American people were “immune to his faults” has no basis in reality. The rest of the essay contains musings on loosely related topics and provides little in the way of depth. Sadly, the same statement holds true for many of the other essays in this volume.
Perhaps what most makes this collection so disappointing is the potential it has at first glance. Time travel, utopias, and dystopias always provide interesting ideas and possess great potential for social commentary. Furthermore, the international scope and the diversity of scholars is admirable and should be emulated by organizers of future publications. Many of the works considered in this volume were unfamiliar to me (and I suspect they would be to many other English-speaking readers), and I gained a desire to read them and to learn more about their authors. Recent scholarship has grown more aware of the similarities and differences of sf across different cultures, and collections with a wide array of international authors such as this volume can make valuable contributions to fostering cross-cultural conversations.
In all, however, this volume fails to live up to its potential. Its lack of thematic unity, poor editing, and weak literary analysis make it a book that should be left on the shelf in favor of something better. —James Hamby, Middle Tennessee State University
Foundational Criticism.
Peter Nicholls. Genre Fiction: The Roaring Years. Reading: Ansible, 2022. 415 pp. $22.50/£18 pbk, £5.50 ebk.
Our understanding of sf owes much to Peter Nicholls. For several decades he was arguably most prominent as a citation or as part of one for The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1979, 1993, 2011, 2021), which guided us through pretty well every sf novelist, film, and television series (minus Octavia E. Butler in the first edition), alongside a large number of themes for further study. In its book forms, its (temperamental) CD-ROMs and its constantly updated webpage, the Encyclopedia has been and should remain an invaluable reference. Nicholls had moved to London in 1970 from Melbourne, soon becoming the first administrator of the Science Fiction Foundation at the then North East London Polytechnic, a role he played until his work on the Encyclopedia took over in 1978. He was the second editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction from 1974 to 1978. He organized a series of talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1975, featuring Ursula K. Le Guin, Edward de Bono, John Taylor, John Brunner, Harry Harrison, Alvin Toffler, Alan Garner, Thomas M. Disch, and Nicholls himself, plus Robert Sheckley, who replaced Philip K. Dick. These talks were collected as Science Fiction at Large (1976). He also wrote The Science in Science Fiction (1982, with David Langford and Brian Stableford) and Fantastic Cinema (1984), before returning to Melbourne in 1988.
There is a risk that such an important figure would be forgotten—in the Encyclopedia hidden behind the initials [PN], in dusty obsolete guides in academic libraries, or in reviews in journals, newspapers, and fanzines available only to the most intrepid researcher. In 2012, Nicholls decided to select some of this material for a collection, Genre Fiction: The Roaring Years: A Collection of Commentaries and Reviews, but this remained incomplete at his death in 2018. David Langford has completed this editing and made the collection available as part of Ansible Editions. The book brings together around thirty reviews, a number of articles—mostly from Foundation—several profiles, four write-ups on conventions, and talks, including the one from Science Fiction at Large, “Science Fiction: The Monsters and the Critics.” Nicholls tells us, in “Tolkien: Anatomy of a Romance” [Vector 67/68, 1974, reprinted here] that he first read The Lord of the Rings in 1954, went through a period of being critical of it for its prose, its songs, and Tolkien’s treatment of women, but after Tolkien’s death he admitted that there was something to the books, despite acknowledging their flaws; it was inevitable that Nicholls would borrow the subtitle of Tolkien’s 1936 lecture on Beowulf for his ICA talk.
The reviews provide the meat of the book, from Lem’s Solaris (1961, trans. 1970), “a novel more notional than realized” (18) to Damien Broderick’s collection Earth Is But a Star (2001). It is also worth noting his description of “celebrated critic John Clute who, when in obscurantist mode ... is magisterially opaque” (395). The bulk of the novels reviewed are from the 1970s and early 1980s, the Foundation years and beyond. It would be tempting to take a lot of these as evidence that Nicholls actually hates science fiction, but the approach is similar to that of Clute and M. John Harrison in their reviews of that era: he fears that too many authors retread old ground, that literary value cannot be located in them, and that the authors are not thinking through their ideas sufficiently. Nicholls criticizes sf precisely because he loves it. In the volume’s introduction, he writes “I haven’t stuck with science fiction all these years still wanting from it exactly what I required when I was sixteen” (171), guarding against the sentimental nostalgia of his adolescent reading experiences.
The veteran male writers reviewed here include Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, and Gene Wolfe. The critique of Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love (1973) is headed “Heinlein—A Lazarus Too Long?” (1975), which sets the tone for what is to follow. Nicholls sketches in the context for Heinlein’s popularity, which feels convincing, and attempts to locate Heinlein’s ideological beliefs. “Heinlein’s novels are offensive to me not because I dislike his ideas (though I do),” Nicholls writes, “but because I dislike what he does with them” (129). He admires Heinlein’s embracing of sexual themes, but finds Heinlein’s tone and that of his characters to be cynical or sentimental. Nicholls sums up by saying he “believe[s] this book to be one of the worst science fiction novels of the decade” (133). On the face of it, perhaps six pages is a lot to spend putting the boot in, but Nicholls is aware that Heinlein has become a social phenomenon, a guru to many, and is wary that younger readers might follow his creed. Such sentiments feel very current, as Incel influencers are feared to be polluting young men’s minds.
Nor is Nicholls a fan of Vonnegut’s Bluebeard (1987), although he clearly approved of Slaughterhouse-Five (1969); he argues that Vonnegut’s “vigorous voice has sunk into self-parody; nervous tics disfigure it” (312) and he finds the ending sentimental rather than beautiful. His account of Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972)is bogged down in plot summary, describing the novel as a “maze” (235) requiring a lot of commitment from the reader. He is comparatively gushing in his praise for The Urth of the New Sun (1987), describing the sequence it is part of as “the best science fiction of the past decade, and by any standard at all an important work of twentieth-century fiction” (317). In contrast, Christopher Priest’s Inverted World (1974) is seen as “a substantial achievement” (127). Priest had already been critical of the state of the genre, especially in fanzines such as Zenith, and had hardly mellowed; in fact he was the reviews editor of Foundation under Nicholls’s general editorship when this review first appeared in 1975. It was a close community, but it is probable that Nicholls would have deployed what Clute later called “excessive candour” if he had not liked the novel.
Few women are reviewed—no Butler, C.J. Cherryh, or Joanna Russ—Nicholls presumably being at the mercy of the various reviews editors. A glance through the (almost certainly incomplete) ISFDb entry does not point to significant omissions from this selection. “The Books We Really Read” (1996), written for The New York Review of Science Fiction and reprinted here, lists his 235 favorite writers, only 35 of whom are women. “I’m alarmed at how sexist a reader I turn out to be (368),” he confesses, before advancing what he admits is a sexist and biologically determined theory: “I argue that fiction by men tends to be narrative-driven, and fiction by women tends to be ambience-driven. My personal weakness, according to this theory, would be an addiction to narrative-driven fiction” (369). Ursula K. Le Guin makes his favorites list, Cherryh his second division. In a review of Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore (1972), and the rest of the Earthsea trilogy (1968-1972), Nicholls celebrates her above Tolkien as being “condensed [… rendering wonders] with clarity and precision” (114), and rates her slightly above Alan Garner in terms of children’s fantasy fiction. A round-up of children’s fiction from 1976 contains books by Susan Cooper (The Grey King [1975]), which he finds fine), Sylvia Engdahl (The Far Side of Evil [1971], which he finds preachy, pedestrian, and depressing), and Fay Sampson (F.67 [1975], which is jolly and silly). Later in the volume there is an overview of Philippa Pearce, with a focus on Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958) and The Way to Sattin Shore (1983), and an interview with Diana Wynne Jones; there are passing references to Russ, Cherryh, Pamela Zoline, Josephine Saxton, Connie Willis, and others in some of the articles and talks.
The articles collected here fall into two broad camps: surveys of the genre and accounts of conventions. The first set definitely reward a deeper examination; the second need to be read with an eye to irony and fictionalizing, preferably triangulating with other accounts of those events. In his two-part “Science Fiction and the Mainstream,” “The Demolition of Pigeon-Holes” (1973), and “The Great Tradition of Proto Science Fiction,” (1974) he raises arguments about the genre that are still with us today. He refuses to define science fiction, while arguing that “The Science-Fictional imagination typically constructs imaginary worlds, which comment on our own (whether consciously or not) by giving us new places to stand and see our own world in longer perspective” (36). He suggests that sf emerges as a self-conscious genre in 1926, even if equivalent literature had already been produced before then.
Nicholls suggests that we think of literature as a spectrum, with the purely realist and naturalist at one end and fantasy at the other—although the latter also creeps into the midpoint of the spectrum. Science fiction sits somewhere in the middle, close to historical fiction, “the mirror image of science fiction. Both forms, of course, are fundamentally about the present” (45). While he cites Darko Suvin (reviews from The Magazine of Science Fiction, May 1972), he uses terms related to “strange,” rather than to “estrangement.” Suvin’s “Cognition and Estrangement: An Approach to SF Poetics” had appeared in the previous issue of Foundation and the fanzine SF Commentary, both owhich Nicholls must have seen, and it is cited in “The Great Tradition of Proto Science Fiction” (1974). In “The Demolition of Pigeon Holes,” he sardonically rejects the use of proto-sf as a counter to those who argue that all sf is rubbish, in the process noting that the examples tend more to satire. A wider set of examples of proto-sf are discussed in the article’s “Part Two” (1974)—The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, The Republic, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,and so on, not so much as inevitable steps toward Gernsback, but rather as models for certain kinds of science fiction. Perhaps the most unexpected name is Herman Melville—whose “pure science-fiction story” The Bell-Tower (1855) for Nicholls points to Zelazny and Delany. Moby-Dick (1851) is a realistic novel, but its “spirit ... is very close to the spirit that permeates much science fiction” (149).
Another essay which would repay examination is “Jerry Cornelius at The Atrocity Exhibition: Anarchy and Entropy in New Worlds Science Fiction 1964-1974” (1975), an account of a key moment in written sf produced more or less at the time when it was dissolving. Nicholls is already calling it a “legend” (221)—citing Donald Wollheim’s account in The Universe Makers (1971) and Brian Aldiss’s in Billion-Year Spree (1973). Nicholls’s favorite works are from the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s. He focuses, however, on a handful of novels by Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, and Michael Moorcock, noting they are all rather singular writers although they all use distancing devices of “irony, cool, wit, and style” (227). Even if the main character of Crash! (1973) is Ballard, it is not clear that Ballard’s opinions are identical to Ballard’s. There is a deadening of affect and an embrace of irony.
David Langford continues to do sterling work in making such archive material available. There are a few glitches in the volume that I suspect are relics of scanning faded originals. Ellipses in quotations go astray and there are other places where periods are missing where they should be; equally there are periods appearing where they should not be. It could be my ereader, but the headings for each item leap between fonts and font sizes. None of this, however, should take away from a very useful consideration of science fiction from a largely 1970s perspective and Nicholls’s own challenging and challengeable views.—Andrew M. Butler, Canterbury Christ Church University
Is Another World Possible?
Ebru Deniz Ozan, ed. Rethinking Utopia: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Lexington, 2022.122 pp. $90.00 hc, $45.00 ebk.
In a world in crisis, it has become crucial to rethink utopia. The search for alternative world systems has gained particular significance under the strong influence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, and the ongoing wars in different parts of today’s world. Amid such despair, Ozan’s Rethinking Utopia: Interdisciplinary Approaches draws particular attention to the urgent need to think again about utopias that are “expressions of our desire for being otherwise or being better” (1). The book is divided into two parts and consists of six chapters. It brings together researchers from Türkiye working in such disciplines as political science and public administration, international relations, and law. These researchers, many based at Kütahya Dumlupınar University, discuss the concept of utopia in politics, law, and literature, engaging critically with both canonical works by Thomas More and Ursula K. Le Guin and lesser-known texts by the Turkish authors Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Sezai Karakoç, and İsmet Özel.
This collection contributes novel insights to utopian and dystopian studies through its in-depth analyses of utopia in relation to concepts such as populism, redemptive politics, modernism, modernity, political theory, international humanitarian law, the classless society, ownership, unalienated society, and Turkish Islamism. Its chapters are well written and well researched, with many to-the-point references to influential literary and theoretical works and figures. There are at times repetitive remarks about utopia, utopianism, and dystopia, however, and while such repetition may be useful for those new to the field, it will be less so for specialists.
Ozan’s brief introduction successfully outlines the objectives of the volume, that is, to demonstrate how “utopian thinking as discussed in this book can be a means to envisage a world beyond the crisis, rather than trying to develop resilience and coping strategies” and “the value of seeing utopias in different ways rather than creating a working model of utopian thinking” (2). Ozan emphasizes the “multidimensional and dynamic” characteristics of utopia (2), rightly accentuating the intricate entangled relationship between utopia and dystopia: “The history of dystopias or anti-utopias can be traced back as long as the utopia tradition” (3). She then briefly explains the main characteristics of utopia with special reference to social change and Karl Mannheim’s understanding of ideology and utopia. Ozan then engages with the conventional claim that utopias or utopian thinking may result in totalitarianism and totalitarian world systems. Her explanation of the structure of the book is also helpful: “The first part of the book is more theory oriented while the second part is more applied” (7). The introduction may not offer novel information to those specializing in the field, but it can be useful for interested and informed readers.
Chapter 1, “Utopia as a Free Play” by Hayrettin Özler, investigates the intricate connection between political theory and utopian thinking. Özler concludes that “the utopian reason is somewhere between pure reason and practical reason whereby we can free play” (26). Özler explains (Kantian) pure reason and practical reason in relation to utopian thinking with clarity and brevity. I find Özler’s emphasis here on the function of imagination for future transformation and social change particularly important. Özler also argues that utopia is “a betweenness or a linkage between different dualities” as an “intermediary faculty of mind” (16-17; emphasis in original). This is particularly useful to demonstrate that utopias and dystopias are not antonyms but might be synonyms depending on one’s perspective. Özler’s arguments at times seem overgeneralized, tending not to allow for alternative interpretations. In his last section, Özler draws on Derrida’s definition of free play, linking it to utopia.
Chapter 2, “The Search for a Better Place: Populist and Utopian Redemption” by Volkan Gül, presents a novel insight into utopian and dystopian studies. Utopia and populism may not come to mind as interconnected, but Gül successfully draws a correlation between these two concepts with a focus on populist and utopian redemption. The claim that “populists have their own utopias” is the main underlying point of this chapter focusing on redemptive politics (29). His main emphasis is on how utopias and populists “present themselves and how they create the better place” (31). I find Gül’s discussion of who is included and who is excluded in populist discourses, nationalism, and utopian projects particularly important, as the exclusionary and inclusive politics of such discourses and narratives help us understand the relative nature of these concepts. I agree with Gül’s point that “the utopian better place is more inclusive and has a universal claim compared to the populist better place,” but I do not necessarily agree with the generalized claim that “the utopian better place is for everyone” (39-40).
Chapter 3, “Utopia and The Law of Humanity: An International Humanitarian Law Perspective” by Ramazan Güreşci, is a discussion of international humanitarian law in relation to utopia. Güreşci traces a correlation between utopia and the concept of “the Law of Humanity”: “The foundation of utopianism and The Law of Humanity is to bring dynamism to political and legal reform aspirations” (44). He argues that “civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights as a pillar of today’s international order are outcomes of utopian thinking” (53). Although Güreşci’s points are important, however, his at times jargon-filled language poses an obstacle to highlighting his main argument for the interdisciplinary reader. This is not ideal for a volume in the series “Political Theory for Today,” which “seeks to bring the history of political thought out of the jargon-filled world of the academy into the everyday world of social and political life” (publisher’s website).
Part II offers analyses of various canonical and lesser-known texts of utopian and dystopian literature. Chapter 4, “Modernism in Thomas More’s Utopia” by Süleyman Sıdal, discusses More’s important work in relation to modernism and modernity, revealing its controversial aspects in the context of our own age of decolonization. Sıdal analyzes the connection between utopia and modernism through references to Plato, More, and relevant historical and political developments. He rightly claims that “Thomas More’s piece is a unique example to understand the inherent contradictions and solutions of modernism which cause an ongoing crisis” (63). (It is probably a personal preference, but I do not think it is historically correct to refer to Constantinople as Istanbul: “With the fall of Istanbul in 1453, the Byzantine Empire collapsed” (61). Rather, it should be “with the fall of Constantinople.”) Sıdal’s discussion reveals “modernism’s contradictions between individual vs. family, freedom vs. equality, plurality vs. majority, state vs. society, and man vs. woman” (74).
Ozan’s own contribution is Chapter 5, “The Classless Society in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Utopia: Always Coming Home.” She analyzes Le Guin’s work as a response to those “who condemn utopianism either as totalitarian or idealist” in this chapter that “traces a communist or anarchist, classless, and an unalienated society in Le Guin’s Utopia” (80). In her analysis, Ozan draws on the philosophical and theoretical approaches of influential figures such as Marx (unalienated and free society) and Olin E. Wright (radical egalitarianism). Her critical approach is reinforced through her analysis of Kesh society in Le Guin’s work. She presents an in-depth analysis of Le Guin’s world as a classless society in terms of economic structure and productive sources, rights and powers, ownership, exploitation, nature and alienation. I find her analysis of the relationship between the human and non-human world important within the scope of current discussions around posthumanism, transhumanism, ecocriticism, and environmental humanities.
Last but not least, chapter 6, “Turkish Islamism and Utopia: Collating the Works of Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Sezai Karakoç, and Ismet Özel” by Ertuğrul Zengin is an important chapter, especially for international readers, since it introduces three influential figures from Türkiye who played an important role in the intellectual and political development of the country. Zengin explains the difference between transnational Islamism and Turkish Islamism. He sees these writers as responding “to the ultimate question of Islamism in Turkey between 1960-80s, that is, whether Islamism can or should formulate a perfect state and social order, a utopia” (100). He then discusses the connection between Islamism and utopia via references to Mannheim, Sayyed Qutb, and Kısakürek. Through the discussion of philosophical works such as Ideological Knit (1968) by Kısakürek, Zengin clarifies what utopia means for the author and likens his work to Plato’s Republic. Through the analysis of The Credo of the Generation of the Resurrection (1976) by Karakoç, Zengin explicitly demonstrates the difference between Kısakürek and Karakoç. He also illustrates how Karakoç’s utopia “reflected the characteristic of Islamist politics of the 1970s” and “sympathized with the electoral politics and democratic mechanisms in order to come to the power” (111). Through the discussion of Three Issues: Technique, Civilization, and Alienation (1978) by İsmet Özel, he explains the differences between imagination and dream: “The imagination is originally Western and modern; the dream is Eastern and Islamic” (114). This chapter is strong, but a more in-depth analysis of a single selected text (rather than three) would help to reinforce the argument.
This interdisciplinary collection will be useful to scholars of utopian and dystopian studies, speculative fiction, and critical future studies, as well as those interested in utopianism, alternative world systems, sf, speculative narratives, and political theory. Its authors once more remind us of the urgent need to rethink utopia in ways that have strong potential to indicate “new possibilities to us” through “other possible societies” (6).—Emrah Atasoy, University of Warwick, UK
New Slants and New SF Cinemas.
J.P. Telotte, ed. The Oxford Handbook of New Science Fiction Cinemas. Oxford UP, 2023. xviii+338 pp. $165 hc.
In his exceptional introduction to sf genre studies, J.P. Telotte lays out the organizational principle of The Oxford Handbook of New Science Fiction Cinemas: the volume will not locate the “Platonic idea” of the genre (quoting Edward James) but will explore “slant forms of sf” (11, 10; emphasis in original). The contributing authors show how contemporary sf films shift and divert attention away from traditional genre conventions while incorporating concerns typically associated with other generic forms. Telotte details three ways in which the scholars in the volume approach contemporary sf cinema: through fractured forms, through critical/theoretical windows, and through “‘special filters’ through which audiences see and appreciate” the films (18). The authors here examine a plethora of twentieth and twenty-first century films; academically oriented readers will find many chapters to pique their interests.
As one might expect from a Handbook, most chapters function as overviews of a respective topic; other chapters advance an argument closer to what one might find in a journal or edited collection on a more narrowly focused area of inquiry. Many chapters share a common structure, making for a straightforward read, whether cover-to-cover or by subject. Susana M. Morris’s contribution, “Ethnogothic Film,” is a good example. Morris begins with the contemporary stakes of the slant and defines it as sf cinema featuring Black protagonists that “troubles dominant tropes of the uncanny and abject so that those deemed monstrous must deal with the specter of themselves and those who dehumanize them” (72-73). Then she locates gothic antecedents, provides twentieth-century examples, and concludes with an original reading of a contemporary ethnogothic film, Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017).
Telotte files Morris’s chapter in part one of the volume, “Slant Screens of New SF Cinema,” on the fractured forms noted above. Her contribution complements De Witt Douglas Kilgore’s opening chapter on Afrofuturist cinema. His typology of Afrofuturist films as thin, strong, and revolutionary, and his historical overview from Space is the Place (John Coney, 1974) to Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018) suggests a rich array of works in this slant.
Part one leans on the social and political significance of new sf cinemas. Susan A. George offers some novel insights into feminist speculative fiction (femspec). She reminds readers of the secondary place of women in twentieth-century sf cinema; not until Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) and Terminator 2 (James Cameron, 1991) do women become the heroes of the story. These films “opened the door to a host of strong, heroic, often genetically engineered, enhanced, or synthetic new-millennium sf women who ushered in new values and cultural perspectives,” although many twenty-first century femspec films depict traditionally beautiful women performing their impressive physical feats in “tight leather outfits” (92). George concludes with close readings of two popular examples of “femspec perspectives and feminist ideologies” (93), Alex Garland’s AI-thriller Ex Machina (2015) and Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s superhero flick Captain Marvel (2019).
The Marvel Cinematic Universe gets a longer treatment in Angela Ndalianis’s gloss on the superhero genre. She reads Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s “seven beauties of science fiction” in the inaugural MCU film Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008). Ndalianis’s chapter is an exciting way forward for studies of superhero cinemas as sf rather than fantasy. Gerald Duchovnay advances a study of magical realism sf film, another type closely linked with fantasy. After outlining the challenges of defining magical realism and its literary and film precursors, Duchovnay reads Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017) as a prime example. He reads the film biographically, stylistically, and thematically across the director’s oeuvre. Then he supports the argument by identifying its narrative based on reality, the “strange effect” of the fantastic on that reality (in this case, the gill-man), and its specificity of setting (the 1950s) (133).
Steampunk cinema and kaiju film put further slants on sf films. Regarding the former, in a long and impressive chapter Thomas Lamarre leaves no stone unturned. His account of the two steampunk models, the extrapolative (extrapolating the past into the future) and metapolative (cinema’s aesthetics and tricks), are applied to two Karel Zemna films. Lamarre continues by identifying three traits of steampunk and engages with too many films to list here. The three traits are steam worlds (world building), transdimensional kinemation (with Hayao Miyazaki’s oeuvre as an example), and “the adventure of energy.” Bradley Schauer also ranges widely in his analysis of the kaiju film (kaiju eiga, or giant monster movie). His overview of Godzilla’s beginnings in 1954 and its countless sequels, reboots, and spinoffs demonstrates the production and reception rollercoaster ride for the King of the Monsters. Schauer ends with a detailed discussion of Gareth Edward’s Godzilla (2014). The kaiju film maintains its relevance for filmmakers and audiences to explore the “creatures as metaphors for natural disasters or nuclear weapons,” thereby indicating the slant’s “deeper significance” (123).
The climate crisis adds fuel to sf cinema filmmakers’ search for significance. Mark Bould observes that “cli-fi” has become a buzz genre, with many critics marking it as distinct from sf. Other scholars tackle climate change in various films but rarely deal with sf fare. Bould’s chapter is thus a corrective and a guide. He identifies three of cli-fi cinema’s tendencies—“strategic realism, techno-utopianism, and apocalyptic environmentalism” (56)—and provides bountiful examples. Bould puts sf back into cli-fi. Lars Schmeink also brings hard science to sf cinema in his contribution. Biopunk film “negotiates how technologies in a late-capitalist globalized economy push life towards becoming a commodity” (18). Examples explored by Schmeink include Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997), Antiviral (Brandon Cronenberg, 2012), and The Girl with All the Gifts (Colm McCarthy, 2016).
The second half of the book, “New Slants on SF Films” addresses various critical/theoretical windows and the “special filters” mentioned above. Sherryl Vint covers territory similar to Schmeink’s chapter. She reads High Life (Claire Denis, 2019) through Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theories of biopolitics and bioethics. For Vint, High Life demonstrates that under venture capitalism, “life [must] prove its economic value as justification for its continued existence” (200-201). Foucault makes an appearance earlier in the Handbook as well. I position Joan Gordon’s part one contribution here. Gordon makes a compelling case for applying Foucault’s concept of heterotopia to films such as District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009) and Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016).
In part two, contributing authors take sf beyond the human in several chapters. Through the lens of queer cinema, Catherine Constable and Matt Denny provide detailed readings of the android figures in the Alien franchise (1979, 1997, 2012, 2017). Frances McDonald makes the case for bringing feminist materialism to bear on contemporary sf aesthetics, such as those in the under-appreciated Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, 2013). Telotte picks up the same thread in his chapter on posthumanism. He draws on Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles to assist him in articulating sf cinema’s efforts to think beyond the confines of the human body as well as human conceptions of space and time. Among many other examples, Telotte explores the new understanding of time experienced by Arrival’s protagonist Louise; in Luc Besson’s Lucy (2014), the eponymous character explores new identities and embodied relations by becoming digital by the film’s end. Lucy is also studied at length in Caroline Edwards’s chapter on utopianism, which groups it with Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) and Melancholia (Lars Von Trier, 2011) as films that “challenge the liberal humanist notions of discrete subjectivity” (312). As I observed in another review (SFS 48.1), I still do not find utopianism a useful theoretical lens for sf film scholarship. Edwards’s posthumanist lean is exciting but it is needlessly framed by an introductory discussion of utopia.
Back to the (in)significance of the human, Gerry Canavan offers a short but detailed overview of the Anthropocene and ecosophy (deep ecology). For Canavan, sf cinema can visualize non-human time, with The Time Machine (Simon Wells, 2002) as an example. During the use of the machine, the centuries pass by the time traveller and show a world operating according to a logic and order different from humanity’s brief yet environmentally devastating existence. Then the lone philosopher of the book, Levi R. Bryant, adopts object-oriented ontology to undertake an original reading of Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990). By turning to a non-human object, in this case gravity, scholarship gains a new perspective on the older film.
In the first of two “special filter” slants, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock examines cult sf cinema. His specific focus is “quirky dystopian cult films,” and he productively traces a line from Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985) and Repo Men (Alex Cox, 1984) to The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015) and Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018). Next, Chuck Tryon concisely and impressively details the impact of digital technologies on the production, distribution, exhibition, and reception of sf cinema.
Indeed, most of the chapters are impressive. In his introduction, Telotte notes that the contributing authors are some of the most distinguished in the field. It shows in their original takes on sf cinemas, old and new. For seasoned sf studies readers, there is pleasure in seeing the veterans pull together years of research and thinking on their respective topics. Moreover, because the chapters are concise and readable, undergraduates and established scholars will both have rewarding reading experiences.
A few chapters stand out more than others, and some authors could have condensed the length and breadth of their contributions. On the one hand, in 11 to 15 pages most chapters articulate the traits, theoretical underpinnings, and brief history of a slant and its respective application in a contemporary film or two (e.g., Gordon, Ndalianis). On the other hand, a few contributors submit deeper arguments about a slant in 16+ pages with readings of three or (many) more contemporary films (e.g., Lamarre, Constable and Denny, Edwards). While these longer chapters develop novel arguments or extensive historical excavations, the volume is at its best in the more straightforward overview-type chapters.
But what is exciting is the total package. This 338-page project provides plenty of reasons why twenty-first century sf cinema demands our attention. Looking at the films discussed or nodded to in passing in the collection, it is clear that this century’s canon includes Lucy, Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2013), Ex Machina, Arrival, Black Panther, and Captain Marvel (Spike Jonze’s Her [2013] is surprisingly absent). The volume may be slanted towards American productions, but future researchers can build on many of the great ideas explored in this Oxford Handbook.—Troy Michael Bordun, University of Northern British Columbia/Concordia University
Vim and Verve, and Sometimes Verne.
Gary Westfahl, ed. Jules Verne Lives!: Essays on His Works and Legacy. McFarland, 2023. ix+313 pp. $49.95 pbk.
Right from its exclamatory title and the first words of its Introduction—“Jules Verne may be the most important author of the nineteenth century” (1)—this edited collection proclaims itself an energetic, all-embracing celebration of Verne’s works and influence. The boldness of this approach strikes a welcome note in Verne studies, still so often placed toward the margins of Anglophone academia; indeed, Jules Verne Lives! is only the second edited collection in English of Verne scholarship, after Edmund J. Smyth’s Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity (2000). (Special mention goes to the four English-language contributions in the 2015 festschrift Collectionner l’extraordinaire, sonder l’ailleurs: Essais sur Jules Verne en hommage à Jean-Michel Margot.) Westfahl continues his Introduction in a similarly vigorous vein; after noting some long-held misunderstandings of Verne and recent efforts in rehabilitation, he promises “a sampling of cutting-edge scholarship” on Verne’s works, the creative responses they have garnered, and the subgenre of steampunk sf with which Verne is often associated (3). This ambitious scope proves both a strength and a liability, often veering toward structural chaos but offering many rewarding moments along the way.
The book’s first section, “The Writings of Jules Verne,” suggests the bold approach pays off: Westfahl has collected largely sterling work in seven essays by Arthur B. Evans, Bed Paudyal, Marie-Hélène Huet (twice), John Rieder, Howard V. Hendrix, and Nicolas Saucy. Evans’s “Humor in the Works of Jules Verne” makes a joyful starting point, reflecting the lighthearted tone of the title Jules Verne Lives! and contextualizing it in a thorough, well-balanced analysis of Verne’s varied comic strategies. Among other highlights of the section, Paudyal’s “Imperialism and the Sublime of the Enlightenment in Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires” investigates Verne’s multifaceted treatment of the sublime and points up its colonialist undertones, while Huet’s “Winter Lights: Disaster, Interpretation, and Jules Verne’s Polar Novels” is a tour de force drawing apposite connections to polar history, meteorology, psychology, and even Surrealist art. Considering that the book seems to select from a wide pool, including new pieces as well as existing papers from the 2009 J. Lloyd Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, this section has some unexpected imbalances in its curation—The Mysterious Island (1875), though one of Verne’s crowning achievements, begins to feel a little over-represented—but the essays certainly support the book’s title in suggesting Verne’s vibrant scholarly afterlife.
The second section, “Responses to Verne’s Works,” is more forced in concept, despite the quality work in its six essays by Ekaterina Yudina, Kieran O’Driscoll, Terry Harpold (twice), Westfahl, and Peter W. Sinnema. On the plus side, Harpold’s “There Are No Chicken Dinosaurs on The Mysterious Island: Or, Why the Film Adaptations of Jules Verne’s Novel Are Mostly Terrible” perfectly delivers on the section header’s promise; the essay’s insights illuminate not only the specific films it delightfully disses, but fundamental properties of the source novel—and indeed of Vernian storytelling writ large—that are often lost in adaptation. Most of the other topics in this section, however, strain against the catchall label “responses.” For example, although Yudina’s “‘Comrade Jules Verne vs. the Sharks of Imperialism’ in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Crimson Island” neatly outlines the implications of deploying Verne as a satirical pretext and quasi-character, it also documents how The Crimson Island (1927) “responds” far more to Russian and Western conceptions of revolution and empire than to Verne’s own writings, which are relegated essentially to set-dressing. Somewhat similarly, while Westfahl’s “Have Verne—Will Travel: When the Three Stooges and Paladin Met Phileas Fogg” details two oddball 1960s versions of Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), it is hard to shake the suspicion that both versions are comments on Mike Todd’s 1956 blockbuster film rather than on Verne’s original, and that adding this missing link would have fruitfully complicated the essay’s conclusions on adaptational priorities. As for Sinnema’s “Halley’s ‘More Ample Creation’: Divine Utility in Hollow Earth Theory and Fiction,” it seems to have wandered in from a different book: no amount of fine-grained analysis and historical context (and Sinnema provides both) can offset how neither of the nineteenth-century Hollow Earth fictions described, much less Edmond Halley’s seventeenth-century thought experiment, owe anything to Verne. Indeed, the essay’s one reference to Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) points not to Verne’s text but to the “Hardwigg” version—a heavily rewritten pseudo-translation originally published by Griffith & Farran in 1871—underlining how tenuous the Verne connection is here.
By the third section, “Steampunk,” the collection’s scope seems so brashly all-encompassing as to be confusing. Rather than making good on the title with a composite view of how “Jules Verne lives” within steampunk sf, or indeed delivering any curated theme, the final six essays by Mike Perschon, Westfahl (twice), Donald M. Hassler, Stephen W. Potts, and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro seem scattershot. The most thoroughly Vernian entry, Perschon’s “Finding Nemo: Verne’s Antihero as Original Steampunk,” has close affinities with Hendrix’s “Verne Among the Punks, or ‘It’s Not All Just a Victorian Clockwork’” in the first section; both are 2009 Eaton Conference papers making imaginative first stabs at tracing a Verne sensibility in steampunk (and vice versa), so it is unclear why they are placed so far apart here. Another highlight, Westfahl’s cheerfully opinionated “Steamjunk: Four Works by Philip José Farmer, the Deservedly Unacknowledged Father of Steampunk,” demonstrates how Farmer, whose The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (1973) regularly comes up in discussions of Verne reception and strongly suggests proto-steampunk, can nonetheless make difficult reading. The remaining essays are less convincing fits for a book that promises to explore Verne-steampunk connections. Westfahl’s “If Jules Verne Were Alive Today ... Reflections on Steampunk and Technothrillers” argues that a modern Verne would write not steampunk but Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990); the other three contributions are engaging studies each touching in some way on steampunk or Verne, but not both together. To take the most extreme example, Potts’s “A Study in Sherlock, or Constructing Holmes in the Twenty-First Century” focuses tightly on contemporary screen visions of Sherlock Holmes, mentioning Verne only in a cursory opening gambit and steampunk not at all. It is a thoughtful comparative analysis, but even the Introduction seems at a loss to account for its presence here, offering up only that it concerns “the Victorian era’s most prominent character” (4).
If the third section confirms a tendency toward sweeping boldness over strict curatorial logic, then the book’s final features, as if by design, show off that tendency at its best and worst. “Steampunk: The Authors Speak” breaks imaginatively out of essay mode to offer an inspired appendix, an informal panel in which sf writers James P. Blaylock, Jonathan Green, Stephen Hunt, and Paul Di Filippo define steampunk through eloquent personal witness. While the selection of four white Anglophone men does not bode well for the subgenre’s diversity, their practical perspectives on steampunk’s origins and boundaries are usefully varied; Verne appears in turn as essential influence (Blaylock: Verne “physically altered my brain,” 262), false friend (Green: Verne was “not writing steampunk,” 263), nodding acquaintance (Hunt’s Vernian borrowings are limited to “fan service” in a single novel, 266), and complete stranger (Di Filippo’s poetic contribution omits him entirely). By contrast, the three bibliographies are ambitious but messy. The primary Verne bibliography is riddled with errors and omissions; a “Principal English Translations” section skips all titles from Oxford UP, Wesleyan UP, University of Nebraska Press, and SUNY Press, not to mention all translations of (ironically) The Mysterious Island. The secondary bibliography, though limited to works in English, leans more toward being completist than being helpful; major studies and highly specialized articles mix indiscriminately with broad-strokes journalism and biographies for children. Finally, the far more streamlined steampunk bibliography seems an afterthought by comparison, covering four pages to the secondary Verne bibliography’s seventeen.
To imitate the collection’s boldness with a move into a whimsical metaphoric mode: if Jules Verne Lives! seems to promise a smooth survey of a single field, be aware that it is more of a rough crossing over varied terrain—perhaps a stormy flight in the steampunk dirigible that graces its cover. Even so, the insights and intriguing perspectives offered make it an engaging journey for readers interested in Verne, steampunk sf, or both. Mind the bumps, but enjoy the ride.—Alex Kirstukas, Royal Holloway, University of London
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