REVIEW-ESSAY
Mark Bould
Transitional Demands
John Rieder. Speculative Epistemologies: An Eccentric Account of SF from the 1960s to the Present. Liverpool UP, 2021. vii+183 pp. $137.50 hc, $47.99 pbk.
In Speculative Epistemologies, the author of the justly influential Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008) and Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (2017) continues to destabilize and reorient our understanding of sf. And once more, he displays his uncanny knack for spotting those things bobbing and flickering in the corner of sf studies’ eye, of gathering them together and placing them center stage, and of saying things about sf that immediately strike you as obvious and true—but only after he has said them.
Rieder’s new book is concerned with “truth effects in sf” (1). It explores the interrelation of mimesis and rhetoric, of representation and persuasion, in sf works that “challenge dominant assumptions about the normal, the possible, and the real”—hence, “speculative epistemologies”—but that have occupied the edges or, rather, some of the multiple “epicenters” of sf—hence, “eccentric”—since the 1960s (2). His six key examples, to each of which he devotes a chapter, are Pamela Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), Samuel R. Delany’s “The Tale of Plague and Carnivals” (1985), Theodore Roszak’s The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (1995), Albert Wendt’s The Adventures of Vela (2009), and Donna Haraway’s “The Camille Stories” (2016). Clearly, then, what is on offer is not, as the subtitle of Brian Aldiss’s Billion Year Spree (1973) was sometimes rendered, the true history of sf, or even just the history of sf. Instead, Rieder navigates the last half century of sf, which he understands both as a “fluid, historically malleable” discursive object and as many often interweaving and overlapping communities of knowledge and practice (3).
His six exemplary texts do not merely “flirt with generic boundaries”—they are “boundary objects” that “draw together” these subcultures and thus “foreground social struggles against the maintenance of dominant knowledge systems” (3). At the same time, they express the “marginalized and alternative ways of knowing” associated with women (Zoline, Roszak), Indigenous communities (Silko, Wendt) and queer communities (Delany, Haraway) (4), and because the period that interests Rieder also features the rise of sf studies and its associated subculture(s), two of his authors are also career academics (Roszak, Haraway) (19). Moreover, all six texts are rooted in “the civil rights and women’s movements of the 1950s and 1960s and their legacy in the ongoing struggle against institutional racism and sexism, and in the allied pursuit of environmental activism”; they are “positioned at the prolific intersections of multiple histories, communities and discourses” (152). Consequently, in addition to providing detailed close readings, Rieder traces each text through its circuits of production, circulation, and reception, activating its relationship(s) with the different communities that (came to) understand it as sf.
Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe,” for example, was first published in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine and then promptly anthologized in both his Best S.F. Stories from New Worlds 3 (1968) and Judith Merril’s England Swings SF (1968). Thus, it was first understood as exemplifying the way the New Wave “challenged and modified previously accepted meanings of” sf (21). It was subsequently anthologized, with an introduction by Brian Aldiss, in Robert Silverberg’s The Mirror of Infinity: A Critics’ Anthology of Science Fiction (1970), a story collection that also included commentary by both author-critics and scholar-critics (Kingsley Amis, Algis Budrys, James Blish, Thomas Clareson, H. Bruce Franklin, Damon Knight) and then, perhaps surprisingly, rejected from the sf canon in David Ketterer’s scholarly New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature (1974). These moves resituated Zoline’s story in relation to different communities and contexts, where the wider literary significance of sf was being debated. Its anthologization in Pamela Sargent’s The New Women of Wonder (1978) resituated it once more and much more explicitly in relation to second-wave feminism and feminist sf—a position reinforced, for example, by its treatment in Sarah Lefanu’s In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988) and inclusion in Justine Larbalestier’s Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (2006). Throughout the half century since its publication, however, and alongside such differing-though-related embraces of the story by different-though-related communities, others have continued to question whether the story really is sf. As Rieder argues, this not only demonstrates how richly Zoline expressed “the stylistic and ideological conflicts troubling the sf community in the 1960s,” but also how, like his other selections, the story presented sf with a choice: to recede “into its commercially oriented genre niche” or to embrace “the looser identity of sf-ness by seeking out complex articulations with diverse generic boundaries and less market-driven regimes of publicity” (46).
Silko’s Ceremony has a similarly complex reception history. Initially canonized in the context of Native American literature and then as a regional novel, it soon attained—partly because of its classroom adoption within and beyond these remits—the status of great Native American novel. Only then did its journey to becoming sf begin, traced by Rieder through the work of several critics. In a 2008 article, Sharon Holm rejected the deracination and toothless progressivism that had secured (and accompanied) the novel’s elevation, re-emphasizing its Vietnam-era anti-imperialist and anti-war position. With the novel’s indigeneity restored, Patrick B. Sharp’s 2014 essay situated it in opposition to Cold War nuclear sf novels that assumed that nuclear catastrophe lay in the (possible) future. Ceremony’s evocations of the Trinity test site and the Jackpile Uranium Mine insist that apocalypse has already happened to Indigenous peoples. Silko’s novel is thus both post-apocalyptic and a story of Anthropocenic timescales. Following critical work that analyzed Ceremony in relation to traditional ecological knowledge and ecological posthumanism, and building on Anishinaabe scholar Grace L. Dillon’s groundbreaking work on Indigenous Futurism, David M. Higgins’s 2016 essay is able to treat the novel as being fully “legible as sf within a larger shifting of sf’s networks of influences and associations” (58). This is not to claim that Ceremony was sf back in 1977, but rather to articulate a series of questions about “boundaries defining not just sf’s categorization but the way those boundaries are shifting in relation to effects of reality and truth, authority and plausibility” and about “what sf has become and ... what Ceremony has always been” (Rieder 42).
Subsequent chapters move away from tracing reception histories and place a stronger emphasis on this becoming of sf. For example, Delany’s novella, included in Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985) as “‘Appendix A: The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, or, Some Informal Remarks toward the Modular Calculus, Part Five’ (1984),” is his (un)usual blend of paraliterature and post-structuralism, bringing sword and sorcery into dialogue with the HIV-AIDS crisis, while appealing to “an academically trained audience” and “several other groups definitely not included in the niche audiences of Conan-style adventure: female; non-white, especially African-American; and non-heteronormative readers” (62). Rieder argues that, while the mid-1980s are typically remembered in terms of cyberpunk, “the racial and sexual opening-up of sf achieved in Delany’s work indicates a longer, deeper current of vitalization of the genre” (84), as the shortlists and winners of the last decade’s major sf awards affirm.
Elements of this opening-up are also evident in Samoan Albert Wendt’s novel-length narrative poem, which bears close resemblance to the Indigenous futurism described by Grace Dillon—the naming of which was inspired by the Afrofuturism with which Delany’s work has been associated—and the “wonderwork” described by Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice that is “rooted in meaningful uncertainty, curiosity, humility [and] places unsolvable mystery, not fixed insistence, at the heart of engagement” (qtd. by Rieder 105). If The Adventures of Vela does not look much like sf, that is because it decenters the hegemonic power and insistent mastery of the colonial project from and alongside which sf emerged; but if it does look like sf, that is because the communities, contexts, and developments that Rieder describes have fed powerfully into your sense of what sf has become and is becoming.
Roszak’s novel is a similar case. Just as the explosion of scholarly interest in Mary Shelley and Frankenstein (1818) was a product of the cultural crises and political developments of the 1960s and 1970s, so The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein resonates with key issues in feminist historical scholarship from the 1970s and 1980s, particularly the origins of modern science, the masculinization and gendered professionalization of healthcare, the capitalist restructuring of female labor, and the destruction of pre-industrial ecologies. That is, Roszak’s novel is “rooted in and draw[s] upon his membership in an academic community of practice,” as well as his connections to countercultural politics, and as such it is best understood as a “communal product” (102). And if its braiding together of “historical novel, Gothic romance, feminist historiography, and ... speculative fiction” into “a kind of alternate history set in the past” (88) makes it seem that “it is not science fiction,” then perhaps it is “not science fiction in very much the same way as the literature of cognitive estrangement ... is not science fiction, or at least not most science fiction” (89).
Haraway’s “The Camille Stories,” included in her Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), is even more of a collective project, arising from a conference workshop in 2013 where she was invited, along with filmmaker Fabrizio Terranova and philosopher Vinciane Despret, to “fabulate a baby, and somehow bring the infant through five human generations” (qtd. in Rieder 141). The resulting narrative of queer reproduction features genetically engineered symbionts born not because an individual or a couple wish to have a baby but because the community—known as the Children of Compost—takes “a collective decision ... on forming kinship relations aimed at ‘reducing human numbers and demands on the earth, while simultaneously increasing human and other critters’ flourishing’” (135). The openness of this collective form of storytelling invites further associations, both with works that respond directly to Haraway’s stories, such as virtuellestheater’s 2018 Children of Compost (available to watch on Vimeo) and Lyz Soto and Keali’I MacKennzie’s performance of “When They Become Us” at SFRA 2019, and with projects that share a similar brainstorming/workshopping/collective praxis, such as adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha’s Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (2015) and Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elain Gan, and Nils Bubandt’s Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017).
Throughout, Rieder also distinguishes the fiction he favors from the dominant mass-cultural forms of sf since 1977, represented by the Hollywood blockbuster. For much of the book, it appears as a problematic (if only ultimately apparent) straw man, but the final pages do then make explicit the reactionary tendencies (unequally) present in actually existing blockbusters: an unthinking reiteration of the historically catastrophic ideology of technological progress; a preference for managing appliances over understanding complex interrelations; a vague and superficial corporate progressivism that while never exactly misogynistic nonetheless accepts the patriarchal status quo; the reproduction of fantasies of spectacular violence as a punctum rather than recognition of everyday life’s slow violence; and so on. In contrast, Rieder urges us to attend more closely to those more marginal science fictions that “do not merely accommodate the legacy of the movements for social justice [but] seek to expand and radicalize it” (164).
In Ida Yoshinaga’s essay in Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction (2022), a volume she co-edited with Sean Guynes and Gerry Canavan, she identifies Rieder’s work as part of Science Fiction Studies 2.0, the generation of “mostly Marxist-influenced academics” who “recovered the sociohistorical specificities of science fiction from classical SF theory’s oversimplification of the genre into a singular form” and “opened the door to the current historical moment of broadly conceived SFnal expressions put forth by wide-ranging global populations who seek justice through imaginative truth-telling” (169). That would be no mean legacy, not least because Yoshinaga’s call for a Science Fiction Studies 3.0, which is dedicated to Rieder, builds directly on his work; for instance, she describes sf now “as the cultural recalibration of existing knowledge systems through innovative genre play, toward the ethical transformation, or community-informed regeneration, of historical modes of production” (172).
But John being John, of course he also has an essay in the inaugural volume of Science Fiction Studies 3.0.
WORKS CITED
Higgins, David M. “Survivance in Indigenous Science Fictions: Vizenor, Silko, Glancy, and the Rejection of Imperial Victimry.” Extrapolation 57.1-2 (2016): 51-72.
Holm, Sharon. “The ‘Lie” of the Land: Native Sovereignty, Indian Literary Nationalism, and Early Indigenism in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.” American Indian Quarterly 32.3 (2008): 243-74.
Sharp, Patrick B. “Questing for an Indigenous Future: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony as Indigenous Science Fiction.” Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction. Ed. Isiah Lavender III. U of Mississippi P, 2014. 117-30.
Yoshinaga, Ida. “Science Fiction Studies 3.0: Re-networking Our Hive Mind.” Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction. Ed. Ida Yoshinaga, Sean Guynes, and Gerry Canavan. MIT, 2022. 165-76.
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