#100 = Volume 33, Part 3 =
November
2006
ARTICLE ABSTRACTS.
Editorial
Introduction
This is the 100th issue of SFS. For us, many of whom
have been associated with the journal now for nearly half its span, editing
SFS has been an inexhaustible source of surprise, inspiration, and
solidarity. It has been a near-utopian co-operative enterprise that has crossed
generations and national boundaries, ideologies and techniques; an enterprise
that has been free of chauvinism and disciplinary jealousies, and a chance—worth
more than gold—for humanists and scientists (social and natural) to collaborate
in sketching out our technoscientific culturescape. Whatever sf may be as an
art-form, as a pretext for study it offers the universe—literature and special
f/x, quantum gravity and Omega points, the Singularity and Paris in 2440. (We’ll
take Paris.)
SFS began in 1973 as the
brainchild of R.D. Mullen and Darko Suvin. They had, as a later brace of editors
would state, "the ambition to open up SF criticism to a number of new points of
view, to broaden its horizons, and to break with the comfortable purring of
anecdotal and thematic commentary inherited from the Golden Age (or Tin Age) of
SF and its fandom" (SFS 17.1, [March 1979]: 4). Fed up with the
insularity of both the fiction and the criticism brought so lightly to bear on
it, Suvin and Mullen established a venue for genre criticism that would be
historical, international, and theoretical. Mullen, an
eighteenth-century scholar who was also the son of a newspaperman, provided deep
knowledge of the pulps, as well as management and editing know-how. Suvin, who
developed into the most productive and influential academic theorist of the
genre, provided theoretical energy and a supply of brilliant contributors. The
first volumes of SFS regularly featured work by Stanislaw Lem, Ursula K.
Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Samuel Delany, Fredric Jameson, Gérard Klein, Patrick
Parrinder, David Ketterer, Marc Angenot, Tom Moylan, Peter Fitting, John
Huntington, Robert Philmus, Walter Meyers, Albert Berger, and many others who
helped establish the contours of our field.
In those first years SFS was unmistakably inspired by
the Europe-oriented, Frankfurt School-inflected, cultural New Left, as were many
new critical-theoretical journals (such as Telos, SubStance, and New
German Critique) that were subverting the Academy at the time. Although
Mullen (who was not a Marxist) and Suvin (who was and is) printed many more
articles that were not Marxist than those that were, the core belief in
materialist cultural critique, internationalism, and the utopian function of sf
gave the journal a distinctive identity and something of a mission. The
importance of sf needed no justification; what was at stake was "what the genre
ought to be doing" (Luckhurst 397, this issue). The normative mission of
laying out the ground rules of critique and establishing a critical canon
inspired SFS to remain open to theory and international perspectives.
SFS regularly published articles on sf of the USSR, the Eastern bloc,
France, Germany, and Latin America at a time when the vast majority of sf’s
readers considered US sf the only kind worth reading.
Most of the current editors were in school when SFS
first began publication. We stumbled on it in library reading rooms, at
conferences, in footnotes. The discovery had much the same effect on us as the
pulps had for early sf fans. Here was sophisticated criticism of an outlaw genre
we loved and believed in. Here also were conceptual tools that were completely
distinctive, yet drawn from respected intellectual currents. Here were claims
that the genre is not only legitimate, but critically important for this
historical moment. The mood was captured in Le Guin’s famous introduction to
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969): sf is not about the future, but the
present. All other fiction is about the past.
The founding writers of SFS seemed like Olympians to
us. When the journal moved to Canada in 1979, at first co-edited by Suvin, Marc
Angenot, Charles Elkins, and Robert Philmus, it became a more accessible
institution. Philmus, who eventually managed the journal alone, doing by himself
all the work that it takes the current six-person collective to do, acted as a
mentor to many of his younger contributors. For us, the once radical new
cultural currents were already norms. Science fiction was becoming a credible
mode of art as popular culture gained influence in university curricula. In the
Montréal years, special issues were compiled on sf by women, sf cinema, utopia,
nuclear-war sf, Olaf Stapledon, Lem, a second volume on Philip K. Dick.
Groundbreaking articles appeared—Jameson’s "Progress versus Utopia," Katherine
Hayles on Lem, Bruce Franklin on sf’s role in fostering the Vietnam War, an
intense debate on the validity of Baudrillardian critiques of Marxist analysis,
and in #50 our first piece on cyberpunk (Glenn Grant’s essay on détournement
in Gibson’s Neuromancer [1984]).
The first incarnation of the current collective took the helm
with issue #54, in 1993, when the journal returned to Indiana, where it was once
again managed by Mullen. Each of us has brought his or her own area of
expertise—feminist and queer theory, the Vernian tradition, the Golden Age, the
New Wave and postmodernism, contemporary writing, cyberpunk, and world sf. In
this work, we have become firmly committed to each other and to others in our
scholarly community. This solidarity is based on the conviction once expressed
by Mullen that "literary scholarship is an ongoing cooperative endeavor" (SFS
24.3 [Nov. 1997]: 532).
In their comments published in this issue, Roger Luckhurst and
Patrick Parrinder both suggest that the journal began a second phase with that
change, from a normative, founding project to the treatment of sf as "less a
genre than a mode of apprehension" (397). As the things scholars had observed in
the fiction appeared increasingly in the real world, the tools of sf critique
proved transferrable to cultural theory. For Luckhurst, "Jameson, Baudrillard,
and Haraway almost seemed legitimated by sf, not the other way around"
(397). If this is so, the political-technical culture of the West made it
inevitable. The effects of postmodernism, the ground-level technoculture incited
by personal computers and the Net, the mutation of Left theory into cultural
studies, and the attendant respectability of queer theory, seemed to make sf the
privileged art of the age—as Brian McHale, for one, has argued in
Constructing Postmodernism (1992). Events were changing the world
dramatically, too, at an irrecuperable pace, dissolving the verities of the
post-World War II techno-political world system. US economic hegemony was being
challenged by Japan; commercial nuclear power was collapsing in America;
Pershing missiles were deployed in Central Europe; the Soviet bloc fell, freeing
up capitalist technoculture to occupy all the global niches; Yugoslavia
disintegrated into a shocking war in the midst of Europe; microprocessing and
the Web began the process of transforming any human activity that could be
digitized. In sf, cyberpunk and the cyborg had taken center stage almost
simultaneously. (Neuromancer appeared in 1984; Haraway’s "Cyborg
Manifesto" a year later.) Together they gave sf what it craved most, an image
and a language that could make the real seem natural again. They infected
scholarship, too, as the agenda of theoretical criticism was almost entirely
determined by the interpretation and interrogation of cyberculture.
If SFS has changed, it has been gradual. We have
preserved a strong sense of continuity with the journal’s past and its original
mission. Materialist critique now comes mainly from cultural studies, queer
theory, and race theory; and we have welcomed them. We have worked hard to keep
our international focus, both in publication and readership. And we have
encouraged historical scholarship of many kinds. We have devoted much more space
to popular media than did our predecessors; sf itself has taken us there. To the
degree that relevant theory is still being produced, we strive both to
assimilate it and to make it accessible.
If culture is a great stream, scholarship’s job is not to keep
abreast of the speedboats and paddle-wheel casinos of artists and entrepreneurs,
but to lag behind. Our job is to map, to collect, and now and then to push
things out of the way for the slower boats behind us. SFS has changed
slowly over the past thirty-three years. Our cover still looks like that of the
Journal of Medieval Agronomy. We only recently, grudgingly, acknowledged
that fantasy can have a healthy relationship with sf. We have tried to keep up
with (i.e., to lag not too far behind) the waves of theories, novums, media, and
styles that sf mediates for us; but none of these, for better or worse, has
seriously affected our faith in scholarly rigor, honesty, and art.
Some of our friends in the Roundtable on the current state and
future promise of sf criticism included in this issue wonder what our putative
"third wave" will bring. Most likely, it will bring whatever the world brings.
Science fiction itself will surely change as it appears in new forms: games,
television, digital video, web-forms and public installations. On-demand
publishing will probably allow literary sf to live on. As long as ftl drive,
time travel, and consciousness downloads remain out of reach, our technoculture
will still have need of sf’s plausible impossibilities. Science fiction will
still be needed to manage the unmanageable boundaries of our existence, sf
criticism will still be needed to place it in context, and sf artists will still
need critics and scholars to give them an audience after they go back to clay.
We will continue with special projects, with forthcoming special issues on
Afrofuturism, animals and sf, and sf and history.
Still, it will probably not be business-in-the-future as
usual. The postmodern moment may be over, simply because the relentless de-historicization
of the present described by Jameson has also completely evacuated the good old
modernist future. We find ourselves between, on the one hand, a posthumanity few
believe in, entranced by the prospect of a technological transcendence that will
make the future mute and inaccessible; and, on the other, a future that has
collapsed so completely onto the present that our most influential sf artist,
William Gibson, has excised it entirely from his latest, most artistically
ambitious novel. The hard-core actual state of our world, between these poles of
the presentless future and the futureless present, is war. We have explored the
posthuman in recent articles on Greg Egan, Charles Stross, nanopunk, and the
gendered technobody. We are exploring the collapsed future in this issue, in
three fine articles on Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003). We have not
yet talked about the war.
Mark Bould reminds us in his comments in the Roundtable, that
SFS was founded in wartime and that its utopian core values were forged
in response to global violence made possible by a technoscientific war-machine.
Much as we might want to avoid it in safe havens (offices and pages), it is
becoming ever harder to look away from the violence and irrationality on a
world-historical scale, pushed by cynical Realpolitik, self-intoxicating
nationalism, and religious fanaticism. The challenge to construct cultures and
technologies that can transform the converging crises in ecology, democracy,
poverty, economic imperialism, work, and technologically administered
mass-hypnosis may yet inspire a new sf with a future for real people. It may
also inspire a new criticism, which, if not precisely utopian, yet may still
look for hope with eyes open. If that is to happen, we expect SFS to be a
part of it.
WORKS CITED
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York:
Ace, 1969.
McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. New York:
Routledge, 1992.
Allen A. Debus
Re-Framing the Science in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth
Abstract. -- The erroneous geological
theory of Humphry Davy (1778-1829) is a pillar supporting Jules Verne’s
Journey to the Center of the Earth. The updated 1867 edition of Journey
may be viewed as a fictionalized paleontological treatise, or odyssey
through Life’s history. The apex (or climax) of the story occurs on the shores
and waters of the Lidenbrock Sea, an oracular cave setting where Axel has his
waking dream, brilliantly reinforcing Verne’s life-through-time motif. Fossils
and the waking dream foreshadow later appearances of living antediluvians as
certain paleoanthropological debates of the day are incorporated into the novel.
Michelle Reid
Urban Space and Canadian Identity in Charles
de Lint’s Svaha
Abstract. -- This article analyzes Charles de Lint’s
1989 novel Svaha as an example of how distinct national identities can
endure in the globalized future espoused by most cyberpunk texts. Instead of
imagining a generic urban sprawl in which it is increasingly difficult to
maintain a stable social or communal identity, Svaha addresses issues of
Canadian identity based on the division of living spaces by various social and
cultural boundaries. The article begins by assessing Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s
argument that science fiction shows little interest in the future of nations, a
notion I counter by means of Anthony D. Smith’s claims for nationality as an
enduring connection to history (time) and homeland (space) that extends both
before and after the current political incarnation of the nation-state. The
article then offers a reading of the segregated urban space in Svaha as a
response to the legacy of Canada as a settler colony that prioritizes immigrant
identities over First Nations identities. In the novel, the mosaic model of
Canadian multiculturalism that resulted in the fragmentation of the country is
replaced by a more integrated model based on a First Nations land ethic. The
article ends by considering some of the problems with the optimistic conclusion
of the novel, in which space is used to overcome historical legacies of
dispossession.
Paul Kincaid
"A Mode of Head-On Collision": George Turner’s
Critical Relationship with Science Fiction
Abstract. -- George Turner (1916-1997) was one of the
most important science fiction writers Australia has produced, but before he
published his first sf novel he had established his notoriety as one of the most
acerbic of genre critics. This essay looks at Turner’s genre criticism and
detects within it signs of an antagonistic relationship with sf. He had been an
award-winning mainstream novelist, and his criticism often comes down to
attacking science fiction for not being sufficiently mainstream. Starting with
his attack on Alfred Bester’s 1953 novel The Demolished Man, and
demonstrating that Turner exaggerated the affront his attack provoked, the essay
goes on to examine his problems with any suggestion of the fantastic in relation
to sf as well as his sharp exchanges with Stanislaw Lem and Lucius Shepard, both
of which hinged on Turner’s attempt to see the genre as if it were based on
exactly the same principles and ideas as mainstream literature. Finally, the
essay looks briefly at how these attitudes impinged upon the sf novels Turner
would subsequently write.
Veronica Hollinger
Stories about the Future: From Patterns of Expectation
to Pattern Recognition
Abstract. -- It is not news that "science fiction" has
come to refer in the past few decades not only to a popular narrative genre, but
also to a kind of popular cultural discourse, a way of thinking about a
sociopolitical present defined by radical and incessant technological
transformation. William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003) is both a
realist novel set in 2002 and an sf novel set in the endless endtimes of the
future-present. It brilliantly conveys the phenomenology of a present infused
with futurity, no longer like itself, no longer like the present. In this essay
I discuss Pattern Recognition in the context of two other contemporary
novels, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and Greg Egan’s
Schild’s Ladder (2001), that also address the complexities of contemporary
technoculture’s interactions with the future. Oryx and Crake, an
apocalyptic satire by an author most often associated with the realist novel, is
a telling demonstration of how non-genre writers turn to science fiction as a
way to characterize the lived experience of technoculture. Schild’s Ladder,
situated at the centre of genre, captures the fascination with which some
contemporary hard sf views the potential of technoscience to transform human
history in radically unforeseeable ways. In his latest novel, meanwhile, Gibson
has traded in the tropes of sf for the strategies of mimetic realism to
dramatize the future as a kind of impossibility. I read these three novels as a
series of significantly interrelated stories about the increasingly complex
nature of the future in technoculture.
Christopher Palmer
Pattern Recognition:
"None of What We Do Here Is Ever Really Private"
Abstract. -- In this article William
Gibson’s Pattern Recognition is read as a response to issues raised by
9/11 that concern the power and obscenity of images. The main character has lost
her father in mysterious circumstances at the fall of the towers, but the novel
approaches the event obliquely, and it does not name Al Qaeda or terrorism at
all, although it has a lot to tell us of the aftermath of the Cold War and of
post-Soviet Russia. This article assesses these omissions and interprets what is
offered in their place: Cayce Pollard’s quest for the mysterious internet
footage; the connections with old technologies and old disasters that her quest
traces; the novel’s thoughts about art, and the ambiguities of these thoughts.
Much of this can be read as a response to the challenge issued by 9/11: a
rethinking of when we should disclose and when withhold (or tantalize), and an
ambiguous reassessment of the relations of the producers and receivers of a work
of art, the footage, which is here read as ambiguously romantic and postmodern.
Neil Easterbrook
Alternate Presents: The Ambivalent Historicism
of Pattern Recognition
Abstract. -- Pattern
Recognition, Gibson’s most recent novel, is purportedly set in "the
present," and so purportedly marks a significant break both in his own work and
in the way sf is conceived. The book’s treatment of the concepts of past,
present, and future, however, is inherently ambivalent—that is to say,
simultaneously oriented toward several possible alternative positions, some of
them mutually exclusive. To clarify this ambivalence, this article engages
notions of alternative history, counterfactual conditionals, and historicism to
show that Gibson’s novel demonstrates a fundamental fact about fictional
discourse: that it necessarily forms an "alternative present" of the readerly
now.
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