BOOKS IN REVIEW
Children at the End of the World.
Emily Ashton. Anthropocene Childhoods: Speculative Fiction, Racialization, and Climate Crisis. BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC, FEMINIST THOUGHT IN CHILDHOOD RESEARCH, 2024. x+198 pp. $170.95 hc, $52.65 pbk, $0 open-access.
Emily Ashton’s debut monograph is part of the Feminist Thought in Childhood Research Series, a significant series in the field of childhood studies. The series aims to move the discussion from focusing on individual children to a more posthumanist model, taking into account the complex more-than-human systems and nonhuman entanglements that encompass concepts such as humanity and childhood. Taking this remit as a starting point, Ashton produces a book that weaves together a posthumanist perspective on the figure of the child with a number of apocalyptic science-fiction texts, situating her work in the context of sf studies and creating an interdisciplinary approach that will be of interest to many scholarly fields.
Ashton draws on Lee Edelman’s key text, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), to analyze the figure of the child as the future guarantor of the contemporary status quo. She also notes Rebekah Sheldon’s development of Edelman’s work, which more specifically situates the child as a figure of reproductive futurism and points to a move from seeing the child as someone for whom the world must be preserved, to seeing the child as a potential savior (a figure that Ashton sees in the children taking part in school strikes to save the climate, à la Greta Thunberg), ultimately asking: “instead of the child-figure failing to suggest a future, the Anthropocene makes thinkable that there is no future for the child. So, in a bit of a twist, what if the appeal is not for the future or even for the child but for the end of the world?” (15). Sheldon’s and Edelman’s positions have already been developed in some interesting conversations with speculative fiction, particularly in Heather Latimer’s writings, and it is exciting to see them applied and developed in the field of childhood studies, and in the depth that a full monograph allows. Ultimately, Ashton is arguing that reproductive futurism becomes a kind of “cruel optimism” (following Lauren Berlant) in the age of the Anthropocene—placing hopes for the future in the figure of the child ultimately disguises the need for real action in the present.
As per its subtitle, the book foregrounds the issue of race alongside its interests in childhood studies and science-fiction studies. Ashton clarifies her interests when she writes that “the main focus in this book is on racialized child-figures in speculative texts of literature and film that story the end of the world through some sort of climate-related disaster” (5). In bringing race into the discussion, Ashton draws on critical race studies, intersectionality, and Indigenous studies, producing a complex figure of the child at the end of the world. Ashton’s focus on racialized and Indigenous children dovetails perfectly with her argument, in that racialized children have never been representative figures of the (white supremacist) future. These are children who have often been denied the innocence of childhood, judged older than their years, and sexualized or seen as violent. This has echoes of the point made by Kathryn Yusoff among others that Black and Indigenous communities may have already experienced an “apocalypse”; as Ashton puts it, they are “communities that have already had their worlds ended” (31). Ashton’s work therefore offers a welcome corrective to investigations into the figure of the child that tend to focus on the child/adult binary, thereby flattening out other elements of difference that may exist within those figures—particularly the imbalance between the members of Anthropos who have been responsible for consuming resources and those who have been treated like a resource to be consumed or an inconvenience to be removed from the land.
Speculative fiction is used here to help Ashton “consider how the end of the world can mean otherwise: it can be the end of apocalypse, the end of settler colonialism, the end of anti-Black racism ... a glimpse of what otherwise might feel, look, and be like” (46). Many of the texts Ashton reads in the course of this monograph will likely be familiar to SFS readers. They include Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017), M.R. Carey’s The Girl With All the Gifts (2014), N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy (2015-2017), Ruha Benjamin’s “Ferguson is the Future” (2016), the film Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), and The Handmaid’s Tale television series (2017-). These texts are framed by dense engagements with theoretical concepts. For example, Chapter 1 reads Beasts of the Southern Wild and The Marrow Thieves alongside Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism (2016), which rethinks Foucault’s biopower to consider the interplay between “life” and “non-life” in contemporary governance, particularly in the context of colonialist and Indigenous disputes. Part of Ashton’s goal here is to move beyond the binary that has tended to structure childhood studies between biological understandings of childhood (that are therefore universalizing) and socially constructed understandings. As well as the bio- and the socio-, Ashton asks her readers to consider the geo-. She asks how a geological understanding of childhood might contribute to these two waves of childhood studies, how throwing a rock into the waves might diffract our concept of the child.
Ashton’s thoroughgoing introductions to the theoretical frameworks she mobilizes in the book and their sound connections to her broader arguments mean that the readings are well integrated into the whole, while offering new insights even to readers who may be very familiar with the primary texts under discussion. As well as Povinelli, Ashton draws heavily on the work of Sylvia Wynter who, following Frantz Fanon, describes humanity as homo narrans, a people self-constructed from stories. Framing speculative fiction as a key strategy of creation for homo narrans shows its importance and allows Ashton to build connections between the texts she analyzes and the social practices around climate change and racialization in which she is invested. The book also deals with the politics of care through consideration of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s Matters of Care (2017), which Ashton uses in her discussion of The Handmaid’s Tale, in an argument that shows how planetary stewardship and parental stewardship are aligned in the text. As Ashton rightly argues, this environmental perspective has not regularly been brought to the fore despite the significant body of scholarship on the television show, the original novel, and its sequel which tends to focus on gender and violence against women, rather than the intersections with environmentalism that the television show, in particular, emphasizes.
These theoretical and political engagements culminate in a provocative conclusion in which Ashton resists the drive in criticism to separate the figure of the child from specific children. To some extent this was crystalized by Edelman who writes against the figure of the child, but not against individual children, and taken up by the many theorists who have worked with his position since. Ashton complicates the distinction between the two—the figure of the child and the lived experience of children—to consider educational futures. Here it turns out that a posthuman approach that aims to recognize the entanglement of the human/child with other systems and beings challenges established ideas about child-centered pedagogy, an approach that—while well meaning—has been accused of re-enforcing Anthropocentrism and individualism by positioning the child in a hierarchy with the educator. Ultimately what emerges from this discussion is a nuanced account of the tensions to be found in pedagogy when the figure of the child is complicated with the lived experiences of actual children, and when those lived experiences are considered intersectionally, with all of the difference and entanglement that implies. In bringing speculative fiction into these debates, Ashton distinguishes between the “cruel optimism” science fiction might be accused of (by offering the illusion of a future that will never arrive) and the “angry optimism” that Kim Stanley Robinson urges readers to adopt, an optimism that might result in change. In taking this stance, Ashton convincingly shows how speculative fiction is a productive site for imaginatively exploring the tensions and contradictions of Anthropocene childhoods in the climate crisis and at the end of the world, recognizing the activist affordances that so many contemporary sf scholars are finding in the genre.
—Anna McFarlane, University of Leeds
Deadly Belief.
Simon Bacon. Faith and the Zombie: Critical Essays on the End of the World and Beyond. McFarland, 2023. x+280 pp. $49.95 pbk.
An eclectic range of essays can represent the strength or the weakness of a collected volume. This engaging gamut of chapters squarely falls into the former category with 17 contributions encompassing literature, media, and philosophy, united by their treatment of zombies from the late twentieth century onward. Given that zombies raise metaphysical questions about life after death and personhood and agency, it is surprising that there is relatively little scholarship devoted to the religious aspects of these creatures. In his thoughtful introduction, Bacon points out that not only Christianity in the West but also other faiths “equally spark the supernatural fire that enlivens the bodies of the risen dead” (5). In other words, the idea of the zombie may ultimately stem from concepts taught by different world religions.
The volume is divided into five parts and clearly some thought has gone into grouping complementary chapters together. The first section, “Survival and Loss at the End of the World,” includes essays focusing on the impact of the returned on the living and their belief systems. Stella Marie Gaynor opens this section and the volume with an original and tightly argued piece on the path-breaking French television show The Returned. This series, which ran for two seasons (2012-2015), was the first television show to feature rational zombies. Gaynor notes that, while the conventional walking dead provokes horror, the return of loved ones tends to inspire “disbelief and fear” (29). The paranormal nature of these returned is coupled with a strong religious presence both in the local Catholic priest and in a secretive doomsday cult. Gaynor argues that the show’s zombies drive people away from Christianity either into the cult or into a substitute creed where a newborn baby, Nathan, the result of the union between a living woman and her returned former fiancé, becomes “a perverted representation of the Virgin Birth” (38). Mark Richard Adams turns his attention to Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy (40-54). These three Italian movies (1979-1981) are characterized by “both their recurring nihilistic themes and their use of the living dead as antagonistic forces” (41). Adams concludes that, while there are strong religious motifs in the films, they are primarily a symbolic backdrop and Catholicism does not equip characters to fend off zombies, a somewhat surprising economy given that the director was a devout Catholic. George J. Sieg and Scout Tafoya provide philosophical overviews of zombie depictions, the former themed on conversion as zombification and the latter probing the concept of zombie optimism. This segues neatly into the volume’s second section, “Undead Capitalism, Undead Planet.” Erin Giannini is interested in the role of capitalist theology in iZombie. The five-season show (2015-2018) is one of the few recent undead series not to have been canceled before a concluding season. Giannini suggests that the cruelty manifested in some theological systems is more monstrous in two of the show’s characters than the fact that they are brain-eating zombies. Jacopo Della Quercia delves into the undead army in Game of Thrones, while Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns is fascinated by the countercultural theological and ecological subtexts of the 1974 Spanish zombie movie No Profanar el Sueño de los Muertos [Let Sleeping Corpses Lie].
The book’s third part is themed on “The Christian/Judaic Apocalypse and the Zombie,” opening with John W. Morehead’s study of Hershel Greene’s religious faith in The Walking Dead, contrasting this character’s religious convictions with Rick Grimes’s decidedly “pragmatic expression of hope” (153). In one of the jewels of the volume, James T. McCrea reflects on the peculiarly Christian aspects of representations of the undead in the West. McCrea identifies and explores three significant factors: “the combative relationships between God and neighboring divinity, the restless dead in Christian texts, and ... the Christian burial plot” (166). Sarah Cleary’s insightful chapter is themed on the relatively predominant (and paradoxical) absence of religion in depictions of the zombie apocalypse. Cleary highlights “two dominant forms of hauntological representation: money and religion” (177), both of which lose their currency following the collapse of societal order. Cleary considers a spectrum of zombie works and her essay is magisterial. It should be essential reading for every student and scholar interested in the undead.
Part four, dedicated to “The Biblical Undead,” starts with Charlotte Thomas’s analysis of M.R. Carey’s novel The Girl with All the Gifts (2014) in the framework of the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, finding that both texts employ rhetorical strategies to subvert ideas of who is worthy to inherit a new world. Phil Fitzsimmons’s chapter examines the ways in which the 2013 movie World War Z employs biblical apocalyptic tropes and finds close parallels between the work’s plot and symbols and the Book of Revelation. This is followed by Kevin J. Wetmore’s study of scriptural exodus and remnant motifs in George A. Romero’s 2005 Land of the Dead (2005). Wetmore convincingly suggests that, in the movie, “the very place of safety is also a place of confinement” (222).
The fifth and final section of the book, “Faith of the Zombie,” begins with Ildikó Limpár’s reflection on how The Girl with All the Gifts and Daryl Gregory’s Raising Stony Mayhall (2011) subvert biblical tradition. Sharon Coleclough muses on the cognizant zombie in television shows, a topic about which I have written in SFS (“From Contagion to Cogitation: The Evolving Television Zombie” [SFS 47.1 (2020)]), yet the chapter offers a variety of captivating perspectives that were fresh to me. Coleclough contends that the status of a rational form of undead challenges the conventional us vs. them premise of zombie media, representing a significant generic reconfiguration. The volume’s final essay, co-authored by Nikki Foster-Kruczek and Catherine Pugh, proposes that the BBC show In the Flesh (2013-2014) “offers three potential undead saviors” (256), most notably the protagonist Kieren Walker.
In his Foreword, seasoned zombie scholar Peter Dendle underscores that “Central to the zombie ethos are enduring anxieties concerning God, humanity, and the search for meaning in a world of brutality” (2). The subsequent introduction and 17 contributions probe this assertion and leave no stone unturned, from faith to ferality. But while this collection is quite international in its scope, it does not include any chapters focusing on zombies from Asia. This is a pity as there have been some innovative and critically acclaimed zombie media from the continent, particularly South Korea, during the past decade. This is essentially a minor quibble, however, as the essays in this highly readable volume not only constitute an important and timely addition to our understanding of the cultural fascination with the undead but also suggest ways in which religion is largely responsible for our interest in—and for the origins of—this phenomenon.—Paul Scott, University of Kansas
Speculative Bardolatry.
Sarah Annes Brown. Shakespeare and Science Fiction. Liverpool UP, LIVERPOOL SCIENCE FICTION TEXTS AND STUDIES, 2021. vii+212 pp. $120 hc, $35.60 pbk.
The speculative imagination loves Shakespeare and, as this well-researched, critically astute, and engaging monograph illustrates, Shakespeare rewards this affection through the richness of his intertextual contributions to sf. Brown makes a strong case for Shakespeare’s very real influence on/in the genre, and she suggests several reasons for this. One is to accrue a bit of Shakespeare’s canonical cachet, of course, especially in Anglo-American cultural spheres. When you title your Star Trek film The Undiscovered Country (1991; cf. Hamlet), the association with Shakespeare immediately implies (misleadingly or not) something about the film’s depth and complexity. For Brown, however, this is the least of what is going on “to account for the complexity and inventiveness of science fiction’s engagement with Shakespeare’s works” (3). Her study is proof of physicist Phillip Schwe’s wry observation that “Shakespeare is like an expanding universe.... The more you look, the more meanings you can discover” (qtd. 3). The “real” Shakespeare is notoriously mysterious: his life is largely absent from the historical record and even the authorship of his plays has been open to debate. Shakespeare as blank slate invites fiction to fill in some of the empty spaces in his life, and the protean worlds of his plays invite endless speculation about their often ambiguous “messages.”
As a genre itself given to protean world-building, sf is tailor-made to engage with the Bard and his plays. Brown examines Shakespeare’s intertextual presence in a wide range of speculative fictions, arguing that “Shakespeare—like science fiction—tests the boundaries of our species” (7). Her readings range from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) to recent fiction such as Emily St. John Mandel’s critically acclaimed Station Eleven (2014). While her focus is “literary science fiction over the last hundred years” (12), she includes some attention to tv, especially Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) and Dr. Who (countless iterations since 1963), of which she is obviously very fond, as well as the recent reboot of Westworld (2016-2022), and films such as Forbidden Planet (1956) and The Postman (1997). Brown looks at science fictions in which Shakespeare is a character in the storyworld, as well as sf that engages with individual plays, especially Hamlet and The Tempest (whose Prospero is often read as an avatar of the playwright), and fictional futures in which “Shakespeare” is the name of a precious cultural resource, “a kind of touchstone for the species, ... both transcending and exemplifying what it means to be human” (5). As Brown astutely notes, in some sf stories “there is an interesting interplay between human and Shakespearean exceptionalism” (6), with the latter working to shore up the former (anthropocentric) position.
Science fiction has both embraced and resisted the “Benjaminian aura” (22) that surrounds “Shakespeare” (both playwright and plays) as exemplar of human exceptionalism. Brown notes, for instance, that when “Shakespeare” and sf aliens encounter each other, “Alien responses to Shakespeare are in a sense the ultimate test of Shakespeare’s universalism” (89). One amusing act of “resistance” that Brown introduces is Nick Nicholas and Andrew Strader’s Klingon translation of Hamlet as The Klingon Hamlet (1996); their “scholarly apparatus” argues that Shakespeare was really a Klingon and that the Hamlet we know today is a translation from the original. Brown reproduces the cover illustration of the Klingon Hamlet holding up a skull, in that most iconic of all Shakespearean poses (56).
Brown sets the scene in her introduction by recalling the Royal Shakepeare Company’s 2008 production of Hamlet that starred David Tennant (the tenth and fourteenth Dr. Who) and Patrick Stewart (ST: The Next Generation’s Captain Picard). This segues into a consideration of the resonances over time between “Shakespeare” and sf. In her following chapters, Brown organizes an absolute wealth of material into examinations of individual sf tropes: time travel, alternate history, dystopia, new worlds and alien species, magic and sf, posthuman identity, and post-apocalypse.
he chapter on time travel introduces gems such as Harry Turtledove’s “We Haven’t Got There Yet” (2009), in which a bemused Shakespeare attends a performance (by time-travelling actors) of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), Tom Stoppard’s extremely postmodern take on Hamlet. The chapter on alternate history gives sustained attention to one of my own favorite “Shakespeare” stories, indigenous writer William Sanders’s “The Undiscovered” (1997). Brown provides a substantial critical reading of it as a brilliant post-colonial subversion of the trope of Shakespeare’s “universality” (48). Sanders’s title, like that of Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, evokes Hamlet’s metaphor for death, but in this case the metaphor is literalized: Shakespeare is castaway in the as-yet “undiscovered” New World, eventually staging Hamlet with uncomprehending “actors” from the bemused Cherokee community who have taken him in.
In her chapter on dystopias, Brown focuses her attention on the political function of “Shakespeare,” reading classics such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949) for their valorization of “Shakepeare” as the paragon of western culture, too painfully affective for the inhabitants of Huxley’s world and too potentially liberating for the oppressed population of Orwell’s Ingsoc. In the context of dystopian fiction, she argues that “Shakespeare often operates as a kind of canary in a coal mine. A world in which Shakespeare’s works are under threat or in decline is usually in trouble” (61). Not for nothing does she give some attention to Ray Bradbury’s book-burning classic Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and she also looks at Susan Collins’s very popular Hunger Games trilogy (2008-2010), drawing out affinities between Shakespeare’s conflicted military hero Coriolanus and Collins’s conflicted protagonist Katniss Everdean.
Shakespeare and Science Fiction takes advantage of the same shorthand as the illustrator of The Klingon Hamlet. Brown’s cover image is of a robot Hamlet, suitably inscrutable, holding up a human skull. Brown reads Hamlet as the most popular Shakespearean intertext in stories about posthuman identity, given (among other things) Hamlet’s sense of imprisonment in/by a script imposed from outside; Brown sees “a growing tendency to associate Hamlet with the merely mechanical and reflexive” (152). (The Tempest’s Ariel as non-human spirit enacting Prospero’s commands is also occasionally read as a type of mechanical being [140], embodied, for instance, by Forbidden Planet’s Robbie the Robot). In Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019), the android character, Adam, finds in Hamlet a meditation on consciousness that seems to support his own sense of self (155).
Brown’s chapter linking Shakespeare with (post)-apocalyptic sf notes how “the book of Revelation reverberates in both King Lear and Macbeth—two plays that loom large in post-apocalyptic science fiction” (167). In Shelley’s The Last Man, for example, at a production of Macbeth meant to console the remnants of an ultimately doomed humanity, the audience finds instead that this bloody and violent play is “a prompt to a still more agonized sense of its own hopelessness” (168). Other notable post-apocalyptic novels in which “Shakespeare” retains his iconic status include Ronald Wright’s A Scientific Romance (1997), which owes much to Macbeth, and Mandel’s Station Eleven, in which travelling players work to keep “Shakespeare” alive after a plague destroys most of the human world.
Shakespeare and Science Fiction, covering as many texts as it does, could easily have devolved into a series of lists and name-checks, but Brown expertly weaves all her material together into a Shakespeare-shaped reading of the feedback loop between canonical and popular culture, between “Shakespeare” and sf as a genre that thrives on intertextuality. Her critical readings are admirably succinct, and often only a few pages of discussion (as with Sanders’s “The Undiscovered”) yield a wealth of ideas. As Brown convincingly demonstrates, “the multiple Shakespeares of science fiction [are] a prismatic array of competing possibilities which prompt reflections on politics, art, time, reality, mortality, humanity, history and religion” (186). This is a substantial contribution to sf studies.—Veronica Hollinger, SFS
Getting Mad and Getting Even.
Sandra J. Lindow. Nnedi Okorafor: Magic, Myth, Morality and the Future. McFarland, CRITICAL EXPLORATIONS IN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY, 2023. 240 pp. $39.95 pbk.
Various forms of Black and Indigenous sf are having a moment in the sun, and Lindow’s monograph makes a timely contribution through an exclusive focus on Nnedi Okorafor and her growing canon of speculative and science fiction. Overall, the book is a thoughtful and considered meditation on how Okorafor’s work intersects personal biography with such seismic cultural movements as Black liberation and feminist struggles in the US, and with the history of sf as a predominantly white genre. The chapters provide complex analyses of how Okorafor’s work consistently returns to an awareness of the ongoing psychological and ideological warfare levelled against Black girls and women and, more importantly, how her use of sf leads to explorations of personal empowerment and social change for each of her central characters. Okorafor’s worldbuilding is particularly rich because she “grew up with no clear cognitive boundaries between the magical and the mundane,” resulting in “an ingrained acceptance of and interest in the Other and a blurring of boundaries between human, plant and animal” (Lindow 9). Her characters navigate spaces that are sensory, magical, and mundane fusions of African pasts, presents, and futures that allow them to challenge the status quo of colonial capitalism, particularly in relation to the impact they continue to have on women’s identities and on the environment.
Chapter one addresses the moral development of girls in Okorafor’s YA fiction. In Zahrah the Windseeker (2005), The Shadow Speaker (2007), the Akata series (2011-2022) and the Binti trilogy (2015-2017), the protagonists initially find themselves entangled in oppressive cultural, familial, and social structures, but eventually grow to trust their own experiences as opposed to their socially determined realities. As Lindow argues, Okorafor adapts Joseph Campbell’s archetype of the hero’s journey to portray how young girls find themselves as they navigate the dangers of the world. Yet, as Okorafor shows, this moral development is a quest to go beyond being “good”—instead, they use and master anger as a critical tool for social justice and personal transformation. Lindow shows how these protagonists are positioned as cultural outsiders because their traits and talents make them subject to ridicule, but Okorafor’s magical intervention “interrupts the status quo of the mundane and allows a new set of rules to emerge” (20) such that deficiency is reframed as newfound personal agency and collective power.
A further unpacking of these characters’ magical talents takes place in chapter two. Looking primarily at Okorafor’s Windseeker stories, Lindow highlights the persistent motif of flying in Okorafor’s work. She argues for it as a symbol of transcendence and “the ability to rise above repressive attitudes and stereotypes to become one’s truest self” (41). Careful not to romanticize this phenomenon, Lindow shows how representations of flying are often related to a psychological struggle with racial and cultural trauma, but through character development flying shifts from personal escapism to a magical vehicle that helps people fight for the freedom of others. A second but weaker strand of this chapter involves an attempt to position Okorafor within feminist frameworks. Though the inclusion of Black feminism seems piecemeal (and there is no mention of how Okorafor’s work might read in relation to African feminism), the identification of Okorafor as a third-wave sf author is nevertheless useful. In comparison to second-wave authors such as Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ, Okorafor imagines worlds in which “women have a right to empowerment and that empowerment can be self-defined” (48). Unlike the timidity of generations prior, Okorafor’s protagonists can express strength that celebrates their difference as power, but also intimacy and interdependence as part of their need for community and care.
Chapter three examines how Okorafor’s Who Fears Death (2010) interrogates mythmaking as a particularly powerful (and thus problematic) ideological weapon of kyriarchies. Because myths are over-arching and subconscious narratives that justify the status quo, they work particularly well in maintaining pre-existing forms of power as opposed to challenging them. In Who Fears Death, the main character, Onye, challenges the discourse of myths in her community by overcoming their oppressive laws and eventually rewriting them. Though Who Fears Death is darker than Okorafor’s other YA novels, Onye’s death and resurrection test the limits of remythologizing the messianic tradition as her preordained death and transcendence allow for the end of oppression and the rewriting of the Great Book as a more egalitarian lore for the future.
The fourth chapter is an entirely novel and compelling comparative reading of Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix (2015) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Lindow highlights the many parallels in the two narratives: both use framed self-narration, and both Okorafor’s Phoenix and Shelley’s creature are motherless beings who become autodidacts without any moral guidance or emotional nurturing. In addition, both Phoenix and Frankenstein’s creature are harbingers of scientific and technological malpractice, and their journeys thus explore the dynamics between anger and agency. More importantly, Lindow illustrates how “Okorafor’s reconsideration of the Frankenstein story is historically important to Afro and African futurism” especially in the light of a “history of scientific experimentation on black bodies” (80). While Shelley’s novel certainly carries some consciousness around the creature’s position as racially and socially inferior, Okorafor makes her neo-slavery narrative explicit through Phoenix. A further distinction is noted in the recognition of women’s agency; while Shelley’s novel uses the nineteenth-century ideal of the selfless woman, Okorafor’s Phoenix follows her angry impulses, making the novel far more hopeful in the end. Okorafor also circumnavigates despair by showing how Phoenix flies to Africa and finds some semblance of normality there, unlike the ending for Frankenstein’s creature, who is left to roam the cold depths of the Arctic Circle entirely alone.
Harmonizing with the first chapter, in chapter five Lindow examines “The Palm Tree Bandit” (2000), The Girl with the Magic Hands (2013), and the Binti trilogy as examples of Okorafor’s teaching stories for young girls. She argues that Okorafor is interested in teaching stories that create healthy developmental rites of passage for young girls in ways that “support women’s wisdom, self-esteem, and moral education.”(99). Through the analysis of the Binti trilogy, it is possible to see how the protagonist’s journey maps a way out of trauma and oppression by using experience to incorporate change and build resilience. In the end, these protagonists are empowered by an ability to solve problems and to exercise agency in relation to their own lives. Yet the rendition of trauma in the Binti trilogy is particularly complex, since it draws upon the Boko Haram kidnapping of the 276 Chibok school girls in 2014. Okorafor’s fictional representation of this event provides distance to help process the horror of its occurrence, while remaining sensitive to those whose lives have been irrevocably altered by it.
As in chapter three, chapter six draws attention to Okorafor’s skill at remythologizing West African cultural forms in her contemporary narratives, and here Lindow turns her attention to the abundant use of the masquerade as an evolving motif in her work. A masquerade is a masked character who connects the earthly and spiritual realms and brings divine messages from the ancestral plane into mundane reality. Yet becoming a masquerade is typically a male rite of passage and women are not even allowed to touch or to engage them directly. Needless to say, Okorafor challenges the gendered polarity of masquerade culture by bringing many of her protagonists into contact with them; “throughout her fiction, a masquerade parade dances through young adult terror toward a powerful expression of ancestor-supported decision-making in crisis.” (138). In serving as powerful symbols of fear that must be confronted, the masquerade loses its aura of physical and psychological danger but none of its magic. Lindow suggests that these encounters with masquerades culminate in the final installment, Binti: The Night Masquerade (2017), where she not only sees a night masquerade but unmasks one through her own ability to embody its ancestral power.
Reading Okorafor alongside Le Guin, chapter seven reflects on the similarities and differences in their fictional responses to the Anthropocene. Lindow argues that the comparison is useful because both novelists imagine alternative worlds that subvert hierarchal structures of power that inform unbridled capitalistic production and, in turn, ecological and social degradation. The worlds they present are thus ecologies that use degrowth as a philosophical means to explore the possibility of a democratized awareness of community that connects the human and the alien, the ecological and the technological. Yet Okorafor’s creation of the Ginen universe is far more hopeful than anything Le Guin dared to imagine; Okorafor has a far more organic and communal understanding of technology and is thus able to imagine how her green economy accelerates technological growth and social interaction. In addition, because degrowth demands a different ethos of engagement and conflict resolution, protagonists seek to live more equitably with others and their environment, making their personal journeys towards self-realization socially and ecologically transformative.
The last chapter examines Okorafor’s foray into popular culture through her creative involvement in the Marvel universe, and her own graphic novel LaGuardia (2019). While other chapters make passing mention of Okorafor’s Afrofuturist and Africanfuturist influences, this chapter offers a more substantial analysis of her work in this regard. While Afrofuturism was born out of a need to address the racially myopic conventions of sf and American society at large, Okorafor’s contemporary contribution to Afrofuturism lies in “taking African history and culture and giving it a fantastic, futuristic feminist twist”(152). Lindow identifies Okorafor as a literary descendant of the many women of color who later widened the Afrofuturist lens to include their own challenges and experiences. Hence, her recasting of Black Panther (Wakanda Forever 2018) marks an evident shift in his thinking as he voices awareness of his male privilege and sexism. Similarly, Okorafor’s characterization of Shuri revises understandings of natural leadership through her representation of women’s contributions to history and science. More entrenched in Okorafor’s personal style of Africanfuturism, LaGuardia imagines dynamic African worlds and realities through stories of inter-planetary migration. Future Lagos is an endosymbiotic world that has thrived through its acceptance of aliens and NYC similarly stands to benefit from inter-species exchange if they are able to accept the challenges of immigration as part of its long-term gains.
Overall, Lindow portrays Nnedi Okorafor as a contemporary Black sf author whose work continues to grow in relevancy by broaching issues such as racial equality and women’s rights through the enchanting lens of sf. Nnedi Okorafor: Magic, Myth, Morality and the Future is the first full-length book about Okorafor and Lindow imparts a profound appreciation for Okorafor’s keen focus on the lives of women and children of color. By crafting stories that usher her young protagonists beyond harmful social norms, Okorafor’s readers become painfully aware of how disobedience is a rite of passage on the road to transformative justice and more inclusive futures.—Nedine Moonsamy, University of Johannesburg
Human-Nonhuman Encounters in French Science Fiction.
Christina Lord. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction. Liverpool UP, 2023. 198 pp. $130 hc.
Christina Lord is an assistant professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction examines French sf through the lenses of transhumanist and posthumanist theories. Lord shows how the interrelation between philosophical thought and storytelling in the French sf context proposes different ways to understand the place of the human and the nonhuman Other. To do so, she provides close readings of various sf novels and two films with a preliminary analysis of three novels by one of the fathers of French sf. In each chapter, Lord examines a specific interaction between humans and an archetypal nonhuman Other (aliens, the endangered orangutan, cyborgs, and posthuman women.)
In her introduction, Lord introduces the reader to posthumanist and transhumanist theories and explains how they have intersected with French literary criticism and philosophical thought. Lord clarifies that, while not all French sf has a philosophical component, she chose her corpus because of the presence of posthumanist and transhumanist tropes. Lord establishes a very interesting connection between French anti-humanist thoughts in the 1930s and 1950s, the political animal-rights movement of the 1960s, and posthumanism: she explains that the renewed interest in the biological world outside the realm of the Anthropos led to poststructuralism, and that Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault influenced many posthumanist, feminist, and decolonial thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Edward Saïd, Judith Butler, and Homi Bhabha. Yet when posthumanist theory came back to France in the 1990s and then in the 2020s, it was not reassimilated into literary criticism, as much of sf scholarship tends to be about literary history, genre formation, and reception theory. Acknowledging the complexity of usage, Lord notes that both transhumanism and posthumanism are used very differently and sometimes interchangeably, depending on who is trained as a philosopher, a literary scholar, or an author.
In part one, “Evolutionary and Ecological Shifts,” Lord examines alien and animal encounters. The first chapter, “From Spears to Spaceships: Alien Encounters in the SF of J.H. Rosny aîné,” is dedicated to J.H. Rosny aîné, a French author of Belgian origin. This chapter situates Rosny as one of the “fathers of sf”—in company with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells—and argues that his work is already intrinsically posthuman. Lord explains how Verne’s techno-optimism puts him closer to American sf, while Rosny and H.G. Wells were more interested in the social potential of the merveilleux scientifique (scientific-marvelous) and rely on science as a plot device to engage in a more philosophical exploration of sf’s estrangement. Lord analyzes three of Rosny’s novels: Les Xipéhuz [The Xipehuz, 1887], which imagines a prehistoric human-alien encounter; Les Navigateurs de l’infini [The Navigators of Space, 1925], which follows three astronauts sent to Mars where they meet different species of aliens; and La Mort de la Terre [The Death of the Earth, 1910], which narrates the extinction of the human species in the far future. Lord examines posthumanist and transhumanist tensions in Rosny’s novellas “at different points in humanity’s evolution within the Anthropocene” (27) and uses Levinas’s Humanism of the Other (2006) to better understand how humans see the Other. In her conclusion, Lord states that the “alien contact ... forces the human protagonists to reevaluate their relationship with other species and their responsibility as citizens of planet Earth and of the solar system. In this regard, Rosny follows the French tradition of “the relativity of cultures” (61). While he emphasizes what could be described as transhumanist technology, his approach to the human-nonhuman encounter is fundamentally posthumanist.
Lord’s second chapter focuses on Éric Chevillard’s Sans l’orang-outan [Without the Orangutan, 2007]; Chevillard’s oeuvre is influenced by both Oulipo and the Theater of the Absurd. Lord starts by situating Chevillard in the debate about what makes a text sf or not: despite its clearly science-fictional themes, the novel has been categorized as speculativefiction and not sf by most scholars. It elaborates on the aftershocks following the last orangutans’ death: witnessing the ecological, linguistic, and societal deterioration consequent to this extinction, the narrator and former zookeeper, Albert Moindre, tries to reestablish the “natural” order by training people to behave like orangutans. When this first absurd endeavor fails, he decides to reintroduce the orangutan by inseminating his girlfriend with simian oocytes. Lord relies on the ecocritical and posthumanist theories of Ursula K. Heise and Timothy Clark, as well as of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, to examine how Chevillard’s novel challenges both narrative and human-animal boundaries. The connection to the Absurd is obvious in Chevillard’s imagery of a world literally falling apart, the use of bio-horror tropes, and the disintegration of language. Lord argues that Moindre’s impulse to overcome nature is fundamentally transhumanist and demonstrates that “despite striving for a posthumanist world of permeable boundaries between human and animal, humanity reverts to transhumanist thinking” (69). Because Chevillard never reveals whether Albert’s undertaking is successful or not, Lord concludes that if the anthropocentrism of Moindre’s process is transhumanist, Chevillard emphasizes the need for a posthumanist ethic.
Part two is intitled “Posthuman Bodies, Posthuman Minds.” The first chapter, “Cyborg Encounters in the Fiction of Jean-Claude Dunyach and Ayerdhal” is devoted to their novel Étoiles mourantes [Dying Stars, 1999]. Jean-Claude Dunyach and Ayerdhal are two of the most prolific contemporary French sf writers, and their novel is a rare example of French hard sf. Their space opera engages with two archetypal human-nonhuman encounters: first, between human and AI; second, between cyborgs and enhanced human-AI entities. The novel is influenced by Anglo-American cyberpunk, yet Lord notes that “gallic cyberpunk” “takes a more measured approach to new technologies, balancing a careful optimism with residual technological cynicism” (103). Lord spends time establishing the history of the word “cyborg,” from its birth in informatics and AI research to the more recent transhumanist techno-fantasies of the Singularity. In this chapter, Lord argues that each degree of cyborg embodiment influences how the characters see “the face” of the Other (referencing Levinas again). Étoiles mourantes introduces four types of technologically enhanced humans, each symbolizing another component of transhumanism: the Mechanists are warriors whose AI armor is in symbiosis with their bodies; the Originals are holograph personae of people who transferred their souls into AI devices; the Connected have, as their name suggests, the ability to be linked online with others; the Organics turn the human into the geological and live in “Animal Cities” that share part of their genetic pool. Lord uses scholarship from Katherine Hayles, Timothy Morton, and Deleuze to critique transhumanist disembodiment and to analyze how “posthumanism complicates human-nonhuman encounters within a posthumanist and transhumanist framework” (120). At the core of her argument, and relying on Haraway’s famous manifesto, is the importance of intersubjective communication for cyborgs to locate humanity within themselves and, in the process, move from the transhuman to the posthuman.
The last chapter, “Encounters with Posthuman Women in the Films of Luc Besson,” shifts the focus onto human/posthuman women. Lord focuses on two films from Luc Besson, The Fifth Element (1997) and Lucy (2015). Besson’s work is influenced by auteur films but also graphic novels, non-auteur genres such as sf and detective stories, and video games. His cinematographic style belongs to cinéma du look, a genre that prioritizes the aesthetics and the spectacle over the narrative. Besson is one of the few French directors who has produced successful Hollywood blockbusters. The main protagonists in The Fifth Element and Lucy, Leeloo and Lucy, drift between the human and the nonhuman; they are both technologically enhanced yet appear to be human women to the other characters and the viewers and, therefore, like aliens, animals, and cyborgs they are inherently Other. Leeloo is one of the Supreme Beings, sent by unknown forces to defend Earth, and she functions as the fifth element of a weapon destined to destroy Evil. Lucy is a young tourist who is kidnapped by people who intend to make her a drug mule; she is surgically implanted with a drug that leaks into her body, giving her supernatural abilities. Lord offers contextual information about femme fatales and female-robot (man-constructed) archetypes in literature and cinema, emphasizing how these archetypes have patriarchal and reactionary origins. Lord claims that Leeloo and Lucy are constructed in such a way that they reject the male gaze and the gendered archetype of the cyborg/femme fatale in cinema. She relies on feminist theories from Simone de Beauvoir, Laura Mulvey, and Haraway to show that “these posthuman women both reclaim their identities and symbolize a female-coded heroism rooted in love” (120). Indeed, their masculine-coded qualities are subverted: “whereas Leeloo uses her posthuman identity to rebuild the world of men through love, Lucy uses her posthumanness to offer to rebuild the world through knowledge, suggesting that learning is a tool for survival” (126). Lord ends the chapter by affirming that Leeloo and Lucy are connection-making entities who are not simply figures of alterity. Their connections to their humanity, and to their posthuman bodies, uplift the transhumanist fantasy of disembodiment and transform it into a fully posthuman gesture. At the end of all the chapters, it becomes clear that the transhumanist usage of technology can be subverted. Indeed, in the book’s conclusion, Lord states that “by gradually relegitimizing the technological metanarrative espoused by transhumanism, these stories demonstrate how technology can, in fact, be a life-giving force and a tool for change” (153).
Outside France, sf has been a topic of academic study for a long time. However, while France has played a consequential historical role in the birth of the sf genre, for a long time sf in general was relegated to the category of “paraliterature,” shunned by French/Francophone academics as a guilty pleasure and not a literature worthy of study. The winds have shifted and French sf is increasingly considered a valid area for academic scholarship. Most books dedicated to the genre, however, are bio-bibliographical studies aiming to promote French sf authors and to situate their works in literary history. While such overviews are much needed, Lord’s research fills an important gap: her book distinguishes itself by bringing back posthumanist theory to analyze her corpus and by providing close readings of her selected texts and films, while situating them in contemporary conversations about sf both within and outside the French-speaking context. Lord’s book is a delightful introduction to French sf writers and filmmakers and an invigorating reflection on what it means to be human during the Anthropocene.—Tessa Sermet, Lake Forest College
All Tomorrow’s Gestalts.
Anna McFarlane. Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing Through the Mirrorshades. Routledge, 2022. 168 pp. $160 hc, $36.71 ebk.
The title highlights the change. Already in The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (2021) and in Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture (2022), both of which Anna McFarlane co-edited with Lars Schmeink and Graham J. Murphy, the title’s choice of wording—”Cyberpunk Culture”— indicates the completion of a forty-year transformation process. Cyberpunk, which began life as a localized movement in literary science fiction, has now become a multimedia, multi-platform repository of cultural and aesthetic practices that involve every kind of text available to our civilization—novels and short stories, film and television, comics, video games, tabletop board games and RPGs, art, photography, music, and fashion. The Companion makes this transformation into one of its central critical and discursive standpoints, while Fifty Key Figures presents us with a list of creators that, taken together, embody the history and contemporary practice of cyberpunk culture. If the Companion constitutes the multi-faceted guide to the many tributaries of cyberpunk culture, Fifty Key Figures represents a who’s-who directory to the guide.
And then there is the book under review here. McFarlane is the sole author, but the connection to the works mentioned above becomes explicitly clear in the introduction when, referring to the Companion, she writes that “This monograph contributes to this body of scholarship by bridging the visual emphasis of cyberpunk and its implications for posthuman ontology” (2). McFarlane’s aim in this book is to discuss the novels of William Gibson, whom she credits with spearheading cyberpunk’s renewal of science fiction during the mid-1980s, as documents to his work foregrounding the twin influences of visual culture and posthumanism. In her analysis, we can see Gibson’s work as a prescient embodiment of the practices, parameters, and indeed values of cyberpunk culture.
McFarlane traces out Gibson’s posthuman/visual influences using a critical lens of her own devising. She calls it “gestalt literary theory,” a term she derives from the gestalt school of psychology as exemplified by the work of Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler, which first became available to English-speaking professionals in the early 1920s. Gestalt psychology argues against John Locke’s tabula rasa model of perception, positing instead that “the human mind imposes a form, or ‘gestalt,’ onto visual information from the outside world. This allows information to be understood without overwhelming the subject with raw data through privileging some information over others” (3). Gestalt perception is therefore characterized, for example, by pattern-recognition processes, by the tendency to simplify the individual features of outwardly similar objects in order to group them together more easily, or by the privileging of relationships between elements in a given data set over the individuality of those elements.
Gestalt literary theory derives from the original a focus on the same processes in literary texts. Its connection to William Gibson, a writer who repeatedly uses the term “gestalt” in his novels and who titled one of them Pattern Recognition, is particularly strong. McFarlane explains that the creation of this new discipline in literary criticism allows her, in the present book, to read Gibson’s novels, and indeed literary sf in general, as embodiments of threshold literature, fictional entities capable of welding together such seemingly separate realities as art and science, human and non-human, pre- and post-human. Throughout this book, McFarlane looks at Gibson’s texts both as examples of gestalt writing (in the story, relationships between detailed agents take precedence over the agents themselves) and as engines of gestalt perception: that is to say, we are meant to walk away from a Gibson novel with the feeling we have witnessed the weaving of a network of connections between otherwise separate entities.
The book is divided into seven chapters (plus the introduction), which analyze Gibson’s novels in order of publication. Accordingly, the first two chapters respectively tackle the first two series, the Sprawl trilogy (1984-1988) and the Bridge trilogy (1993-1999). Starting with chapter 3, each chapter focuses on a single novel, thus comprising the five novels of the Blue Ant trilogy (2003-2010) and the Jackpot trilogy (2014- ). In each chapter, McFarlane shades the lens of gestalt literary theory through a different specific approach. Chapter 1 looks at the Sprawl trilogy—Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)—from the point of view of autopoiesis, the process of self-creation by which characters in the trilogy determine their own sentience and ontological status through privileging cognitive functions rather than biological processes.
Chapter 2 examines the Bridge trilogy—Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999)—by recourse to chaos theory. Chaos theory can here be understood as the interface that best facilitates our understanding of the constant switches, common in the trilogy, between real space and cyberspace. As McFarlane points out, the previous triad had kept the two spaces relatively sharply separate, whereas Gibson’s pervasive usage of fractal and infinite-regress imagery in the second one generates a visual perception of all spaces, cyber and otherwise, as complex, intertwined realities. Such realities present the characters (and the reader along with them) with a different kind of dilemma in their attempt to determine their own ontological status, and McFarlane uses chaos theory to chart the novels’ path to a solution.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 look at the novels of the Blue Ant trilogy—Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and Zero History (2010). Chapter 3 uses the gestalt perspective to look at Pattern Recognition’s main character conflict: the struggle against apophenia, a psychological condition describable as the inability to correctly recognize data patterns, expressed in the novel as socio-historical paradigms. Cayce, the protagonist and an advertising consultant with a preternatural affinity for pattern recognition, finds herself affected by apophenia in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Throughout the story, McFarlane argues, Cayce’s struggle is presented as a struggle to read a world whose paradigms have been changed by the trauma of 9/11, so that her quest for a cure to her apophenia becomes the microcosm of a correspondingly larger quest taking place throughout the world. In order to represent the import of this larger societal quest, McFarlane superimposes another interpretive layer upon gestalt theory through reference to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). In her analysis, Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shift, which was originally meant to describe the evolution of thought in scientific circles, effectively transitions into a model that can explain our society’s struggle to cure its apophenia in the wake of 9/11.
Chapter 4 addresses Spook Country through recourse to the psychoanalytic meaning of gestalt, particularly focusing on Lacan’s work on the so-called “ideal-I,” the idealized notion of ourselves that we receive at the mirror stage of development. This specific flavor of gestalt literary theory is useful because the novel, which deals with espionage and black ops during the second Iraq War, features characters struggling with alienation as a result of their involvement in the conflict (the tech expert Bobby Chombo is a good example). Chapter 5, for its part, discusses Zero History by employing the notion of parallax as detailed in Slavoj Žižek’s The Parallax View (2006). McFarlane uses the concept of parallax view not only as a way to delve into the psyche of Spook Country’s characters, but also as an illustration of larger processes at work in science fiction itself.
Chapters 6 and 7 are respectively dedicated to the first two novels of the Jackpot trilogy, The Peripheral (2014) and Agency (2020), and they mark a departure of sorts from the standard critical approach of the book. In her explanation for this turn, McFarlane tells us that Gibson’s fiction, which “is consistently concerned with the relationship of the individual to their society and the interface between the two, as mediated through the senses” (136), comes to this point in its development organically. Its trajectory is part of an arc that, starting with the first two trilogies’ privileging of vision as the main sense, moves through the Blue Ant trilogy’s focus on the body and its overall perceptive processes to culminate in the Jackpot trilogy’s concentration on “haptics,” a term cognate to “optics” that refers to the sense of touch. This focus on the tactile is accompanied in both novels by the portrayal of characters facing the onslaught of climate change and disaster capitalism, which McFarlane expresses as invasive processes writing themselves onto and into the body.
Anna McFarlane is a gifted writer. One of her best qualities, in this reviewer’s eyes, is the ability to bring complex theoretical matters to light clearly and concisely. Her writing is dense, in the sense that her words work hard to first let the reader absorb such concepts as gestalt psychology, autopoiesis, chaos theory, or parallax with facility, and second apply them to the novels under examination. When McFarlane is done discussing a trilogy or a novel, the critical lens she employs in that chapter is not gone; it returns throughout the book, both as a reminder of the intellectual journey undertaken thus far and as a term of comparison and clarification for the new critical lens.
The best example of this practice comes in the form of the image called “Rubin’s vase.” This image was created by Edgar Rubin, a Danish psychologist, to illustrate the dynamic of the figure/ground distinction as an experiment in gestalt perception. Viewing the image, the observer will find their focus shifting between two interdependent elements: one white vase at the center of the image and two black faces on the sides. Each element is dependent on the other because the convex profiles of the two black faces determine the concave profile of the white vase, and vice-versa; the shift between the faces and the vase depends on the observer’s choice to focus on the color of each element. Thus, Rubin’s vase is a useful textbook example of a gestalt image, but while McFarlane’s explanation and analysis of it occurs in the introduction as a means to the reader’s understanding of gestalt perception, its usefulness for the book is not limited to that part. The image returns in chapters 1, 2, and 5, where it assists our comprehension of the critical lens employed in the Sprawl and Bridge trilogies as well as in Zero History. Therefore, our original understanding of gestalt perception remains with us throughout the book, updating itself and morphing into different shapes as the occasion warrants, allowing us to update our own concepts as well. The same happens with all critical approaches McFarlane uses.
This book gives us reason to be glad. Considered as part of a critical arc that includes The Routledge Companion and Fifty Key Figures (we might also mention 2017’s Cyberpunk and Visual Culture, also edited by Schmeink and Murphy, for which McFarlane wrote an article), Seeing Through the Mirrorshades contributes to the switch of our collective critical attention toward cyberpunk culture and all it has to offer. Considered individually, it represents an accomplished, engaging analysis of William Gibson’s work, as well as a precious document foregrounding a new critical approach that, in this reviewer’s opinion, deserves a great deal of consideration.—Simone Caroti, Full Sail University
Narrative and/as Land.
Anne Stewart. Angry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World. U of Minnesota P, 2022. 279 pp. $104 hc, $26 pbk & ebk.
The earth is the ontological framework for decolonization, Anne Stewart asserts in her impressive interdisciplinary, land-based literary study Angry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World. The book is groundbreaking as it invests in the study of literary grounds breaking, terrestrial disturbances, and “shattered grounded normativity” (following Glen Sean Coulthard) embedded, etched, indeed terraformed not only onto the earth’s surface, but also into what Stewart informally names terrestrial media or terrestrial grammar as decolonizing narrative forces. The book reads “a seismic tremor, a crumbling coastline, or a catastrophic storm” (4) alongside descriptions of infrastructural, social-systemic failures and Black and Indigenous-led activist uprisings that demonstrate an ontologically grounded mode pervading US literary production following the Cold War, crucially predating the current wave of so-called Anthropocene fiction and contemporary ecocritical theory. The book is far-reaching in its important interventions into literary criticism and especially ecocriticism, genre and narrative studies, Indigenous studies, multiethnic studies, and cultural studies more broadly.
Angry Planet begins by relaying “Messages from the Angry Planet”—the title of Stewart’s introduction—setting out an expansive argument about the chapters’ foci on “narrative act[s] of claiming ontological authority” (25); she finds roots largely in texts from the 1970s. Angry Planet is, overall, a project indebted to an enormous wealth of Indigenous, Latinx, Chicanx, and Black studies scholarship from the 1970s to the contemporary moment. Stewart navigates this material adeptly and powerfully, drawing out lineages for reading “angry planet fiction” that have long undergirded current ecocritical and Indigenous ontological frameworks. Claims to land are essential to Indigenous knowledge production, so much so that “By far the largest attack on Indigenous Knowledge systems right now is land dispossession” (Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, qtd. in Stewart 9). The title concept of the “American third world” is used with “deliberate ironic force,” and follows in large part from Sylvia Wynter’s concept of the “archipelago of Human Otherness” (“Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, its Overrepresentation—an Argument” [2003]) and from George Manuel and Michael Posluns’s The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (1974). Stewart calls Wynter’s racial-spatial concept “a zone of exile ... made up of slices and pockets of the nations, cities, suburbs ... factories ... borderlands, rural areas, and reservations that share more in common with the struggles of populations around the world dispossessed in modernity’s wake than they do with the affluent First World citadels of recognizably American imperial power” (11); she borrows from George Manuel the idea of a “Fourth World” that relies on the establishment of “the priority of land as the basis ... for human knowledge about being-in-the-world” (7).
Each of Stewart’s four chapters reads a pair of novels to flesh out stages of decolonization found in angry planet fiction in which the terrestrial motion of the earth strikes back against colonial-capitalism and its infrastructures: Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997) and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999); John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire (1985) and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997); Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991) and Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier (1998); and Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart (1990) and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993). If, as Stewart quotes from Franz Fanon, projects of decolonization are always destined to be violent, Angry Planet is aware of the difficulties of land-based decolonization projects that demand more than the metaphoric (following also Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” [2012]). Each chapter reflects these difficulties and ultimately reveals the narrative-ontological limitations of these novels.
Chapter one, “Terraforming the New World,” reads the ways in which “bodies become physically entangled by racialization within the structures of colonial capitalist social order” (37). She cites historical novels by Pynchon and Whitehead that understand the violent entrapment of bodies as racial objects in the processes of land very differently terraformed according to settler-colonial ideas (what she calls “colonial terraforming”). Rather, forms of colonial development such as Saudi Arabia’s “The Line” and other urban infrastructures explored inWhitehead’s The Intuitionist reveal disruptions of the spatial logics of linearity and of divide, disruptions of those infrastructural logics whose primary operative is largely to produce and reinforce racial difference as itself material and ontological. This chapter focuses on both the loss of human agency in architectures of colonial-capitalism (Pynchon) as well as on possible forms of mobility found by characters of color in “physical environments reluctant to serve the state” (43).
Though Stewart explicitly acknowledges the ways in which angry planet fiction closely overlaps with speculative fiction, and the ways in which terraforming is a term taken from speculative fiction, she contends that “Thinking terraforming in terms of its colonial history rather than its speculative futurity allows us to ... [understand] how racialization is produced and inflicted on bodies environmentally rather than grown out of embodiment proper” (16). While Stewart’s chapter on colonial terraforming is perhaps my favorite, I would contend that sf scholarship on speculative futurity regarding terraforming and other speculative infrastructures is, at least at its best, also always considering colonial histories. Studies of sf futurities have done ample work to trouble the ways in which the future is bound up with history and with the past. In short, especially given the many overlaps with sf studies that this book promises, Stewart’s chapter on colonial terraforming will be foundational reading to interested sf studies scholars.
“First World Problems,” the second chapter on Wideman and Yamashita, reads examples of direct state military violence deployed by local government in the “profoundly colonial” 1980s and 1990s in Cold War-era city centers. Focusing on the Philadelphia bombing of the Black radical MOVE organization rowhouse headquarters in Cobb’s Creek in 1986 as depicted in Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire, and the Los Angeles riots of 1992 (and the longer history of violent state reprisals against citizen uprisings in LA) that inform Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, chapter two locates where decolonial politics become possible. Stewart writes: “Claiming space from the settler state and attempting to reorganize land use in that space is the ultimate provocation to state violence”; fictions of poor communities of color “align themselves with the angry planet to disrupt urban space” (78). Politicizing the often-criticized object-oriented ontology by building on Graham Harman’s concept of objects that “withdraw” in an ontological register, Stewart argues that in some angry planet fiction, the planet itself withdraws from colonial-capitalist state power. This chapter points to the ways in which both novels depict a planet revolting via colonial warfare, as crumbling freeway infrastructures also signal a revolt of their own “mineral aggregate-being” (94). Here, citing urban studies scholarship and Sherryl Vint’s reading of the freeways of Yamashita’s novel, Stewart argues that the destabilization of the freeway’s state-sanctioned function reveals its true identity as a piece of the angry planet that is “more sincerely itself the more it breaks down” (94). In short (and these chapters are dense and impossible to characterize entirely fairly), “First World Problems” reads non-Indigenous communities in both novels as attempting to transform American Third World and colonial-terraformed space. Stewart sees this as akin to Indigenous struggles for land sovereignty, inherently tied to the questions of land use that also undergird each chapter.
Chapter 3, “Third World Liberation,” explores other instances of narrative ontology in which the earth withdraws, or “quits colonial capitalism” (128), pushing beyond the limits of the previous chapter’s depictions of the angry planet. Both Silko’s and Tobar’s novels are examples of a political-ontologizing of what Walter Mignolo calls “delinking” (“Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality” [2007]) in Latin American revolutionary projects of decoloniality, where landslides and urban decay come to stand as models for strategies of decoupling the land from infrastructural state power and where human subjects gain new access to agency and mobility (Stewart 110). Here, securing the planet as a powerful and furious ally is a practice “that emerges out of long-standing solidarity with Third World social movements” (112). In both novels, Stewart points to comparisons between earthquakes and riots that break down both infrastructural and social order.
The fourth chapter, “The Fourth World Resurgent,” continues with various “rumblings and landslides” through readings of Vizenor’s Bearheart and Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Here, Stewart marks these apocalyptic sf narratives as the angry planet’s rejection of “the entanglements of colonial terraforming, generating terrestrial conditions that are instead shaped by lightening-scorched earth, wildfires, oil and water shortages, collapsing coastlines, and swarms of earthquakes” (143) and offers what Stewart calls, citing Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a “radical resurgence” (Simpson, As We Have Always Done [2017], 48-49). Manuel’s vision of “the Fourth World” can be manifested finally if only in a glimpse, and only after the planetary revolutions explored in chapter three. This chapter argues that the fantasy of “privatopia” of Parable’s gated community of Robledoreveals the “pervasive sense of being made insecure by security” that is endemic to the “spatially racializing function of private property ownership” (151). Indeed, Stewart argues that Lauren Olamina’s inability to let go of her privileged relationship to property will haunt her attempts to build a new utopia in the isolated hills of Humboldt County (151).
There is simply not enough space to do justice to the many contributions of this book. Chapter four ends with a crucial section called “Strange Humans,” for example, that ties together the ways in which the entire book has been invested in the project of renegotiating our relationship to being altogether human (162). The question of what constitutes the human and the category’s perilous history in the dehumanization of non-white subjects has led Wynter and much contemporary Black studies scholarship to claim that we need to move beyond the “genre of the human” (Wynter, “Unsettling The Coloniality Of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards The Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument” [2003], 269) developed by colonial capitalism. For Stewart, only Bearheart and Parable of the Sower offer truly reciprocal relations between humans and nonhumans; this is “a recognition of nonhuman agencies that in effect actually brings us back to the human and to a more equitable and productive form of solidarity among peoples” (165). But this window, this space for a transformative imaginary, quickly closed at the end of the twentieth century. Confronted with a rapidly narrowing set of solutions to the many anthropogenic catastrophes wreaked on the planet, angry planet fiction has been “left behind by the twenty-first century”; it remains “rooted in the struggle between the First and Third Worlds, the Fourth World it fights to imagine, and the brutal conditions that would have to be just as brutally overturned in order for its ontological imaginaries to be realized” (173).
The book’s last line ends with Stewart declaring that she writes out of stubbornness, “like angry planet fiction” (199). She writes of a stubborn hope that our imaginaries will not remain walled off and divided from our embodied political realities, that unlike all of the novels in this project we will not also “get stuck” at trying to imagine a reorganized and shared relationship to land that “becomes the material basis for accounting for difference” (185), or unlike the famed example of Octavia E. Butler’s never realized third book of the Parable series with which Stewart begins her conclusion: “The failure of one of the twentieth century’s most boundary-breaking speculative authors to narratively decolonize her genre [before her untimely passing] is emblematic of the fundamental limitation of angry planet fiction: it struggles, under the narrative ontologies it delineates, to move into the space-time of a decolonized future” (175). What Gerry Canavan identified as Butler’s “crisis of the imagination” (qtd. in Stewart 176) is what Stewart ultimately identifies as a larger problem in decolonial fiction, even as she still stubbornly believes in narrative’s potential to tell different stories that will bring different material realities into being.—Alison Sperling, Florida State University
Taking Ballyhoo Seriously.
J.P. Telotte. Selling Science Fiction Cinema: Making and Marketing a Genre. U of Texas P, 2023. vii+206 pp. $45 hc.
A good deal of sf scholarship has looked at American sf films of the 1950s mainly as symptomatic texts expressing Cold War anxieties, and so they have often been left out of consideration in the generic question of “what is sf?” Or, if not left out, then they have been presented as something of a problem for sf scholars who want to take sf films “seriously” in a way that will not have colleagues in literature and film studies departments rolling their eyes. Films such as The Thing (1951), Forbidden Planet (1956), and The Blob (1958) are rarely featured in lists of canonical sf texts and certainly are not recommended in film studies courses as exemplars of either sf film or 1950s cinema, even if they have become cult texts among aficionados of bad films (The Day the Earth Stood Still [1951] might be one of the few exceptions for this period). But the terrain of sf studies has shifted away from the pedigree-anxious theorizing of the 1970s and toward a more historical understanding of genre shaped by changes in genre theory that emerged in the 1990s. This is perhaps best exemplified today by John Rieder’s approach in “On Defining SF, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History” (SFS [July 2010]) and later in his Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (2017). These most stereotypical and derided “sci-fi” films need be reconsidered for their role in the history of sf genre-making.
Selling Science Fiction Cinema offers this much needed reconsideration by focusing on how the meaning-making strategies of 1950s film marketing worked to create a popular, broadly shared understanding of “science fiction” as a genre distinct from similar and often overlapping filmic categories—such as adventure, horror, and thriller—and in the process created an audience for this newly recognizable film genre by the end of the decade. Telotte is by now a familiar name to scholars of sf film and television, having published regularly in the field since the early 1980s. He is the author of monographs such as Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film (1995), A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age (1999), Animating the Science Fiction Imagination (2017), and Movies, Modernism, and the Science Fiction Pulps (2019), as well as of several single-authored introductions to and edited collections on sf film and television for Cambridge, Routledge, Oxford, Wayne State, and other presses. Telotte’s work has never been solely about sf media, but is also about the larger cultural and industrial contexts of sf film and television.
Telotte’s new book situates marketing practices as key to sf film’s constitution as an emergent genre system mediated by the film industry—including directors, writers, producers, distributors, trade publications—and its audiences. Central to this is the story of how over the course of a decade, sf film marketing campaigns created audiences who could understand what to expect from sf film and to seek it out. Telotte tells this story through chapters that focus on the marketing campaigns—what used to be called “ballyhoo” or “exploitation”—of several key films of this period produced not as B films but by major Hollywood studios such as Paramount, Warner Brothers, MGM, and Columbia. Telotte’s introduction establishes the need in genre studies to understand marketing as a constructive if not constitutive genre-making practice; he also demonstrates its relevance for film studies, where marketing has often been overlooked in favor of a focus on the films themselves, as if narrative alone were all that drove audience and market conceptions of genre. Telotte provides a brief history of sf film up to the 1950s and demonstrates how, for audiences and studios alike, what we now consider films in the sf genre were not understood as sf, but were either confusingly described as their own brand of fantasy adventure or otherwise labeled horror or thriller. The chapters that follow provide case studies in the history of sf filmmaking and marketing and cover films such as Destination Moon (1950), The Thing from Another World (also called The Thing, 1951), Forbidden Planet (1956), The Blob (1958), and Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (also called Godzilla, 1956) and several sequels produced by Toho Studio in Japan and repackaged by US distributors for American audiences.
At stake in each of these chapters is not so much what was identifiably “sf” about a given film, since we recognize all of them, retrospectively, as part of the long history of sf film, just as we typically include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), despite ongoing battles over genre periodization. More relevant here is how the genre of sf—already well-known to enthusiasts of the literary genre born in pulp magazines and, in the 1950s, crossing over into mass-market paperback publishing—became salient across the spectrum of cultural workers involved in making and consuming film. Telotte describes this process of making sf legible as the creation of a “thick relationship” among filmmakers, marketing executives, distributors, audiences, and the many narrative and aesthetic concepts that were being pulled into the orbit of this emergent filmic genre. Bringing sf film into view as its own thing in the 1950s, legible as such and different from genres such as horror or thriller (even if incorporating elements) necessitated a shift in how marketing campaigns handled films. As Telotte shows, studios learned quickly at the outset of the decade that sf was something different from other film genres and could be marketed as such, if only marketing campaigns could make the genre legible to viewers.
Major film studios’ marketing campaigns early in the decade suggested that marketing to sf readers through pulp magazines such as Astounding Science Fiction or Thrilling Wonder Stories could be marginally successful, mostly at convincing sf readers that the sf films could take the genre seriously, as Eagle-Lion did with Destination Moon (adopted from a Robert A. Heinlein novella). Studios also tried the opposite, marketing an sf film with little reference to genre or narrative expectations, as RKO did with The Thing. This sort of “teaser” campaign was marginally successful if expensive. Both efforts, however, underscored the need for developing a stronger sense of the generic horizons of sf in order for such films to appeal broadly to filmgoers without much additional work, which in turn meant creating a targeted audience through improved marketing strategies that were experimented with throughout the decade. Major film studios also had to contend with the rising popularity of schlocky B films that lower-budget studios pumped out as the decade went on, and that not only helped to define the genre for audiences but also created a sense that this sort of film was a cheap and, increasingly, a humorous and unserious endeavor. This conception of the emergent film genre jibed with audiences’ experience of sf in TV serials such as Flash Gordon and pulp magazines, which many felt were children’s media or at the very least artistically bankrupt. Hollywood thus faced what Telotte calls the “pulp paradox” in efforts both to make high-budget, serious sf films and to convince audiences to see them as such. Paramount in particular took this challenge head on with marketing campaigns for When Worlds Collide (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), and Conquest of Space (1955), all overseen by George Pal. Over the course of the first half of the decade, Paramount released these three high-budget films to decreasing critical acclaim and financial success, each seemingly the result of a failure to capture appropriately the meaning of the film for its audience through advertising that, by 1955, was trying to pull them in with scantily clad “space girls.” But the key failure was that these films’ exploitation efforts often emphasized the scientific accuracy and meticulous special effects behind the creation of the film “without expressing a consistent [generic] identity” that audiences could latch on to. Thus efforts to sell these films in a way that might appeal to sf readers largely failed with the public, especially as B films set an increasingly clear (and low) bar for what an sf film might be.
Telotte’s story of sf film and efforts to market it, and particularly to carve out an audience, continues into the second half of the 1950s with MGM’s efforts to sell Forbidden Planet, a movie now best remembered for its poster featuring a silly but menacing robot lumbering on a vibrantly colored planet’s surface, carrying an unconscious woman with a short dress and very large breasts. In some versions, this poster had big block letters touting the film as “AMAZING!” This sums up the challenges major studios faced in marketing big-budget sf films at a time when studios feared film-going was under threat from television and an increasingly uninterested audience, and at a time when viewer demographics seemed to be shifting from adults and their children toward a teenage audience with money to spend and time to kill. MGM thus tried to court multiple audiences, though it did so in a rather confusing manner. On the one hand it featured attractions such as a touring robot and sets from the film, as well as a partnership with Quaker Oats that encouraged audiences to view the film as a children’s movie. On the other hand, posters such as the one described above leaned into horror and titillation fit for an adult or teen audience. MGM thus confused things with its emphasis on “moppet” exploitation (i.e., using a sellable figure such as Robby the Robot to entice children) of a film that was very much for adults, both in its sexual undertones and its philosophical reflections on the failure of an advanced civilization. Telotte shows us, however, that by the end of the decade films such as The Blob and Godzilla were able to leverage earlier marketing failures, shifting social concerns about technology and atomic power, and a growing familiarity with sf no doubt bolstered by earlier high-budget and B film productions alike, to produce marketing campaigns that cleverly addressed a teen/adult audience of sf-aware filmgoers. The success of these films at the end of the decade demonstrated to studios and distributors that sf was not a cycle nearing its end, but “a multiply extensive narrative, one that was designed to reach beyond the filmic experience and to entangle audiences within a broad filmic and cultural discourse” about society now and in the future (6).
Selling Science Fiction Cinema might be read as a pre-history of the sf blockbuster: as the story of how major Hollywood studios marketed the sf genre and its audience into existence, paving the way for a recognizable type of film and a savvy audience that by the 1970s was able to turn out massive crowds and ultimately launch the transmedia phenomena that dominate media markets today. Telotte not only tells the story of sf’s legibility as a film genre, but he also subtly examines the genre prestige economy, since the case studies Telotte turns to are major film studios’ efforts to produce and exploit sf films as multimillion-dollar productions—even though these films were a minority of sf films produced in the period covered by Telotte’s book. By focusing on how the genre became legible as a film genre, and in particular as a set of aesthetic and narrative expectations sold to an audience before they even see a film, Telotte offers a fresh perspective on one of sf film’s most derided eras. Importantly, Telotte shows that studio marketing efforts to frame genre perceptions within the new postwar media ecology were also strategies of audience creation, of carving out a market that would want these films and that could be identified and targeted in future marketing efforts. Telotte’s Selling Science Fiction Cinema raises important questions for the field at a time when we are increasingly interested in historicizing genre formation, and it should give us pause when considering whether arguments about genre can so easily cross media boundaries, prompting us perhaps to consider the medium-specific histories of genre in a period of transmedia dominance.—Sean Guynes, Michigan State University
Commodity Futures.
Harry Warwick. Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science-Fiction Film, 1979-2017: The Aesthetics of Enclosure. Liverpool UP, 2023. x+202 pp. $130 hc.
For many commentators, utopianism has become practically synonymous with sf as a genre. It commonly denotes a central concern, even a longing, for what might be, and particularly for the ways in which science and technology might help bring that other world or condition into being. Expanding this notion, utopian thought has also increasingly become a useful analytic method for deconstructing and recasting a variety of conceptions about contemporary culture and human subjectivity. While primarily focused, as its title underscores, on dystopic narratives, Harry Warwick’s Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science-Fiction Film, 1979-2017: The Aesthetics of Enclosure serves both of these interests. The book repeatedly zeroes in on notions of utopia and its generic status, including in the discussion a close reading of Thomas More’s foundational volume, all in the service of identifying a film subgenre, the “utopian dystopia”: that is, a narrative that paints a bleak picture in the service of suggesting something better. At the same time, the volume is heavily praxis-oriented, deploying a Marxist methodology to focus on and critique cinematic depictions of what Warwick identifies as “enclosures”—boundaries of public land, of nations, of minds, etc.—that are emblematic of changing attitudes toward what might be. The result is a book that vacillates between trying to identify and employ generic concepts and forwarding a political vantage, as it aims to show how certain “neoliberal narratives,” particularly those of American sf films, have lost their way in their treatment of individualism, commodification, and property rights in what remains a stubbornly capitalist world.
Bracketing almost forty years of films, Warwick’s book argues that, despite sf’s demonstrable popularity, the genre is today “in decline” (2). It advances this argument by comparing two groups of what it identifies as “Hollywood” sf films over the roughly contemporary period stipulated in its title, 1979-2017. We should note, however, that it labels as Hollywood films any that have received distribution or some funding from an American studio—a problematic approach in this era of international co-production and talent participation. Working from this basis, the first half of Warwick’s book traces out a critique that he identifies as properly dystopian (the “utopian dystopia”), ranging from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979)—a suitable landmark because it so radically shifted the genre’s tone from works such as as Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)—through films including Blade Runner (1982), Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and The Truman Show (1998). While obviously quite different in setting, characters, and style, these and other films from this era are linked here through their common investigations of different forms of enclosure, which, Warwick contends, are actually “the genre’s prime object of concern” (12). The book argues that, in their representation of such forms and the practices that produce them (commodification, property laws, etc.), these films offer variations on dystopian futures that might result from “the universalisation of capitalism” (12), as they aim to estrange their viewers from these futures and thus from the contemporary conditions that could make them possible.
The book’s second half—divided from the first by a lengthy chapter devoted to explicating Marx, More’s Utopia, and contemporary political economy—focuses on several more recent films that, for all their seemingly good intentions, are judged to fall short in their cultural critiques. These include works such as the first three Matrix films (1999, 2003, 2003), Children of Men (2006), District 9 (2009), Repo Men (2010), The Purge (2013), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017). In all these films, we are told, “the critique of enclosure ... goes astray” (146), as for different reasons they fail to produce the necessary level of estrangement from a dark future and from the current political and economic circumstances that they metaphorize, and thus go wrong as sf narratives. Instead, their critiques become largely formal strategies that ultimately naturalize the sort of enclosures on which the genre should properly focus. The result is a relatively recent turn in the genre that is characterized by what Warwick terms “a pervasive anti-utopianism”—or rather, a failed dystopian vision. More crucially for sf study, he claims that this body of relatively recent films has effectively deadened the “radical and speculative” thrust of the sf film genre (180).
While I find this notion unconvincing, along with the argument that the sf film’s “prime object of concern” is that elusive concept of enclosure (12), Warwick’s attempt to sort out the often problematic relationship between utopian and dystopian visions could prove useful to others exploring this territory. Drawing largely on the work of Fredric Jameson, as well as that of utopian/dystopian scholar Tom Moylan, Warwick proceeds from the premise that utopianism as a concept is, at its roots, a “negation,” a needed rejection of the status quo, typically abetted by projecting contemporary circumstances into a future or “other” context and metaphorizing them to allow for critique. As he brings this framework to bear on his treatment of enclosures, he concludes that fundamentally “utopia is the critique of private property by representations of its negation” (177). But while crafting this definition based on “the problematic of property” (179), he also manages to shed light on a dynamic that is persistently at work in utopian narratives, what he describes as a constant “tension between utopia and dystopia” (64) that is likened to a “yin and yang” (136) balancing—a situation that we can see played out visually in many scenes of, for example, The Matrix. That tension, he suggests, helps to produce—and explain—different varieties of utopian narrative, such as the “utopian dystopia” and “the anti-utopian dystopia” (146), while also allowing for a historical reading of this dynamic: that is, by prompting us to look for and give reason to ongoing shifts in that “tension,” after the fashion that this book’s readings try to demonstrate.
While offering an often nuanced treatment of the utopia/dystopia problem, Warwick’s book is less effective in its treatment of the films and of the sf supergenre. It ignores any cinematic context prior to the period under consideration. It also relies on lengthy plot summaries, especially as it introduces each film—a useful tactic when addressing an audience unfamiliar with the subject but less so for a specialized audience, which is the book’s most likely readership. And despite the subtitle’s foregrounding of “aesthetics,” there is scant attention to film aesthetics found here. Rather, the films are largely treated, because of the insistent Marxist critique, as political markers, prompting the early assertion that films such as Star Wars and Close Encounters, along with their imitators and sequels, “are only superficially science fictions” (34), while those examined in the book, because they are “more explicitly political,” are “more fundamentally science-fictional” works (34). Lacking reference points from earlier sf films, while relying on a small sampling of high profile films, such claims tend to move us away from the far larger and demonstrably flexible corpus of sf, to simplify the historical dimension the book has linked to utopian/dystopian thinking, and to bracket off much consideration about the genre in general. We should also note that almost all mention of science and technology—conventionally fundamental components of sf and, on screen, the source of much of its visual focus and appeal—seems to have been elbowed out of the text in favor of what the author sees as “more fundamentally” sf, or at least utopian concerns, such as “the regime of property rights” (180), privatization, and overaccumulation.
Despite these weaknesses, Dystopia and Dispossession is clearly a complex effort at trying to make sense of the sf film’s cultural place during a period when it has become arguably our most popular genre (with Wikipedia identifying more than 660 sf films being released between 1999 and 2017, the period this book characterizes as the falling off of contemporary sf). Certainly, some of its pronouncements should contribute to further discussion, such as its notion of what is most “fundamentally science-fictional” (34)—a consideration that should obviously take us beyond the limited number of films cited here and indeed beyond sf cinema. And the judgment that the contemporary sf film is a failed genre (in spite of those numerous releases) might prompt some reassessment of widely valorized texts such as Children of Men and District 9, which, a final paragraph allows, are not “meritless” (180). Readers should approach the book expecting not so much a conventional work of film criticism, but rather one that frequently shifts focus from the cinematic and seems intent on making its primary mark as political commentary.—J.P. Telotte, Georgia Tech
The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Gender and/in Science Fiction.
Lisa Yaszek, Sonja Fritzsche, Keren Omry, and Wendy Gay Pearson, eds. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction. Routledge, 2023. xix+411 pp. $250 hc.
As of 15 March 2024, 484 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced across the United States. The bills are expansive in their aims and scope and have far-reaching implications. From attempts to “legally” re-define “sex” in ways that exclude transgender and gender non-conforming folx, to curriculum-based restrictions such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” laws, and the proliferation of anti-trans “bathroom bills,” these renewed investments in gender essentialism and gender policing and the material and often deadly impacts of such investments speak to the continued power of white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchal imaginaries and the ever-pressing necessity of imagining and actualizing more liberatory modes of knowing and being in the world. The recent publication of Lisa Yaszek, Sonja Fritzsche, Keren Omry, and Wendy Gay Pearson’s The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction is thus a timely and welcome addition to a growing body sf scholarship that is critically engaging anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, and queer modes of speculation across geography, media, and time.
This Companion features an impressive fifty-three chapters—inclusive of section introductions—penned by a diverse array of established sf, media, and literary and cultural studies scholars such as Marleen S. Barr, Ritch Calvin, Paweł Frelik, Joan Gordon, Michael Pitts, John Rieder, Sherryl Vint, Ida Yoshinaga, and, of course, the collection’s editors, as well as emerging scholars from around the globe. Resisting chronological and geography-based organization, The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction is dividedinto five thematic “conversations”: “What: Gender and Genre”; “How: Theoretical Approaches”; “Who: Subjectivities”; “Where: Media and Transmedialities”; and “When: Transtemporalities.” Interrogating the “what, how, who, where, and when” of gender and sf, the collection “introduce[s] readers to the ways that SF artists communicate their ideas about gender across centuries, continents, and cultures,” offering layered meditations on how the genre has and continues to “question gender, including bringing feminist and queer perspectives to bear on masculinities and recognizing the existence and importance of transgender and nonbinary folx as both creators and consumers of SF” (4). Though focused on speculative explorations of gender (and sexuality), the collection highlights differing approaches to reading and theorizing representations of gender in sf that include, but are not limited to, animal studies, critical race and ethnic studies, ecocriticism, disability studies, and queer, feminist, and women studies. Notably, and refreshingly, sf is not consigned to the literary here; readers will come across articles featuring works of sf in fashion, film, music, television, and video games, to name a few. The collection, in short, is ambitious in its themes, theoretical, and aesthetic approaches, each section an invaluable source for scholars across (post)humanistic (and [post]humanistic social science) disciplines.
In the first and shortest section—“What: Gender and Genre”—Yaszek offers a condensed yet expansive overview of the history of gender, of sf, and of the makings of this particular collection. The section then moves on to a roundtable discussion, led and described by sf film scholar Ida Yoshinaga “as an act of hope for a liberatory future,” gathering five BIPOC and LGBTQ+ contemporary sf writers (when shared by the artist, author, or scholar, I include their respective pronouns): Joyce Cheng (she/her, they/their), Jaymee Goh, Andrea Hairston, Lehua Parker, and Bogi Takács (e/em/eir, they/them). Throughout their discussion, the authors reflect on their narrative speculations of liberatory gender and sexual imaginaries, consider questions of genre and market(ability), and reflect on the future of gender and sexuality in sf (for instance, the inclusion of more intersex representation in the genre). For folx newer to the field of sf studies and its debates on questions of gender and genre, this first section might seem a tad hurried and overly condensed. Considering the space constraints that come with producing such a wide-ranging companion text, however, the introduction still proves useful and deeply informative.
The second section—“How: Theoretical Approaches”—includes another introduction by Yaszek followed by twelve intellectually incisive chapters that sample a variety of analytical approaches being used by sf scholars in their critical engagements with the genre, including critical race theory, disability theory, womanist theory, and queer theory. A few of my favorite readings in this section include Jonathan Alexander and Sherryl Vint’s “Feminism, Violence, and the Anthropocene in The Handmaid’s Tale,” and Ritch Calvin’s (he/him) “Queer SF.” Alexander and Vint offer a compelling feminist critique of the tv adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel by interrogating the complexities, contradictions, and failures of whiteness, feminism, and white feminism in the series (and in our “real” world) and its lack of “understanding of intersectionality, or the ways in which different racial, sexual, and class experiences might impact one’s understanding of the relationships between gender, identity, and power” (27). Taking us into the realm of queer sf, Calvin outlines, by way of a literal list, key “historical” moments and narrative aspects of queer sf. Most notably, he offers an overview of what he sees as queer sf’s three major story types: 1) those that engage queerness obliquely; (2) those that make queerness an obvious yet underexamined aspect of the story’s plot; and (3) those where queerness is a palpable and focal feature of the narrative (Calvin points to the works of Rivers Solomon, M Téllez, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor as compelling examples of this third type). Though a seemingly small detail, Calvin thoughtfully includes pronouns for all the writers and scholars he engages in this brief yet informative chapter, a “queer” practice of naming and writing that we should consider incorporating into our work as scholars of sf and gender studies. Other compelling chapters in this section include Anna Kurowicka’s discussion of asexuality and genderless futures in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Samuel Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah,” (1967), and Anne Leckie’s more recent Imperial Radch trilogy (2013-2015), R. Nicole Smith’s womanist reading of queer Afro-Caribbean writer, poet, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumb’s “Evidence,” and Smin Smith’s examination of collaborative worldbuilding strategies in the feminist sf art of Sophia Al-Maria, Tai Shani, and Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley.
Moving to the third section—“Who: Subjectivities”—Wendy Gay Pearson frames the dialogue across this twelve-chapter section vis-à-vis the perennially human question: “Who am I?” In terms of the sf genre, however, this “who am I?” query is extended, as Pearson aptly reminds us, “not only to those who have been historically denied subjectivity (in the West, mostly women, LGTBQ2S+ folk, people of colour, other marginalized groups) but also to those whose ideas about subjectivity might be radically different: aliens, androids, animals” (119). The chapters in this section thus offer rich interrogations of human, transhuman, and posthuman subjectivities and agency, including, for instance, trans becomings vis-à-vis the figure of the trans cyborg (Jacob Barry), queer relationalities (Peyton Campbell), questions of gender variance and language (Misha Grifka Wander), non-binary explorations of biological sex and “sex-changing” (Wendy Gay Pearson), and re-imaginings of Black women’s sexual pleasure and desire in Black feminist sf (Sara Wenger), among others.
The thirteen chapters collated in section four—“Where: Media and Transmedialities”—offer a critical sampling of sf across media forms including anime, film, television, and video games. This survey of differing media approaches offers, as Keren Omry notes in their section overview, insightful musings on “how technology within the aesthetics of science fiction creates new ideas, new possibilities, and new mechanisms to mediate [gendered] difference” (209). One of the most persuasive meditations on gender and technology in this section is Nedine Moonsamy’s “Afro-Feminist Intimacies: Women and AI in African Short Fiction.” Taking up Western sf’s either reductively technophobic or technophilic speculations about human-automata relationships, Moonsamy focuses on the feminized AI figure as re-imagined in African sf. Through her critical readings of Nnedi Okorafor’s “Mother of Invention” (2018) and Wole Talabi’s “The Regression Test” (2017), two short stories that center relationships between African women and feminized AI, Moonsamy argues that “the African context of these stories help modify inherited ideas about gender and AI from Western science fiction ... draw[ing] on the example of Afro-feminist friendships to imagine how human-AI relationality can, in fact, be realized as mutual reciprocity” (241). In a moment where the impacts and futures of AI are being debated and largely framed via a language of control and domination, Moonsamy’s chapter proves particularly timely and instructive. Other chapters of note include Rebecca J. Holden’s exploration of feminist cyberpunk fashion, John Rieder’s analysis of changing representations of gender and sexuality in popular adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Erik Steinskog’s engagement with the contradictions and powerful nuances of Janelle Monáe’s “sci-fi queerness.”
In the collection’s final “conversation,”(“When: Transtemporalities”) fourteen contributors explore, as Sonja Fritzsche notes in her section introduction, “moments and movements in SF and in gender studies where paradigms have shifted ... allowing audiences to look towards futurities, alternate temporalities, and all manners of futural and historical thought” (301). Notably, the “trans” appended to “temporalities” in this section speaks to both the representations and theorizations of gender in sf across historical periods and, animated in part by trans [and queer] studies discussions of queer/ed time, the “social constructedness” of time itself (301). The chapters in this section, in turn, highlight works from across the “historical categories” of sf: from “proto sf” to the pulp era and golden age, to the new wave and the contemporary. In line with the rebellious spirit of the section (and the collection, more broadly), the chapters do not follow this “chronology.” For instance, the second chapter in this section features Marleen S. Barr’s insightful discussion of feminist sf superheroes in contemporary feminist superhero novels. Readers are then “pushed back” in time vis-à-vis M. Giulia Fabi’s mapping of early US Black feminist speculative fiction through her comparative reading of the “antebellum future fiction” of Frances E.W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins’s pan-African Black feminist sf serial novel, Of One Blood (1903), and the lesser known yet nevertheless important utopian novel, Five Generations Hence (1916), written by Lillian B. Horace. By section’s end, readers are pulled into the “present” day by way of Mengtian Sun’s chapter on contemporary Chinese female sf writers and their ingenious narrative challenges to a still male-dominated Chinese sf field. Thus, given the historical breadth and depth of this section, readers will appreciate the many convergences, divergences, and transformations of gender in sf that the scholars included in this section bring to the fore in their analytically rich chapters.
Lisa Yaszek, Sonja Fritzsche, Keren Omry, and Wendy Gay Pearson’s The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction is an intellectual tour de force. Given its cultural, geographical, historical, thematic, and theoretical range, it could easily be integrated into graduate-level coursework in literary, media, and/or cultural studies and in women’s, gender, and sexualities studies courses with a focus on sf or speculative fiction. Despite its myriad strengths, however, it would have benefited from a more sustained historicization of sexuality as explored in sf and its complex relationship to questions of gender. Indeed, several chapters critically examine the complex entanglements of gender and sexuality as articulated and (re)imagined in the genre. The introduction to the collection, in turn, might have engaged the two as distinctive yet intersecting categories of social identification that have variously animated the developments and transformations of sf itself. Further, while the collection includes sf works and sf scholars from around the globe, scholarship from and about, for instance, Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean is insufficiently featured. Nevertheless, The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction remains an equal parts exciting, intellectually rigorous, and indispensable resource that will undoubtedly animate the future direction(s) of studies of gender and sf for years to come.—Karina A. Vado, Florida Atlantic University
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