#80 = Volume 27, Part 1 = March 2000
The
Language of Futurity.
Janeen Webb
and Andrew Enstice. Aliens & Savages:
Fiction, Politics and Prejudice in Australia. Sydney:
HarperCollins Australia, 1998. vi + 297 pp. AUS$17.95, paper.
Aliens & Savages
examines the discourses of Australia’s colonization from the late seventeenth
to the late twentieth centuries, using fiction and nonfiction texts to represent
the appropriation of the continent as a specifically science fictional
undertaking. The language of colonization is essentially a language of futurity:
the colonial project depends for its success upon the future promise of the
colonized space, which licenses the colonizer to rewrite, ignore, or otherwise
obscure its past. Space is made for the fabulation of a new history onto
occupied territory, a fabulation that often makes direct use of sf themes and
tropes.
For example, Erle Cox’s 1925 novel Out
of the Silence tells the story of a beautiful, rational, highly evolved
woman from the dim past who is unearthed in a time capsule by two present-day
white Australians. Earani, as the time-travelling beauty is named, is one of
three emissaries preserved from the doomed Earth of the past. Horrified by the
presence of non-whites, whom she considers subhuman, Earani makes an offer to
the Prime Minister to eradicate all non-whites from the face of the Earth in
order to "redeem" mankind. Although Earani’s scheme is aborted when
she is killed by a jealous female rival, the suggestion of genocide as the
solution to the Aboriginal "problem," as Webb and Enstice point out,
betrays the shocking depth of white Australia’s anxieties about the putatively
threatening presence of non-whites.
Aliens & Savages
documents the Europeans’ early development of Australia through a thoughtful
analysis not only of fictional texts such as Cox’s novel, but also
travelogues, government reports, and personal narratives. These documents reveal
the brutality and insensitivity of the European colonizers, and they also sketch
out a history of European sociological thought. The story of the colonization of
Australia begins as the story of the disciplining of the Aborigines—a people
William Dampier, the Englishman who "discovered" the continent in
1688, dubbed "the miserablest people in the world" (qtd. 22).
According to Dampier’s accounts, the Aborigines were, in turn, terrified,
mystified, and finally disgusted by the presence of the foreign invaders. The
two groups regarded each other with mutual dismay and incomprehension, setting
the stage for European and Aboriginal relations for the next 300 years.
In chapter four, Webb and Enstice take
up the second thread in their story of race relations, charting the history of
Chinese immigration to Australia in the middle of the nineteenth century. The
authors analyze the various cultural productions, including science fiction
texts, that reflected white Australia’s anxieties about Chinese immigrant
culture. One such example was the work "White or Yellow?: A Story of the
Race War of A.D. 1908." Written in 1888 by William Lane, a notorious
political agitator who lobbied for an all-white Australia, the serialized novel
portrayed a British-sanctioned "Asian invasion" —a campaign for
Chinese supremacy that resulted in white Australia’s social and economic
marginalization. Webb and Enstice read the novel against the backdrop of popular
Darwinism, used to to establish the "natural" superiority of white
Australians over both Aborigines and Asian settlers. Yet they also show the ways
in which this racist ideology was confounded with issues of class difference—specifically
in Lane’s criticism of Chinese aristocrats. Here, as throughout the volume,
the authors display an admirable sensitivity to textual and social nuance.
Part three asks the most difficult
question in the aftermath of Australia’s bloody colonial history:
"Towards Reconciliation?" Webb and Enstice analyze current trends in
Australia, such as the incendiary, disruptive discourses still being produced by
Australia’s political figures, who play upon whites’ ingrained fears about
the potentially violent consequences of decolonization. They also examine
hopeful counter-movements to these discourses of repression, such as the
Australian academy’s efforts to canonize Aboriginal literatures. Aliens
& Savages reproduces, in a positive, dialectical manner, the discourse
of futurity that has been Australia’s downfall: after an honest assessment of
the past, it seeks reconciliation in a forward-looking perspective that hopes to
repair its former abuses. The book is a work of sf criticism in every sense, and
a very trenchant and valuable one indeed.—Alcena
Madeline Davis Rogan, Louisiana State
University
Fragments
and Freeze Frames.
Janeen Webb
and Andrew Enstice, eds. The Fantastic Self:
Essays on the Subject of the Self.
Eidolon (P.O. Box 225, North Perth, Western Australia), 1999. 309 pp. AUS$21.95
paper.
The Fantastic Self
is an enticing title that disguises a book of conference proceedings in fantasy
drag. The outcome of the tenth conference of the Mythopoeic Literature
Association of Australia, held in Melbourne in July 1994, it is a collection of
39 pieces of uneven quality. The book is divided into five sections: Writing the
Self; A Question of Identity; Identifying a Self—Children’s Literature; the
Traditional Self; and the Genre Self—SF and Fantasy. Many papers deal with the
conference theme of "desperately seeking self-hood" (6) and engage in
"the debate on the nature of identity and the myth-making process in a
rapidly changing literary world" (6). Others muse about books the authors
were reading (or writing) at the time—for example, Peter Nicholls’s
thoroughly engaging but mostly off-topic essay, "Trapped in the Pattern:
Science Fiction vs. Fantasy, Open Universes vs. Closed Universes, Free Will vs.
Predestination." Some "articles" are fragments of 1000 words or
less and are contributions to the sort of ongoing discussions that occur from
one year to the next of a specialist conference, rather than stand-alone essays.
I am quite disappointed in this book,
yet I want to be able to like it. The cover is gorgeous. The book includes much
useful material for teachers of genre fiction and children’s literature. It is
certainly far from being a bad book, yet has had the misfortune of being frozen
in time. The editors themselves note the gap of five years between the
conference in 1994 and this book’s publication. This would not matter if the
articles had been updated, but there are few references to books or criticism
published since 1994. For example, Van Ikin’s article on "Tomorrow’s
Selfhood: Self in the Science Fiction of Greg Egan" is admirably to the
point of the volume’s overall subject, but includes no reference to work Egan
has published since 1995. Susan Nicholls, in "Hypergender: Embodiment in
Cyberspace," examines the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson. But why
not, since she is talking in an Australian context, engage with issues brought
up in Van Ikin’s paper and consider by comparison Egan’s clever and
idiosyncratic projections of the future of embodiment? In an ideal world, the
authors of conference papers in a volume such as The Fantastic Self would
be encouraged to engage more with each other’s ideas—especially given the
five-year lag time in publication. The book could have been rescued, at least
for this reader, by a longer introduction in which the central issues were
updated to at least the end of 1998, but the editors’ opening contribution
dated January 1997 is extremely short. Still, nobody, least of all the editors,
could have intended such a lengthy prepublication period.
As a freeze frame of what Australian
writers and critics were thinking and talking about in July 1994, the book does
sterling service. Two articles were published soon after the conference, in the
October 1994 issue of the New York Review of Science Fiction: Damien
Broderick on "Minds, Modes, Models, Modules"—covering the theme of
plug-in personalities—and Russell Blackford on "Hi-tech, Samuel R. Delany
and the Transhuman Condition." Sylvia Kelso tackles gender and women’s
writing in an entertaining and informative essay entitled "Writing New
Ones: Myths of Self-hood in Recent Women’s SF." As might be expected at a
meeting of the Mythopoeic Literature Association, there are articles on C.S.
Lewis: Paul Tankard’s "The Moral Writer and the Struggle for Selfhood:
C.S. Lewis and Samuel Johnson," and Hadyn Williams’s
"Manifestations of the Grail Quest in Charles Williams and C.S.
Lewis."
In any collection of essays, there is
always at least one that gives special and unexpected pleasure. This
"Eureka!" reaction came, for me, with Donat Gallagher’s "The
Wolves Always Howl Once: Finding a New Self in Jessica Anderson’s Taking
Shelter, Amy Witting’s A Change in the Lighting and Joan Dugdale’s
The Gripping Beast." In all three novels, the central character is a
woman over fifty; as Gallagher comments in his introduction: "all of these
women ... respond to an invitation that has come belatedly—but not too late—to
‘run with the wolves’" (219). The article is placed by editors Webb and
Enstice in the section on the Traditional Self, as the three novels are
realist depictions of Australian suburban life. Gallagher has taken up the
challenge of finding the "fantastic self" in places the reader might
not have thought to look, and this reader is grateful to him.—Rosaleen
Love, Monash University, Australia
A
Virtual WisCon.
Helen Merrick
and Tess Williams, eds. Women of Other
Worlds: Excursions Through Science Fiction and Feminism. U
Western Australia P (fax: +61-8-9380-1027), 1999. xi + 472 pp. AUS$22.95 paper.
The annual WisCon, held in Madison,
Wisconsin, may or may not be the world’s only feminist sf convention, but it
is certainly the best known, most successful, and longest running. WisCon 20,
held in 1996, seems to have been an especially fruitful gathering of writers and
scholars from many parts of the world. A strong contingent of Australians
attended, and two of them, Helen Merrick and Tess Williams from Perth, Western
Australia, have put together this doorstopper collection of material presented
at the con, inspired by it, or otherwise associated with WisCon’s traditions.
By no means a conventional proceedings volume, the book reads, as Jeanne Gomoll’s
introduction suggests, like "an attempt to create a virtual WisCon
with paper and ink" (4).
Most of the items presented in Women
of Other Worlds have been published previously, though sometimes in
different versions (e.g., the pieces contributed by Nicola Griffith and Pat
Murphy). The volume also contains original material, however, such as the
trans-Pacific, post-convention correspondence between American sf author Lois
McMaster Bujold and Australian literary critic Sylvia Kelso. Part of the book’s
interest comes from the way its various elements interact—e.g., the inclusion
of Kelly Eskridge’s fascinating story "And Salome Danced" alongside
the transcript of a listserv discussion debating and exploring it. By such
devices as this, the editors convey some of the excitement of actual attendance
at a serious, constructive, and highly stimulating sf convention.
The mix of fiction and nonfiction
pieces also recreates the more general experience of encountering sf within a
community where people read novels and stories, discuss them with others, and
use a raft of forms—not only fiction and criticism—to share their ideas and
experiences. The nonfiction in Women of Other Worlds includes interviews,
autobiographical apologetics, internet literary discussions, correspondence
between participants, and fannish histories. Eileen Gunn’s all-purpose recipe
for "Ideologically Labile Fruit Crisp" is mischievous and hilarious.
Most of the contributors write with clarity and enthusiasm. The late Judith
Merril’s contribution, "Better to Have Loved: Excerpts from a Life,"
rounds out the book and is especially thoughtful and thought-provoking.
The quality of the fiction is generally
high, with strong work by Eskridge, Katherine MacLean, Nalo Hopkinson, and Delia
Sherman. Oddly little of it communicates an overt feminist message, however, and
it is difficult to imagine an unreconstructed male-chauvinist reader taking
offense at any of the stories. A possible exception is editor Williams’s
"And She Was the Word," which delivers a solid punchline at the
expense of heterosexual attraction, but even this is relatively gentle stuff
compared with Joanna Russ’s feminist anger. The fiction authors are all women,
and I would imagine that they all self-identify as feminists, but most of them
appear to have individual agendas and concerns that certainly do not conform to
any monolithic conception of gender politics.
The literary critics and theorists
spend more energy in overtly resisting something that is occasionally referred
to as "technological, masculinist" sf. While I have a vague idea what
this phrase might mean, I was surprised to find that the fiction of William
Gibson, neither a rightwing patriachal figure nor a hard-sf exponent, appears to
be considered a prime example. Indeed, Gibson is a kind of phantom menace
shadowing the book. Jeanne Gomoll complains about "the seemingly
irresistible urge of well-known SF critics to close the book on the experiment
in feminism and move on to the adventures of mirror-shaded boys hacking into
virtual reality" (8). Rebecca Holden complains, though without providing a
real argument, that Gibson’s Molly Millions embodies a "rather dangerous
‘postfeminist’ position" (211). Kelso and Bujold gripe a bit
resentfully over the putative reasons for Gibson’s enormous success, while
Kelso laments that his work "reacted against feminism" and ended back
in the world of "technological, masculinist SF, or ‘the Gernsback
Continuum’" (386). To her credit, Kelso does set the record straight when
she admits that "the guy crystallized the information revolution and
cyberculture" (392). Yet Women of Other Worlds invites speculation
as to why so many feminist theorists are hostile to Gibson and the cyberspace
visions that he helped to develop in the early 1980s.
Nicola Griffith’s essay,
"Writing from the Body," may provide a clue. Griffith trots out the
familiar but intellectually untenable thesis that there is an affinity between
cyberpunk writing and metaphysical dualism, which is supposed to be a
masculinist philosophy. Those who propound this line do not notice that
cyberpunk’s deepest assumptions are thoroughly materialist, not dualist at
all. What’s more, the wish of some vulgar transhumanists to be free of the
body’s "meat" has been more often criticized than valorized in
cyberpunk works—from Gibson’s early stories to movies such as The Matrix
(1999).
Some of the feminist critiques of
cyberpunk’s alleged metaphysics are founded on garbled relativist philosophies
based, in part, on the ideas of Thomas S. Kuhn and his successors. One
contributor to Women of Other Worlds, Lisbeth Gant-Britton, twice
misquotes the title of Kuhn’s most famous book, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (1962), then proceeds, in a long footnote, to make a complete
hash of explaining his basic ideas. Such confused wanderings into philosophical
territory are common in the present intellectual climate of literary study, and
the book contains thankfully few examples of this trend. Better still, and
despite its anti-Gibson leitmotif, it is a generous book—generous in its
commemoration of what must have been a joyous convention, in the bounties it
offers its readers, and in its attitudes towards science fiction, the future,
and the possibilities of a better world for women and men alike.—Russell
Blackford, Melbourne, Australia
Transforming
Text.
Jennifer
Burwell. Notes on Nowhere: Feminism, Utopian
Logic, and Social Transformation. U Minnesota P
(800-621-2736),1997. xix + 237 pp. $19.95 paper.
Jennifer Burwell’s Notes on
Nowhere is one of a number of recent critical texts seeking to redress the
purported loss of grounding for political action in this postmodern,
deconstructed world. In another such work, Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern
William Burroughs (U California P, 1997), Timothy S. Murphy defends an
author sometimes maligned as politically reactionary, arguing that Burroughs’s
work promotes new forms of social organization and a new collective project.
Burwell, on the other hand, focuses on individual subjectivity and what she sees
as a need for situated agents of change who can put to good political use the
multiple contradictions inherent in the "locations" assigned to them
by majoritarian culture. Burwell links utopian fictions to feminisms concerned
with identity and standpoint: each conceives of subjects as embodying social
spaces, real or imaginary.
Burwell’s argument relies on a small
number of feminist science fiction novels produced during the 1970s. She
distances herself, and her chosen texts, from both "traditional"
utopias—which, she argues, are invested in a self-contained, harmonious
subject expressive of an "ideal space free from ideological conflict"
(xv)—as well as from utopias that seek to preserve a "negative"
purity through the shared experience of victimization (e.g., Sally Miller
Gearhart’s The Wanderground [1980]). In novels by Joanna Russ, Octavia
Butler, Marge Piercy, and Monique Wittig, Burwell locates exemplary female
subjects who move among contradictory and internalized "positions,"
often literalized as movement through different times and places, and who are
able to gain the critical distance necessary to stage an oppositional or
resistant politics. Burwell views these earlier texts as essential correctives
to the now prevalent viewpoints of postmodern, poststructuralist, and queer
theorists such as Donna Haraway and Judith Butler. These thinkers she variously
and provocatively faults for offering undifferentiated, passive, overly abstract
figurations of subjects who engage in "subversive acting out" rather
than in strategic forms of activism grounded in particularized subjectivities.
Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975),
Burwell argues, functions along the reductive faultline woman/human, yet plays
out rich negotiations among autobiographically-informed subject positions that
pose a challenge to Haraway’s "passive" cyborg. Octavia Butler’s Patternmaster
trilogy (1976-78) and her novel Kindred (1979) improve on Russ by
complicating notions of female identity with the addition of the category of
race and by exemplifying "an active, situational logic that is founded upon
agency and movement within and between communities" (119). Marge Piercy’s
Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) is "Foucauldian," exploring
"the way that power acts on and through the individual body" (132); in
Burwell’s reading, Piercy does Foucault one better by articulating specific
forms of resistance. Finally, Burwell examines language and its relationship to
subject formation and strategies of resistance in Monique Wittig’s novels and
other writings.
Burwell’s text has an explicitly
Marxist-Jamesonian orientation: social change arises out of contradiction;
agency derives from the ability to perceive distance between subject locations;
location substitutes for the presumed loss of other grounds in postmodernist
culture. Overall, her argument is presented with passion and verve. The
commitments evidenced here are laudable, and even plausibly worked out, if you
accept the parameters and assumptions of the project. I don’t, however, and
thus the book causes me serious frustration.
Despite Burwell’s claim to be working
within a New Historicist frame, her text suffers from a lack of historical
context and from a rather shaky methodological rationale. Three travel-weary
Sherpas carry the weight of her argument: the "traditional" utopia, as
represented by More, Campanella, William Morris, Bellamy, and B.F. Skinner;
feminist science fiction novels, written between 1969 and 1979; and
"postmodern/poststructuralist" theory. Burwell too carefully chooses
her "traditional" utopias, which she argues operate through a
"logic of resolution," and sets them up as fall guys with reference to
1970s feminist science fiction. But this opposition only works because Burwell
unduly minimizes the extent to which her traditional utopias critique and
destabilize the political and social conventions of their respective present
times. Furthermore, Burwell refuses to identify her main objects of inquiry as
anything other than "novels" or "feminist utopias." In other
words, "science fiction"—as a predilection, a moniker, a genre with
a history, a cultural phenomenon, a group of literary strategies, or a set of
reading protocols—is entirely invisible. Burwell never raises the question of
why her authors chose to write science fiction, or of how science fiction, a
genre with a "situated" history, may have offered feminist writers of
the period some of the tools Burwell attributes only to canonically correct
theorists. In my opinion, Burwell weakens any argument to be made about
oppositional "locations" by eschewing science fiction and aligning her
own efforts with the academic and literary mainstream.
This tacit disavowal of sf gets Burwell
into more serious trouble. She repeatedly speaks of "cognitive
alienation" without ever mentioning relevant sf theory (e.g., Suvin), and
only with respect to alienation experienced by characters in books. In her
discussion of Wittig, Burwell notes the non-normative assignment of meaning to
language, again remaining within the confines of the novel and without employing
any of the critical literature concerned with the effects of language in sf.
Burwell’s engagements with her chosen novels proceed at the level of plot and
thematics. She reads the texts only as self-contained enactions of the modes of
subjectivation she wishes to promote, with no thought as to how language,
structure, rhetoric, or other formal choices work on the reader.
Burwell’s omissions raise a serious
question for literary and cultural theorists in our roles as both readers and
producers of texts. What is the relationship of a description of activism, a
model of activism, to social activism? Isn’t activism a name for a set of
effects? If we do not ask how language, structure, and concepts affect readers,
and about the ways and means of these effects, in what sense do we even speak of
activism? Burwell lauds, via her analysis of Wittig, the proposition that
language and people stand in a mutually shaping relationship. She goes so far as
to note that, through her experimentation with language, "Wittig rejects
novels that merely thematize a specifically ‘lesbian’ point of view" in
favor of changing the "textual reality" (185). Yet even a changed
textual reality, interpreted within the boundaries of the page, stands as simply
another variety of thematization. While the novels Burwell discusses stage
especially sophisticated assaults on their readers for specifically political
purposes, Burwell’s own readings never acknowledge this. She argues, speaking
again of Wittig, that her novels have "political force" and
"activate lesbian subjectivity," yet she provides absolutely no clue
as to how the leap is made from reading something to enacting or
embodying changed subjectivities as forms of resistance. In the end, Burwell’s
interesting claims about the political inertness of certain kinds of figurative
modeling in contemporary theory cannot be supported in a text that, unlike some
of the best sf theory, does not even get close to asking about the relationship
between activism and theorizing or activism and writing.—Ann
Weinstone, Stanford University
Bringing
Utopia to Order.
Dorothy F.
Donnelly. Patterns of Order and Utopia.
St. Martin’s (800-221-7945), 1998. x + 150 pp. $45 cloth.
As an analysis of the concept of reason
and its influence on ideas of order, Patterns of Order and Utopia points
towards some important interpretive gestures made by a number of medieval and
early-modern thinkers. As an inquiry into the evolving influence of ideas of
order and nature from Augustine to Bacon, it is also interesting. As a rigorous
history of utopian thought, it is terribly uneven, and unfortunately what this
book is most successful at is also what it does least often.
Donnelly begins by specifying her
intention "to discuss the radical role that a classical utopian writer’s
unique ordering vision has upon the particular kind of transforming ideal that
is envisioned" (1). There are two problems with this project right from the
start. The first is that, despite the term’s recurrence no less than six times
in the opening paragraph, the reader is never told exactly what a
"classical utopia" is. We are told right away that the authors under
consideration will include Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante,
Marsilius of Padua, Thomas More, and Francis Bacon; this leads us to believe
that Donnelly considers them all classical utopians. Not long after this we find
that "We have agreed that classical utopianism is a mode of thought
that deals with humanity’s temporal condition and that the intention of
classical utopias is to offer ideas concerning a perceived possibility of
achieving the good life in this world" (28; emphasis added). So far, so
good, although I didn’t remember agreeing to anything.
Soon, however, Donnelly states that
Augustine’s system "was to spell the end to classical utopianism"
(31), and on the very next page we find that Aquinas became "a primary
influence on the reappearance in the fourteenth century of classical utopian
thought" (32). Neither Augustine or Aquinas, then, are themselves classical
utopians. Shortly thereafter, More’s Utopia (1516) is characterized as
"the first modern utopia" (59), and as we reach the end of the book,
Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1629) becomes for Donnelly the final radical
break from the utopian tradition as it persisted in More—so that if More was
modern, this must make Bacon ... what? postmodern? And isn’t The New
Atlantis still concerned with "the good life in this world" and
therefore classical?
This looseness in definition would not
be so troublesome if the reader got the sense that the interrelation of Donnelly’s
central terms created some kind of coherent argumentative matrix, but the
rhetorical structure of Patterns of Order and Utopia is equally unstable.
The best example of this is probably Chapter 4, a seventeen-page discussion of
More. Donnelly begins:
It is typical to study Thomas More’s Utopia
for its commentary on the social ills of sixteenth-century England, its
representation of a community where all people are created equal, or its tightly
structured social institutions that serve to control all facets of human
activity. In this chapter I want to explore More’s meaning in the Utopia
through a study of the concept of order that he set forth in that work. (61)
Why these should be two separate goals
Donnelly never explains, and it seems perfectly obvious that ideas about More’s
concept of order might usefully be approached through a study of Utopia’s
social institutions.
She goes on, though, not to clarify
this point but, for six pages, to summarize the previous three chapters of the
book (with the exception of two valuable paragraphs contrasting the Stoics and
Augustine that might have been more useful in her earlier chapter on Augustine).
Three full pages of minute summary and block quotation from the Utopia
follow, punctuated by the eyebrow-raising statement that it is "not
necessary to give all of the details More provides about the way in which life
in Utopia is organized" (71). Then another two pages resummarize Augustine’s
and Aquinas’s ideas on the origin of the state, after which Donnelly contrasts
More’s idea of the state with those of his predecessors, finding that
"More is less concerned with the expression of a particular political
philosophy than with a conceptualization of a world that is designed by human
beings, a world that is informed by, and which in turn conforms to, a concept of
order defined strictly in human terms" (76). But isn’t this
conceptualization a political philosophy? Perhaps not, but Donnelly never makes
clear exactly what the differences are between such a philosophy in her
understanding of the term and what More himself is doing—and later on she will
state, "There is little doubt that More saw himself in the Utopia,
albeit somewhat reluctantly, as a political theorist" (97).
Donnelly ends this chapter arguing that
"Utopia presents a radically different vision of order" from
that of Marsilius or Dante or Aquinas—but she has said exactly the same thing
(often in exactly the same words) about Marsilius and Dante and Aquinas. In her
treatment, each writer is first a radical, then—when the time has come to
consider the next radical—suddenly more of a traditional "classical
utopian" after all: for example, More, we discover at the beginning of the
chapter on Bacon, "still retained strong traces of the traditional
outlook" (79).
All of this is in the service of the
book’s primary point, which is that Bacon’s New Atlantis is a real
radical departure, a work that liberated the concept of order "from
stagnation and from the uncompromising tension that resulted from the link
between cosmic and temporal order" (94). This may be true, although Bacon’s
ideal of progress seems a bit more, well, orderly than Donnelly argues, and I’m
not sure what she means by "Bacon’s proposal that all order is
characterized by change, not by stability" (14). Baconian inquiry, after
all, proceeds along prescribed channels and is devoted to the discovery of
immutable laws that lie behind the flux of the material world. Bacon does, as
she points out, predicate his utopia on
a radically different way of perceiving
nature and of viewing the connection between nature and human nature. Whereas in
the Greek view nature was a model to be imitated, and in the Augustinian view it
was something to be conquered by divine grace, in Bacon nature can be modified
and transmuted, and it can be controlled by human beings. (87)
This approach to utopian history might
have made for a stimulating study. But once again, in order to forge Bacon into
another link in her successive chain of radical departures, Donnelly overstates
her case: "Cosmic law, divine law, nature’s law—all are replaced by
Bacon with those principles of nature discovered by inquiry into the operations
of discrete natural phenomena" (88). As with earlier cases of
terminological uncertainty, the difference between "nature’s law"
and "principles of nature" is not easy to discern. Only the method of
approach differs, and Donnelly—even as she foregrounds the importance of
experiment and inductive reasoning (80-81)—explicitly dismisses the idea that
Bacon’s radical departure originates with his specifically scientific concerns
(14-15).
The second problem with Donnelly’s
book is that it’s all a bit obvious. Only rarely does she venture outside her
program to take a fruitful look at what should have been significant issues in
the general argument: evolving ideas of the natural world and humanity’s
relationship to it; the influence of contemporary politics on a given writer’s
utopian vision; resistance to new concepts of reason, nature, and order that
originated in a struggle between an emergent modern rationalism and traditional
religion. Each of these issues surfaces for tantalizing moments in the text;
none is investigated in any real depth, and more importantly, none is ever
substantively related to the historical project of utopianism.
Instead, the argument of Patterns of
Order and Utopia consists largely of pointing out things that other critics
have previously noted in the texts under discussion, and then stating—after
extensive summary of previous summaries, invariably signaled by the phrase
"we have seen"—that those interesting facets are the result of the
writer’s attitude (or, more often than not, the writer’s century’s
attitude) toward concepts of order. The idea, finally, is too slight for even
this book’s modest 99 pages (plus notes). Patterns of Order and Utopia
would have made a fine journal article on the gradual divergence of utopian
thought from traditional ideas of order as understood through paradigms of
resemblance. At book length, it doesn’t offer enough of a reward to justify
the sloppy terminology, repetition, and organizational dilapidation.—Alexander
Irvine, Denver University
[Editor’s Note: Another recent
book on the subject of utopias is Richard C.S. Trahair’s
Utopias and Utopians: An Historical Dictionary(Greenwood, 1999; xvi + 480 pp; $95 cloth), which features entries on
major authors, books, and topics in the history of utopian literature and social
theory. Each entry is broadly informative—giving for major books, for example,
both summaries of their content and of their contextual significance—and is
capped by a useful list of sources for further study. Dystopian texts and
contexts are covered somewhat spottily, and include the Donner Party, presumably
intended to balance out the extensive coverage of historical utopias; the
analogy, however, is unsound, as the Donner Party certainly didn’t set out to
found a community based on principles of murder and cannibalism! While not a
substitute for more substantive historical or critical studies, this dictionary
is useful for its provision of brief focused overviews of major topics in the
field and for its concise gathering of secondary materials on those topics.—RL]
An
Arbitrary Polemic.
Gary Westfahl.
The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the
Idea of Science Fiction. Liverpool UP (fax: 0151-794-2235), 1998.
viii + 344 pp. £32 cloth; £14.95 paper.
Gary Westfahl begins with the clear
agenda of correcting almost all previous students of sf. He proposes to
demonstrate, by what he claims is a simple "description" of the
"true history" of sf, that until Hugo Gernsback named it and devoted a
pulp magazine to it, sf did not exist as a genre. With special attention to
Brian Aldiss and Darko Suvin, the opening chapter attacks the majority of modern
critics for attempting to trace a generic consciousness developing in the
nineteenth century. In contrast to such "subjective" readings of sf
history, Westfahl’s own reading, he assures us, is "neutral." But by
the end of this long book one senses that something other than historical
accuracy is at stake. Westfahl conceives of his mission as saving sf from elite,
theoretically oriented, usually academic, interpretations. Anyone familiar with
Westfahl’s work will recognize the theme looming here: only someone who has
become one with early fan culture by putting in the heavy labor of reading what
he at one point estimates as 650,000 pages of sf commentary written "by
people who have not been employed to do so" (290), is qualified to describe
the history. The book is less an historical interpretation than a brief for the
embattled and belligerent consciousness of 1930s fandom.
Hugo Gernsback is the hero of the
polemic. Most of the basic story of Gernsback’s historical presence is
familiar: in fact, Westfahl has little new to add to the picture of the slightly
sleazy entrepreneur we already know. Westfahl wants to change our understanding
by making the remarkable claim that Gernsback was a genuine "literary
critic" whose "theory," as formulated in editorials and in his
selection of letters in Amazing Stories, gave sf the self-consciousness
that, by Westfahl’s argument, made it a distinct genre. In the first issue of Amazing
Stories, Gernsback defined science fiction as "a charming romance
intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision" (38).
"Charming" and "intermingled" are hardly precise terms, yet
Westfahl takes this casual statement very seriously and goes on to consider at
great length how scientific sf must be and how the science should be presented,
and he emphasizes the call for "prophetic vision." Gernsback’s triad—story,
science, prophecy—is held up throughout much of the book as a profound and
historically central idea. Westfahl’s enthusiasm for it is such that he can at
one point exclaim that "Gernsback is arguably the most important literary
critic of modern times" (63).
Later chapters on legendary sf editor
John W. Campbell, Jr. are both more detailed and more reasonable, probably
because they are not committed to so grandiose a claim. With his usual
all-or-nothing energy, Westfahl sets out to debunk Campbell, making the case
that he took credit for developments in sf that Gernsback had set in motion.
Westfahl proposes a loose and occasional distinction separating Gernsback’s
visionary sf from Campbell’s social and "problem solving" ideals.
Gernsback was not a systematic literary critic, however, so the case ultimately
rests not on the disciplined reading of a coherent body of work but on the
juxtaposition of selected quotations.
There is comparatively little attention
paid to sf practice in this book. A chapter on Gernsback’s early novel, Ralph
124C 41+ (1911-12), tangles itself in difficulties: Westfahl repeatedly
apologizes for the book’s clumsy style and plot, but he is nevertheless
committed to asserting its centrality as a model. Robert A. Heinlein stands in
for Campbell when Westfahl needs to look at actual fiction from the late
thirties and early forties and finds Campbell’s own not worth analyzing. The
discussion of Heinlein is judgmental, leading to odd critical conclusions such
as the following: "Thus, Ralph 124C 41+ is an unsatisfactory
combination of several unsuccessful novels; Beyond This Horizon is an
unsatisfactory combination of several successful novels" (247).
Westfahl becomes embroiled with
previous critics regarding issues of genre that are for the most part matters
not of fact, value, or interpretation, but simply of stipulated definition. His
arbitrary and strict definition of genre asserts that unless authors consciously
know they are writing in a genre, the genre does not exist, a definition that
does not even conform to the practice of Gernsback himself (for instance,
Gernsback calls Wells and Verne sf writers). It is an easy task to show that
other critics have not subscribed to this definition. Such an argument does not
substantially change the way we read the earlier material, however, so it is not
clear why such a distinction about genre matters except that it gives Westfahl
an occasion to set himself apart.
One may grant an author the privilege
of creating his or her own definitions, yet, after he has denounced most other
modern critics, Westfahl himself abandons his early concerns. The final chapter
engages in a wandering meditation that arrives at a definition of sf unrelated
to self-consciousness and ready to dump any or all parts of Gernsback’s triad
of story-science-prophecy. Throughout the final chapter Westfahl offers a number
of definitions of sf that are incongruent with each other. One of the simpler
(he calls it "an expedient shorter version") asserts: "A work
labeled science fiction has these three features—it is a prose narrative with
scientific language and non-realistic subject matter—or any two of these three
features" (299). The enigmatic circularity of the opening phrase and the
openness of the options at the end leave it unclear how one could possibly use
such a definition. This is a definition that will allow Westfahl to include all
the works he thinks of as sf, but by not requiring a work to be scientific or
fictive it opens the door to almost anything. Westfahl seems confused about the
very purpose of definition: at times he understands it to construct a
theoretical category, but at other times he uses it to describe an historical
understanding or practice. His discussion drifts between these very different
purposes, and they undercut each other.
Westfahl knows a great deal about
the pulp writers of mid-century America, but unfortunately his polemical agenda
prevents him from writing the book that might serve as a useful literary history
of the period.—John
Huntington, University of Illinois at Chicago
The
Pleasures of Pulp.
Clive Bloom. Cult
Fiction: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory (fax: 800-672-2054),
1996. ix + 262 pp. $17.95 paper.
Deborah
Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye, and Imelda Whelehan, eds. Pulping
Fictions: Consuming Culture Across the Literature/Media Divide.
Pluto Press, 1996. vi + 160 pp. $16.95 paper. Distributed in the US by Stylus
(800-232-0223).
______, eds.
Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture and Its Audience. Pluto
Press, 1997. vi + 170 pp. $16.95 paper. Distributed in the US by Stylus
(800-232-0223).
Taken together, these three books, all
British imports, are an exciting excursion into the land I call home, the
largely uncharted realms of pulp fiction, exploitation film, and trash culture
in general. They are a welcome addition to existing scholarship, and any student
or critic of science fiction could benefit from dipping into them. They operate,
however, on very different levels. The anthologies, the first two books in a
series from De Montfort University aimed at bridging the gap between English and
Media Studies, are entertaining but fairly light in substance, and succeed best
at documenting interesting cultural phenomena and marking key questions for
later scholars to answer more fully. Bloom’s book, on the other hand, is a
true work of pulp scholarship. Colorful, rambling, and ungainly, like many of
the pulp treasures Bloom examines, Cult Fiction is filled with fresh and
compelling insights.
All four editors of the Film/Fiction
series are on the faculty at De Montfort. This may account for the tight
thematic unity of the collections. One can see that the four share enthusiasms,
and can easily imagine them complaining to one another about lacunae in their
fields born of academic prejudice, and working together to produce this series
to fill them. The best of these essays are defined by the editors’ brave
willingness to venture into largely uncharted terrain, and to challenge not only
existing canons of study—which is a commonplace, even a defining virtue, among
scholars of popular culture—but also the standard theories of pop culture
experts. For example, it would be easy enough for an sf scholar to sneer at the
1989 film Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure: the science is bad, the
history is bad, the humor is lame. Yet I.Q. Hunter (a name to conjure with!)
does a grand job of placing the film within the framework of Francis Fukuyama’s
seminal essay "The End of History" by exposing how Bill and Ted work
as "shock troops" simultaneously commenting on the banal wonders of
consumer capitalism and spreading its ideology throughout history. Several of
the authors in each book join Hunter in an attempt to grapple with the elusive
nature of postmodern capitalist culture. Often, as in Jenny Rice and Carol
Saunders’s discussion of the BBC-TV version of George Eliot’s Middlemarch
(1871-72), these essays deal with how high-culture texts are recycled by and for
a consumer economy. On the other hand, Helen Merrick’s excavation of the role
of women in sf fandom and Stephen Knight’s analysis of Mel Brooks’s Robin
Hood: Men in Tights (1993) apply more traditional scholarship to popular
texts and contexts. All of the essays are animated by an impulse to expose the
mythmaking process of mainstream cultural histories as the construction of
palatable stories designed to serve largely middle-class interests.
Unfortunately, this tightly coherent
vision shared by the editorial board may also account for the drawbacks common
to the collections. Many of the essays work from a surprisingly small base of
shared theorists—Pierre Bourdieu is invoked repeatedly, as is Michel de
Certeau, and other French theorists (Barthes, Kristeva) are nodded to. Perhaps
the editors are trying to break free of the traditional neo-Marxist base of
cultural studies—this aim is obliquely indicated in the introduction to the
second volume—but the result is to convey the sense of a closed, weighty, and
highly academic vision that isn’t fully appropriate to its hyperkinetic
subject matter. The bulk of the essays share a curious sameness of format and
emphasis. They seem far too willing to stop once some aspect of a text has been
tagged as an attribute of postmodernity, far too secure in the notion that
analyzing something (like gender identity) is the same as
"destabilizing" it. At times this insulated theoretical stance leads
the critics to deal with their subjects rather naively, as in Martin Barker’s
essay on a self-proclaimed "fascist" fan of the comic Judge Dredd.
Barker engages in a brave and serious reflection on the difficulty of studying
an audience of one, especially when the critic dislikes and cannot identify with
the person, but ultimately he treats class, fascism, and audience in a fairly
shallow fashion. The two books are finally great as entertainment, and as
"first scout" into strange and wonderful new territories, but they
function better as texts geared to prompt discussion among advanced
undergraduates than as powerful voices in the scholarship.
The same is not true, I am happy to
state, about Bloom’s Cult Fiction. A direct comparison would not be
fair, since Bloom takes an entire book to develop his argument while the writers
in the Film/Fiction series seem to have been allotted a standard twenty pages
each; however, Bloom too is crucially concerned with how the pressures of the
marketplace work to define literary and cultural production. More specifically,
he investigates the "underworld of literary production" (3) through
the last two hundred years (focusing on the last hundred), in an attempt to
expand our understanding of "pulp." In Bloom’s view, this word
refers less to cheap materials or ephemeral aims than to "certain
attitudes, reading habits, and social concerns" (3) that are worthy of
study in their own right. The attitudes he explores well, but they are fairly
familiar; it is in its analysis of the intersection of pulp reading habits and
social concerns that his book succeeds most fully.
One of his projects along the way—one
quite useful for the science fiction scholar—is to challenge the genre model
of literary analysis. Bloom finds this approach too text-based and
insufficiently dynamic to describe the febrile workings of the pulp mentality.
Bloom advances a more active and adaptive vision of both writers and readers, as
cultural producers and consumers in a complex matrix of literary exchange,
engaged in various negotiations for power in a continually shifting cultural
landscape.
After sketching his overall project,
and nimbly demonstrating how genre designations and publishing categories can
shift over time (even for a single text), Bloom devotes the first half of the
book to a detailed review of the historical development of literacy and its
relationship to the forces of cultural production. Along the way he repeatedly
revises simplistic understandings of the spread of print culture—for example,
the traditional British myth of literacy spreading outward in a grand sweep due
to foresightful government action, specifically the Education Reform Act of
1870. Using both the complaints of the upper classes about what the lower
classes were reading and the business records of pulp publishers, Bloom paints a
picture of active market forces seizing on a potential new market and opening it
to whatever could be sold there. The resultant products often conflicted with
Victorian public morality, whether they took the form of working class political
pamphlets or lurid accounts of sex and violence. Often the two came together
nicely, as in sensational reports of highwaymen who robbed the rich.
Throughout this history, Bloom takes
care to trace the now parallel, now independent tracks of British and American
literary production—though he seems a bit more certain about the British, more
eager to revise it than he is the American. Throughout, he carefully examines
the nature and function of cultural hierarchy, sketching pulp culture not as the
force for revolution that some champions of popular culture would have it, but
as the necessary "other" that high culture has traditionally used to
define itself. As with all mirrors, however, what high culture sees in its pulp
Doppelgänger is necessarily reversed and distorted, and Bloom spends much of
the second half of the book delineating the rules of pulp. Rather than defining
an aesthetics in parallel with high culture strategies, Bloom offers what might
be called a "hedonics" of pulp culture. The actual chapter on the
"Rule of Pulp," which uses the Comics Code as a model for the
restraints high culture would put on pulp materials, is quite fine. Here, Bloom
develops an argument for pulp as an obsessive lifestyle—it is a lived
literature. In so doing, he indicates the class hierarchy implicated in
judgments of taste, the highbrow assumption that economic liberty leads
inexorably to moral laxity among the lower classes. At the same time, he offers
a skillful critique of how pulp functions mold its readers, exposing its
essentially individualist and biologically determinist ideologies.
The chapters that follow, which feature
four individual examinations of pulp figures (Jack the Ripper, Sax Rohmer’s Fu
Manchu, H.P. Lovecraft, and Harry Price), are the most uneven in the book. In a
way they are the most pulpy, for while they are fairly exciting in themselves,
the texts chosen seem arbitrary and highly personal. In one case, that of Bloom’s
study of Harry Price, a professional British ghost hunter, this is so patently
the case that one wonders why the essay was included. All four of these chapters
were previously published elsewhere, and all bear the marks of forced editing to
make them fit into the book. Perhaps the most obvious instance of shoehorning
involves Bloom’s study of Lovecraft. Originally published in 1990, it is a
skillful discussion of the racial and social paranoia that informed the author’s
psyche and his works. It reads as very dated now, however, and it is clear that
Bloom did no new research to update the original article. Since a great deal of
critical and biographical work has been done on Lovecraft since 1986, the date
of Bloom’s most recent citation, this seems very remiss, even sloppy.
This lurching if pleasant ride through
Bloom’s personal obsessions does have a reward at the end. The final chapter
turns a theoretically informed eye first on the intersection of literature with
other arts, and then on contemporary critical theory itself. Using F. Scott
Fitzgerald and Dashiell Hammett as representatives of high and pulp literatures
respectively, Bloom examines how each man’s fiction responded to the artistic
pressures of new media, specifically film. Examining the style of The Great
Gatsby (1925) and The Maltese Falcon (1930), specifically character
description and dialogue, he shows how the close-up, the pan, and other elements
of cinematic vision are reworked by each author. Pulp, he argues, embraces
hybridity, accepting the tools of film as it has other media in the past, just
as high-art fiction defines itself by ignoring or attacking technological and
economic advances.
This insight, illustrated by a skillful
close reading, would have been a strong enough point to end on, but Bloom goes
further. Examining the language and claims of critical theory with the same
tight focus that he had pulp fiction, he argues finally for a blending of the
two, in which critical theory functions as a new kind of pulp. What unites them
both, he argues, is an almost metaphysical nostalgia pitched in a gothic
register. As the pulps voiced a longing for the secure individual, critical
theory mourns a unitary self. Both express these feelings through linguistic
violence upon the object of their longings, and a lurid, passionate response to
its sufferings. Exposing these violent textual decompositions helps us see a
difficult thing—how supposedly liberatory contemporary theories themselves
serve similar class functions as cheap comics, hard-boiled detective stories,
and space operas. All offer an experience of consumer capitalism as the road to
determining one’s own destiny, as well as, along the way, the "illicit
pleasures of pulp" (240). —Gregory Beatty, University
of Iowa
Monster
Mash.
Mark Jancovich.
Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s.
Manchester UP, 1996. vii + 324 pp. $24.95 paper. Distributed in the US by St.
Martin’s (800-221-7945).
Kevin McCarthy
and Ed Gorman, eds. "They’re
Here...": "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," A Tribute.
Berkley Boulevard (fax: 212-951-8993), 1999. xi + 273 pp. $13 paper.
Good monsters never really die. They
can always be resurrected for another assault on humanity, in order to scare the
hell out of us. And 1950s horror movies also keep coming back: consider the
remakes of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958; 1993), The Blob
(1958; 1988), The Fly (1958; 1986), Invaders from Mars (1953;
1986), or Little Shop of Horrors (1960; 1986). More recently, the
television series The X-Files keeps recycling the old stories and images.
And in Hollywood, within the past two years alone, Norman Bates once again
sliced up Marion in the shower (as Gus Van Sant, in an absurd act of homage,
remade Psycho [1960] shot-for-shot); Godzilla stomped once more
across the screen; and the 1963 film The Haunting, based on Shirley
Jackson’s classic 1959 ghost story, The Haunting of Hill House, was
also remade. Although none of these last three remakes improved on the originals—bigger
budgets, more blood, and more elaborate special effects do not necessarily scare
audiences—the return of such works shows that the 1950s were indeed the
seedbed of contemporary American horror.
Mark Jancovich’s Rational Fears:
American Horror in the 1950s is an ambitious, thorough, and highly useful
reappraisal of the seminal nature of the fiction and film of that decade, when
horror moved away from the exotic settings of the Gothic (Frankenstein, Dracula,
and Lovecraft) and into the streets and homes of modern America. He builds on
the revisioning of the American 1950s by historians such as Richard Pells—author
of The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the
1940s and 1950s (Harper & Row, 1985)—and of 1950s horror by film
critics such as Andrew Tudor, in his Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural
History of the Horror Movie (Blackwell, 1989). Jancovich takes issue with
the standard view, expressed by such film critics as Robin Wood and Peter
Biskind, that 1950s horror is, like the decade itself, largely politically
conservative or reactionary. Jancovich proposes a far more nuanced and complex
view of 1950s American culture and 1950s horror. He sees the threats in these
films as reflecting not so much fears of the Red Menace as anxieties about the
rapid changes being brought about in postwar American life by the rise of what
he terms "Fordism" or "rationalisation": "the process
through which scientific-technical rationality is applied to the management of
social, economic and cultural life.... [T]his new system of organization was
seen by many as an inherently totalitarian system which both created conformity
and repressed dissent" (2-3).
This is a wide-ranging book. In terms
of content, Part One concerns "invasion narratives" such as The
Thing (1951), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Beast from
20,000 Fathoms (1953), The War of the Worlds (1953), and Invaders
from Mars. Part Two deals with the "outsider narratives" of Ray
Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Jack Arnold, and the low-budget horror films of
American International Pictures aimed at the new youth audience, such as I
Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). Part Three concerns "psychological
horror": the fiction of Robert Bloch, the Hitchcock film based on Bloch’s
novel Psycho (1959), the films of Roger Corman, Forbidden Planet
(1956), and the novel The Haunting of Hill House. Jancovich objects to
the tendency to view historical decades as all of a piece. As he points out,
this ignores "both historical change across periods, and differences or
struggles within any particular period" (10). And he objects to the similar
tendency to view genres "as coherent and hermetically sealed objects"
(10). Audiences get their sense of a genre such as horror or science fiction by
exposure to many different media, including film, literature, television, and
comic books. And they are not much concerned with the categories critics impose.
For example, the arguments about whether 1950s invasion films are better
classified as science fiction or horror "was irrelevant during the period
in which they were produced, and they were usually simply referred to as ‘monster
movies’" (11).
In terms of critical focus, Part One
discusses the rise of "Fordism" in the late 1940s and 50s and the
widespread fears that as a result of this new system of organization,
"America was becoming an increasingly homogeneous, conformist and
totalitarian society" (22). "The Soviet Union was used to highlight
and challenge aspects of American society.... It was not simply an ‘external
Other’ which was used to legitimate American society...." (18). Thus,
Jancovich argues that the "invasion narratives" cannot be viewed
simply as "a code for fears of Soviet aggression" (15), but rather
that they express a fear of the effects of the new forms of scientific
rationalism on American life. Jancovich reverses the usual critique of the two
1951 films The Thing and The Day the Earth Stood Still, arguing
that the former is the more respectful of difference and the latter the more
"rational"—and therefore totalitarian—because the alien Klaatu
demands "rigid conformity to the universal order, an order from which there
can be no dissent" (46). The problem, as Jancovich sees it, is that critics
tend to prefer "the rational over the emotional" and thus to devalue
most of 1950s horror (58). He demonstrates how in so many of the stories and
films of the 1950s, "rationality and science are dehumanizing and
dangerous" (67). It is the warmth of small, local groups, such as those in The
Thing or War of the Worlds, that is "distinguished from the
large, abstract structures of Fordist America" (56).
In Part Two, Jancovich argues that
"while the 1950s invasion narratives used the alien invaders as images of
rationalisation and conformity, other horror texts of the period used aliens as
an image of difference through which they investigated, problematised and even
rejected the notions of ‘normality’ prevalent in 1950s America" (82).
Here he cites examples of aliens and outsiders from the fiction of Bradbury and
Matheson. In particular, he deals insightfully with Matheson’s novel The
Shrinking Man (1956), with the Jack Arnold film based on it, The
Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), and with The Creature from the Black
Lagoon (1954) as critiques of 1950s notions of masculinity through their
elevation of alienated outsiders. Part Three continues this reappraisal of
gender roles in 1950s horror, citing, for example, "active female
characters who are often presented positively" in the films of Roger Corman
(274). The book ends with a comparison of the film Psycho and the novel The
Haunting of Hill House. Although Psycho is often seen as "an
attack on matriarchy and motherhood, no real evidence is given that
substantiates the claim that Mrs. Bates is actually to blame for anything. All
that is seen of Norman’s mother are his perceptions and interpretations of
her" (300). Instead, Jancovich argues that Shirley Jackson’s novel is far
more critical of matriarchy than is Psycho. In The Haunting of Hill
House, the heroine’s psychological problems and eventual destruction are
shown as directly caused by the early death of her father and her domination by
her mother.
Rational Fears
is a well-informed work of scholarship filled with stimulating re-evaluations of
1950s American culture and insightful readings of many novels and films. If
Jancovich can be faulted, it is that he perhaps rides his thesis too hard. Just
as there is a danger in seeing "fear of Communism" as the all-purpose
explanation for 1950s horror, so there is a similar danger in simply replacing
it with "fear of Fordism." In his urge to prove his thesis, he
sometimes ignores contradictory evidence. For example, he argues that in The
Day the Earth Stood Still, "for Klattu [sic], as for the film,
greatness means scientific genius" (45). Yet Klaatu refers to Abraham
Lincoln as a great man, and Klaatu himself is implicitly compared to Christ (he
goes among the common people and is hated and feared and finally killed by the
authorities, only to rise again). And contrary to Jancovich’s view of Klaatu
as merely cold and rational, we may recall the alien’s fondness for Billy, a
boy whom Klaatu praises to his mother as "warm." Finally, in his urge
to refurbish the image of 1950s horror, Jancovich perhaps takes some works too
seriously. He strains to find merit in such forgettable Roger Corman
exploitation features as Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954) and Viking
Women vs. the Sea Serpent (1957), films ripe for treatment on Mystery
Science Theater 3000.
More re-evaluation of 1950s horror and
assessment of its postmodern reworkings can be found in "They’re
Here...": "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," A Tribute, edited
by Kevin McCarthy and Ed Gorman. Unlike Jancovich’s book, this volume is aimed
primarily at fans. Scholars would do well to consult first Invasion of the
Body Snatchers (Rutgers, 1989), edited by Al LaValley, which includes the
complete continuity script of director Don Siegel’s classic 1956 film, a
post-production file, an interview with Siegel, as well as serious critical
articles. "They’re Here...," while overfilled with fannish
trivia, is useful in discussing the persistence of the Body Snatchers
phenomenon during the postwar era through Jack Finney’s novel and the three
films it inspired. Each decade discovers a different form of paranoia in the
story: in the 1950s, it is fear of conformity; in the 1970s, urban paranoia; and
in the 1990s, paranoia about government (the Army is taken over by the pods).
The collection offers views of Jack Finney’s career, of his 1955 novel The
Body Snatchers, and of the films: the 1956 Siegel version, the 1978 remake
directed by Phillip Kaufman, and the 1993 version directed by Abel Ferrara.
In addition, "They’re
Here..." includes interviews with Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter, stars
of the 1956 movie; with Philip Kaufman and W.D. Richter, the director and writer
of the 1978 movie; and with Abel Ferrara, Stuart Gordon, and Robert Solo,
respectively the director, one of the writers, and the producer of the 1993
version. The interviews with the makers of the 1993 movie provide contrasting
viewpoints on what went wrong with that particular venture. Robert Solo, who had
produced the 1978 film, envisioned this new version as the start of a franchise,
with two sequels and perhaps a TV series. But the script went through
"development hell," had six writers, and died at the box office. Solo
blames the failure of the project on an inept studio head and the choice of
Ferrara as director, accused of being indifferent to science fiction. But Stuart
Gordon claims Ferrara made a good, scary movie that Warner Brothers killed by
not marketing it. Ferrara, who says he likes science fiction (he is working on
an adaptation of William Gibson’s story "New Rose Hotel"), also
blames the studio. Ferrara’s interview is remarkable in one respect: he
succeeds at being more foul-mouthed than a rock star.
The best appreciations of the Body
Snatchers phenomenon, not surprisingly, are by horror novelists Dean Koontz
and Stephen King. In his introduction to the volume, Koontz says that the
standard interpretation of the film as a "red-scare movie" is
inadequate, and that the film instead works because "In the twentieth
century, so many powerful forces have reshaped society so rapidly, compared to
the more measured pace of change in previous centuries, that it’s no surprise
when we feel besieged and in danger of losing our humanity" (vii). Koontz
then would probably agree with Mark Jancovich. King, in an excerpt from his
study of the horror genre, Danse Macabre (Everest House, 1981), credits
Jack Finney, along with Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury, as having pioneered
modern horror by shifting it from exotic Lovecraftian locations to the American
small town. "Finney’s little town of Santa Mira predates and points the
way toward Peter Straub’s fictional town of Milburn, New York; Thomas Tryon’s
Cornwall Coombe, Connecticut; and my own little town of ’Salem’s Lot,
Maine" (9).
There is a lot of repetition and
padding in the volume. Some of the critical articles repeat the same
information. Others contain mostly plot synopses or impressionistic, bad
writing. For example, James Combs writes of the ending of Finney’s novel:
"it’s so lame ... it’s quadriplegic" (41). The interview with
Kevin McCarthy is much too long at 85 pages, of which only 25 concern the making
of Body Snatchers; the rest concerns his long career as an actor.
McCarthy is a genial storyteller, but as one of the volume’s editors, he was
too self-indulgent.
It will be interesting to see how the
twenty-first century continues to rework 1950s American horror. As Jancovich
points out, 1950s horror played "a central and formative role" for
writers and filmmakers who grew up in the era, such as Stephen King and Steven
Spielberg (304). Yet younger audiences can continue to relate to the material
because they were exposed to these films "on television at an early
age" (304).—Andrew
Gordon, University of Florida
A
Not-So-Different Story.
Val Gough and
Jill Rudd, eds. A Very Different Story: Studies
on the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Liverpool UP (fax:
0151-794-2235), 1998. ix + 188 pp. £32 cloth; £15.95 paper.
This collection could almost be
retitled "Studies on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland," as
nine of its eleven essays touch on that utopian novel. Gilman is probably best
known for The Yellow Wall Paper (1892), a much-anthologized story that
chillingly evokes the author’s experience with the "rest cure"
prescribed for "hysteria" in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. In Gilman’s lifetime, the less-familiar Herland was only
published as a serial in her magazine The Forerunner in 1914, but has
been widely read and taught since its book-length publication in 1979. Herland
is a feminist utopian novel in which three male explorers "discover" a
country populated entirely by women who reproduce parthenogenetically, and who,
in their exchanges with the men, reveal both new ways of being-in-the-world and
a critique of US society. Herland inverts discourses of exploration and
colonization, reverses sex roles, inserts humor into the didactic genre of
utopia, and consistently tweaks male understandings of females. In short, it is
a fun serious book, generally considered an important text in the history of
utopian literature.
The editors of A Very Different
Story are coy about their volume’s massed attention to the novel,
noting only that "several of the essays revisit" Herland, and
stating that Gilman’s more general "utopianism ... is the focus of this
collection" (1). Indeed, many of the essays touch on Herland as part
of Gilman’s overall utopian-feminist project, rather than focusing on that
book exclusively. The editors hope to bring Gilman scholarship to a new
understanding of her aesthetics and didacticism by emphasizing that "Gilman’s
literary work forces reassessment of conventional evaluative criteria" (2)—a
point that several essays demonstrate through close attention to Gilman’s
manipulation of different genres. Finally, the editors praise the essays in the
volume for participating in what they see as a willingness in current Gilman
scholarship to "acknowledge and explore, rather than suppress, the
inconsistencies and contradictions of her work" (4); along this line, they
single out the essay by Chris Ferns, "Rewriting Male Myths: Herland
and the Utopian Tradition," for its reading of Herland’s failures
as well as its successes.
Ferns’s essay is certainly one of the
best in the book. Pointing out that Gilman’s utopia has been read as both
critiquing and confirming contemporary perspectives on femininity and women’s
roles—particularly in its insistence that "woman’s sphere remains the
home; the only difference is that here the home has expanded to embrace the
entire community" (33)—Ferns notes that Gilman’s confirmation of such
contemporary values is congruent with the visions offered by other (i.e., male)
utopian writers of the time, from emphasis on the domestic roles of women to
their apparent lack of sexual desire. "Gilman ... may be seen as echoing
four hundred years of utopian tradition" (35), he asserts, and finds that
the author, even while satirizing the "infantilization" of narrators
in traditional utopias, finally reinscribes that infantilization in her
treatment of the male narrators, especially in the marriages between the
explorers and three of the women of Herland. Ending on a provocative note, Ferns
reads the willingness of the Herlanders to embrace the possibility of change
through renewed contact with men as contravening the traditional stasis of
utopias, and observes that it is the "word of honour [of] gentlemen,"
as well as the act of naming by "a gentleman," that closes the novel
and generates one of its deepest puzzles and paradoxes.
Unfortunately, where Ferns’s essay is
strong and clear and carefully argued, other pieces could have been better
written and edited. Moreover, although the essays together paint a rich, strong,
multidimensional picture of Gilman, taken individually they don’t add dramatic
new bibliographic or historical information to what is known about the author or
her work. Several fail to live up to their own potential. Mary A. Hill’s
"Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Journey from Within," for example,
seems mostly intended to portray Gilman as prefiguring contemporary
quasi-feminist invocations of "The Goddess." For me, this came as a
strangely anticlimactic conclusion to an essay that begins by provocatively
connecting Bluebeard, Gilman, and contemporary academia, proceeds to quote in
full an apparently previously unpublished (and fascinating) violent dream Gilman
had, and intimates a lurking fascination with violence, even cannibalism, in
Gilman’s letters and dreams. Hill is one of the major Gilman scholars in the
world, but this essay does not rank among her finest work.
A stronger essay is Bridget Bennett’s
thoughtful exploration of "pockets" as an organizational metaphor in
Gilman’s writing; these pockets "exist at the intersections between
public and private," as "marginal space," and as locations of
knowable mysteries (38-9). This metaphor is well known to Gilman’s readers
from her writings about men’s and women’s clothing, in which she skewers
gender inequity by examining differential access to pockets for carrying
necessary and useful items. Bennett successfully connects Gilman’s interest in
pockets with other aspects of Gilman’s writing having to do with boundaries,
especially between interior and exterior worlds. Much could be made of Bennett’s
reading of the mountain-rimmed valley geography of Herland as "a pocket of
civilization in a vast dark continent [that] can be read against the theme of
space which has so preoccupied commentators on North American culture and
identity" (42). She concludes accordingly that Herland’s
"private world of woman’s space" is "a liberating counterpart
to the forced private world of The Yellow Wallpaper" (42). Bennett
takes great care not to overstep boundaries of evidentiary reasoning when she
leaves the reader with the provocative suggestion that "Gilman may be
establishing a lesbian pocket of woman-identified women" in Herland,
noting that such speculation met with much resistance at the conference where
she originally presented this chapter as a paper (50). Her provocation, coming
from a close, historically situated reading of the text, and from suggestive
evidence in Gilman’s letters and diaries, bears further scrutiny and
interpretation; one hopes other scholars or Bennett herself will continue this
interesting line.
Some of the contributors to the volume
will be familiar: Hill, for instance, to scholars of Gilman, and Ruth Levitas to
scholars of utopia. Others have published widely in feminist criticism and
theory. As a group, they address familiar topics: marriage, family, sexuality,
economics. Janet Beer examines Gilman’s treatment of illness and health to
illustrate connections among Gilman’s short fiction, autobiographical writing,
and utopian fiction. Anne Tanski reads two lesser-known fictions, "Making a
Change" (1911) and The Crux (1911), as examples of Gilman’s
commitment to the possibility of changing even the most deeply held social
values. Alex Shishin provides a survey of the industrial and mechanical arts
both present and notably absent in Herland, reading the novel as a recipe for
the successful reconciliation of the sexes. The essays showcase the wide range
of possible perceptions of Gilman, from Bennett’s assertion that she "was
a writer for whom boundaries had little sanctity" (38) to Hill’s
exploration of her adherence to public and private boundaries "almost as
though she sensed ... that there are certain issues we should refrain from
openly approaching" (9). What emerges is a collective portrait of Gilman in
all her fullness: egalitarian, racist, strong-willed, timidly uncertain,
crusading, cautious.
The rest of the essays range fairly
widely over the possible approaches to Gilman, and it is fascinating to consider
how central a role Herland takes in this criticism. Amanda Graham, for
example, reads the novel through the lens of ecofeminist criticism, openly
confronting the question of how much Gilman successfully resists or contests
masculinist modes of thought, and suggesting that, for all the weaknesses of the
novel and personal faults of its author, it can be read as anticipating some of
the feminist theorizing of the later twentieth century. Val Gough’s essay
tackles Gilman’s earlier utopian novel, Moving the Mountain (1911),
alongside Herland, which is generally considered more successful,
radical, and oppositional; Gough works against the grain of that critical
consensus, valorizing the earlier novel because of its greater realism and its
frank presentation of a blueprint for social transformation. Jill Rudd analyzes
Gilman’s use of animals in her writing for what it can reveal about her
penchant for rule-making, rule-following, and carefully considered
rule-breaking. And, finally, Anne Cranny-Francis rounds out the collection with
an essay that reads Gilman’s use of different genres in her program of reader
re-education in the service of social change. All but one of the essays in this
volume are original, the exception being Levitas’s "Utopian Fictions and
Political Theories: Domestic Labour in the Work of Edward Bellamy, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman and William Morris," which appeared as "‘Who Holds
the Hose’: Domestic Labour in Bellamy, Gilman and Morris" in Utopian
Studies (6.1 [1995]: 65-84). Levitas critiques Gilman’s utopics on the
grounds that Gilman inappropriately denigrates child-rearing and other domestic
labor; it is an important essay written with characteristic vigor, but is
probably already familiar to readers.
Readers interested in Gilman in general
might find this volume revolves too much around Herland, and is perhaps a
little too demanding on those who are not familiar with the basic contours of
Gilman scholarship. Readers seriously engaged in Gilman scholarship will surely
notice that, other than the major book-length publications of the 1990s, such as
Mary Hill’s edition of some of Gilman’s letters, a good deal of Gilman
scholarship surrounding the 1992 centenary of The Yellow Wall Paper, and
some of the more recent scholarship on Herland, is not much referenced in
these essays. Bennett might have noted, for example, previous queer theory
readings, such as Jonathan Crewe’s argument for lesbian undercurrents in The
Yellow Wall Paper ("Queering The Yellow Wallpaper? Charlotte
Perkins Gilman and the Politics of Form," in Tulsa Studies in Women’s
Literature 14.2 [Fall 1995]: 273-93), or Val Gough’s own argument that
Gilman resolved the conflict between lesbianism and marriage in favor of an
independence joined with heterosexuality ("Lesbians and Virgins: The
Motherhood in Herland," in Anticipations: Essays on Early Science
Fiction and Its Precursors, ed. David Seed [Syracuse UP, 1995]: 195-215).
Still, for those doing serious scholarship on Gilman, utopian studies, and
feminism, the book generates numerous questions and provocations that far
outweigh its weaknesses.—Peter
Sands, Univ. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
[Editor’s Note: Teachers and
researchers interested in Gilman’s fiction might want to consult two new
gatherings of her work. Herland, The Yellow
Wall-Paper, and Selected Writings (Penguin, 1999; xxx +353 pp.;
$9.95 paper), edited with an introduction and notes by Denise D. Knight, is
suitable for classroom use and contains, alongside the famous works listed in
the title, eighteen short stories and eighteen poems. Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s Utopian Novels (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1999;
389 pp.; $52.50 cloth), edited and introduced by Minna Doscow, contains Gilman’s
With Her in Ourland (1916), sequel to
Herland, as well as the hard-to-find Moving the Mountain. This
book’s price, however, will tend to limit it to larger library collections.
Also worth consulting are The Charlotte Perkins
Gilman Reader (UP of Virginia, 1999; 256 pp.; $14.50 paper),
edited and introduced by Ann J. Lane (whose 1997 biography of Gilman, To
Herland and Beyond, is still in print from UP of Virginia), which
features—though in excerpt form only—a broader selection from Gilman’s
novels, and The Abridged Diaries of Charlotte
Perkins Gilman (UP of Virginia, 1998; 320 pp.; $22.50 paper),
edited by Denise D. Knight. Gilman studies are definitely in full swing these
days.—RL]
A
Biology of Art?
Brett Cooke
and Frederick Turner, eds. Biopoetics:
Evolutionary Perspectives in the Arts. Paragon House (fax:
651-644-0997), 1999. viii + 466 pp. $16.95 paper.
Since human beings are biological
creatures, it would seem self-evident that a biological perspective ought to be
capable of producing valuable insights into human culture; and it is salutary to
state this truism in an era when the extreme culturalism prevalent in some (by
no means all) varieties of poststructuralist thought has become a dogma whose
acolytes react with nothing short of panic to the least hint of nature—rather
like proper Victorians shocked beyond words at the public display of a naked
ankle. Unfortunately, most actual attempts to define evolutionary elements in
culture and art have been disappointing in the extreme. Sometimes they have
suggested no substantial mechanisms connecting culture to biology, with the
result that the latter figures only in a vague, gestural way. Sometimes they
have fallen into a biologistic reductionism so crude as to make one sympathize
with the most hysterical poststructuralist fears after all. And sometimes—indeed,
most of the time—they have been guided by a knowledge of biology that is shaky
at best. Specifically, they have generally fallen into what might be called the
adaptationist fallacy: the popular and almost quasi-religious notion (denounced
by Darwin and cogently refuted in our own time by Stephen Jay Gould) that
natural selection is the sole driving force of evolution and hence that all
significant biological characteristics must have (or, in a subtler version of
the error, must at least once have had) adaptive survival value. The infamous
reductionism of most of those who attempt "biopoetics" does not, then,
begin when they turn to poetry; it is rooted in their (mis)understanding of
biology itself.
There have been exceptions to the
general sterility of biological approaches to culture—for instance, in certain
areas of evolutionary psychology farthest removed from "sociobiology"
of the old E.O. Wilson type. But the book under review (in which Wilson appears
practically as an incarnate god) is not a good place to look for them. Here only
Joseph Miller repudiates the adaptationist fallacy that haunts most of the other
contributors. Perhaps not coincidentally, his essay is the best in the volume:
adducing evidence from drug use, language use, and other areas, Miller posits a
"novelty drive" in human beings and suggests that the reading of
science fiction may have evolutionary value in influencing the ways we respond
to novelty and the future. His logic is speculative, but frankly and
productively so. He displays a sophisticated sense of biology and of literature,
and suggests a mechanism that may actually link them.
The other essays in the volume that
concern sf are all worth reading as literary criticism, but, unlike Miller’s,
none has much to do with biology or a genuine "biopoetics." Eric
Rabkin contributes two essays on fantasy (construed so as to include many works
of sf) that are intelligent and well-informed but that establish no real
connection between literature and evolution; it is only their vague speculations
about human survival that have, presumably, led the editors to include these
pieces in the anthology. Gary Westfahl appears as his normal provocative self,
arguing (implicitly against Miller) that science fiction is a less radically
novel literature than is often supposed. As usual, I disagree with Westfahl’s
view of sf in several ways, but his case is well argued, especially in his
detailed reading of Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Again,
though, there is nothing biological in his argument, save for the half-hearted
suggestion that the mixture of strangeness and familiarity in science fiction
may reflect Wilson’s notion of humankind as an only moderately adventurous
species: a point that, if taken seriously (as Westfahl himself does not seem to
take it), would be hair-raisingly reductionist indeed. Finally, Lee Cronk also
addresses herself to The Left Hand of Darkness, skillfully using the text
to make a cross-cultural argument for the primacy of the family. Her failure to
anchor her case in biology is particularly curious because here a valid argument
from survival value does seem to be suggested by the "prematurity" of
the human infant and its consequent biological need for years of intensive care.
On a lower intellectual level are the
essays by critics less familiar with sf. The worst is Joseph Carroll’s almost
unbelievably stupid meditation on literary theory. Carroll’s grasp of ideas is
fairly indicated by the fact that he dismisses Marx and Freud with breezy
ignorance as "obsolete" (149) and then goes on to celebrate an
instance of criticism that does impress him: an empirical experiment claiming to
show (I am not making this up) that test-takers possessing different
psychological attributes tend to write different kinds of stories—thus
"scientifically" establishing a link between authors’ psyches and
their works. This is an astonishing finding, since, for example, though Proust
and Hemingway are well known to have been very different psychological types, Swann’s
Way (1913) and The Sun Also Rises (1926) are so similar as novels as
to be nearly indistinguishable (yes, I am being ironic).
No other contribution to Biopoetics
is as bad as Carroll’s, though several come close. For instance, Brett Cooke’s
close reading of Pushkin’s "The Snowstorm" (1830) conveniently
encapsulates many of the worst problems common to the "biopoeticians":
the essentialism of the adaptationist fallacy at its most naive; a confusion
between Darwinian and Lamarckian models of evolutionary change (a confusion that
enables the vulgar reduction of the cultural to the natural); the silent and
untheorized use of the Freudian concept of the Unconscious in a field that
usually (though not always) holds Freud in ignorant contempt; and others. There
are better pieces too. Nancy Easterlin contributes some interesting remarks on
literary modernism (and a welcome corrective to the reactionary neoclassicism of
her fellow contributor Frederick Turner), but never rigorously engages
biological questions. There are also two substantial efforts by Ellen
Dissanayake on the putative origins of art in general and music in particular;
rough, highly speculative, and not wholly free of the general conceptual
problems that plague her colleagues, these essays do nonetheless seem to make
real progress in understanding the relations between nature and culture, and
perhaps provide at least a glimpse of what a "biopoetics" of the
future might look like.
In sum, the search for the biology of
art and culture remains, in principle, a promising one. But it is unlikely to
progress far until those undertaking it liberate themselves from the influence
of sociobiologists like Wilson and adaptationist "fundamentalists"
(Gould’s term) like Daniel Dennett—and, indeed, until they also bother to
learn a great deal more about the actual achievements of cultural theory over
the past hundred years than they have managed to do so far. As to the present
volume, those with an unusually keen interest in the interfaces between nature
and culture should read Miller’s and Dissanayake’s essays and perhaps skim
the remainder of the book. Those waiting for a "biopoetics" really
worthy of the name must continue waiting.—Carl
Freedman, Louisiana State University
A
Noble But Dying Breed?
Richard A.
Hauptmann. The Work of Jack Williamson: An
Annotated Bibliography and Guide. NESFA (New England Science
Fiction Association) Press (fax: 617-776-3243), 1998. xvii + 185 pp. $17 cloth.
This handsome volume, one might argue,
represents a noble but dying breed: given the current economics of book
production, and the increasing availability and attractiveness of electronic
publishing, can the hardcover single-author bibliography continue to survive as
a viable product? Perhaps—if the author is sufficiently distinguished, and if
the volume is crafted so as to be not only useful to consult but also enjoyable
to read.
Happily, Richard A. Hauptmann’s The
Work of Jack Williamson: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide passes both
tests. No science fiction author has enjoyed a career as long and as productive
as Williamson’s, ranging from his first published story in 1928 to his recent
novel The Silicon Dagger (1999); and if he is rarely lauded as a literary
craftsman, he has always commanded respect for his vigorous storytelling,
consistently innovative ideas (in varied areas such as machine intelligence,
genetic engineering, and terraforming), and his contributions to the genre as a
scholar, teacher, and supportive friend. Hauptmann’s presentation of
Williamson’s singular career also provides an abundance of both data and
interesting reading material, including an introductory appreciation by Frederik
Pohl, an afterword by Williamson himself, and a fascinating year-by-year
chronology of the author’s life (with details about the ups and downs of his
income from writing). Each listed novel and story is accompanied by a brief
summary and/or quoted blurb from its original magazine publication, and
sometimes snippets of critical commentary are featured as well. Improbably,
then, the book holds one’s attention simply as a page-turner.
To summarize its contents: the two
longest sections, occupying more than half the volume’s length, offer
information and commentary on Williamson’s novels, including all editions and
translations, and on his short fiction. There are shorter sections on his
nonfiction and on his involvement in other media, and a final section of "Miscellanea"
features a number of lists, including his fiction in chronological order and his
degrees, honors, and awards. To anyone interested in Williamson or in the
development of twentieth-century science fiction, this book is essential
reading.
Like the typical reviewer, I do have a
few complaints, although none of very great import. In the listings of book
publications, Hauptmann occasionally gets bogged down in detailed discussions of
minutiae—how many copies of one edition were published, how many were left
unbound, how many covers were green and how many were gray—matters that are
surely important only to a handful of book collectors. The summaries of novels
and stories vary tremendously in their length and thoroughness, and some are
clearly inadequate, like the one-sentence summary of "The Prince of
Space" (1931) that fails to mention the story’s most striking feature,
the first appearance of a true space habitat in science fiction. While the
original magazine blurbs might logically be included in a bibliography to convey
the ambiance of first publication, they should never be used to replace true
summaries, as occurs far too often here; all that one learns about "The
Fortress of Utopia" (1939), for example, is "On a Lifeless Mystery
Satellite, Five Lone Mortals Summon Secret Forces of the Citadel of Science to
Free the Earth from the Doom of the Dark Nebula!" (89). Perhaps those words
were ideally suited to lure a twelve-year-old boy into buying that issue of Startling
Stories, but they tell modern scholars virtually nothing about what actually
occurs in the story. Inevitably, this massive compilation of data has a few
errors and omissions: Hauptmann lists Richard W. Gombert’s The Work of
Edmond Hamilton: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide, containing an
introduction by Williamson, as a published but unseen book from Borgo Press,
although the book actually never appeared, and he does not cite Williamson’s
brief essay "Space vs. Time," which appeared in the program of the
1997 SFRA/Eaton Conference. Finally, while Hauptmann’s impulse to mention all
of Williamson’s own comments about his works is admirable, some of the cited
observations are trivial at best and might profitably have been omitted; of what
possible value to the Williamson scholar, for example, is the gossipy remark
that "Pohl and J.W. separately report having heard the rumor that Betty
Ballantine posed for the nude woman who appears on this cover [of Starchild]"
(39)?
The major problem with this or any
Williamson bibliography, of course, is that this venerable author, now in his
nineties, continues to produce worthwhile new material; so, just as Hauptmann’s
book replaces Robert E. Myers’s outdated 1980 bibliography, a third
bibliography may someday be needed to record the author’s future
accomplishments—including two Williamson essays that will appear in an
anthology scheduled for publication in February 2000, advancing his career as an
active writer into the new millennium.—Gary
Westfahl, UC Riverside
Bold
Interdisciplinary Speculation.
Gregory
Benford. Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates
Across Millennia. Avon/Bard
(212-261-6800), 1999. 208 pp. $20 cloth.
After some twenty novels that have
established him as one of the most important science fiction authors of his
generation, Gregory Benford has now published his first nonfiction book. This
nonfictional turn is, however, by no means out of character: not only is Benford
a research physicist and the author of many popular essays on science, but his
sf is distinguished by an unusually strong sense of fact. Benford’s
speculations are audacious, but they are grounded in science—which Benford
(unlike most sf authors) tends to understand not only as a set of theories and
experiments but also as an institutionally-based human practice.
Deep Time (the
title refers to any span of time much longer than a human lifetime) is
similar in many ways to the author’s sf. Though the book has little to say
about science fiction as such, its own speculative riffs and cognitive
estrangements are often akin to those in Benford’s novels. Benford has
participated in several scientific projects involving large time scales—for
instance, designing a nuclear waste dump to last safely for ten thousand years,
and composing messages to be rocketed into outer space—and in this book he not
only tells the stories of these experiences but uses them as springboards for
more general interdisciplinary musings on communication across millennia.
Nobody, as he points out, lives for more than about a century. It is also true,
as the German novelist Theodor Fontane famously noted, that it is difficult to
have a personal (as opposed to scholarly) sense of any historical period earlier
than the youth of one’s own grandparents; and we might add that it is just as
hard to feel much spontaneous concern for any future beyond the old age of one’s
own grandchildren. Nonetheless, attempts to communicate across vast spans of
time have fascinated some sections of humanity at least since the days of the
Pharaohs. Of course, the problems are enormous, as the failure of so many
earlier attempts suggests: how little even Stonehenge, or the much-studied
Pyramids, convey to us compared to what they must once have been meant to
convey! Addressing "deep time" involves issues of mathematics,
physics, geology, meteorology, chemistry, biology, archaeology, history,
linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, literary and cultural studies, and
much else; and even the richest attainable combination of perspectives may be
inadequate to the case.
But the theme has often proved
irresistible to science fiction—Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930)
and Star Maker (1937) continue to set the standard in literary sf, as
Kubrick’s 2001 (1968) does in sf cinema—so it is not surprising that
a science fiction author should be the first (so far as I know) to engage the
matter in a full-length nonfiction book. As speculative visionaries go, Benford
is often remarkably practical. In one interesting aside, for instance, he points
out that simple earthen mounds have always enjoyed one big advantage when it
comes to durability: nobody bothers to steal dirt. He also pays a good deal of
attention to the economic costs of various ways that "deep time" might
be negotiated, to the institutional means that might be employed, and to the
political and bureaucratic obstacles that may have to be circumvented.
But this practicality by no means
precludes a sense of wonder. Benford is fascinating, for example, when he
discusses the efforts to design a nuclear waste dump that would be
striking-looking enough to convey its message of danger to our distant
descendants, yet not so aesthetically attractive as to become a tourist site. He
is equally interesting when he engages far more immense temporal vistas,
wondering whether even pure mathematics is a truly universal language that will
be legible to alien beings who evolve long after homo sapiens has gone
the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon. Then too, many of the book’s
most original pages are devoted to the conjuncture between "deep time"
and ecology. Benford points out that the largest time capsule we will bequeath
to futurity is the planet itself, and that the chief contribution of our own
historical period may well be the extinction of an enormous number of plant and
animal species. In view of Benford’s usual political profile as a conservative
of libertarian, pro-capitalist bent, readers may be surprised to find him
appearing here as also a passionate environmentalist, with ideas about
preserving nature that are significantly different from those commonly found on
either the right or the left.
Of course, all such discussions demand
a synthesis of various disciplinary approaches that no individual is truly
competent to make, and Benford frankly admits that his generalizations may
appear oversimplified to those with more specialized knowledge of the pertinent
fields. I myself, as a literary critic, noticed a number of dubious statements
on matters ranging from the history of English verbs to the status of
"postmodern" theories of textuality. But so what? Though monographic
accuracy is an indispensable ingredient in a healthy intellectual culture, it is
not the only worthwhile goal of intellectual labor. Bold
interdisciplinary speculation, with its inevitable slips of detail, can also be
valuable—especially if, as here, it estranges our spontaneous mundane concerns
and forces us to think anew about matters that, though far removed from our
daily routines, engage our humanity in hard-to-define but sometimes powerfully
felt ways. After reading Deep Time, one is less likely to look at a clock
or a calendar in quite the same way as before.—Carl
Freedman, Louisiana State University
Brief Notices
H. Rider Haggard.
She, ed. with
an Introduction and Notes by Daniel Karlin. Oxford UP (800-451-7556), 1998.
xxxviii + 332 pp. $8.95 paper. World’s Classics Series.
Clark Ashton Smith.
The Book of
Hyperborea, ed. Will Murray. Necronomicon (fax: 401-826-1151), 1996. 173 pp.
$9.95 paper
_____. Tales of Zothique, ed. Will
Murray with Steve Behrends. Necronomicon (fax: 401-826-1151), 1995. 224 pp.
$11.95 paper.
Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer.
When
Worlds Collide [includes When Worlds Collide and After Worlds
Collide]. U Nebraska P (fax: 402-472-6214), 1999. 192 pp. + 190 pp. $14.95
paper. Bison Books "Frontiers of Imagination" Series.
Here is a gathering of recent reprints
of vintage sf and fantasy titles. The classic late-Victorian lost world novel She
(1887) has just been reissued as an Oxford World’s Classic. Typeset from the
British first edition, it offers a somewhat different text from other versions
of the novel currently in print, which incorporate revisions Haggard made in
later editions—changes that smoothed out the jagged texture of the narrative,
a roughness editor Karlin prefers (xxxii). Karlin’s introduction is strong on
both the novel’s mixed-genre composition and its fraught sexual politics,
offering sharp insights along the way on the history of its critical reception;
his Explanatory Notes are helpful yet unobtrusive, making this an excellent
choice for classroom use. The cover features a striking still from the 1965
Hammer Films adaptation of the novel starring Ursula Andress, which manages to
capture some of the beckoning luridness of this magnificently weird tale.
And speaking of Weird Tales,
Clark Ashton Smith was one of that magazine’s signature authors during its
1930s heydey, and Necronomicon Press has recently released two collections of
his best stories, set in the imaginary worlds of Hyperborea and Zothique. Editor
Murray draws on Smith’s original manuscripts and incorporates changes the
author made to the published versions; these collections thus differ from those
assembled in the early 1970s by Lin Carter for his Ballantine Adult Fantasy line—entitled
Zothique (1970) and Hyperborea (1971)—which used the texts that
appeared in Weird Tales (and were subsequently culled for a series of
Arkham House volumes). They also offer more material than Carter provided; this
is especially true of Tales of Zothique, which features an excised story
preface, fragments from an unpublished manuscript, a verse drama entitled
"The Dead Will Cuckold You," and four ink drawings Smith produced at
the behest of Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright. Finally, Murray also
resists Carter’s dubious imposition of an internal chronology on Smith’s
story cycles, presenting the tales instead in the original sequence of their
composition, since this approach alone "best reveals the creative mind of
the artist at work" (Hyperborea 14). Despite his own sometimes
tone-deaf prose (e.g., "Smith’s poetic comet was soon dashed into the
hard concrete of commercial reality" [Hyperborea 7]), Murray
displays a real appreciation for Smith’s incantatory style, his
"mordantly decadent" vision (Zothique 11). The wasted
worldscape of Zothique—with its shadowy necromancy, its corrupt erudition, its
linguistic excess—paved the way for subsequent depictions of morbid far
futures, such as Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth (1950) and Gene Wolfe’s
Book of the New Sun (1980-83). (Recent evidence of Smith’s abiding
influence is the 1999 anthology The Lost Continent: New Tales of Zothique,
edited by John Pelan for ShadowLands Press, which contains nineteen homages and
pastiches by Wolfe, Brian Stableford, and others.) Some of the tales gathered in
these volumes—for example, "The Dark Eidolon" and "Ubbo-Sathla"—have
a thrillingly macabre energy that even Poe might have envied. Anyone studying or
teaching early twentieth-century fantasy should make use of these marvelous
books: Smith deserves a place in that tradition at least as high as Lovecraft’s.
Finally, Bison Books’ "Frontiers
of Imagination" series, published by Nebraska, has reissued Wylie and
Balmer’s classic novels of planetary catastrophe, When Worlds Collide
(1933) and After Worlds Collide (1934)— though the omnibus status of
the volume is not immediately apparent from the front cover or title page and is
acknowledged only in a line on the back cover. As per usual with this series
(see my review of several earlier releases in SFS 26.2 [July 1999]:
338-39), a few corners have been cut in terms of the presentation of the texts,
which have been so cheaply typeset from earlier editions that the paging is not
consecutive throughout. But the book does include attractive cover art and an
appreciative introduction by sf author John Varley. The other new entries in the
series announced in my earlier review—Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora: A
World of Women (1880-81), which depicts a bizarre hollow-earth all-female
utopia that may have influenced Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland
(1914), and J.D. Beresford’s The Wonder (1911; a.k.a. The
Hampdenshire Wonder), a brilliant superman story that certainly influenced
Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John (1935)—have also appeared. Given Bison
Books’ evident budgetary constraints, which would seem to limit them to
out-of-copyright materials, one wonders how much farther into the twentieth
century their series will venture, but anyone who studies or teaches proto-sf
can be thankful for their services to date.—RL
Alan Morton. The Complete Directory
to Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Television Series: A Comprehensive Guide
to the First 50 Years, 1946 to 1996. Peoria, IL: Other Worlds, 1997. viii +
982 pp. $29.95 paper.
Roger Fulton and John Betancourt.
The
Sci-Fi Channel Encyclopedia of TV Science Fiction. Warner Aspect
(212-522-7200), 1998. 668 pp. $15 paper.
Morton’s self-published guide is
about as no-frills as reference works get, but it is a truly comprehensive and
useful compendium of information. Organized alphabetically by series title and,
within each entry, by season and episode, it covers, by my quick count, 389
different television programs. The series treated are mostly American (and are
certainly limited to the English language), and include only live-action
programs that have consistently featured fantastic themes and elements—though
Morton has been "as lenient as possible with [his] definitions" of
genre when confronted with marginal cases, such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents
(vi). Wherever possible, the original episodes have been consulted to glean the
information that Morton distills down to his bare-bones summaries, which are
usually no more than an elliptical sentence or two (though for major series he
provides some introductory paragraphs). The utility of this book is its
admirable thoroughness and its provision of the dates of original broadcast for
every episode of every series included. Though it lacks an index—Morton says
he generated one but decided that adding its 400 pages to this already weighty
tome would have sent the price skyrocketing (vii)—it is fairly easy to use if
you know what you’re looking for. Even if you don’t, it is possible to find
relevant data quickly through diligent browsing. For example, I had long been
haunted by a creepy episode of an obscure horror anthology series that I saw as
a child, in which a woman doing research on a series of murders in a smalltown
library finds herself alone in the stacks with the killer, and within ten
minutes of opening the book I was able to determine that this must have been the
third telecast episode of a 1968-69 British-American co-production called Journey
to the Unknown. Anyone who has grown up on fantastic television will find
this seemingly gray and stolid tome filled with similar moments of sharp,
nostalgic recollection.
It deserves to sell more copies than
Fulton and Betancourt’s Sci-Fi Channel Encyclopedia, which is a rather
shoddy enterprise by comparison. In the first place, it makes no attempt at
comprehensiveness, listing 150 fewer titles than Morton. While all the major
series are here, the information presented regarding them is spotty: episode
guides for programs are included "where relevant, or possible" (n.pag.)
and dates of broadcast for individual episodes are not provided (only overall
seasons are dated). In their entry on the 1960s Gothic soap opera Dark
Shadows, the editors claim to omit an episode guide because it "would
be the size of this whole book" (126), but Morton manages to fit this data
onto 41 closely packed pages. If Fulton and Betancourt had offered more
extensive critical commentaries in place of the dull details they sometimes can’t
be troubled with, then their sketchiness in coverage might not be so irritating,
but they do not; their episode guides (when they do choose to provide them) are
as scanty as Morton’s, and their introductory summations generally shallower.
But their book bears the imprimatur of the Sci-Fi Channel, is published by a
major press, and is thus likely to reach more users, which is a shame. If you
are a fan or scholar of television sf and fantasy looking for a useful gathering
of information, and if you can find Morton’s book (which is available from
online booksellers), it is worth the higher price.—RL
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