#92 = Volume 31, Part 1 = March 2004
BOOKS IN REVIEW
Empowering Girls Who Read SF.
Joanne Brown and Nancy St. Clair.
Declarations of Independence: Empowered Girls in
Young Adult Literature, 1990-2001. Scarecrow Studies in Young
Adult Literature 7. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2002. xiii + 207 pp. $32.50 hc.
The latest in Scarecrow Press’s series on young adult literature features a
chapter on girls in fantastic YA fiction, and it works very nicely as a summary
of recent and important novels of the fantastic starring empowered young women.
The book as a whole would be ideal for reference librarians at public libraries
and other people interested in locating good reading material for young women.
It could also serve as an accessible set of small essays for undergraduate
students who are trying to think critically about the fantastic for the first
time, so it could also be a good addition to a university library where these
novels are taught. The binding is very solid, and I have a feeling that
Scarecrow is pitching this book mainly to the library market.
The chapter gives a close reading of four recent novels as well as an
annotated bibliography for further reading. Without referencing high theory or
dense cultural criticism, the authors summarize the merits of the novels
according to their very clear criteria: would these novels empower female
readers, and do they portray young women who are themselves empowered? Brown and
St. Clair largely skip any novels that don’t meet those criteria, so rather than
producing a book that repeatedly points out the darkness, they make an important
contribution by lighting some candles.
The chapter doesn’t address many fantasy novels, but the range is helpful:
Beauty: A Retelling of Beauty and the Beast (1986) and Deerskin
(1994) by Robin McKinley, Blood and Chocolate (1997) by Annette Curtis
Klause, and Parable of the Sower (1994) by Octavia E. Butler. The
annotated bibliography lists another twenty-one recommended titles.
The chapter is not without its problems (there are some shaky offhand
assertions made about the fantastic, and Butler’s novel isn’t reviewed in either
Publisher’s Weekly or Voya as YA), but they are ancillary to the
book’s purpose. This isn’t cutting-edge scholarship on the fantastic; it’s a
guide for people who want to make sure that the fiction girls read helps them
become strong, capable women, and in the end that’s also valuable.
—Joe Sutliff Sanders, University of Kentucky
Books, Books, Books.
Michael Burgess and Lisa R. Bartle.
Reference Guide to Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror.
2nd ed. Reference Sources in the Humanities. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited,
2002. xv + 562 pp. $75.00 hc.
Sometimes you come across a really useful book. This is one of those times.
Regardless of whether you are a librarian in a small public library or in a
research university, no matter whether you have been a scholar since the dawn of
science fiction criticism or just taking your first steps on the road of fantasy
research, you will find something of use in the Reference Guide to Science
Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. It provides guidance among the various kinds
of reference volumes that are available to scholars of the fantastic. Its only
drawback is the tacky cover that detracts attention from the solid scholarly
work this volume performs.
This guide is part of the Reference Sources in the Humanities series, the
purpose of which is “the identification, description, and organization of the
reference literature of the humanities disciplines” (xi). The first part of the
book consists of a preface by James Rettig, series editor, and a brief
introduction, half of which explains the basis for the annotations in the rest
of the guide. The other half contains the authors’ acknowledgments. A 100-word
explanation on how to use the book and a list of seven abbreviations conclude
this part. The main part of the guide is divided into thirty chapters of
annotations, followed by lists of what the authors consider to be “Core
Collections,” and finally three indices.
The main part of the book annotates a wide range of reference works. The
authors’ intention is to include “all major (and most minor) SF reference
volumes” (xiii) and they certainly give the impression of having reached that
goal. The items range from those still in print to others virtually
unobtainable, and they include author bibliographies on well-known writers, such
as Ursula K. Le Guin, and more obscure ones, such as William F. Temple.
“Fannish” and scholarly material is reviewed with equal attention, and they
manage to cover an expansive range of reference works.
Exactly what lies behind the order of the chapters in the main part is not
clear. The contents are: “Encyclopedias and Dictionaries,” “Atlases and
Gazetteers,” “Cataloging Guides,” “Yearbooks, Annuals, and Almanacs,” “Annual
Directories,” “Statistical Sources,” “Awards Lists,” “Pseudonym Lists,”
“Biographical and Literary Directories,” “Readers’ and Critical Guides,” “Guides
to Secondary Sources,” “Library Catalogs and Collection Guides,” “Magazine and
Anthology Indexes,” “General Bibliographies,” “National Bibliographies,”
“Subject Bibliographies,” “Publisher Bibliographies,” “Author Bibliographies,”
“Artist Bibliographies,” “Character Dictionaries and Author Cyclopedias,” “Film
and Television Catalogs,” “Printed Guides to the Internet,” “Calendars and
Chronologies,” “Quotation Dictionaries,” “Collectors’ and Price Guides,”
“Professional Writers’ Guides,” “Fan Guides,” “Major On-Line Resources,” “Core
Periodicals,” and “Professional Organizations.” Some of these chapters are very
short, containing only one or two entries, and almost half the book consists of
the various bibliographies or “Core Collections.”
Each chapter is introduced by a scope note that clearly explains what the
authors consider should be included in this particular chapter (i.e., “general
dictionaries or directories of one or more authors’ works” [412]). For material
that might belong in more than one chapter, references are made to the
appropriate chapter (i.e., “[b]ooks whose primary intent is to provide a guide
to the created place names in the author’s fictional world are included in the
‘Atlases and Gazetteers’ section” [412]). This feature greatly contributes to
the notable clarity of the guide.
A typical entry includes: author, title (in boldface), place of publication,
publisher, year of publication, pagination, part of series (if applicable),
Library of Congress Control Number, and ISBN number. The work is then described
in detail, including table of contents and general format, with a comment on its
usability. Whenever necessary, there are extensive and interesting comparisons
to similar works, including comments on which volume to prefer, and the entries
are wrapped up with a recommendation or grade (possibly including suggestions
for improvement), such as “now superseded by,” “recommended for all research
collections,” “one fang on the vampire scale,” “a second, updated edition would
definitely be warranted.” In the few cases (about 10) where the authors have not
had access to the reference work in question, this is clearly indicated.
The 704 entries are numbered consecutively from 1 to 705 (entry #77 is
missing), and there are copious “See” references. The descriptions are
straightforward and knowledgeable, and the occasional “pithy comments” that have
been thrown in do indeed “enliven the tour” (xiv). Positive and negative aspects
are covered and, on the whole, the comments give an impression of fairness and
impartiality. Unfortunately, the subjectivity of the individual reviewers shines
through sometimes, for instance in the case of Harold Bloom’s volumes (#71-#76).
In the comments on the first five volumes, it is mentioned that “[o]f interest
is Bloom’s commentary, ‘The Life of the Author,’ which appears in all the books
of the series” (69, 70, 71), whereas for the last volume (Science Fiction
Writers of the Golden Age), that commentary is criticized in no uncertain
terms (72). The discrepancy suggests enough variance in editorial opinion to
undermine my confidence in the fairness of the comments, however slightly.
In each chapter or section, the volumes are listed alphabetically by author
and then alphabetically by title. Personally, I would have preferred the works
of each author to be listed chronologically instead, to avoid the slight hustle
of finding out which publication is actually the most recent, but it is a moot
point. The reader does well to look at all entries for a chapter or a relevant
section, however, because of the haphazard way in which the authors include
comparisons and descriptions. The “See” references take care of some of this
problem, but there is no telling what determines in which entry an author,
critic, or subject is introduced. Samuel R. Delany is briefly but differently
introduced in the entries on the two bibliographies about him (#365-366). There
is a description of the publishing company itself only in the second of three
bibliographies on DAW Books (#287). In one of the two entries for bibliographies
on Stephen King, the bibliographer is presented, in the other the author. Some
sort of pattern would be useful.
Another problem is pointed out by the authors themselves in “Printed Guides
to the Internet.” In the sole entry there (#662), they observe that “any
directory that tries to pin down the Internet is going to have a short shelf
life” (515), and, unfortunately, that is true about this guide as well. Of the
21 entries in the chapter “Major On-Line Resources,” I could not gain access to
seven of them. For five of these, the URL differs from that given in the guide,
and the other two seem to have been removed from the web. Another site, lauded
by the authors, bombarded the user with pop-up windows and is impossible to use
unless one disables java script for one’s browser or uses a pop-up blocker. When
will writers and publishers realize that if they want to refer to URLs in print,
they should give only the URL to their own pages, and then keep updated links
there?
The Core Collection lists are a valuable bonus. Nearly all individual
annotations for the reference works include recommendations regarding for whom a
particular work is suitable, which is useful if you only want to know whether or
not to invest in an item. If you are interested in knowing more generally what
items to look for, however, the lists come in handy. There are separate lists
for academic and public libraries of various sizes, as well as for private
research libraries. The only possible problem I can see is an assumption that
researches in sf, fantasy, and horror fiction all require the same references.
On the other hand, the effort of going through the list and weeding out
unnecessary items is small compared to having to go through the entire book.
The guide’s entries are indexed separately by author, title, and subject. On
the whole, that is not a problem and provides easy access to all the material in
the guide, but in some cases, the indices are slightly misleading. Looking up,
for instance, the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts in the
author index gives a reference to entry #39 in the chapter “Annual Directories.”
In the subject index, there is a reference to another entry (#705) in the
chapter “Professional Organizations.” These entries are not cross-referenced,
nor is there any reference in either of them to IAFA’s publication Journal of
the Fantastic in the Arts, which is listed in entry #702 (in the chapter
“Core Periodicals”), erroneously called Journal of the International
Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.
These minor caveats aside, this is an excellent reference guide: comprehensive,
easy to use, and clearly written by people with in-depth knowledge of their
subject. It is something any researcher of the fantastic will find useful, and
it belongs in all libraries that intend to have a reference section on sf,
fantasy, or horror literature.
—Stefan Ekman, Lund University
Of Apes and Various Types of
Human.
Charles De Paolo.
Human Prehistory in Fiction.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003. xii + 160 pp. $36 pbk.
Charles De Paolo notes my help in the Acknowledgments of Human Prehistory
in Fiction; but my assistance was limited to the editing of an article for
Foundation, the origin for the penultimate chapter of the book, on
Wells’s ideas of the future evolution of humanity as found in The Time
Machine (1895). Had I advised on this book, I might have suggested dropping
that chapter (and probably the chapter on The Island of Doctor Moreau
[1896], too), or, alternatively, changing the title of the book to make it
reflect the content rather better. It is not, in fact, a study of prehistoric
fiction. Only in the chapter on Wells’s ideas on the origins of human religion
(in “The Lord of the Dynamos”) does De Paolo touch on later prehistory (although
most of the discussion is about perceptions of “primitive” societies rather than
prehistory as such). There is otherwise no mention of the Neolithic, and none of
the numerous works of fiction set in the Bronze Age or Iron Age are present. The
book is not really about prehistory as such; it is about paleoanthropology or,
even more specifically, about human evolution, and that should have figured in
the title.
Paleoanthropology, more of a biological science than any other aspect of
prehistoric studies, is therefore more susceptible than, say, the Iron Age, to
treatment by sf writers. Wells is here (chapters 1, 5, 9, and 12), as well as
Pierre Boulle (chapter 2), Jules Verne (chapter 3), Edgar Rice Burroughs
(chapter 4), Lester del Rey (chapter 6), Arthur C. Clarke (chapter 8), and J.-H.
Rosny aîné (chapter 11); the other writers studied are William Golding and Jean
Auel (chapters 7 and 10). In each chapter De Paolo assesses the relationship
between the work discussed and contemporary scientific opinion. As can be seen
from this listing of the chapters, he does not do this in chronological order of
work discussed, and it took me a while to realize that the chronological order
of setting within prehistory is what dictates the structure of the book. He
discusses The Island of Doctor Moreau first, because it is (partly) about
the nature of species change, and then moves on to Planet of the Apes
(1963), in order to discuss the point at which humans branched off from the main
primate line; Chapters 5, 6, and 7 all deal with the nature of Neanderthal “man”
and his relationship with “modern” humans (although so does chapter 10). As each
chapter places the work in its scientific context, this involves a good deal of
zigzagging backwards and forwards among different decades (and indeed
centuries), which is at times confusing. Having said that, the alternative
procedure (discussing the works themselves in chronological order) would not
have isolated the individual points of debate within palaeoanthropology so
clearly.
If there are problems with structure, Human Prehistory in Fiction
nevertheless offers a fascinating case-study of the relationship between
individual works of fiction and their scientific context. Some texts argue
against that context, while some accept it fairly uncritically; and others seem
to be writing to engage in debate with other writers, as when Golding wrote
The Inheritors (1955) in opposition to the ideas of Wells. All of the
authors consciously engage in some sense with scientific opinion, even if it is
sometimes opinion that may have become received knowledge by the public, though
it is already outdated as far as the scientists are concerned. Only Edgar Rice
Burroughs stands out on a limb: if he is engaging with scientific opinion, it is
to condemn it. De Paolo shows how The Land that Time Forgot (1924) is
totally at variance with any known scientific theories, and suggests how
deliberate this was, revealing Burroughs’s deep worries about the whole secular
concept of evolution. It is perhaps salutary to note that, in this discussion of
a number of figures who rate as “fathers of science fiction,” it is the only
female author in the book, Jean Auel, who alone is commended for the way in
which she conscientiously reflects the best contemporary scientific opinion in
The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980).
I learnt a good deal from this book, so I regret having to end on a negative
note. There are only three works studied in this book that did not originally
appear in English. J.-H. Rosny aîné’s (to be pedantic, that’s not normally cited
as J.-H. Rosny-Aîné, as De Paolo has it) La Guerre du feu (1909),
translated in 1911 as The Quest for Fire (not Quest for Fire, as
De Paolo has it); Verne’s Le Village aérien (1901) (although this
original title is not mentioned by De Paolo), translated as The Village in
the Treetops by I.O. Evans in 1964 (not 1901 as De Paolo’s bibliography
appears to state), and Pierre Boulle’s La Planète des singes (1963),
translated in 1963 as Planet of the Apes (not The Planet of the Apes).
De Paolo appears to use the English translations throughout, despite the fact
that the Talbott translation of Rosny is abridged, and that Evans frequently
abridged and changed the sense of Verne. The reader is left uncertain what any
of these authors actually originally wrote; and when this reader came across
“Rosny, in 1911 [my italics], anticipated.…” he winced. Talbott is not
(necessarily) Rosny. De Paolo might have been better advised to drop discussion
of works he could only apparently know at second hand. And his seeming
unfamiliarity with French means that he ignored a splendid opportunity for his
book. François Bordes appears in it (116-17) as an expert on the palaeolithic.
De Paolo appears not to know that Bordes was also (using the name of Francis
Carsac) a prolific and popular writer of science fiction—to my knowledge the
only professional prehistorian of whom that can be said.
—Edward James, University of Reading, UK
Close Encounters, Near
Miss.
Mark Featherstone.
Knowledge and the Production of Nonknowledge: An
Exploration of Alien Mythology in Post-War America. Creskill, NJ:
Hampton, 2002. ix + 205 pp. $45 hc;$18.95 pbk.
Struggling to stay awake through the first episode of the Spielberg-produced
mini-series Taken (2002)—an experience not so much like watching paint
dry as watching dry paint—I found myself becoming irritated and then troubled.
What got to me was not the tedious predictability of the goings-on, nor that
someone (or something) had abducted Tobe Hooper, the director of The Texas
Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and replaced him with a namesake untroubled by
talent, but the historical inaccuracy of it all. One has grown used to
Spielberg’s peculiar abuses of history—Jews escaping the Holocaust, slaves
returning to Africa, the well-being of individual soldiers being an object of
the military’s concern—and a series about aliens among us does require at least
one very big historical inaccuracy. What irritated me was the anachronistic
appearance of the grays in the 1940s and 1950s—a version of flying saucer aliens
that did not really enter UFO lore and popular consciousness until the
mid-1970s, courtesy of NBC’s The UFO Incident (1975) and Close
Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)—rather than Etherians or Aryan space
Nazis from Venus or some other variety actually described in that period. What
troubled me was that I knew and cared.
In an important sense, however, the error was not Taken’s but mine.
Mark Featherstone’s explication of the myth of human-alien encounters in the US
details eight submyths, subject to constant cycles of revision. The “conspiracy”
submyth began in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and is associated with Donald
Keyhoe’s Flying Saucers are Real (1950) and Flying Saucers from Outer
Space (1953), the latter of which created the image of a shadowy US
government in cahoots with extraterrestrials (other variants suggested the
saucers were top secret US military craft, or Soviet or Nazi craft). The
“contactee” submyth originated with George Adamski in the early- and mid-1950s,
with books like Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953) and Inside the Space
Ships (1955), recounting his meetings with messianic Venusians. The “men in
black” submyth, charting the interventions of black-suited figures who sabotage
or threaten UFO research, began with Gray Barker’s They Knew Too Much About
Flying Saucers (1956), in which “they” worked for a secret government
agency; Albert Bender’s Flying Saucers and the Three Men (1963)
identified the men in black as aliens. The “early abduction” submyth is
exemplified by the 1961 Betty and Barney Hill case, filmed as The UFO
Incident: an interrupted journey, missing time, bad dreams, and memories of
abduction and “medical” experimentation recovered under hypnosis. These early
abductions gave rise to the “cattle mutilation” myth, starting in 1967 (and with
a horse called Snippy rather than a cow), in which apparently mutilated
livestock are presumed to have been the subject of alien experimentation. The
“late abduction” submyth began 14 years after the Hill case, but in the month
following the broadcast of The UFO Incident (1976), with the five-day
disappearance of Travis Walton, later filmed as Fire in the Sky (1993).
Next came the rediscovery of the Roswell story in Charles Berlitz and William L
Moore’s The Roswell Incident (1980), which launched the “crashed saucer”
submyth. (For a useful analysis of the various versions of the Roswell story,
and an account of the New York University Constant Level Balloon Group’s
experiments with meteorological balloon clusters carrying corner-reflecting
radar targets, such as the one which crashed at Roswell, see Benson Saler,
Charles A. Ziegler, and Charles B. Moore, UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis
of a Modern Myth [Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1997].) The
“underground base/Majestic-12” submyth, which Featherstone sees as reworking
Richard Shaver’s “Dero mystery” (recounted in Amazing Stories in 1943),
contends that the grays live in underground bases, constructed with government
collusion, beneath the New Mexico desert. In exchange for new technologies, the
government permits the aliens to conduct mutilations and abductions without
interference. First proposed in the early 1980s, the “underground base myth”
coincided with the supposed identification of Majestic-12 as the secret
government agency collaborating with the aliens. As can be seen from this final
submyth—and, indeed, Taken—UFO lore constantly reworks earlier
myth-material (here, the Shaver precursor and the “conspiracy,” “men in black,”
“mutilation,” “abduction,” and “crashed saucer” submyths) and forgets
inconvenient elements (the “contactee” submyth); a more detailed analysis of
this process than Featherstone offers can be found, with regard solely to the
six major versions of Roswell, in UFO Crash at Roswell.
This broad-brush typology of the alien myth occupies the first of the two
parts of Knowledge and the Production of Nonknowledge, and provides a
useful framework for any analysis of what must be the only sf megatext to
compete with Star Trek and Star Wars in terms of penetrating and
colonizing popular consciousness and attracting devotees. The larger second half
of the book is rather less successful in its attempts to contextualize the
cycles of the alien myth within postwar US history. Featherstone argues, for
example, “that the aliens described in the conspiracy ... and contactee ...
submyths reflected America’s changing opinion of the atomic bomb” (5). The
chapter in question is divided into “The Impact of the War on American Culture,”
“The Cultural and Sociopolitical Dimensions of the Cold War,” and “The
Sociocultural Implications of the Atomic Bomb,” with further subdivisions called
“Gender During the War,” “Race During the War,” and “The Impact of the Cold War
on Domestic Policy.” The problem with this is not that so much of the
information it details is drawn from a standard undergraduate textbook (William
Chafe’s The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II [1986]), but
that so little is done to make any connections between this social, cultural,
and political history and the UFO lore of the period. Subsequent chapters are
little better, and this is exacerbated by the absence of a clearly articulated
theoretical framework or methodology. Elements of Barthes, Baudrillard, Bauman,
Bell, Boorstin, Boyer, De Landa, Deleuze, Derrida, and Girard rub shoulders with
Heidegger, Jameson, Jung, Lévi-Strauss, Lyotard, Marx, Propp, Virilio, and Žižek,
but this grab bag of references cannot really be said to constitute a coherent,
theoretically-informed argument. Featherstone’s clumsy prose does not help, his
precise meaning frequently a rewrite or two away from being clear (or precise).
Moreover, he never reflects upon his use of the term “myth,” he is endearingly
naïve on the possibility of separating form and content, and he early on
espouses the “pure methodological principle” (3) and political neutrality of
Vladimir Propp’s morphology.
All of this is a great shame. Roger Luckhurst opened his review of Jodi
Dean’s Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace
(1998) by noting the sparsity of “intelligent commentary” on UFOlogy and alien
abductions (SFS 25.3 [1998]: 534); and even UFO Crash at Roswell tails
off sharply. A volume on the subject that was also concerned with “how different
levels of knowledge are related to the vicissitudes of the economic sphere”—and
the ways in which “the political sphere represents the dominant center’s ...
attempt to impose order on the changeable economic system and secure hegemonic
centrality in relation to peripheral groups,” with the alien myth constituting
“a debased form of political articulation that describes the periphery’s attempt
to articulate the nature of the antagonistic postindustrial system” (8)—should
have been a welcome addition to the scant literature, even if one is wary of the
rather outmoded center-periphery metaphor. Featherstone’s primary assertion—that
“alien myths and their morphological movement represent the motion of capital
de-scribed [sic?] at the level of popular mythology,” connecting “anxious
Americans to the postindustrial machine” and humanizing “its technological
violence through the transcendental beliefs they maintain” (14)—could have
provided an important focus for future work on UFO lore, if he had succeeded in
constructing an argument to support it. But as with Dean, Featherstone has been
poorly served by his editors. The doubts raised by the lack of clarity,
coherence, and, in the second part, purpose make the earlier, more useful part
of Knowledge and the Production of Nonknowledge seem less authoritative
than its invaluable spadework warrants.
—Mark Bould, University of the West of England,
Bristol
Classic Anthology Back in Print.
James Gunn, ed. The Road to Science Fiction, Vol. 1: From Gilgamesh to
Wells. 1977. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2002. 368 pp. $29.95
pbk.
─────, ed. The Road to
Science Fiction, Vol. 2: From Wells to Heinlein. 1979.
Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2002. 536 pp. $32.50 pbk.
─────, ed. The Road to Science Fiction, Vol. 3: From
Heinlein to Here. 1979. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2002. 600 pp.
$32.50 pbk.
─────, ed. The Road to Science Fiction, Vol. 4: From
Here to Forever. 1982. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002. 560 pp.
$39.50 pbk.
In the early 1990s, when I took James Gunn’s science fiction class at the
University of Kansas as part of the Institute for the Study of Science Fiction,
The Road to Science Fiction, the anthology Gunn compiled to teach the
course, was out of print. He obtained permission from the publisher to photocopy
all four books, and so I have stapled-together bundles that comprise these
volumes, four pages of text to a single photocopied page, all in incredibly tiny
type. I still have them, even though they’re a little battered—I find that I
need to refer to my marginal notes sometimes. It was only when I began to teach
sf myself that I realized how common this scenario was. Consider the state of sf
anthologies: they only stay in print for a heartbeat; they are organized
according to some theme I don’t care about; they are a “year’s best” so recent
as to provide no historical depth; or they are some weird combination of old and
brand new.
Thus, Scarecrow Press’s resurrection of this series is timely and welcome.
They have reprinted the four-volume set originally published in the 1970s and
again in the 1980s by New American Library and White Wolf Publishing. (White
Wolf reprinted the volumes in the 1990s, although my copies from that era don’t
list the date of reprint.) This series is geared to teachers and students of sf
and is organized, as the titles imply, according to a chronological principle
that aims to sketch, in admittedly broad strokes, the emergence of sf as a
genre. Volume 1, From Gilgamesh to Wells, which covers the years 2000 b.c.
to a.d. 1900, sets the stage for the books that follow and introduces precursor
texts to sf. Gunn’s introduction is particularly useful because he outlines his
theory of sf (that it is a literature of change), which he revisits in later
volumes. He argues that the primary texts in volume 1 contain “some of the same
kind of qualities that later science fiction would possess” (xviii), but they
are, he admits, not sf. The stories in volume 2, From Wells to Heinlein,
which covers 1900 to 1940, clearly are: this volume contains classic and
provocative stories by H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapleton, Stanley G. Weinbaum, and
Isaac Asimov, among others. The introduction describes the pulps and market
forces that permitted the creation of sf as a genre.
Volume 3, From Heinlein to Here, covers 1940 to 1975, and includes
stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Joe Haldeman, among others.
The introduction discusses the Golden Age of sf, World War II, and the New Wave.
In this volume, voracious readers will find that the texts, or at least the
authors’ names, become more familiar—old favorites, perhaps. In his introduction
to the fourth volume, Gunn notes that the primary criterion for a story’s
inclusion in the first three volumes was “genre importance” (xvi). Volume 4,
From Here to Forever (1950 to 1992, with each decade represented by a few
stories, although the 1990s are represented only by a single Jorge Luis Borges
story), focuses on the literary aspects of sf. It ranges more widely in time,
and were a single one of these volumes to be adopted as a textbook for a general
sf course, this one would be it.
In addition to lengthy introductions to each volume, Gunn provides cogent
headnotes for each primary text. The headnotes contextualize the work, telling
an anecdote about the story’s original publication, perhaps, or providing more
information about the author’s or the story’s importance in the genre. I would
have liked to see Gunn add a section to the end of each volume’s introduction,
rather than simply reprinting them as they originally appeared; I’d like to see
what he has to say about these same topics after twenty years’ reflection.
Although the skewing of the first three volumes toward male writers is likely
inevitable, volume 4, which includes work by James Tiptree Jr., Vonda N.
McIntyre, and Joan D. Vinge, among others, nonetheless can’t make up for the
lack of women writers in the other three volumes. Volume 3 includes work by only
four women, all must-read authors: Judith Merril, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Joanna
Russ each have a story, as does “Lewis Padgett” (coauthors Henry Kuttner and C.L.
Moore). And the books are breathtakingly expensive for trade paperbacks, which
may limit the adoption of any of them as textbooks.
This series of anthologies provides one of the most comprehensive views of the
field and should be required reading for all students of sf. It has withstood
the test of time, with classic stories that I turn to again and again. Gunn’s
headnotes and introductions remain provocative, even years later. The Road to
Science Fiction can be read as an historical document, one that says as much
about Gunn, his mind, and his take on sf as it does about the state of sf from
its roots to its full maturity as a genre.
—Karen Hellekson, Jay, ME
Frankenstein: Symptom and
Diagnosis.
Susan E. Lederer.
Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2002. ix + 78 pp. $60 hc; $30 pbk.
Donald F. Glut. The
Frankenstein Archive: Essays on the Monster, the Myth, the Movies, and More.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002. vii + 225 pp. $28.50 pbk.
Mary Shelley, in creating Frankenstein, created a monster—her image of the
creature entered our consciousnesses in 1818 and has refused to leave, haunting
us in every age, whether we identify with the creature or with those who fear
him, but in every case morphing to fit contemporary anxieties. These two books
illustrate the grip of her monstrous vision, one attempting some medical
diagnosis, the other exhibiting symptoms. Neither addresses the book itself,
except tangentially, so both are only tangentially relevant to literary
scholarship. Lederer’s study, however, contributes some valuable observations
about the science surrounding the book and its progeny. In contrast, Glut’s book
is of interest more as an example of the grip of Shelley’s vision on one fan.
Lederer’s book is the catalogue for an exhibit of the same name that opened
in October 1997 at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. In
its purpose lie its strengths: it is lavishly illustrated and it explores
scientific and medical implications of the images spawned by the novel and its
many offspring. The exhibit and its catalogue are divided into three parts. The
first part, “The Birth of Frankenstein,” emphasizes the images and scientific
and medical contexts surrounding the novel itself. The second part, “The
Celluloid Monster,” “focuses on the redefinition of the Frankenstein myth in
popular culture,” and the third “examines the continuing power of the
Frankenstein story to articulate concerns raised by new developments in
bio-medicine” (1). Because of its medical angle, the catalogue offers
information not found in the usual literary discussions, such as Shelley’s own
medical history of miscarriages, including the fascinating details of her fifth
miscarriage, when Percy “saved her by placing her in an ice bath in order to
stop the bleeding” (10). The first section also discusses galvanizing,
resuscitation, spontaneous generation, blood transfusion, and attitudes toward
dissection. As the catalogue moves from the book to its place in popular
culture, the discussion turns to eugenics, biological determinism, and attitudes
toward science. The last section discusses cloning, xenografting, and
bio-ethics. Throughout are illustrations of the novel, other artistic
representations of the monstrous, political cartoons, scientific and medical
illustrations, and, of course, movie stills. Although neither analytic nor
literary, Lederer’s volume is nevertheless fascinating and useful for
contextualizing Shelley’s text.
Glut’s book is not analytic either, and it has little to offer to our
understanding of the novel, its context, or even the films upon which this book
focuses. Instead, it offers us a demonstration of the power of Shelley’s images
on a film fan. The book comprises a collection of essays “assembled and stitched
together from ... individual ‘pieces’ (in the literary sense of that word)” (1),
many of which first appeared in magazines such as Famous Monsters of Filmland
and Monsters of the Movies. As Glut himself says, “This volume is simply
my musings on variations of the Frankenstein theme” (3). Some of these musings
describe his own amateur films of Frankenstein, others his encounters
with actors involved in the many films using the creature, and others, as the
back cover blurb says, “the author’s longtime personal involvement with all
things Frankenstein.” The essays reveal the minutiae beloved of fans but, alas,
of little interest to the rest of us. Utterly representative of this sensibility
is the collection’s first essay, “Frankenstein: the (Untold) True Story,” which
facetiously yet meticulously attempts to reconcile all the discrepancies in
plot, character, and setting among the many, many Frankenstein movies as if they
were all part of some coherent documentary mega-story. The result is an
ingenious if ultimately tedious exercise, of real interest only to “Frankenstein
buffs” (6), but, of course, that is the constituency for whom this book was
written.—JG
Liberation Into Fantasy.
Deborah O’Keefe. Readers in Wonderland: The Liberating Worlds of Fantasy
Fiction from Dorothy to Harry Potter.New York: Continuum, 2003. 222 pp. $29.95 hc.
At first glance Deborah O’Keefe’s professed goal, “to introduce specific
admirable works—with glimpses of plot, character, texture, and theme—and to
discuss ideas about individual books, types of books, and the whole field of
fantasy literature” (9), may seem wildly ambitious. Yet, almost from the first
page, O’Keefe establishes that she is more than capable of doing just this and
doing it in a manner that makes clear both her wide reading of fantasy
literature for all ages and her ability to frame that literature in a variety of
psychological and cultural contexts that bring new insights to these texts.
Fantasy fans, long burdened by the charge that their taste in this literature
is escapist, will be heartened by O’Keefe’s contention that fantasy is “not so
much an escape from something as a liberation into something, into openness and
possibility and coherence” (11). In supporting this thesis, O’Keefe takes on
such well-known figures as Bruno Bettelheim and his problematic yet iconic text,
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
(1975). She rejects his notion that the primary function of fantasy is to help
young readers psychologically by relieving “unconscious pressures” (18). Rather,
she contends that, in a world that is increasingly complicated, even grim,
fantasy shows children of all ages “[h]ow to deal with the weird and complicated
world outside” the self (18). She stresses that fantasy at its best goes beyond
merely helping children and young adults understand the world; it also suggests
ways to make that world a better place by showing “how a community works” (64).
The discussion that follows these assertions is wide-ranging and astute.
O’Keefe’s primary focus is on fiction written since 1950, though she does make
some reference to L. Frank Baum’s Oz books (1900+), to Tolkien and E. Nesbit,
and to various others who it would be difficult to ignore in any survey of the
genre. The chapters following her introduction are arranged in a progression
that allows her to examine “six increasingly complex categories of fantasy
worlds” (24). In the first of these chapters, “A Child Goes into the World,” she
brings fresh insight to children’s classics such as Dr. Seuss’s And to Think
That I Saw It On Mulberry Street (1937), Crockett Johnson’s Harold and
the Purple Crayon (1955), and William Steig’s Sylvester and the Magic
Pebble (1970). The appeal or freshness of her discussion of these texts has
two aspects. The first is that these books are seldom discussed as fantasy, so
that when they are we see them in an entirely new light that makes clear the
important psychological and cultural work they do. We see, for example, the
eponymous Harold not only constructing a whole new world but negotiating the
difficulties it presents. The second aspect is that O’Keefe draws on sources
seldom used or applied to discussions of children’s or young adult literature,
including Suzanne Langer’s theories of symbolization, L.S. Vygotsky’s theories
of child development, and Dorothy and Jerome Singer’s work on the relationship
between child development and imaginative play.
In later chapters, O’Keefe continues to couple her close readings of texts
with theories of play and ritual that provide new insights not only to the
individual texts but to the genre of children’s and young adult fantasy as
whole. Her use of liminality or “thresholdness” (79), as discussed in Victor
Turner’s The Ritual Process (1969) and Tom Driver’s more recent
Liberating Rites (1998), provides the reader with new ways to read fantasies
as varied as The Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis 1950-56) and Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll 1865). Equally helpful in the later
chapters is her understanding of the different ways in which cultural tensions
and needs shape and construct both the fantasy and the reader’s expectations for
the fantasy.
O’Keefe draws on her own experiences both as a child reading fantasy and as
an adult reading fantasy to her own children. She has strong opinions and no
compunction to keep them to herself. She tells us very firmly, for example, that
Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse (1910) “would be better company
on a desert island than all the formulaic Brian Jacques’ Redwall books [1986+]
about warring mice” (24). Considering the ongoing popularity of Roald Dahl’s
books, she wryly notes: “[c]hildren adore bad taste. Maybe Dahl’s approach is
liberating for them, but maybe it’s infantalizing: maybe the greatest authors
are subtler and don’t write like angry six year olds” (43). Some readers might
find her willingness to take on some of the sacred cows of children’s literature
off-putting, though I found it part of the overall charm of this book. Not only
does O’Keefe offer new insights into the function of fantasy literature for
children, but she does so by drawing on a variety of sources seldom used in
children’s or young adult literature. This book is highly recommended for all
levels of readers interested in fantasy literature. O’Keefe infuses her study
with wit and a luminous intelligence.
—Nancy St. Clair, Simpson College
Existential Equanimity in PKD.
Christopher Palmer.
Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the
Postmodern. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool UP, 2003. xii + 259 pp.
$62.95 hc; $29.95 pbk.
The title of Christopher Palmer’s collection of essays is perhaps misleading:
Palmer’s detailed analysis of Dick’s oeuvre leans rather more toward “terror”
than “exhilaration,” and “Postmodern” in the title seems slightly off the mark
since one of Palmer’s working assumptions in the text is that, though Dick may
have been a master at depicting postmodernity, he was not himself a
“postmodernist.” But, as Marge Simpson points out in a recent Simpsons episode,
“Titles are hard.”
Palmer’s treatment of Dick is impressively thorough. He considers in detail
nearly every one of the sf novels, and many of the short stories, even devoting
a chapter to the posthumously published and patently non-sf novels Dick wrote in
the late 1950s. Throughout his book, Palmer explores a variety of critical
themes and offers some interesting readings of Dick’s various works, offering a
painstaking academic treatment of a purveyor of sf who happens now to be on the
verge of more mainstream canonization (thanks in part to the immense success of
such films as Blade Runner [1982] and Minority Report [2002]).
Palmer’s book should appeal to both literature scholars and casual readers.
The book is loosely organized, and indeed seems more a compendium of
scholarly articles than a book with a central focus or guiding thesis. Readers
used to books that offer a final chapter of summary and recapitulation will be
frustrated, though readers who prefer to digest the occasional essay might like
the fact that many of these chapters have appeared previously as journal
articles.
Readers will discern two general arguments in Palmer’s book, both of which
seem to be at cross-purposes with his title. The first argument seems to be
that, while “[Dick’s] fiction creates a particular blend of hysteria and
entrapment, fragmentation and high anxiety” (6), it nevertheless offers a
promise of redemption through isolated “incidents” in the fiction that suggest
some kind of ethical challenge to the suffocating despair of postmodernity.
Though Palmer never gives an unequivocal definition for “incidents,” the gist
here seems to be that we need to look in Dick’s fiction for events or occasions
where “exhilaration” balances out “terror.”
The other argument Palmer makes is that the specific tension in Dick’s work
as a whole derives from its allegiance to humanism even as it depicts
postmodernity (9). One of the tenets of postmodernism as popularly understood is
of course a rejection of liberal humanism—it is no accident that Foucault ends
Les Mots et les Choses (1969) by announcing what amounts to the death of
“man.” Palmer argues that Dick may do a tremendous job of portraying in his
novels “postmodernity” avant la lettre, but Dick is no postmodernist because of
his persistent humanism. Palmer sees a central current in the flow of Dick’s
voluminous output that values “the individual subject, especially as a vessel of
ethical response” (8), which he admits is quite contrary to the tenets of
postmodernism, such as they are. Later, however, Palmer writes that, “Among SF
writers, [Dick] is the most thoroughgoing in his embrace of the Freudian notion
that to define our innermost personhood is to define the way in which we are
all, adults and children alike, at best neurotic” (162). Does this mean that
authentic humanist responses to postmodernity can’t help but be neurotic? If so,
what’s the point of looking toward them as some kind of relief from the
dizzying, metastasizing slippage of postmodernity?
Palmer suggests that we may look to Dick for some refreshing indication of a
way out of the political impotence and critical impasse to which postmodern
theory often leads. Indeed, Palmer invokes “the politics of writing” (11)
implicit in Dick’s often extreme fictional situations that should shock
postmodern readers (and academics) out of a “complacency so dense that it cannot
be upset and undermined sufficiently often” (11). Palmer discusses various
episodes in Dick’s works that force readers to confront the ironic shift between
verisimilitude (which good fiction is assumed to have) and simulacra (which
postmodern hyperreality thrives on). To avoid the future Dick projects, Palmer
suggests, we must cultivate the humanism that inheres in Dick’s stories.
Palmer is less successful in convincing us that any such confirmed humanism
actually inhabits Dick’s fiction: according to Palmer, the “humanism” of Dick’s
novels consists in his focus on ordinary, plebian individuals who find
themselves forced to confront conspiracies of power or information. Whether or
not such individuals are successful is a matter of interpretation, of course,
and depends on whether you see “terror” or “exhilaration” as the preponderant
force in Dick’s writing.
Neither of Palmer’s arguments is ultimately persuasive, though along the way
he leads readers on a fascinating, proficient, and scholarly tour of Dick’s
fiction. But any “humanism” we might identify in Dick remains hazy, and even our
tour guide suggests that such a humanism would be more tragic than liberal: “The
individual in Dick’s oppressive futures often assumes guilt for a situation that
is not his responsibility” (24). And so far as the postmodern goes, Palmer
suggests that Dick is more likely the epitome of late modernism: “A
self-delighting postmodern circularity is not available to Dick; he is more
likely to think in terms of a closed loop signifying sterile repetition” (29).
Expecting readers to draw “exhilaration” from “sterile repetition,” however,
seems an optimistic leap of faith.
Palmer doesn’t provide much textual evidence to support his claim that Dick’s
works contain an aspect of “exhilaration” that adequately balances the grim and
ubiquitous terror of Dick’s worlds. For example, he briefly claims (206) that
the “anarchy” and “fakery” of The Simulacra (1964) is somehow “positively
delirious,” though it’s unclear how this works. Toward the end of the book,
Palmer tries to explain how Dick’s dystopian vision is redeemed into an
uplifting, liberating promise of salvation from the bleak postmodern abyss
(209). His attempt appeals to narratology, but the effort seems mostly
superstitious. Palmer spends several pages toward the end of his book
summarizing the essential quality of most of Dick’s sf novels as “entrapment
coexisting with anarchy” (205), but then suggests that certain “incidents” in
those novels allow for an interpretation of “ethical hope and the value of
empathy or solidarity” (209). Most readers will have a difficult time
understanding how “entrapment” and “anarchy” can be “positive” or
“exhilarating.”
Palmer does offer the more palatable suggestion that one reason Dick’s
fiction is worth considering is that Dick does not dismiss “human” out of hand
and instead seems to hint that if any redemption is possible in this bleak
“postmodern” world, it must derive from human responsibility. If so, a better
title might have been Existential Equanimity in the Face of Postmodern Terror.
Palmer perceives that “throughout his career Dick attempts to deepen the
human—to affirm values such as solidarity and empathy and to endow his
characters with the capacity to apprehend intense moral dilemmas, and to take
responsibility” (33). While it remains arguable just how much responsibility
humans take in Dick’s fictional worlds, Palmer’s view may certainly be applied
to the world we actually live in. In other words, Palmer’s heart is in the right
place as he attempts to find a meaningful solution to the jaded discourse and
ethically ambivalent impasse of postmodernism by way of Dick’s fiction.
Palmer’s guided tour of Dick’s work is particularly compelling when he offers
comparative criticism of Dick’s novels and stories by situating them in their
larger literary context. His analysis, for example, of how A Scanner Darkly
(1977) anticipates much of the theme of Pynchon’s Vineland (1990)—“that
the counterculture, joyful and zany as it seemed, existed inside grim,
totalitarian circuits of power”(178)—is insightful and interesting, and makes
the reader yearn for more of such treatments.
While Palmer’s optimistic impulse is admirable, the evidence for such an
“exhilarative” reading is simply thin. Nietzsche argued that the most pernicious
of the evils Pandora unleashed was the last to fall out of the box—Hope—and it’s
hard to see a different sentiment operating in Dick’s distinctively dystopic sf.
If anything, what balances out the grim gravity of Dick’s worlds is his
humor—the occasionally zany moments of interstellar satire, the characters’
sense of irony and self-deprecation, and the brilliant if sometimes goofy
wordplay.
—Aaron Parrett, University of Great Falls
From Psychohistorians to
Sandworms.
Donald Palumbo. Chaos Theory, Asimov’s Foundations and Robots, and
Herbert’s Dune: The Fractal Aesthetic of Epic Science Fiction.
Contributions To The Study Of Science Fiction And Fantasy 100. Westport, CT:
Greenwood. 2002. x + 240 pp. $67.95 hc.
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) and Frank Herbert (1920-1986) were among the
bestselling sf authors of their times. Both were intellectuals, and the
pleasures they provided to countless readers were often intellectual ones. But
their work has nonetheless been underexplored by academics. Asimov has inspired
introductory studies such as those by Joseph Patrouch and James Gunn; the state
of Herbert criticism is similar, with work by Tim O’Reilly and William Touponce,
who has also written on Asimov. But Palumbo’s book takes the next step. He
provides a specialized but accessible look at the two writers in light of a
specific paradigm, that of chaos theory. After a brief theoretical introduction,
roughly two thirds of the book is devoted to Asimov (divided between three
chapters on Asimov’s FOUNDATION novels [1942+] and three
chapters on his robot stories [1940+]), the other third to three chapters on
Herbert’s DUNE series (1963-1985). Palumbo is a critic who
uses conceptual structures to animate his overview of the “astonishing and
previously unexplored depths” (1) of their achievements.
Literary chaos theory of the variety associated with the pivotal work of N.
Katherine Hayles is appropriately mentioned. But Palumbo’s vision of chaos
theory is largely scientific, not literary or philosophical. This is appropriate
for his subjects who, in different ways, both saw themselves as scientists.
Palumbo defines chaos theory as “the popularized term for dynamical systems
analysis—the study of orderly patterns in turbulent, dynamical, or erratic
systems” (2). As pioneered by the former IBM scientist Benoit Mandelbrot and
others, chaos theory, by studying such complex systems as weather patterns,
epidemiological surveys, and cognitive processes, has shown how order can end up
being dynamic, not static. Yet chaos theory also demonstrates how purposiveness
can underlie the seemingly arbitrary.
The first part of Palumbo’s study concerns Asimov’s FOUNDATION
books. Palumbo’s discernment of chaos theory in Asimov’s later work (post-1982,
when he began writing fiction extensively after a long hiatus), and by logical
retro-focus, in his earlier production, is not a will o’ the wisp of critical
imposition. Asimov was actively interested in recursive scientific theories such
as fractal geometry and the anthropic cosmological principle. Asimov did
actually meet Mandelbrot in Philadelphia in April 1986, a small detail that
would have fortified Palumbo’s case. Palumbo is justified in extrapolating, from
the overt citation of these theories in Asimov’s post-1982 novels, their
applicability to the earlier (largely pre-1958) work. Psychohistory, the
predictive science analyzing long-term collective human behavior pioneered by
Asimov’s far-future thinker Hari Seldon, has been compared to rationalist,
Enlightenment theories. Palumbo demonstrates the chaos in psychohistory (which
Asimov himself implied was derived from Maxwell’s work on the kinetic theory of
gases, learned by every elementary chemistry student). Palumbo’s major
breakthrough is to understand the common motifs in Asimov’s oeuvre. These motifs
continued even through gaps in setting (from the near future to 30,000 years
from now), mode of production (from Astounding magazine stories to
Doubleday hardcovers), and time of production (Asimov had two major periods in
which he wrote fiction, from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s and in the 1980s).
Following William Touponce in his 1991 study of Asimov, Palumbo does not isolate
the initial FOUNDATION trilogy from the later sequels but
explores Asimov’s entire fictional continuum as a “metaseries.”
Palumbo recognizes, for instance, that there is a thematic kinship between the Hober Mallow (last chapter of Foundation, 1951) and Bel Riose (first
section of Foundation and Empire, 1952) parts of the trilogy. Both deal
with the confrontation of the nascent Foundation with the dormant but still
predominant Galactic Empire. This “self-similarity of parts to one another and
to the whole” (17) is typical of the nonlinear systems of fractal geometry,
“indispensable to chaos theory” (19). With Robots and Empire (1984),
Asimov’s robot novels of the 1950s became linked to the Foundation universe
despite the latter’s lack of robots. Many people hold it against Asimov that he
combined the series. They see the later books as vulgarizations of the earlier.
But Palumbo painstakingly points out how intertwined is all of Asimov’s work.
Disguise and mystery are frequent motifs. So is a search for the “other” that
turns out to have been there all along—as in the (multiple) revelations of the
locale of the Second Foundation. “Snatching victory from the jaws of
defeat” (44) is also a mainstay. Asimov’s resourceful protagonists learn how to
solve problems in the face of seeming impossibility. The backup plan,
guardianship, and disguise are motifs of Asimov’s work, as rabbits are pulled
out of hats and deeper levels are revealed. Asimov always values mental
ingenuity, which conceals itself only to spring out at the climax. Individuals
also matter. The sweep of time can be irrevocably altered by one individual
gesture. This has a cognate in the great importance of mental or emotional
control in Asimov’s work. Often, the power of one mind does not just design the
future, as in psychohistory, but actually manipulates people, as in the Mind
Touch possessed in different “epochs” by robots, the mutant tyrant “The Mule,”
the Second Foundation, and the planet-wide collective mentality Gaia.
Palumbo excels in getting interpretive mileage out of small details. As an
example of how individual gestures can influence aggregate ones, in Asimov’s
story “Spell My Name With an S” (1958), nuclear war is averted because an
American physicist changes his name from Zebatinsky to Sebatinsky. Ironically,
in the year Asimov’s story was published, a real-life Russian chemist named
“Zhabotinsky” (sic) discovered an autocatalytic reaction that “is often
mentioned in discussions of chaos theory” (86). Palumbo makes good use of
Asimov’s memoirs and of his nonfiction in general. For instance, he deduces that
the discomfort of the Solarians with face-to-face contact in The Naked Sun
(1957) was inspired by the behavior of Horace Gold, the then-editor of Galaxy,
a connection many readers of the memoirs no doubt made but that Palumbo is the
first to point out in print. Palumbo praises Asimov’s emphasis on freedom from
bias and prejudice, as shown by his many depictions of individuals from one
planet, culture, or species overcoming antipathy towards another. He links this
to Asimov’s own life. Asimov espoused an appreciative tolerance of diversity,
despite recognizing the extent of anti-Semitism.
Asimov’s late interest in the Gaia hypothesis, as symbolized in the planet
Gaia’s being a wholly interdependent unit, links him with the ecological
concerns of Frank Herbert, explored in the latter part of Palumbo’s book.
Herbert was one of the first imaginative writers to know what ecology was and to
take it seriously. In having the protagonist of Dune be an entire planet,
Herbert moved the focus, and scrutiny, of sf beyond individuals to systems. In
making Arrakis a desert planet, he goes beyond conventional ideas of beauty
(just as the pictures of Mandelbrot sets and fractal patterns Palumbo provides
show how beauty can be whorled and multivariate). Herbert has the governance of
the planet, from politics to religion to the crucial variable of irrigation
itself, be vulnerable to both positive and negative feedback—that is to say,
between responses that change an existing situation and others that ”maintain
the status quo” (142). He makes his ecological system self-reflexive, a chaotic
system.
The compelling dramatization of Children Of Dune on the Sci-Fi Channel
in March 2003 may help return Herbert’s reputation to its late 1960s-early 1970s
peak. As Palumbo notes, Herbert’s vision is not simply mantic and guru-like. It
has a fractal to-and-fro quality. Even the planet Arrakis—”Dune” itself—has to
be abandoned eventually, because holding onto it would perpetuate a sterile
myth. Palumbo’s application of chaos theory to the Dune novels is more
metaphysical and spiritual than is his treatment of similar motifs in Asimov’s
work. He elucidates the “dynamic of things tending to become or to engender
their opposites (through the operation of feedback loops in dynamical systems)”
(215). This is sometimes hard to remember amid all the references to Muad’Dib
and his son Leto II as prophetic or god-like. Yet Muad’Dib himself is
uncomfortable with power. Leto II is so uncomfortable with power that he
abandons his humanity, and with that an overweening human centrality in the
ecosystem. Towards the end of his section on Herbert, especially in his
deployment of Joseph Campbell’s idea of the monomyth, Palumbo himself begins to
go off into the empyrean. His prose becomes reminiscent of the far-out reveries
of Leto II in Children of Dune as he combats/becomes the giant sandworm. In this
respect, Palumbo can be said to have adhered to Pope’s dictum: “A perfect Judge
will read each work of Wit/ With the same spirit that its author writ.” For the
most part, though, Palumbo has provided an accurate, pleasingly complex, and
sympathetic study of two of the greatest American sf writers of the twentieth
century
—Nicholas Birns, New School University
No Cure for the Present,
Either.
Domna Pastourmatzi, ed.
Biotechnological and Medical Themes in Science
Fiction. Thessaloniki, Greece: University Studio Press, 2002. 512
pp. By request from Domna Pastourmatzi, School of English, Aristotle University,
Thessaloniki 541 24, Greece, pbk.
Gary Westfahl and George Slusser, eds.
No Cure for the Future: Disease and Medicine in Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. viii + 184 pp. $64.95 hc.
If, following Brian Aldiss, we take Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The
Modern Prometheus (1818) as the first work of science fiction, then images
of medicine—of its potential and risks—are at the heart of the genre from its
inception. Why isn’t there more sf with a medical theme or premise? Both of
these new books attempt to address that question and to draw some common threads
from the relatively limited body of medical sf, both in written form and on film
and television.
Domna Pastourmatzi’s volume collects the proceedings of a conference held in
Thessaloniki, Greece between October 18 and 21, 2001, though many authors have
revised or expanded their original work. There are 32 papers in all, two of
which are left in the original Greek. The absence of a theme index in a book of
this scope is a serious problem, impeding the reader’s attempts to draw out
common threads in such a wealth of material. (The Westfahl/Slusser book also
lacks a theme index, but is somewhat easier to navigate.) Pastourmatzi’s
introductory chapter sets out the terms of the debate that medical sf, and the
papers discussing it, illustrate. There is a central tension between, on the one
hand, the desire for “progress,” for improvements in both the baseline of health
and the capacity to cure, and, on the other hand, a suspicion of technology or
of interfering with nature. Though the status quo is problematic for some (as,
for instance, with the objections of certain religious groups to blood
transfusion), the main targets of this suspicion are future developments such as
biotechnology, genetic manipulation, and cloning. Nor is it helpful for the
patient that the institutions driving these changes are often corporations whose
motives may be suspect, and that the scientific discourse behind these
developments is necessarily couched in highly technical terms. In this context,
it’s not overstated for Pastourmatzi to summarize: “The seeds of radical change
are being sown as we speak. Forces beyond the common person’s control or
awareness are paving the way to the future” (13). She quotes approvingly (18)
the words of Nelkin and Lindee in The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural
Icon (1995) that sf stories are “narratives of meaning, helping their
attentive listeners deal with social dilemmas, discover the boundaries of
socially accepted behavior, and filter complex ideas.” She is therefore making a
case for the usefulness of sf in understanding such issues—not precisely sf as
prediction, warning, or roadmap, but as a combination of the three.
These priorities are evident in some of the most striking work here. A pair
of papers, by Susan M. Squier and Zoe Detsi-Diamanti, on the topic of future
developments in organ transplantation highlight some issues that are already in
the news: in August 2002, the UK General Medical Council banned from practice a
doctor who offered to sell a donor kidney to a patient’s father, and who
indicated that the kidney could be obtained more cheaply from India than the UK.
Detsi-Diamanti’s paper in particular, discussing Manjula Padmanabhan’s play
Harvest (1997), seems eerily prescient. Harvest is set in a Bombay of
2010, and foresees an institutionalized trade in organs between the developing
world and America. I’m not sure that such a trade could become an overground
phenomenon as quickly as Padmanabhan suggests; and, as Detsi-Diamanti indicates,
“The characters in Harvest are essentially stereotyped, thus perpetuating
an artificial difference between ‘self’ and ‘other’” (112). Nonetheless, one
could make the same assertion about many classics of polemical sf, and the paper
is a clear analysis of what is evidently a compelling play.
One name that comes up repeatedly in discussions of near-future medical
advances is Greg Egan, whose work is treated by several authors here. Nerina
Kioseoglou provides an overview of the issues of identity raised in such stories
as “Learning to be Me” (1990), “Eugene” (1990), and “Closer” (1992). Russell
Blackford, in his overview of biotech themes in Australian sf, states that Egan
“is unequivocally pro-science” (341). “Unequivocally” is probably a little
strong, and there are certainly Egan stories (such as “The Infinite Assassin”
[1991]) where science becomes a trap for those who use it. But it’s unarguable
that Egan is at the more optimistic end of the spectrum.
Cloning is one obvious potential development that has become a well-used sf
trope, and is frequently used with a cautionary slant; one of the sections of
Pastourmatzi’s book is devoted to it. Janeen Webb provides a solid overview
article that surveys the fictional uses to which it has been put, from Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1914) onwards. (One puzzling omission, though:
in her discussion of feminist works founded on cloning, she doesn’t discuss
James Tiptree, Jr’s Hugo- and Nebula-winning “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”
[1977], surely one of the most famous and powerful tales of its kind.) Webb does
mention Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972), which is also
treated in the preceding paper by Darko Suvin. Suvin’s position is that
“scientific extrapolation is not and cannot be the function of sf as fiction”
(131), and that sf stories should thus be taken as parables of our present
condition. As applied to Wolfe, he argues that it “could without much problem be
situated in a Gothic version of the Old South” (138), and so, since cloning is
not indispensable to the story, he “cannot see that much cognitive gain results
from [its] jury-rigged estrangement” (138). (Suvin and Webb both focus their
discussions on the first third of that cunningly-wrought novel, whose other
sections have less to do with cloning but a great deal to do with identity and
colonialism, rendered in terms that arguably could not be translated into
mimetic fiction.) Suvin’s standpoint more generally is one of deep suspicion of
science, at least as it is currently practiced: “This supposedly ‘value-free’
technoscience is the central means for—and intimately shaped by use for—shooting
war or the equally ruthless war for profit” (144). The second half of his paper
is devoted to a critique of current scientific practice both from this political
and from an epistemological point of view. Though not as radical as, say, Paul
Feyerabend in this respect—Suvin does grant scientific practice a limited degree
of objectivity (148)—his standpoint is certainly more radical than most
practicing scientists (and many sf writers) would contemplate.
Other papers here concentrate on more far-future issues, those that are
generally lumped under the heading of “posthuman” possibilities. Andrew Enstice
provides a thoughtful take on David Zindell’s far-future novels, especially
War in Heaven (1999). However, I can’t help feeling that his analysis is
hampered by his lack of reference to Frank Herbert’s DUNE
series (1963-85), for me an overpowering influence on Zindell’s books—and also a
work closely engaged in hypothesizing future stages of evolution. (Enstice is
one of several authors to acknowledge the influence of the then-recent September
11 terrorist attacks on the subjects they cover, in his case by focusing on
Zindell’s discussions of the ethics of war.) Brigitte Scheer-Schäzler
contributes a close reading of Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” (1984), arguing
that the central encounter of that dark and complex story is neither a rape nor
a representation of slavery; rather, it is a representation of “the cost of
life” (321) or, in Butler’s words, “a love story”(317).
There is also a selection of papers on cinematic representations. Michalis
Kokonis’s lengthy analysis of David Cronenberg’s films is one of the finest I’ve
ever seen on this body of work: Kokonis has a superbly detailed knowledge of the
films, and cites both them and the secondary literature extremely appositely. He
steers away from interpreting them as just an attack on technology or capitalism
(263-66), though clearly they contain elements of critique. Rather, he contends
convincingly that the films extend and enrich the science fiction tradition, and
that it’s reductive to focus, as other writers have, predominantly on their
horrific aspects. Monika Messner’s discussion of cultural norms in Bryan
Singer’s film version of X-Men (2000) is also helpful, though briefer.
It has to be said that Pastourmatzi’s book is a pretty loose gathering of
work, perhaps inevitably for a set of proceedings from a large conference.
Although she has divided it into thematic sections, I question the decision to
drop some of her Greek contributors into a “Hellenic voices” section at the
back, when their concerns and ability to discuss them are no different from
those seen elsewhere in the book. There is much that I’ve not been able to touch
on—for instance, a section on the implications of biotech advances for space
travel. With some of the authors, one wishes that there had been a greater
degree of editorial intervention to recast papers more fully and explain
underlying assumptions. Some papers that doubtless worked fine as oral
presentations do not come over so well on the page, such as Timothy J.
Anderson’s “I Want to be your Sex Symbol,” whose repetition of its title
throughout the text has diminishing returns. The general picture from this
book—of which Suvin’s paper is the most prominent example—is one of strong
distrust of the implications of medicine and biotechnology for the future. That
necessarily implies disquiet about the present, about the now from which futures
start. Perhaps that’s a reflection of the sobering days of late 2001 when the
conference took place, but I don’t think it’s just that.
Merely looking at the page counts will explain the main difference between
Pastourmatzi’s book and the Greenwood Press volume from Westfahl and Slusser;
the former is almost twice as long. The tone of the latter is mostly calmer, the
scope of papers more restricted, and there is more evidence of editorial
intervention to reduce duplications and ensure a degree of comprehensiveness.
After an introduction by Westfahl, No Cure for the Future is divided into
two sections: “Population Studies” (general overviews) and “Case Histories”
(examinations of specific works).
Westfahl’s introduction attempts to provide some explanations for the
relative paucity of medical sf: that medicine was, relatively speaking,
stagnating when the pulp magazines were getting off the ground, that the
adolescent males who formed the main audience for the pulps were not much
inclined to think about medical issues, or that stories involving doctors would
simply be dull and un-science-fictional. I tend to find the last reason most
plausible: medicine is centrally an endeavor of restoration, of returning
patients to or keeping them at what has historically been their normal level of
function. Sf is involved in precisely the opposite, speculating about situations
that go beyond the normal, and their consequences for individuals and society.
(It’s no surprise, therefore, that such a high proportion of medical sf tells
the stories of characters involved in medical experiments of one kind or
another.)
In the subsequent chapter, H. Bruce Franklin makes more explicit a linkage
that Westfahl alludes to: “What is called ‘modern medicine’ or ‘Western
medicine’ emerged in the nineteenth century as part of the same historical
process that generated another characteristically ‘modern’ or ‘Western’
phenomenon: science fiction” (10). I have to disagree with arguing so strongly
for this linkage, both in broad terms and on some detailed points. On the
details, for instance, Franklin asserts that “A striking example of how the
achievements of modern Western medicine can look overblown is the case of
puerperal fever…. It was not until 1847 that any European physician did anything
constructive about puerperal fever” (13). That ignores the work of Alexander
Gordon (1752-99), who argued—correctly, as it turned out—in A Treatise on the
Epidemic Puerperal Fever of Aberdeen (1795) that its incidence could be
reduced by the midwife or doctor washing thoroughly before delivering babies.
This is part of Franklin’s more general argument that university-rooted medicine
between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries was largely static and
unsuccessful, shutting out non-Western perspectives as well as the women who did
the majority of obstetric work. It seems to me much more compelling to argue
that the roots of Western medicine are in the Renaissance’s recovery of
classical medicine (as in Erasmus’ Latin editions of Galen), and its subsequent
revision by the modern scientific method. Pre-nineteenth century landmarks in
medicine would include William Harvey’s 1628 discovery of the circulation of
blood, the Dutch invention of the microscope (c. 1600), or van Leeuwenhoek’s
resulting discovery of “animalcules” such as bacteria in water and spermatozoa
in semen. (A recent sf story, Gregory Feeley’s “The Weighing of Ayre” [1996],
makes interesting play on this last discovery.) There is much in Franklin’s
argument that I’d agree with, particularly regarding the division between those
aspects of medicine practiced by men and by women, and it is plainly correct
that the nineteenth century saw a great improvement in and expansion of medical
practice. But I don’t think it’s tenable to argue, as he does, that Western
medicine originated in the nineteenth century in the same sense as science
fiction.
Elsewhere, Franklin makes an argument for a particular apocalyptic strain in
medical sf, running from Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) through Jack
London’s The Scarlet Plague (1915), George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides
(1949), Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995), and Norman Spinrad’s
Journals of the Plague Years (1995). He’s surely right to identify this line
of descent, and it’s perhaps indicative of an underlying lack of faith in
medicine that such works are as prevalent now as ever. Other papers in the
“Population studies” section provide similarly stimulating perspectives. Frank
McConnell’s “The Missionary Physician” is a fusillade of ideas, arguing for
(among other things) the essentially Gnostic nature of sf, the falsity of the
idea that all sf writers are ugly, William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) as
the anti-Dante, and the tension in sf between the approaches of two Gospels,
between “John’s transcendence [and] Luke’s immanence” (30). Kirk Hampton and
Carol McKay’s paper, which gives its title to the book, more conventionally
argues for the archetype of the entrapped but virtuous doctor in sf, an analysis
continued in Joseph D. Miller’s paper on MD and PhD characters in the genre.
The “Case histories” section contains much that is interesting, in particular
Westfahl’s own thoughtful and detailed contribution on James White’s Sector
General stories. I am less certain of the justification for including David K.
Danow’s essay on Heart of Darkness (1902): it illuminates themes of
disease in Conrad’s book but has precious little to do with sf, and only a
tangential connection with the fantastic. Elsewhere, Robert Van Cleave’s paper
on “Big Brother as Doctor” brings out the stratum of medical imagery in
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) with clarity and precision. Greg Bear
contributes a fascinating discursive/autobiographical piece, reflecting on
(among other issues) the impetus behind his novels Blood Music (1985) and
Queen of Angels (1990). He remarks that he has only heard one wholly
positive response to the transcendental conclusion of Blood Music, and
that was Bruce Sterling saying, “I can’t wait for it to happen!” This speaks to
one of the recurring themes in both books—that bodily change, whether medically
induced or otherwise, is a deeply unsettling idea for many people.
Inevitably, given the scope of the subject and the lack of surveys on it to
date, both volumes are patchwork collections with no guarantee of
comprehensiveness; but there are things missing in both books that don’t, I
think, just represent eccentric expectations on my part. There is, for example,
an extensive range of medical sf focusing on intelligence enhancement that
scarcely gets a mention here. To take just a few canonical examples, this would
include Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon (1966), Thomas M. Disch’s
Camp Concentration (1968), and Ted Chiang’s “Understand” (1991). James
Tiptree, Jr.’s work used doctors as protagonists almost obsessively, and it
would be very useful to have a consideration of, say, “The Last Flight of Doctor
Ain” (1974), “A Momentary Taste of Being” (1975), “The Screwfly Solution”
(1977), or Brightness Falls From the Air (1985) in light of the issues raised
elsewhere in these books. Finally, I would have welcomed some thoughts on the
fiction of Michael Blumlein, whose relatively small body of work comprises
arguably the finest, and certainly the most radical, sf written by a practicing
physician.
Most of the works mentioned in the last paragraph are at least listed in Westfahl and Slusser’s useful bibliography of medically-themed sf, covering
fiction, non-fiction, and film/tv. This bibliography, and the more engaged
editorial approach, make the Westfahl and Slusser book more useful as a first
reference on this topic, but both volumes have papers of considerable value.
Both also consistently draw out anxieties about what we are allowing to be done
to our bodies in the name of medicine. If we’re worried about medicine of the
future, it’s because we’re worried about its present as well.
—Graham Sleight, London
Who Knew We Were Reading
Ethics?
Michael Pinsky.
Future Present: Ethics and/as Science Fiction.
Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2003. 215 pp. $43.50 hc.
When I began reading science fiction as a bored 12-year-old, I certainly
never thought I was embarking upon a philosophical study of ethics. Michael
Pinsky, however, points out in his new book that sf presents ethics in ways that
are not as possible in other literatures. Because sf deals so much with the
Other, and with particular others, it is able to embody ethics by creating a
future and displaying the repercussions of the developments that led there. As
Pinsky writes:
Science anticipates the future. Science fiction writes the future. And
according to science fiction, our future apparently consists of both external
encounters—technological marvels (and horrors), aliens, and outer space—and
internal tensions—the mysteries of the human mind and body. (13)
Pinsky begins his exploration with a clear layout of the plan of his work,
giving his readers a good roadmap and pointing out that his book does not
necessarily need to be read from cover to cover in order to be useful. “Part I:
Space and Time” is a review of the philosophical bases upon which he develops
his own work. Here he reviews Heidegger and Derrida without overwhelming readers
who might not be completely familiar with how their ideas are connected to our
understandings of space and time.
First, he examines the concept of space, as described by Heidegger, and how
it relates to our understandings of being and self. We recognize ourselves as
beings, and, as we grow, we begin to differentiate that which is the self from
that which is “outside” the self—that which is alien, foreign. In describing
that-which-is-not-self, Pinsky makes an important delineation between the Other
and the other:
the Other is an anticipatory system constructed by the subject and based on
a range of potentialities. The Other is nonlocal, nonspatial, although it does
exist in spacetime relative to the speaking subject. The other is the
localized, spatial manifestation of alterity in the present. This other is
confronted in the face-to-face encounter. (35-36)
In our efforts at assimilation, the human being (or Dasein) seeks to
assimilate the other in order to understand it, and to make the other less Other
than it had been. This can only be done over time, a fourth dimension that
allows for movement closer to the other. Time is also a type of location, for we
can ask where we are in time. We divide experience into past, present, and
future, and we seek to control the future by predicting it—telling stories of
the future as if they were the past. We tell ourselves science fiction stories
in order to determine how we might react to an alien, to technological progress,
to our own lives in the future.
“Part II: The Future in Focus” looks at some particular works of sf and how
they support Pinsky’s assertion that these story-tellings are a presentation of
ethics. As many do, Pinsky begins with Wells. He touches on three of the major
novels and how each presents the subject, law, and the Other. Both The Time
Machine (1895) and its unfinished predecessor The Chronic Argonauts
(1888) dramatize how a subject is transformed by escaping the so-called natural
progression of time. The villain of The Chronic Argonauts reappears as
Griffin in The Invisible Man (1897), although now he has subverted law by
becoming invisible, rather than by slipping through time. The Island of
Doctor Moreau (1896) presents the arbitrariness of law, showing how it is a
product of thinking subjects, and not something eternal. As Pinsky considers
The War of the Worlds (1898), he notes that the Martians of the future,
although presented as Others, are really just other humans—a vision of our
potential future reliance on technology. The true others here are, in fact, the
germs.
The question of the future progression of time is examined not only in terms
of Wells’s fiction, but also through the lenses provided by the architecture and
attractions of Disney’s Tomorrowland and EPCOT Center. Tomorrowland was
originally intended to be a showcase for future innovations, a vision of life in
the future of our dreams. The “Rocket to the Moon” ride had to be revamped to
become “Rocket to Mars” once Apollo 11 brought the moon within reach.
Tomorrowland showcases the problem of how quickly technology becomes outdated,
and eventually, Tomorrowland was redesigned to showcase the 1950’s view of the
future. In contrast, EPCOT Center showcases possibilities and marvels that are
not as precisely tied down as those of Tomorrowland. For instance, Spaceship
Earth focuses on developments in the technology of communication, and it
finishes in an area where corporate partners can display their latest high-tech
gadgetry, keeping products up to date without having to revamp the entire
construction. These two examples, Tomorrowland and EPCOT, serve to demonstrate
the differences between trying to control the future and trying to predict it
while still allowing for the operations of chance.
Pinsky approaches the question of aliens, of others and Otherness, through
first examining the Don A. Stuart (a.k.a. John W. Campbell, Jr.) novella “Who
Goes There?” (1938) and then its 1951 movie adaptation The Thing from Another
World. Here Pinsky argues that we cannot always recognize the Other, since
when it takes particular form, it has become enough like the viewing subject to
be indistinguishable. Next, Pinsky moves to a 1953 issue of EC Comic’s Weird
Fantasy, focusing particularly on a tale in which the other really is one of us,
but one who has come back from further down the timeline. Finally, aliens are
considered through the screen of Star Trek, particularly the Next
Generation’s encounters with the Borg. Worth noting here is the fact that
the Borg become increasingly less alien the more often they appear in the
series, infected perhaps by subjectivity after their capture of Picard/Locutus.
Pinsky then turns to a discussion of the cyborg as a hybrid entity able to
bridge Dasein and Other. The early part of this section looks at two examples of
anime: Akira (1989) and Ghost in the Shell (1995). Both of these
films, on some level, examine the interaction of humans and technology, with
Ghost specifically looking at cyborgs and artificial intelligences. The
discussion next moves to a rapid-fire consideration of David Cronenberg’s films.
The result is something of a rush, but it serves the purpose of outlining how
incredibly different characters and situations serve very similar purposes in
showing how the subject, the other, and the Other interact.
The penultimate chapter uses the stories of Philip K. Dick as particular
embodiments of the types of ethical presentation that sf can engender. VALIS
(1981) and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) provide specific
examples. The discussion of VALIS is particularly intriguing, as the
lines of subjectivity begin to blur as we realize that different characters are
in fact sides of a single person, and as we wonder which parts of the text are
discussing the character Phil as opposed to the author Philip K. Dick. Androids
only seems to present a clearer sense of subject, but that too blurs as we
question who is human. Pinsky’s final chapter returns to the structure laid out
in his introduction. It looks back at the roadmap without being repetitious or
redundant.
Pinsky’s style does not overburden itself with jargon, even when dealing with
philosophical subjects. The book would be useful for scholars in a number of
subfields of sf, particularly of the authors and films it covers as well as of
the broader subjects of cyborg and alien fictions.
—Regina Cross, University of Missouri
The Animal is Us.
Cary Wolfe.
Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist
Theory. Foreword by W.J.T. Mitchell. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
2003. xv + 237 pp. $49 hc; $18 pbk.
As the wordplay in the title suggests, Wolfe’s book is less about animals
(and only incidentally about animal rights) but is instead about the uses to
which animals have been and can be put by our culture. The book’s main concern
is the way the figure of “the” animal as a singular category has been used to
shore up the ruins of humanism in this posthuman age, returning stability and
centrality to the humanist subject through the idea of a human essence
discernable in species identity. Wolfe argues in his introduction that “there is
no longer any good reason to take it for granted that the theoretical, ethical,
and political question of the subject is automatically coterminous with the
species distinction between Homo sapiens and everything else” (1), and further
that the seeming outrageousness of such a claim only confirms how much we
“remain humanists to the core, even as we claim for our work an epistemological
break with humanism itself” (1). While Wolfe doesn’t engage with what I would
call science fiction texts in his analysis (the marginal exception being Michael
Crichton’s Congo [1980]), the value of his theoretical framework for sf
scholars is quite substantial. Where better to explore philosophical
implications of challenges to the boundary between Homo sapiens and “everything
else” than in a genre that has long perceived this boundary to be permeable?
The book is organized into two sections that might be termed “theory” and
“practice,” and approximately equal space is devoted to each. In his
introduction, Wolfe develops his “discourse of species” and traces how the
concept of the animal as Other has long been the foundation for our very
definitions of what it means to be human, and how new developments in science
have consistently eroded the criteria by which this boundary has been policed.
As Wolfe notes, Haraway’s influential “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) asks us to
rethink our subjectivities based on ruptures in the boundary between humans and
animals as well as due to fusions of humans with machines. Wolfe suggests, and I
agree, that we must pay attention to the different ways the human/animal
boundary signifies because “the figure of the ‘animal’ in the West (unlike, say,
the robot or the cyborg) is part of a long cultural and literary history
stretching back at least to Plato and the Old Testament” (6). The central
theoretical claim of Animal Rites is that this discourse of speciesism
has allowed our theories of the subject to retain a category of those who don’t
fully count as subjects. Thus, Wolfe argues, “as long as this humanist and
speciesist structure of subjectivization remains intact, and as long as it is
institutionally taken for granted that it is all right to systematically exploit
and kill nonhuman animals simply because of their species, then the humanist
discourse of species will always be available for use by some humans against
other humans as well, to countenance violence again the social other of whatever
species—or gender, or race, or class, or sexual difference” (8).
This is a philosophical and theoretical rather than a literary book. Wolfe
mainly engages in critiquing the concept of the subject and developing a theory
of ethics consistent with taking seriously the contention that the category of
the subject need not be limited to Homo sapiens. The first chapter examines Luc
Ferry’s The New Ecological Order (1995), a work that critiques the
totalitarianism inherent in radical ecology, and two ethical works on animal
rights, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) and Tom Regan’s The
Case for Animal Rights (1983). In each of these, Wolfe diagnoses a
persistence of humanist values and a failure to acknowledge that the very
defenses for animal rights or the environment that each puts forward is premised
on the same Enlightenment values that require a distinction between the human
and the animal in order to create the possibility of ethics.
In his second chapter, Wolfe outlines a tradition from Wittgenstein through
Derrida that he argues creates a space for a truly postmodern or posthumanist
concept of the subject and a ground for an ethical system that isn’t premised on
a category of those to whom an ethical duty is not owed. Wolfe traces a
philosophical tradition of defining ethics and “the” human through those
criteria that exclude animals from both discourses. The question of the animal’s
ability to use language, to respond in a way that signifies intelligence, is
central to this tradition. Wolfe eventually arrives (through Kant, Heidegger,
Levinas, Wittgenstein, Lyotard, and Derrida) at a call for us to disarticulate
the concepts of language and species. Thus, we arrive at a new concept of what
language is, one that “entails showing how the difference in kind between human
and animal that humanism constitutes on the site of language may instead be
thought of as a difference in degree on a continuum of signifying processes
disseminated in a field of materiality, technicity, and contingency, of which
‘human’ ‘language’ is but a specific, albeit highly refined instance” (79).
Turning next to Maturana and Varela’s work on autopoesis—familiar to sf scholars
from N. Katherine Hayles’s cogent use of it in How We Became Posthuman
(1999)—Wolfe then suggests that we need to extend our concept of what the
speaking subject is from simply the biological organism to that organism’s
situation within and interaction with its environment.
In the second section of the book, Wolfe uses his revised ideas about the
relationships among the subject, language, and ethics to produce readings of the
species discourse evident in three texts: Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the
Lambs (1991), Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden (1986), and
Michael Crichton’s Congo. Throughout this section, the further
development of the theory of the subject takes precedence over interpreting the
text at hand. Although I don’t feel that this order of priorities diminishes the
importance of Wolfe’s book, it is clearly a work in which readings of specific
primary texts are at the service of the author’s theoretical concerns. Watching
The Silence of the Lambs, he argues, teaches us that “the ostensibly
‘pure’ categories of ‘animalized animal’ and ‘humanized human’ are the merest
ideological fictions” (101) because the character of Hannibal Lecter is able to
occupy both sides of this supposed binary simultaneously. The film explores what
Derrida has called—in his essay “Eating Well” (1991)—the “sacrificial structure”
of our subjectivity. Derrida argues that animals are sacrificed in place of
humans in order to reinforce the species boundary and allow us to express our
murderous, yet denied, desire to destroy the Other. Lecter’s cannibalism refuses
to respect this boundary, yet he doesn’t lose his humanity as measured via other
markers, such as intelligence or aesthetic sensibilities.
Wolfe provides a similar analysis of Hemingway’s last—and unpublished at his
death—novel, a novel that is about a young man’s struggle to become a “real man”
by moving beyond his resentment of his father for the slaughter of an elephant
on a hunting trip and beyond his desire to play games with gender in his
romantic relationship. Wolfe argues that the novel’s linking of these two
obstacles to David’s development demonstrates the degree to which speciesism is
structurally and philosophically connected to other hierarchies of subjectivity.
The protagonist David needs to learn to give up both his cross-species
identification with the murdered elephant and his cross-gender identification
with Catherine in order to become a “man.” In this chapter in particular,
Wolfe’s analysis makes it clear that his primary focus is on what the cultural
texts might tell us about the limitations of psychoanalytic theories of the
subject rather than on what a revised theory of subjectivity might reveal about
the text at hand. Wolfe argues that David’s experience of cross-category
identifications reveals “the way the fantasy of such a truth [of the other]
covers over the failure of the symbolic to confer consistency upon the subject”
(158). A more useful theory of the subject, Wolfe suggests, might be found in
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming animal” in A Thousand Plateaus
(1987), which recognizes that the subject is always-already multiple.
The final chapter on Crichton’s Congo continues to develop Wolfe’s
framework for thinking about subjectivity in terms of multiplicity rather than
identity. In Crichton’s novel, the degree to which the human/animal species
distinction is intertwined with cultural and racial hierarchies is revealed by
the confusion of categories. On the animal side, we have the “good” captive
gorilla, Amy, and also the dangerous grey gorillas who guard Mount Mukenko. The
human side technically includes the party of scientists and the “primitive”
cannibalistic Kigani tribe. The narrative makes clear, however—through its
parallel defeats of the grey gorillas by Amy using technology and of the Kigani
by the scientists using technology—that the boundary has more to do with
colonial divisions between the First and Third worlds than with species. Amy is
more human than the Kigani precisely because she is able to act like the
colonizer rather than the colonized.
Finally, Wolfe’s conclusion returns to his theoretical concern with ethics.
He argues that “the operative theories and procedures we now have for
articulating the social and legal relations between ethics and action are
inadequate … for thinking about the ethics of the question of the human as well
as the nonhuman animal” (192, emphasis in original). Wolfe calls for us to find
a way to theorize ethics beyond the “bad-faith repressions and disavowals of
humanism” (193) and posits Zygmunt Bauman’s Postmodern Ethics (1993) as a
promising text because it moves beyond ethical models based in reciprocity or
the idea of contracts.
The strength of this work clearly lies in its informed and extended
engagement with postmodern theories of subjectivity. Its chief weakness, as I
noted above, is that its readings of particular texts are concerned almost
exclusively with how they illuminate problems of subjectivity rather than with
features of the texts themselves. No rationale is offered, for example, about
why a film, a canonical text, and a popular text are chosen for the project.
Versions of each of the “practice” chapters were originally published as
individual essays elsewhere, which may well have something to do with their lack
of relation to one another except on the level of theoretical concerns. Readers
of SFS may in particular be distressed by the lack of true sf texts in Wolfe’s
analysis and his attendant failure to acknowledge the substantial history of sf
scholarship and writing on the subject of nonhuman others and how they figure
into our ethical systems.
Despite the book’s failure to position itself within the tradition of sf
scholarship, I think that it has much to offer those of us who do work in the
field. Sf writers have long struggled to recognize and convey sentience and
other communicative capacities among those whom we do not recognize as subjects
like ourselves, and with theorizing the possibilities for ethical relationships
between “the” human and such others. There is a small but evident stream of sf
that specifically figures this representation of alterity as an analogy for our
relationship to animal others. Novels such as Anne McCaffery’s Decision at
Doona (1969) or Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984), for example,
characterize their aliens as animals, but animals whom we must acknowledge as
subjects. Other works, such as David Brin’s Uplift series (1980-98), ask
us to imagine a future in which our relation to intelligent animal species on
our planet exists within a continuum that includes other relationships among
various alien species and between us and such aliens. Wolfe’s careful and
thorough account of the philosophical grounding of our concept of “the” animal
and the way in which rethinking it allows us to rethink “the” human provides an
exciting theoretical framework through which to read these and other sf texts.
While Animal Rites is a challenging read, it raises an important ethical
question about alterity, a question already central to sf. Thus, it seems to me
essential that sf critics rise to the challenge of Wolfe’s conclusion and show
what sf has to contribute to the debate about subjectivity, language, ethics,
and speciesism. While Animal Rites may not contribute to the study of sf,
it provides the tools to do so.
—Sherryl Vint, St. Francis Xavier University
Back to Home