Science Fiction Studies

#104 = Volume 35, Part 1 = March 2008

ARTICLE ABSTRACTS

Everett F. Bleiler

Johann Valentin Andreae, Fantasist and Utopist

Abstract. -- A category of fantastic fiction that has not received much critical attention is the alchemical fiction that flourished during the Renaissance and early Baroque periods in Europe. A literature of wide variety, ranging from pretended historical accounts rendered with some verisimilitude to total fantasies, some of it is proto science-fiction of a sort, since it fantasized the generally accepted science of the day, physical alchemy. One of the most interesting of these alchemical fictions is the short novel Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreütz Anno 1459 [A Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreütz] (1616) by Johann Valentin Andreae (1586-1654). An outgrowth of the contemporary Rosicrucian hoax, it describes the ritual decapitation and dissolution of triple monarchs who are reconstituted and revived by a traditional alchemical process. The narrative, which embodies elements from various cultural configurations of the day, centers on the experiences of the aged hermit Christian Rosencreütz, who attends the magical court and is witness of and participant in the successful alchemical operation. While much of the novel remains puzzling, it is most interesting in working alchemical ideas into fictional form. Andreae is generally considered one of the most important German authors of the seventeenth century. A pioneer in bringing Italian literary techiques into German literature, he is also the author of the eutopia Christianopolis (1619).

Sean Brayton

The Post-White Imaginary in Alex Proyas’s I, Robot

Abstract. -- Alex Proyas’s 2004 film I, Robot depicts a crisis of white identity in the figure of the marginalized NS-5 robot, Sonny. The anxiety prompted by this crisis is resolved via a parable of racial reconciliation between the “unique” white robot and the black detective Del Spooner (played by Will Smith). The film’s evocation of a post-white mythology is laden with ironies and contradictions, however. Like whiteness itself, the robot is able to slip in and out of racial tropes: on the one hand, it offers a critique of white supremacy in its desire to overcome racialized oppression; on the other hand, the specific forms of alienation it embodies also suggest the “victimized” white male of the conservative right. At the same time, the film’s racial allegory is complicated by the class and gender hierarchies structuring the relations among the robot, the black detective, and the female robopsychologist Susan Calvin.

Andrew Milner and Robert Savage.

Pulped Dreams: Utopia and American Pulp Science Fiction

Abstract. -- The decade Ernst Bloch devoted to his magnum opus, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope), from 1938 to 1947, coincided almost exactly with the so-called “Golden Age” of American pulp sf. Yet, despite his enthusiasm for such older popular forms as the colportage novel, the circus, and the fairy tale, the pulps themselves rate no mention in his study. Bloch’s world never collided with Gernsback’s or Campbell’s, an omission this essay attempts to make good. Focusing on the work of the New York Futurians and stories published in Campbell’s Astounding Science-Fiction, it shows how a lingering utopian impulse continued to inform the more sober writing that characterized the pulp magazines of this period.

Jorge Martins Rosa

A Misreading Gone Too Far? Baudrillard Meets Philip K. Dick

Abstract. -- It is widely known that Jean Baudrillard, in Simulacres et simulation (1981), acknowledges Philip K. Dick as one of the first to reflect, albeit fictionally, on the concept of “simulacrum.” However, a more detailed analysis of how Dickian are Baudrillard’s concepts and theories remains to be done. That is the goal of this article, a task I undertake by distinguishing, on the one hand, the concepts proposed in L’échange symbolique et la mort (1975) and Simulacres et simulation, and, on the other, the radical turn inaugurated in Le crime parfait (1995).

J. P. Telotte

Animating Space: Disney, Science, and Empowerment

Abstract. -- One of the pleasures of animation, it has been argued, is that it affords viewers a sense of power over the everyday, thanks to its ability to bring into being a world unrestrained by the conventions of realism or of probability. This principle is one that Walt Disney not only well understood, but also brought to bear in his studio’s early foray into the realms of science and science fiction, the “Man in Space” programs created for the Disneyland television series during the 1950s. In these shows, produced against a backdrop of popular media science fiction that was clearly colored by the anxieties and uncertainties of the Cold War and its threat of atomic holocaust, Disney employed his studio’s strength in animation to create a new context for these science-related issues, one that allowed for safe speculation about the future, while reframing some of the more disturbing or intractable problems as science fiction, thereby reassuring viewers and offering them a sense of power over the contingencies of their world.

Susan Vanderborg

Gendering “Otherspace”: The “Martian Ty/opography” of Johanna Drucker and Brad Freeman

Abstract. -- This essay analyzes an sf text that challenges stereotypes about women and language transmission through its experiments with stylistic features of the book form—not only narrative conventions, but also rules of typography, margins, and page layouts. The text is Otherspace: Martian Ty/opography, a 1992 collaboration by book artists Johanna Drucker and Brad Freeman. The presentation of different verbal and visual passages on its page spreads is examined, with an eye to the gender politics of the authors’ revisions of the story of Hélène Smith, a nineteenth-century medium. I note parallels between Otherspace’s experimental pages and the cyborg narrative that Donna Haraway calls for in “A Cyborg Manifesto.”

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