BOOKS IN REVIEW
New Perspectives on African Science and Speculative Fiction.
Louisa Uchum Egbunike and Chimalum Nwankwo, eds. “Speculative & Science Fiction” issue, African Literature Today 39. James Currey, 2021. xiv+276 pp. $95.00 hc, $24.99 ebk.
That African science and speculative fiction (ASF) boomed after 2008 has been hard to miss. Over the last 15 years, ASF has gained ample popular recognition, exemplified by Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (2009) winning best short film at Cannes, Lauren Beukes receiving the Arthur C. Clarke Award for her novel Zoo City (2010), and Nnedi Okorafor winning Locus, World Fantasy, Nebula, and Hugo Awards. ASF also has received academic attention and publications now include several special issues, which invariably have an introductory character, shedding light on ASF’s long history on the continent and providing an overview of the corpus of sf works before zooming in on some of those works. African Literature Today 39: “Speculative and Science Fiction” (ALT 39) is the latest of such special issues and continues in that introductory tradition. Nevertheless, it stands out by being somewhat less concerned with the genre’s history and more with its terminology and disciplinary scope. The generic category of Africanfuturism and the discipline of postcolonial studies are at the center of that concern.
The importance of terminology to ALT 39 is already evident in the introduction by editors Louisa Uchum Egbunike and Chimalum Nwankwo. Refreshingly, it rushes readers past their understanding of speculative and science fiction and asserts that “Africa now is both” (2). It then shifts to a discussion of ASF’s relationship to Afrofuturism, which ASF authors had previously adopted despite the sense that it insufficiently described their work because it was based on a history and reality of slavery and racism specific to the USA. Reluctance towards the term culminated with Okorafor coining the term “Africanfuturism.” As Egbunike and Nwankwo explain, Africanfuturism and Afrofuturism are similar because they both involve the “Black diaspora” (6). Citing Okorafor, they point out that, unlike Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism is “‘specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view’” and “‘does not privilege or center the West’” (6). Africanfuturism, the editors show, found immediate traction among ASF authors and scholars, who are now “shaping and expan[ding]” the concept (6), both by redefining what it means and by coining alternative or complementing terms. In this vein, the eight articles in the volume also coin new terms for the ASF context, including “counter-utopian” novels, “political futurism,” “Africanjujufuturism,” and “Africannearfutures,” while also using the concept of Africanfuturism (7-8).
Like the introduction, Kayode Odumboni’s essay on Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018) focuses on terminology. He argues that the main methodology of the film is historical revisionism. The idea of Africa in dominant historical narratives has been confined to “1619 and after,” he says, by which he appears to reference the “European incursion” into the continent and the colonialism that followed (59). Black Panther, however, imagines an African state that was not colonized and thus disrupts “hegemonic historiography” (57) and “the epistemological structures upon which the history of colonialism and the present realities of neocolonialism subsist” (64). Because the past is essential to imagining different futures, Black Panther can form a pathway to thinking alternative futures. Considering the film’s “geographical rootedness” in Africa, Odumboni claims that Black Panther “aligns” with Okorafor’s concept of Africanfuturism (65).
James Orao’s article discusses the terms Afro- and Africanfuturism at greater length, with a strong focus on Okorafor’s writing. He emphasizes that, even though Okorafor foregrounds the importance of location to Africanfuturism, saying that in “Afrofuturism: Wakanda builds its first outpost in Oakland” while in “Africanfuturism: Wakanda builds its first outpost in a neighboring country,” (119), ASF works should be about seeking “new constellations between aesthetics, history, and space” (122).
Clara Ijeoma Osuji investigates the term “speculative” by asking whether the “supernatural events” in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1964) can “convincingly [be] factored into the equation of speculative fiction” (83). She reviews several definitions of “speculative fiction,” favoring Michael Svex and Mike Winiski’s “encompassing” one, which defines “speculative fiction” as including science, experience, and fantasy (83-4). Reading the two Achebe novels with this definition in mind, and with a focus on the priestess/priest figures, she observes that there exists a “fluid boundary between the human world and the world of the spirits” (91) and that Achebe thus weaves “the speculative into the realistic” (93). For her, then, Achebe’s works can indeed be read as speculative fiction.
Janelle Rodriques merges concerns about both terminology and scope in an article that uses “Africanfuturism” to analyze two ASF alien-invasion novels: Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) and Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Godhunter (2019). Rodriques observes that “many writers of African futures” have abandoned the postcolonial paradigm of writing back in favor of turning “their foci inward” (14). This is clear in her case studies, not just in the location of the stories, namely Lagos (Nigeria), but in the fact that the aliens want “to make Lagos their home ... they are invested in it and want to settle there” (18). Thus, the novels reimagine Lagos as “aspirational”—a utopian location where humans and aliens can coexist (28; emphasis in original).
Ezeiyoke Chukwunonso more explicitly rejects postcolonialism in his article on Kojo Laing’s novel Women of the Aeroplanes (1988). He notes the importance that the term magical realism (MR) has had for African literary criticism and unpacks how, in MR works, the speculative “is understood as realism from the perspective of indigenous cultures [and as] magical from the perspective of the West” (44). For him, this “maneuvering” constitutes an attempt to read speculative works as a reaction against colonialism (44) and reduces them to “nothing more than a mode of ‘writing back’” (45). He concludes by reading Laing’s novel as political futurism, as it “remodel[s] the ‘now’ into [a] future projection” based on Ujamaa (Julius Nyerere’s brand of socialism) (46).
Jeffrey G. Dodd, on the contrary, advocates the importance of the postcolonial concept of hybridity in his article on Masande Ntshanga’s Triangulum (2019) and Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019). Against Homi Bhabha and with Gayatri Spivak, he claims that hybridity is not a transcultural path forward but rather characterized by “tensions and enduring effects of racial, cultural, and social hierarchies rooted in colonial histories” (33). In “black-tech art” such as ASF, technology is the “operative site of hybridity wrought with ambivalence,” because technology can be a method of “resistance” for postcolonial subjects but is also “a form of submission ... rooted in colonial power structures” (33). Identifying such ambivalences throughout his case studies, he concludes that they “provide starting points for identifying slippages” into the future (33).
Two outliers in the issue are Éric Essono Tsimi’s article on Abdourahman Waberi’s novella Aux États-Unis d’Afrique (2006) and Edgar Nabutanyi’s essay on Innocent Acan’s “The Machodugo” (2016), Lillian Aujo’s “Where Pumpkin Leaves Dwell” (2015), and Dilman Dila’s “The Last Storyteller” (2019). Tsimi’s essay is a welcome Francophone voice in the otherwise Anglophone volume. It historicizes the reversed-Empire trope so prominent in ASF and analyzes États as part of that tradition. Yet it specifies that the novella should be understood not simply as part of that tradition but as a counter-utopian work, a sub-genre that makes it possible to articulate and imagine “the decline of the West” (74). Nabutanyi, on the other hand, advocates including his case studies in the Ugandan canon based on their “aesthetic finesse and pedagogical robustness” (96). That these works were published on online platforms means that they can steer canonization away from “elitis[m]” (96).
ALT 39 is a welcome and even necessary contribution to the field of ASF because, despite the increasing work on the topic, many questions remain unanswered. These include the role of existing interpretative frames and disciplines such as postcolonial studies: certainly, ASF authors have turned away from postcolonial methods and the discipline has paradoxically reproduced coloniality, as Rodrigues and Ezeiyoke note, but some postcolonial concepts and perspectives may still prove beneficial, as Dodd shows. Perhaps more important still, ALT 39 makes it abundantly clear that the coinage of the Africanfuturist category is not the end but the start of a new phase in the debate about categories, and that it will take time to find a term that enjoys a broad consensus. ALT 39 provides an important stimulus towards that end.
ALT 39 is not without weaknesses and I will name three. First, Dodd coins the term “Africannearfutures” but he barely unpacks what that means. It is evident that this is about stories that are set in the near future, but not why is it important to distinguish them from others. This question appears especially relevant because contemporary sf (not just ASF) appears to prefer near- over far-future settings (exceptions such as Annalee Newitz’s The Terraformers [2023] aside). Dodd thus misses a chance to reflect on the genre at large from ASF’s perspective. Second, Odumboni’s article is USA-centric. He appears to locate the “European incursion” (59) in Africa in 1619, a date commonly used to designate the possible start of slavery in the USA. Yet the Portuguese had entered the African slave trade over a century earlier. USA-centrism also inflects his argument when he writes that “the geographical rootedness of Black Panther aligns it with Okorafor’s conceptualization of Africanfuturism” (65). While Okorafor emphasizes the importance of Africa as a setting for Africanfuturism, Black Panther is her main example of what is not African- but rather Afrofuturism. Of course, one is free to redefine Africanfuturism to include Black Panther. Yet bending Okorafor’s concept without engaging the arguments does a disservice to ASF authors’ attempts to be considered on African terms as peoples with a distinct history, lived experience, and literature and film. Third, Osuji’s attempt to read Achebe’s work as speculative fiction is potentially provocative because some have understood ASF as a challenge to Achebe’s realism, which to their understandable dissatisfaction continues to set the “standard for contemporary African writing” (16). If Achebe’s work were shown to be speculative, it would necessitate a revision of ASF’s status in the African literary canon and of African realism as such. An obvious way of doing so is to see Things Fall Apart as an “‘alien’ invasion” novel, as Rodriques does in her essay (30). Osuji, however, follows the template of MR articles (which Ezeiyoke criticizes), but now understands the supernatural not as magical but as speculative. This makes the two synonymous and raises the question of what we gain by calling works ASF at all.
Nevertheless, even these weak points are important because they highlight what questions must be asked, including the question of what we gain by rereading certain works as speculative fiction. It makes ALT 39 a beneficial intervention and informative reading for those who are new to ASF and for those who have been engaged in these debates for longer.—Peter J. Maurits, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
Madness, Chaos, and the Psychosis of a Sentient Universe.
Ellen J. Greenham. After Engulfment: Cosmicism and Neocosmicism in H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, and Frank Herbert. Hippocampus, 2022. 342 pp. $25 pbk.
H.P. Lovecraft has long been acknowledged as the founder of weird fiction and the father of the philosophical concept of cosmicism. In cosmicism, the human creature is a being of light and order who has forgotten the true magnitude and chaos of the universe. When the human crosses the revelatory threshold, beyond which the dark truth can be seen, that creature “is afforded no option other than madness or death” (19). The cold equations of this dark infinitude and the non-human others that live in its depths are malevolent beyond imagining. In seeing beyond the illusion of a safe and manageable cosmos, the human subject is left isolated in its own insignificance, engulfed in a sea so vast that it would rather die than coexist with it. Ellen J. Greenham’s meticulously researched text explores the ways in which Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, and Frank Herbert carry this philosophy forward, recasting its demonstrably xenophobic nature as something positive and inclusive. In doing so, Greenham asks why “cosmicism as a formalized philosophical lens persists with inhabiting a subterranean theoretical quietude” (11). Why, she asks—without any sense of irony—has Lovecraft been denied the canonical status he so rightfully deserves?
In her attempt to reclaim Lovecraft’s work from what she myopically considers the abusive sidelining of “culturally driven elitism” (11), Greenham offers a complementary “philosophical extension” (19) by means of neocosmicism. In this newly articulated framework, the universe becomes a place not of insanity-inspiring horrors but a “proving ground” (239-42) in which the human being can be reinscribed as part of a greater whole. This greater whole, Greenham posits by way of vital materialism, is a sentient universe capable of agency and “empathic connection” (294) with its myriad parts. By acknowledging its insignificance in a sea of antediluvian chaos, the human being can reclaim its true significance as a necessary participant “within the chaotic tides of the universe” (288). While Greenham acknowledges the seemingly paradoxical nature of this approach, she insists on its viability given “the ubiquitous paradox on which the universe is founded” (297). Humanity, she suggests, has forgotten that instability and “ontological insecurity” (284) are the key elements of a universe craving to re-embrace its errant offspring and to become an entity entire to itself.
On the surface, After Engulfment presents itself as a well-considered academic work, with a helpful glossary of terms, abbreviations for major works, and thirteen colorfully titled chapters. In her introduction, Greenham resituates Lovecraft as a canonical figure in the history of sf and claims “the presence of a holistic textual voice across science fiction’s diversity” (9). The remainder of the text is divided into three parts. The three chapters of Part One explore the history of the universe and of various human cosmologies. Greenham suggests that the human creature’s “amnesia of the cosmos” (49) lies at the center of cosmology’s intellectual and metaphysical pursuits. The four chapters in Part Two outline the key tenets of cosmicism and adeptly introduce the work of Dick, Heinlein, and Herbert. This section includes an examination of the binary nature of the universe, the Heimlich conundrum (“A sense of damnation that the human creature feels, irrespective of the direction that creature chooses to move toward, when faced with the revelation of the universe” [23]), the common trope of human versus machine, and the consequence (i.e., the subsequent apocalypse) that results when the human subject crosses the threshold, sees the true nature of the universe, and is reduced “to a vulnerable object alone in the dark” (171). When this occurs, Greenham asserts that “the universe is a trap from which the human creature cannot escape” (180). In cosmicism, humans are ultimately driven mad because they are incapable of participating in the true diversity of the universe.
In Part Three, “Neocosmicism,” Greenham finally gets into the substance of her new philosophical framework as she revisits the now familiar works of Lovecraft, Dick, Heinlein, and Herbert. She identifies her aim in this section as to “realign the human creature’s sense of its place in the universe by taking that creature through engulfment and providing an alternative choice to cosmicism’s limited human outcomes” (195). To be more precise, Greenham reexamines the authors and their texts with the premise that a “life-affirming outcome is possible” (195). And while she notes that there are numerous overlapping, as well as contradictory, tenets in each philosophy, Greenham insists both are equally valid. In this part of the text, she revisits the dichotomies of a binary universe and refigures them as “aspects of a cogent whole” (200). As such, the universe forms a “proving ground” by which the human can become more than itself. She further reframes the madness and death of cosmicism as positive transformation, claiming that “No” shifts to “Yes” (214) and endings transform to beginnings. Although the mechanism by which this is possible remains stubbornly unclear, Greenham draws on such diverse writers as Friedrich Nietzsche, author and reviewer Russell Letson, and Jacques Lacan to elucidate her ideas. As she delves further into this increasingly complex philosophical framework, she explains that “The void” of the true universe “empties the human creature, and in so doing shatters the Lacanian mirror” (230). In other words, the illusion of being a separate entity is stripped away and the human reconnects with the oneness of the universe. Once this happens, the “previously stable ontological foundation of embodied separateness” (231) falls away so that one can be embraced by ultimate chaos.
In the aptly titled chapter, “Psychotic Universe,” Greenham draws on the ideas of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek to argue that “when the illusion of a cosmos is shattered and the human creature reaches beyond the tele-objective constraints of that illusion to enter the universe, that creature is taking up a psychotic position” (235). “Tele-objectivity” is Greenham’s term for “A restriction in the field of view that is unnoticed by an individual or framework, and which renders all that exists outside the field of view as invisible” (24). In this and other instances, it is not entirely clear how the refiguring of psychosis in neocosmicism is substantively different from the madness of cosmicism. Perhaps, though this reader remains uncertain, the difference lies in Greenham’s elaboration that “It is not only the human creature that becomes the psychotic subject, but the universe too is psychotic” (242). She elaborates: “In order to survive the psychotic universe, the human creature in letting go of measures of finitude is better able to move past schizophrenic insanity and madness, and into psychosis” (250). In this chapter, the universe has the agency “to select” (250) those worthy of further evolution, with morality situated in the ultimate concept of “species survival” (254). In order to accomplish this survival, the human creature, when faced with an infinite universe full of aliens, may choose to blend its body and genetics with the other, according to the tenets of neocosmicism.
After Engulfment concludes with a chapter titled, “The Romance of the Universe.” In it, the reader might hope for further clarification and a sense of exigency. Yet in this chapter Greenham doubles down on the paradoxical nature of neocomicism and its central focus on “ontological insecurity” (284), describing chaos as the “natural state” (287) of the universe. In this way, she claims to resolve the Heimlich conundrum. She goes on to suggest that in neocosmicism, when the human creature merges with the chaotic entity that is the universe, “that creature’s insignificance becomes significant” (292). It is through this acceptance of one’s interconnection with the greater universe, that the madness and death of cosmicism are avoided. The universe “becomes a participant in its own game” (295) thereby reinscribing madness and death as a romance between the transformed human and the dark infinitude.
Perhaps the greatest strength of this text is its careful cross-referencing and erudite intertextuality. Greenham does not draw solely on sf writers, though she does this adeptly and with abundance. Rather, she also incorporates the literary and philosophical ideas of writers as diverse as Alan Watts and Nietzsche, Mikhail Bakhtin and Lacan, as well as Robert Frost and William Blake. As she does this, she offers cogent considerations of various works by Dick, Heinlein, and Herbert, drawing connections between and among them to demonstrate the tenets of cosmicism and neocosmicism. Her consideration of Herbert’s Dune Chronicles (1965-1985) is particularly robust, with in-depth considerations of the Butlerian Jihad and the significance of the presence/absence of water on the planet Arrakis, as well as of the ultimate transformation of Leto Atreides II into the God Emperor. In terms of Heinlein’s work, she draws heavily from Methuselah’s Children (1958) and Time Enough for Love (1973), with a particular emphasis on the actions of Lazarus Long. When discussing Dick, Greenham focuses on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), A Scanner Darkly (1977), and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964). She also considers several of his short stories, with an especially memorable handling of “The Electric Ant” (1970), whose protagonist crosses the revelatory threshold to discover he is an organic robot whose entire universe is a construct controlled by micro-punched tape.
Of course, in a text exploring and expanding upon the theoretical ideas of cosmicism, Lovecraft remains the central figure of consideration. Greenham references numerous short stories by Lovecraft, as well as excerpts from his Selected Letters, 1911-1937 (Arkham, 1965-1976) and Collected Essays (Hippocampus, 2004-2006). She does not, however, address or even acknowledge the underlying racism in these collections, even as she decries his exclusion from the canon. This becomes particularly troubling as she explores the concept of miscegenation in the chapter presenting chimeras as a viable future for humanity. Despite her acknowledgment that Lovecraftian cosmicism sees this miscegenation as “an accident characterized by only negative outcomes” (273), there is no recognition or problematization of Lovecraft’s xenophobia in her readings.
Since Lovecraft’s racism has been widely and amply documented (see, for example, “The Racial Imaginaries of H.P. Lovecraft,” a website curated by Brown University), such an oversight seems profoundly and willfully irresponsible. Indeed, Greenham’s attempts to reimagine two of Lovecraft’s most racist stories—“Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family” (1921) and “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1936)—as celebratory of the human’s “adaptation of its body” (269) through a blending with something non-human strikes the reader as egregiously tone deaf. Greenham’s attempt to rewrite the “genotypic horror,” which literary scholar Mitch Frye describes as designed to elicit “genetic fear” (“The Refinement of the ‘Crude Allegory’: Eugenic Themes and Genotypic Horror in the Weird Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft” [Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 17.3 (2006): 237-54]), falls well short of the intellectual and social expectations of the twenty-first century. For, as Alberto Alcaraz Escarcega of Brown University suggests, “Lovecraft’s race thinking cannot be separated from his body of work” (“The Racial Imaginaries” website). This oversight, along with the book’s escalating emphasis on chaos and psychosis, ultimately mark it as a difficult and unrewarding read.
What is, on the surface, a meticulous work of impressive theoretical reimagining disappoints the conscientious reader, as it overlooks Lovecraft’s blatant racism while embodying its own chaotic vision of the universe as a psychotic entity. I am left asking myself, what have I have gained from reimagining Lovecraft’s universe, and those of his successors, as a “writhing, non-linear ocean of chaos” (299) whose very foundation is one of paradox and instability? Has the field of science fiction been enriched by this “philosophical extension” of cosmicism or have I, the reader, been duped? —E Mariah Spencer, Illinois State University
Ethical Imaginaries Through Genre Form.
Zachary Kendal, Aisling Smith, Giulia Champion, and Andrew Milner, eds. Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Studies in Global Science Fiction, 2020. xx+335 pp. $139.99 hc, $99.99 pbk, $79.99 ebk.
During retirement in his adopted country of Australia, Andrew Milner—the Bourdievian British sociologist who for decades has forged new cultural-materialist methodologies to help researchers better grasp the speculative-fiction literary form—has been vibrantly mentoring the next generation of PhD students and early-career scholars in sf studies, both at English and Antipodean universities. Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction is the latest outcome of those efforts. Funded by the Monash Warwick Alliance, a highly productive cross-oceanic research collaboration between Monash University (Milner’s Australian academic affiliation) and the University of Warwick (his past UK institutional home), this 14-chapter collection presents a cornucopia of rigorously applied interdisciplinary methods through which thoughtful fans of sf might tease out deep sociohistorical contexts and enlightening cultural-reading protocols to better comprehend speculative literatures from around the world.
Placing the question of ethics at its center, Ethical Futures showcases how sf stories pose questions about the varieties of futures we might consider creating, as a collective response to our era of uncertainty and crisis. Assessing an ambitious range of print science fiction from Algeria, Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, Germany, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Macedonia, Mexico, Russia, and South Africa, and the narrative craft of speculative authors from all these regions as well as from the UK and US, Ethical Futures lays out research findings on environmental ethics, postcolonial ethics, tensions between social justice and the state, and various ethical problems of alterity, in four discrete sections.
The first section, “Ethics and the Other,” marshals analyses of what we now call “worlding sf,” interrogating how world-building techniques in sf writing reflect an ethos that might place limits upon definitively representing members of groups outside one’s own. Zachary Kendal advances a rather artificial rubric to examine whether early to mid-twentieth-century sf storyworlds are depicted in totalizing or in pluralistic and open ways. Pitting Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (serialized 1942-1950) against Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We [My,1921], Kendal winds up implying that the US pulps of sf’s Golden Age reveal less ethical worlding than Eastern European “disruptive modernist” narrative techniques (6) such as those deployed by Zamyatin. In a perhaps less totalizing aesthetic argument, Sreejata Paul praises early feminist-utopian literature that is either pre-suffrage or not focused on women’s suffrage, such as the work of South Asian writer Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, whose Sultana’s Dream (1905) and Padmarag (1924) demonstrate that heteropatriarchy can be textually unworlded. Feminist rhetorical devices in Rokeya’s story world include both an inversion of Bengali Muslim patriarchy’s gender roles relative to domestic space and the public sphere, and an historical prolepsis in which the author imagines the (fictive) early entry of Bengali women into the public arena, taking the utopian form of a cross-religious association of diverse females who aid poor women and educate young girls. Reflecting a larger eco-humanist trend to unearth ethically ideal nature-human relationships in science fiction, now typified by growing sf research into animal, plant, and food studies, Joshua Bulleid takes a tour of literary vegetarianism as a hallmark of utopian systems of food production, identifying how carnivorism has been utilized to depict more violent societies.
Idealized nature-human relations are also morally desirable in “Environmental Ethics,” the book’s second section that studies the popular sf subgenre of climate fiction. Milner himself leads the charge by reviewing how effectively climate fiction has addressed, over the centuries, what he views as the critical issue of our lifetime, anthropogenic climate change. He distinguishes five kinds of climate-fiction utopias and dystopias so as to shed light on how these distinctive narrative types might help shape some of the common political responses to this urgent issue, such as denial, mitigation, and positive adaptation. Rachel Fetherston similarly embraces typology—that of transhumanism, techno-posthumanism, and multi-species posthumanism within current climate fiction. Her concept of “ecological posthumanism” suggests a reading strategy that promotes an ecocentric but also feminist-intersectional lens through which to grasp climate-change literature.
Thomas Moran’s sophisticated grasp of Chinese climate fiction would seem to caution sf fans against over-applying the Western utopia-dystopia binary when encountering climate-change sf aimed at diverse reading communities. Using Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (2006, Eng. trans. 2014) as an extended example, Moran argues for interpreting the novel’s drive towards human extinction as a “perverse utopianism” that views this looming threat not as a negative phenomenon but as encouraging readers to reject outmoded utopian practices promoted by historically unreliable models. Giulia Champion theorizes an eco-politically upside-down world where those who wield the most power over climate change are the least affected by it. Comparing Jacques Roumain’s Haiti-set novel Masters of the Dew (1944, Eng. trans. 1947) with La Leyenda de los soles [The Legend of the Suns, 1993] and ¿En quién piensas cuando haces el amor? [Of Whom Do You Think When You Make Love?, 1996), both by Mexican writer Homero Aridjis, she illustrates how ecopocalypse is produced by “years of colonial and neo-imperialist exploitation of lands and communities” (142), exploitation that equalizes human and environmental trauma.
Neo-imperialist exploitation is also the theme of the section “Postcolonial Ethics.” Drawing from Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesistrilogy (1987-1989), Bill Ashcroft asks whether postcolonial speculative fiction—which often reverses the order of colonial dominance (for instance, by making humans the subjugated and interplanetary aliens their threatening colonizers)—might be beholden to the logic of Western ethical theory, which assumes that ethics are “determined by the unenforceable obligations of the powerful” over the powerless (180). He appreciates Butler’s invention of a transcultural ethics within her storyworld, depicted through the interstitial contact zone between alien and human where the two species are mutually transformed.
Nudrat Kamal similarly views complexity and contradiction in Amitav Ghosh’s sole sf novel, The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery (1996), arguing that Ghosh deploys the genre figure of the postcolonial cyborg to offer readers alternatives to the positivistic Western scientific perspective and its impact on our visions of futurity, while ethically focusing the narrative on populations of the exploited rather than the exploiters. Lastly, Lara Choksey focuses her feminist lens on the late twentieth-century continuation of Indigenous-African gender roles within Africanfuturist and Afrofuturist sf storyworlds, through a postcolonial reading of Assia Djebar’s Ombre sultane [A Sister to Scheherazade, 1987] and Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber (2000). Defining “speculative” broadly, Choksey explains how the family of speculative genres offers tools to challenge the colonizing developmental logic of chronological time common in realist literatures, emphasizing how these writers innovate “new forms of African futurist collectivity... in which women shape its terms, imagining new political spaces in which to think the future” (212).
Finally, in the fourth section, “Ethics and Global Politics,” the collection takes aim at institutions (especially the state), testifying to sf’s power to influence, speak back to, or even transform social structures. Jacqueline Dutton holds up as two key literary moments in France the publication of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440: Rêve s’il en fut jamais [Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred, 1771], in its time an anti-royalist bestselling uchronia (utopia set in the known world), and that of Michel Houellebecq’s ambivalently dystopian Soumission [Submission, 2015], set in an “Islamicised Paris” of 2022 (236). By reframing the simplistic utopia-dystopia divide with political and cultural factors such as the rise of Enlightenment ethical perspectives in wake of the 1789 Revolution and the secular French state’s tense interaction with literary discourse over the competing social institution of religion, Dutton traces over the centuries a post-Revolution “declinism” within futuristic images of the country’s most famous urban neighborhood, as literary portrayals turned to a “city of dark” rather than a “city of light” (239).
The power of regional culture in shaping genre evolution within literary production and reception is likewise a major theme in Kalina Maleska’s critical reading of three Macedonian novels from the last 30 years, illustrating that though Macedonian authorial practices of portraying “disillusionment, pessimism, and fear” might occur in recent print stories, it is important to identify historically specific formal/thematic traits that characterize dystopia, so as to uncover regional expressions of the sf subgenre that have arisen largely due to global mass media’s influence over local film and print fiction (261). Anna Madoeuf and Delphine Pagès-El Karoui set their analytical sights on speculative “cities of the South” that have been represented in Global North pop culture (including in sf) as dysfunctional, their denizens disempowered, incapable of imagining the future other than by extrapolating forward their current problems and continuous forms of lacking. They advance two regionally informed predictions of Egypt’s future created by Arabic-speaking authors: the 2015 Cairo imagined by Palestinian American (partly Middle East raised) Jamil Nasir in Tower of Dreams (1999) and the 2023 Cairo envisioned by one-time children’s storyteller, Egyptian writer Ahmed Khaled Towfik, in his first “serious” literary work, Utopia [يوتوبيا, 2008].
Wrapping up this macrosociological section—and entire volume—with theoretical verve and renewed hope as only a Frankfurt-School-trained thinker can, Nick Lawrence conceptualizes the possibly causal connection between today’s “golden age of crisis theory” and the “flowering of dystopian realisms” that the other writers in Ethical Futures have engaged. Paralleling how the post-2008 downturn’s “new sobriety in theory” (304), wherein ardent debates over “key” political categories—including “value, labour, class and social reproduction”—returned like the repressed to academia, and how reviews of the era’s generic movements formally renovated the “landscape of the real” (303), Lawrence frames the emergence of contemporary literary modes that press “against the limits of even the dirtiest realisms” generated by earlier stages of capitalism (304). As the contradictions of capitalism turn further in on the system itself and as examples of post-capitalist futures—now laid out in literary form—become legible to critical audiences, these new forms, Lawrence seems to say, encourage sf fans to find structural openings for collective human agency.
Guided by the spirit of comparative literature and enriched by transnational translation, but nonetheless seeking out distinct originating points for various sf literary traditions as well as (some) unity of genre form, Milner et al. often wrap central questions of sf’s political stakes around the very modern production of the “utopia-dystopia” binary—a sociohistorical contrast that (past and presently) colonized countries and occupied regions often did not have the luxury to experience. Plainly universalizing generic structures are often heralded at the expense of a more complex unfolding of Foucauldian archaeologies of genre knowledge that might more accurately inform us about sf’s reception in parts of the world shaped by colonization, occupation, (sometimes violently) shifting governance structures, neo-(economic and cultural) colonialism, transnational migration and settlement, environmental racism, and regional resistance movements ranging from neofascism to decolonial independence to labor and poor people’s efforts to achieve Indigenous sovereignty. The collection’s more historical approaches to genre production and interpretation shine in their range and level of detail, demonstrating breathtaking cultural perceptiveness. What falters are the boldly formalist engagements that feel over-fixated on categorization.
For instance, while Milner aims for a Weberian interpretive insight, for an heuristic grasp of varied pop-culture tropes regarding climate change, his actual sampling of “ideal types” of climate fiction resemble rigid box-shaped Mertonian typological tables. His recent insistence in dividing sf production, world-systems-theory style, into restrictive categories of core, periphery, and semi-periphery results in overwhelmingly favoring Global North speculative fiction for discussion and in generally ignoring the richness of postcolonial sf and Indigenous Futurist literatures (with the rare exception of The Swan Book [2013] by Australian Indigenous Waanyi author Alexis Wright). Since the 1990s, these literatures have carved out a powerful presence in sf anthologies and short-fiction collections. Writers from communities relying heavily on group and networked forms of artistic resistance tend to prefer and find themselves more publishable within multiplicitous polyvocal platforms.
Still, critical questions ring out soundly and crucially from the volume’s many-layered readings of global sf: how should we engage “the other”; how might we respond to dystopian fears that extrapolate the worst possible political trends from past and present toward what is to come; how might we start to visualize as viable and executable currently unimaginable utopian alternatives? These are not just literary questions: the stories discussed in Ethical Futures represent the pragmatic dilemmas of achieving a sustainable and just futurity.—Ida Yoshinaga, Georgia Institute of Technology
Neo-Wellsian Pessimism.
Paul Kincaid. Brian W. Aldiss. U of Illinois P, Modern Masters of Science Fiction, 2021. xii+200 pp. $25 pbk.
This is the second volume in Illinois’s Modern Masters of SF series to be authored by Paul Kincaid, after his 2017 entry on Iain M. Banks (reviewed in SFS 45.1 [2018]). In many ways, Kincaid is the ideal critic to pen volumes such as this, as he has both the stamina and the skill to work his way through an immense corpus and emerge with compelling insights into what makes an author tick. While Kincaid was clearly a warm fan of Banks, he seems less won over by his current subject, asserting that Aldiss “was a writer whose work was easier to admire than to love,” his career output marked by “at least as many abject failures as towering achievements” (5) and deformed at times by a “priapic masculinity” (a phrase Kincaid uses repeatedly in this study, though he never fully teases out the critique implicit in the charge). Despite these demurrals, Kincaid affirms Aldiss as a crucial figure in postwar British sf, author of a handful of indisputable classics, and deeply involved in the aesthetic and critical evolution of the field.
One of the key challenges of a single-author study is the question of whether to organize the discussion chronologically or thematically. The former approach allows for a careful consideration of the development of an author’s career, but with a potential loss of focus on recurring patterns, while the latter, by emphasizing these patterns, can forfeit attention to the messy contingency of a writer’s life. Kincaid solves this problem by, essentially, adopting both methods: the book is divided into six chapters that focus on specific thematic figures informing Aldiss’s work—the “Warrior,” the “Naturalist,” the “Experimentalist,” the “Historian,” the “Scientist,” and the “Utopian”—but whose overall trajectory corresponds, roughly, to distinct phases in the author’s career. It is an ingenious set-up that works brilliantly in the first four chapters but somewhat loses its cohesiveness in the final two.
Aldiss’s service in the Burmese jungles during the Second World War centers the first chapter, with Kincaid arguing that it gave him a jaundiced view of British colonialism, and of British life in general, as well as a fascination for fecund visions of resurgent nature—thus, his early tales of civilizational breakdown, such as his superb debut novel Non-Stop (1958; a.k.a. Starship). The second chapter further pursues the association of “lush and overabundant vegetation” (6) with stagnation and death, in works such as Hothouse (1962; a.k.a. The Long Afternoon of Earth), Greybeard (1964), and An Age (1967; a.k.a. Cryptozoic), with the author adopting a kind of neo-Wellsian (d)evolutionary pessissism that sometimes, as in his Nebula-winning novella “The Saliva Tree” (1965), summons Wells directly.
The third chapter tackles Aldiss’s relationship with the British New Wave, and it is here, I think, that Kincaid makes his most questionable assertions. He does show, convincingly, that the impulse to experiment was always present in Aldiss’s work, even before Michael Moorcock assumed the editorship of New Worlds, and that it coexisted, sometimes uneasily, with an abiding appreciation for old-school hard sf. And he brilliantly traces the links between Aldiss’s early tales of stagnation and decay and New Wavish experiments in stasis such as Report on Probability A (1968), which Kincaid rightly sees as an undervalued masterpiece. But his insistence that “it is not quite right” to see Aldiss as part of the New Wave in the 1960s seems to me rather perverse, relying as it does on a dubious sense of the movement as being characterized by a youthful “long-haired rebelliousness” that was foreign to the somewhat staid fortyish author (68). Admittedly, Aldiss was of an older generation than Moorcock, but then so was J.G. Ballard, whose New Wave credentials are not disputed. Ultimately, Kincaid sees Aldiss as trying, during the decade, “to develop some new idea of what science fiction was and should be, an idea that was not necessarily encompassed by the New Wave but was, at the very least, liberated by the movement” (68). This strikes me as a distinction without a difference, ignoring how many older authors, in the US as well as the UK, took the opportunity afforded by the New Wave to push their work in fresh directions—e.g., John Brunner, Robert Silverberg. On what basis, then, does it make sense to see them as “not part of” the movement, unless one has a narrow generational definition of what belonging to the movement means.
While Kincaid is certainly right that the ethos of the youth counterculture “did so much to shape the New Wave” (68), this does not mean that, to be a certified New Wave author, one must have had an affirmative appreciation for sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Many of the New Wave’s psychedelic visions were tinged with dread and disgust, including those produced by younger authors such as Moorcock, Norman Spinrad, and Thomas M. Disch. Thus, Aldiss’s most obvious engagement with the counterculture, Barefoot in the Head (1969), with its corrosive vision of psychedelia as “disintegration” (72), is not the historical outlier Kincaid seems to think it is, an older author’s scathing take on the drug culture. It is, in my view, one of the most brilliantly sustained engagements with the counterculture in the New Wave canon, even if it does show Aldiss at times “trying to be hip without quite knowing how” (74), as Kincaid rather uncharitably puts it. The novel’s delirious pun-filled language seems to me to have aged more gracefully than Spinrad’s über-hip lingo in Bug Jack Barron (1968), and its satirical fusion of Ouspenskian mysticism with avant-garde film culture is superbly well wrought.
“I suspect that the [countercultural] story of Barefoot,” Kincaid asserts, was of considerably less importance to its author than the way it allowed him to play with language”—an assertion that emerges from his doubt about whether Aldiss deserves to be seen as a New Wave author at all: “I’m not sure he was ever convinced that the New Wave was the only, or the right, way forward” for the genre (69). The hesitancy of the rhetoric here—“I suspect,” “I’m not sure”—indicates perhaps the basic sketchiness of Kincaid’s argument, if it does not point to a more significant problem with his overall approach—a failure to access archival materials. Many of the best entries in the Illinois series—e.g., F. Brett Cox on Roger Zelazny (2021), Michael R. Page on Frederik Pohl (2015)—have had recourse to the authors’ papers held in research libraries; as a result, their critical analyses have been measured against the author’s own views, as expressed in contemporaneous letters and notes. Aldiss’s papers are somewhat scattered, but there are three major collections in the UK: at the University of Reading, the University of Liverpool, and the Bodleian Library. While Kincaid has read all of Aldiss’s voluminous published nonfiction, including works of memoir and autobiographical novels, material he deploys with exceptional finesse throughout the study, he never really accesses the “private” Aldiss except in speculative asides, which is rather a loss.
But it is more than made up for by Kincaid’s robust engagement with the primary texts and his undeniable brilliance as a critical reader. After his Barefoot stumble, he regains his footing in Chapter 4, which focuses on Aldiss’s post-New Wave retrenchment as a historian of the genre in Billion Year Spree (1973) and in novels such as Frankenstein Unbound (1973) and An Island Called Moreau (1980) that recursively engage with classic sf texts. Kincaid sees these “parasitic novels” (as Andrew M. Butler has called them) as interesting failures, arresting in conception but slight in execution, but also as important rehearsals for his mid-career masterpiece The Malacia Tapestry (1976), with its view of modern European history as a static wonderland hovering on the brink of technological change. The expansive scope of this novel paved the way, as Kincaid compellingly shows, for the author’s crowning achievement: the Helliconia trilogy (1982-1985), with its sweeping vision of a planetary culture transformed by seasons millennially long. A fine-grained and consistently illuminating discussion of the trilogy dominates Chapter 5, which focuses on Aldiss as “Scientist,” largely because of the rigorous world-building that went into the three books.
This is where, I think, Kincaid’s thematic structure starts to break down a bit into more loosely fitting topics, and it is even more evident in Chapter 6, which collects roughly thirty years of disparate production under the umbrella “Utopian,” largely because of the overtly utopian late novel White Mars (1999). Still, if the thematic cohesiveness of the final chapter is rather wanting, there is no arguing with the tart judgment with which Kincaid opens it: the Helliconia trilogy was Aldiss’s “last book-length work of science fiction to attract and merit serious critical attention” (138). These final three decades of the author’s career are thus, in Kincaid’s treatment, one long dying fall: White Mars is listlessly conceived, boringly written, and “marred by … atrocious sexual politics” (155), while HARM (2007), if more vigorous, is nonetheless “jerky, awkwardly constructed, and often unconvincing” (159), and Finches of Mars (2012) is simply “not well done,” a “sad, dispirited end to a career that had seen [Aldiss] become perhaps the most widely recognized and applauded science fiction writer of his generation” (162).
In the final analysis, Kincaid views a handful of stories and novels as the author’s signal achievements, especially “Hothouse, Greybeard, Report on Probability A, Billion Year Spree, The Malacia Tapestry, and the Helliconia Trilogy” (166)—a canon of masterworks to which I would only add Barefoot in the Head, and all of which (even this last, which he likes much less than I do) Kincaid illuminates with the searchlight of his fine critical intelligence.—Rob Latham, Twentynine Palms
New Tools for a Classic.
Dominic J. Nardi and N. Trevor Brierly, eds. Discovering Dune: Essays on Frank Herbert’s Epic Saga. McFarland, Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2022. 274 pp. $49.95 pbk.
In their introduction to Discovering Dune, editors Dominic J. Nardi and N. Trevor Brierly clearly articulate one of the key problems with scholarship on Frank Herbert’s works, especially the Dune series: the lack not only of quantity but also of cross-referencing and dialogue among various articles and books. Their essay collection then is an attempt to bring together perspectives from a range of disciplines and analytical approaches and to make it easier for future sf scholars to build on them. The collection focuses on the original six Dune novels (1965-1985), and although it treads some familiar territory with chapters on philosophical and historical approaches, it still offers new perspectives in these areas as well as fresh takes using game theory, Arab Futurism, disability studies, and other critical angles.
Discovering Dune is divided into four parts: Politics and Power; History and Religion; Biology and Ecology; and Philosophy, Choice, and Ethics. It also contains an appendix with a bibliography covering the scholarship that has been published on Herbert’s Dune series. In the first chapter, “Dune and the Metanarrative of Power,” Edward John Royston brings together previous analyses of power in the Dune series to argue that the series can be read as a metanarrative about the power of narratives. Royston explores the ways that Dune foregrounds its fictional and narrated nature and how the story and characters also focus on narrative control. He concludes that Paul’s cooptation of narratives to secure power shows the dangerous and tragic consequences of trying to control the human story. The chapter adds to the ongoing discussion about Herbert’s stated intention to warn readers about the dangers of hero figures. In Chapter Two, “Political Prescience: How Game Theory Solves the Paradox of Foreknowledge,” Dominic J. Nardi takes a novel approach to the debate regarding the possibility for free will to exist alongside prescience by using game-theory models to analyze the Dune universe. Nardi demonstrates how mathematical models that study strategic interactions between people provide a useful way of explaining characters’ decision-making in Dune. Through his inclusion of specific examples and figures to illustrate his argument, Nardi makes a convincing case that this approach can help reconcile the coexistence of prescience and free will in Herbert’s universe.
Chapter Three, “‘The greatest predator ever known’: The Golden Path and Political Philosophy as Ecology” centers on the character God Emperor Leto II and his long-term strategy to save humanity by means of the Golden Path. Michael Phillips analyzes Leto II’s reign and use of the principles of sociobiology as a driver of the character’s political philosophy, which readers know is a key focus of God Emperor of Dune (1981). Phillips draws on theorists Thomas Hobbes, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Jean-François Lyotard in his exploration of Leto’s beliefs and behaviors, pointing out where they converge and differ. With so few close readings of this character, this chapter provides a theoretically rich approach to Leto II as a Leviathan figure with a vision to prevent humans from falling prey to future threats. In Chapter Four, “He Who Controls Knowledge Controls the Universe: Leto II and the Golden Path,” Caroline Anne Womack also analyzes Leto II but through the lens of Robert Sapolsky’s theories on human behavior and Aristotle’s view of the tragic hero. Womack argues that the characterization of Leto II aligns with Sapolsky’s theory about human nature as unavoidably violent. Womack then explores the symbology of snake-like animals as symbols of evil and how Leto II is set apart as both The Worm and a leader whose time of peace is not one of cultural advancement or exploration but rather stagnation. In the second part of the chapter, Womack analyzes God Emperor of Dune as a work that holds to Aristotle’s view of the features of good tragedy, due to the novel’s short time frame, its empathetic presentation of Leto, and the universality of the plot.
Part II begins with Maximilian Lau’s “Frank Herbert’s Byzantium: Medieval-Futurism and the Princess Historians Irulan and Anna Komnene,” which fills a gap in the scholarship with regard to the possible historical influence of the Byzantine Empire on the Dune series. Lau persuasively points to several parallels between the novels and our understandings of Byzantium, including in the characterization of the Corrino empire and the tradition of blinding to render people unfit for rulership. He then discusses parallels between Princess Irulan and the twelfth-century Byzantine Princess Anna Komnene. Lau builds an argument that highlights these women’s success as intellectuals and authors and reviews the gender politics that have influenced how they have previously been understood.
R. Ali’s “Beside the Sand Dunes: Arab Futurism, Faith, and the Fremen of Dune” focuses on the importance of Islamic themes and terms in the Dune saga, taking a more detailed view than previous explorations. Ali makes the case that Dune is likely the first sf story conspicuously to promote the concept of Arab Futurism, where alternative pasts are explored and ideas are projected into a future where Arab identity thrives. In his close examination, Ali finds a strong influence of the Qur’an in terms of tone and style and identifies which Qur’anic translations Herbert likely used. In addition, Ali points to the influences of related scholarly and historical events that Herbert embeds in the novels as part of his world-building process. This chapter challenges the idea that the Arabic and Islamic influences in the Dune series are there merely to add a sense of exoticism; Ali offers a detailed exploration of how such influences add depth to the world but also become normalized as part of the future of humanity. In “‘A critical moment’: The O.C. Bible in the Awakening of Paul Atreides,” N. Trevor Brierly unearths clues relating to the little-studied Orange Catholic Bible to illuminate the role of this religious text in Paul’s transformation. Brierly considers Paul Atreides’s association with religion and why Dr. Wellington Yueh gives him a copy of the O.C. Bible. Through close readings of O.C. Bible passages and the phases of Paul’s transformation, Brierly shows the importance of this text in preparing Paul for his awakening and adds another layer to the scholarship on religion in Dune.
Part III deals with concerns related to biology and ecology. Leigha High McReynolds’s “Locations of Deviance: A Eugenics Reading of Dune” uses theories in disability studies to argue that Paul Atreides is a genetic deviant in a universe founded on eugenics and genetic control. McReynolds discusses how the Bene Gesserit are the wielders of reproductive power who help create a universe where genetic makeup and ancestry are critically important. Then she explores the language used to describe Paul and Alia and the deviance of their bodies within the context of a genetically planned universe. Her conclusion that Dune raises awareness of not only charismatic leaders such as Paul but also the role of institutions in producing and celebrating such figures adds complexity to prior analyses of the politics in the novel. In “From Taming Sand Dunes to Planetary Ecology: Historical Perspectives on Environmental Thought and Politics in the Dune Saga,” Paul Reef contextualizes the Dune trilogy within the history of American environmentalism and changes in ecological politics. He explains the development of the environment as a political concept in the post-World War II period, with the increase in scientific advancement and research on damage to living organisms that could be broadcast via mass media. Herbert was concerned with the development of a more ecologically minded society but without too much state interference, Reef shows, and he used characters such as Paul and Dr. Liet-Kynes to criticize the state-planned control of nature. Reef argues that Herbert anticipated future directions in ecological science in his crafting of ecocentrism, apocalyptic undertones, and connections between human society and a planetary biosphere.
Willow Wilson DiPasquale’s “Shifting Sands: Heroes, Power, and the Environment in the Dune Saga” demonstrates the importance of reading Dune along with its sequels to grasp Herbert’s full creative vision to subvert Paul as a savior figure. DiPasquale notes the emergence of juxtapositions and tensions in Dune Messiah (1969) that begin the devolution of Paul’s model of leadership set out in the first book. She then discusses each of the other sequels in turn and how they continue the theme of ambivalent heroes and show tensions in different forms of leadership between groups such as the Bene Gesserit and Honored Matres. By bringing together analyses of all six books, DiPasquale facilitates a more holistic understanding of Herbert’s themes and vision for his series.
Part IV adds to the existing body of scholarship on philosophy and Dune. Nathaniel Goldberg’s “The Sands of Time: Dune and the Philosophy of Time” draws on metaphysical views of time to explore the nature of time in Herbert’s novel. Goldberg demonstrates that the concepts of the past and present do exist in the novel and are treated as real, but the concept of the future is less clearly defined. Goldberg then brings in descriptions from sixth-century Roman philosopher Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (AD 524) to compare to descriptions of Paul’s knowledge of the future, concluding that Dune uses a growing-universe theory of metaphysics. In “The Choices of Muad’Dib: Goods, Traditions, and Practices in the Dune Saga,” Jeffery L. Nicholas considers Paul Atreides’s choices and the limitations he faces due to his education in certain traditions. Nicholas uses Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Will to Power and Alasdair MacIntyre’s theory of practices and traditions to explore key sources of Paul’s education from the Mentats, the Bene Gesserit, and the Fremen. Acknowledging previous studies of the Dune series as a response to the Nietzschean hero, Nicholas suggests that there is an alternative to the path of power underlying the choices that Paul makes that points to a beneficial perspective offered by the Fremen.
Curtis A. Weyant’s “‘I suggest you may be human’: Humanity and Human Action in Dune” examines different perspectives on humanity in Dune through the lens of praxeology, the study of human action. Weyant argues that the best developed perspectives come from the Bene Gesserit, Mentats, Fremen, and Great Houses, and he offers a study of each group in relation to its view of humans. Weyant then concludes that Paul’s character represents the most complex perspective, since he is a synthesis of these four groups and can thus take a broader view of humanity. In “Belief is the Mind-Killer: The Bene Gesserit’s Transcendental Pragmatism,” Kevin Williams argues that the Bene Gesserit attempt to avoid assumptions in language and to see beliefs as maps for action, demonstrating a transcendental pragmatism in their outlook and operations. Williams focuses on examples of Bene Gesserit trying to educate or indoctrinate others across the series, showing that their rigorous approach to thinking means that they have no fixed philosophy and rely on being masterful and adaptable communicators.
This essay collection offers a welcome addition to the field of scholarship on the Dune series as it matures in the twenty-first century. Within the space constraints of an edited collection, it manages to cover a broad range of perspectives and includes analyses of the entire series rather than just the first novel. By relying on close reading approaches and providing explanations of key theoretical approaches, it makes itself accessible to a wide audience, and it can be dipped into and out of depending on a reader’s areas of interest. Released during a time of increasing interest in sf classics that are being adapted for the screen, this collection should satisfy seasoned sf scholars as well as new entrants to the study of this bestselling series.—Kara Kennedy, Independent Scholar
The Utopian Imagination is Alive and Unwell.
J. Jesse Ramírez. Un-American Dreams: Apocalyptic Science Fiction, Disimagined Community, and Bad Hope in the American Century. Liverpool UP, 2022. xvi+252 pp. $143 hc.
J. Jesse Ramírez’s Un-American Dreams advances an original thesis about the status of what it calls “apocalyptic science fiction (sf)” in US cultural production: in the American century, the compulsive and repeated representation of the destruction of US culture, population, and state signals more than just a fixation on violence and destruction. Ramírez reads these texts as iterative attempts by the utopian imagination to find purchase in a dominantly anti-utopian world. Put differently, the utopian imagination is alive and unwell in the cultural imaginary of US apocalyptic sf from the second half of the twentieth century. Situating this archive of writing in the utopian tradition allows Ramírez to perform a dialectical reversal in the spirit of Marxian critic Ernst Bloch. That is, in these texts’ attempts to negate the US by disease, bomb, flood, and fire, Ramírez deciphers a counterintuitive hope for better collective life beyond the false reality of the American dream.
Un-American Dreams examines the period between 1945 and 2001, or what Ramírez calls the “short American century” (here he diverges from critics such as Dan Sinykin and myself on our periodization of similar archives). This timeframe grounds the text selection for the book’s five chapters. Its conclusion situates its periodization in two meaningful ways. First, the time frame under examination coincides with the dominance of atomic-bomb-influenced texts. Second, “The mobile, asynchronous experience [of media] on platform[s] that aggregate content and allow [users] to select what [they] want to watch, when [they] want to watch it, is the polar opposite of the televisual experience of 9/11” (215). One might productively describe Un-American Dreams as primarily concerned with apocalyptic sf as mass media.
Each chapter interprets a central text, including three novels and two films: George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949); Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney (1964); Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenisis trilogy (1987-1989); George A. Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead (1968); and Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996). Each entry focuses on a different cultural aspect of un-American dreams, including frontier mythology, countermodernism and evangelical belief, race and the national security state, the heteronormativity of the family, and finally the caricature of Americanization in the era of its dominance. The structure of the five chapters and selection of texts focus the book around a grand interpretation that offers rich historical and biographical detail while never reducing the readings to those details. The larger argument about the state of the US cultural imaginary is always central, but that argument is neither repetitive nor standardized. These chapters build on one another, and each can be taken on its own as a useful piece of research or an assigned reading for a graduate seminar discussion or research essay assignment.
The first chapter on Earth Abides meaningfully addresses the white settler unconscious of Stewart’s ecological interests. Ramírez situates the novel in the intellectual context of the Berkeley anthropology department, which was deeply invested in a Boasian approach when Stewart joined in the early 1920s. This emphasis on social learning is of central interest in Earth Abides as the novel tracks generations of post-apocalyptic humans raised outside of capitalist social relations. Yet Ramírez does not miss the chance to critique the dominance of the single white man traversing an empty American continent and capable of attempting to rebuild society in his image.
Where Stewart wrote literary fiction that was later repackaged as apocalyptic sf, Philip K. Dick’s writing, the subject of chapter 2, starts squarely in the sf camp. Nuclear war, in this account, is the limit point for Dick’s utopian thinking and it is something that Dr. Bloodmoney struggles to think beyond. Ramírez describes Dick as “the patron saint of American Century apocalyptic sf” because of how his character in VALIS epitomizes “the genre’s political alienation, its mass-culturality, and the Gospel’s powerful utopian promise: ‘We will not all die, but we will all be changed’(1 Cor 15:51)” (108). Though Dick struggled with his own un-American dreams, his work captures Ramírez’s thesis that the hope required for utopian thought has been “damaged” and “bastardized” by “capitalist realism,” capable only of representing the future as a return to an “outmoded” past (98).
The function of news media (radio, television) becomes central to the argument presented in Chapter 3 about Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. The title “National Insecurity in Night ...” comes from Ramírez’ reading of Susan Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster”: Sontag writes about a kind of national security sf (114) that includes news montage as part of its world-building apparatus. Additionally, Ramírez cites Survival under Atomic Attack (1951), the National Security Resources Board’s first mass-produced civil defense pamphlet, as a joint effort of the Board and the Advertising council: “The national security state forged alliances with private sector newspapers, radio broadcasters, magazines, television stations, advertising agencies, and Hollywood studios” (115). Ramírez opens the discussion of Night with the radio glitch from the opening scene. Later, characters gather around a TV in the house where they have sought refuge. Unlike the radio which signals an absence of the security state, here Ramírez notes the clear and direct transmission of “official government information” (133). The final detail of the reading that I will mention here is the scene in which the posse, having noted the Black protagonist holding a rifle (something the dead never do), shoot him. As Ramírez notes, the film is over but the images continue. Romero deploys an intermedial strategy presenting still images of the protagonist’s corpse. Once again, Ramírez develops the subtending argument about the latent and often explicit white supremacy within mass media apocalyptic sf.
Chapter four centers on alien sex in Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. While Butler splits possibilities between a conservative future and a culturally revolutionary one, the novel “never fully overcomes reproductive futurism” (148). Ramírez focuses on the ambiguity here: one can read Butler’s trilogy neither as “heteronormative wish fulfillment” nor as a kind of speculation on “queer sexualities and futures after the American century” (148-49). This ambiguity folds itself into the colonial uncertainty of the novel. Ramírez has a careful way of reading Butler again, as he explains that “meta-slavery and meta-colonialism are also ‘meta’ in that term’s other senses: among and with, alongside and between” (153). It is in this context that the chapter ultimately reads Xenogenesis as a figuration of the challenges and possibilities for parenting cultural revolution.
Finally, a white American president, a Jewish scientist, and a Black fighter pilot save the world in the focal text of chapter five. Independence Day represents the “apotheosis of sf’s secular remediation of the Apocalypse as a mass-cultural spectacle” (177), and the convergence of imaginary devastation in the commodity form. In Ramírez’s terms, the film “invited domestic and global viewers to relive and reinterpret the American Century’s founding science fiction, the atomic bombing of Japan, as the holocaust of the United States,” which leads diegetically to unite the planet in a good war that extends US hegemony into the next millennium (177). The exegesis in this chapter follows Ramírez’s well-developed method: start with the form (here CGI), track the intellectual development of the director (Emmerich famously emulates Spielberg rather than German auteurs), unpack the ideologeme of the film, and ignite the kernel of latent utopian possibility.
There is one omission in this study that I need to mention: the negation of America in apocalyptic sf is an act already underway through “the thoroughgoing deterioration of Earth and of nature” (Jameson, Seeds of Time xii) set in motion by fossil-fueled capital and settler-colonial extractivism. For a book that begins with a discussion of Stewart’s Earth Abides, I was surprised that there is so very little discussion about the environmental and climatic impacts of fossil fuel extraction, infrastructure, and consumption. Ramírez does mention gasoline in one tantalizing analogy in his conclusion: “pseudo-apocalypses are to transmedia what petroleum is to the global economy: a commodity whose elementary form can be modified to yield a variety of profitable additional commodities” (214). I do not expect every book to address every topic, but there are apocalyptic sf texts that target oil specifically, such as Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason’s Ill Wind (1995), Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1990), Isaac Asimov’s “The Nightmare Life without Fuel” (1977), and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1964). I make this comment to start a critical conversation on bad hope and energy regimes.
As a reader, I cannot stress enough how cohesive this work is in its entirety and in each of its five chapters. The tone throughout ties together the impressive mix of genre theory, cultural interpretation, political commentary, intellectual history, and biography. It balances critical theory with interpretation and argument in the exegesis of its five central texts/ideological formations. It is a pleasure to think with and a delight to read. Un-American Dreams is worth reading for those interested in the complex workings of hope for and deferral of radical alternatives to the present state of things. It is a coherent and cohesive project that presents deep research on its material from solid footing in a critical tradition. For these reasons and more, it is worth thinking with Ramírez about how to resuscitate hope the hard way, through an immanent critique of hope’s shadowy form in apocalyptic sf of the American century.—Brent Ryan Bellamy, Trent University
Fannish Feminisms.
Roz Samer. Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s. Duke UP, 2022. xii+290 pp. $104.95 hc, $27.95 pbk.
Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s by Rox Samer focuses on how potentials and futurity are expressed in lesbian feminist media. Texts and other cultural productions discussed include independent media in film, art, and fan works that articulate lesbian and feminist subjectivities. Samer draws on Giorgio Agamben’s “On Potentiality” (1999) in their readings of feminist media-making in the 1970s, extending Agamben’s framework of potentiality to closely examine how lesbian futures were articulated then. For Samer, potentiality intersects with other critical examinations of queer futurities and deserves consideration, whether or not these potentials come to fruition. In examining lesbian-separatist ideologies and the formation of lesbian activism in the 1970s, both potentials and failures of becoming are equally important. As Samer explains, “these cultural texts engender new space-times from which women might love and live differently than they do in the present but also suggest that the lesbian existence they envision need not come to be” (18). Samer specifically focuses on attentive readings of lesbian independent media productions, including feminist sf fandom that solidified as a distinct counterpublic in the 1970s (141). Although works from other formative lesbian and feminist groups are identified, here I focus on the chapters that explicitly concern feminist sf fandom.
In chapter three, “Raising Fannish Consciousness: The Formation of Science Fiction Fandom,” Samer examines the fanzines The Witch and the Chameleon (1974-1976), Aurora/Janus (1975-1990), and Khatru’s symposium on “Women in Science Fiction” (issues 3 and 4, 1975), exploring how fans engaged in a feminist critique. The chapter has two major emphases: the act of consciousness-raising for self-reflection and the use of humor in these fanzines. Samer closely attends to how fans in these explicitly feminist print networks incorporated consciousness-raising as part of fannish critique, then turns to examining how humor operates as a form of self-reflection and criticism of lesbian identities. Samer’s work differs from prior investigations of fan-studies scholarship, as it specifically examines the emotional, embedded, and situated dialogues of women fans contesting images of women in science fiction.
Perhaps the most effective investigation of fannish critique is Samer’s exploration of letter columns in The Witch and the Chameleon. They note that Amanda Bankier, as the founder and editor of this Canadian fanzine, engaged a lesbian feminist readership with news, reviews, and information about feminist sf. A series of small case studies examines Bankier’s comments and critiques about Andre Norton’s work. Samer elaborates on how Bankier returned to reading Norton after reading her work as a child. Bankier critiques Norton’s omission of lesbian identities in her fiction in a 1974 issue of The Witch and the Chameleon and Norton responds, claiming that she was bound to publishing standards and reviews from fans (sidestepping the fact that Bankier identified as a fan and lesbian). In addition to showing this dialogue between author and fan, Samer also discusses a similar case of fannish critique in commentary between Vonda McIntire and Marion Zimmer Bradley in another issue of the zine. Samer argues that the reviews modeled “new forms of sf criticism” exploring vulnerability and feminist ethics in 1970s feminist sf fandom (147). This “new form” adopts the prior fan behaviors of impassioned critique that would often initiate flame wars but differs in exploring the potentials of vulnerability and explicitly feminist ethics. I would have liked to see a gesture towards past proto-feminist sf fans and their critiques of gender and sex relations in earlier fandom in the discussion, but I understand that an emphasis on consciousness-raising in feminist fan circles in the 1970s would require a near impossible level of research.
Samer also examines how feminist sf fanzines used humor as a way of forming a “coherent and self-aware counterpublic” (173). Specifically, they examine how humor impacted and shaped the formation of WisCon, the first feminist sf convention, held in Madison, Wisconsin in 1977. At the second convention in 1978, Samer notes that the closing panel was a game in which the audience had to identify the “real James Tiptree, Jr.” from a panel consisting of “two men, a woman, and a cardboard cat” (174). Although Tiptree was not present at the convention, Samer argues that these types of engagements allowed feminist fans to engage in humor while remaining a distinct social community.
Chapter four, “Tip/Alli: Cutting a Transfeminist Genealogy of Siblinghood,” examines the lives of James Tiptree Jr., aka Alice Sheldon, Racoona Sheldon, and Tip/Alli. Samer adopts a “transfeminist genealogy” in exploring the constructed selves of the writer, seeking to disrupt patriarchal genealogies of heritage (179). In their examination of the work of Tip/Alli, Samer seeks the genderqueerness of the archives that extends into a genderqueerness in women’s liberatory sf. Through their examination of genderqueerness in these locations, Samer explores the multiplicities of identities that Tip/Alli embodied in letters written to fans, confidants, and authors. Samer points out that Tiptree’s “epistolary life” was also invoked in the activism of letters written to congressional representatives about abortion access (193). Samer then pivots to the Tiptree awards (now the Otherwise awards), drawing a distinct connection between the epistolary selves that Tip/Alli generated and the following generations who would take up the pen to write to him/her in Letters to Tiptree (ed. Alisa Krasnostein and Alexandra Pierce, 2016).
In historicizing and contextualizing the lives of Tiptree/Sheldon, Samer examines the legacies of the awards that bear their nom de plume. As a member on the board for the Tiptree award, Samer details the discussions about renaming the award, offering an insider’s perspective on the vulnerable conversations that ensued. Samer specifically locates this critique of changing the Tiptree award to the Otherwise award as continuing a heritage of feminist fannish critique of which Tiptree was a part. Samer offers a measured view of concerns from fans, including disabled communities, as well as an appraisal of Tiptree/Sheldon’s work. The piecing together of the histories of Tiptree/Sheldon with Samer’s own experience as a board member is particularly moving, offering a critical glimpse into the many connections and contentions in the legacies of feminist lesbian sf.
Samer’s work creates new ground for feminist sf scholarship, deeply contextualizing the importance of lesbian feminist fannish productions in the 1970s. Rather than taking an uncritical view of fandom as uniformly beautiful, Samer uncovers the contradictions in feminist fan circles of the period. In extrapolating critique from primary sources to reveal the time’s impassioned and embodied discourses, Samer sets a corrective to fan history in a measured and critical light. Such scholarship is as vital in our current historical moment as in the recent scholarship exploring the gains of feminist sf movements of that period. This work would be well matched with Lisa Yaszek’s newest anthology The Future is Female! Volume 2: More Classic Fiction Stories by Women (2022), which also examines feminist fandoms of the 1970s. For sf researchers and educators, these select chapters provide a valuable source for those interested in exploring feminist fan histories. It would also be suitable in courses exploring feminist sf, gender, and sexuality studies.—Kathryn Heffner, University of Kent
A Volume on High-brow SF?
Lars Schmeink and Ingo Cornils, eds. New Perspectives on Contemporary German Science Fiction. Springer Natural, Studies in Global Science Fiction, 2022. 233 pp. $109 ebk.
This collection of critical essays on German sf starts with the editors’ contention that “the significant growth and popularity of the genre in Germany in the last two decades has gone almost unnoticed outside specialist journals such as Science Fiction Studies or the Zeitschrift für Fantastikforschung” (2). It is true that the volume of research in all kinds of the fantastic has increased greatly since the foundation of the “Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung” [Society for Research into the Fantastic] and its bi-annual journal Zeitschrift für Fantastikforschung [Review of Research into the Fantastic, since 2011], but I would claim that this critical interest is accompanied by a decline in its research matter: sf. True, the annual number of new sf titles published is enormous, but most of them are self-published books or editions of very small specialized publishers with almost no distribution. Of the big paperback publishers, only Heyne, Bastei-Lübbe, and Fischer still have sf series at all. There was a time when German publishers bought almost any new sf title; now selection is stricter and it is doubtful that the sales figures of even the great names in sf are significant. Especially notable is the total disappearance of anthologies and short story collections from the lists of the big public publishers. Only semi-professional magazines such as Nova and Exodus remain for short story authors. The German sf market was always a market for paperbacks: even the greatest names in sf rarely appeared in hardcover editions. And since the release of new books in Germany, both originals and translations, is still unparalleled in the world and newspapers have ever less space for reviews, paperbacks are only rarely reviewed. In this, sf is markedly different from fantasy, which always appeared also in expensive hardback editions, and the number of new fantasy releases far exceeds those of sf. But the general book market is dominated by an overwhelming number of mysteries and crime stories of all kinds, from international bestsellers to successful mysteries located in typical German landscapes, such as the Eifel mysteries, which take place in the Eifel region of Germany. TV offers countless mystery series, but hardly any sf aside from established Anglophone series. Interest in sf has shifted from the written word to television, films, and computer games. S. Fischer made a big attempt to establish Tor as trademark for sf and fantasy in Germany with a “Fischer Tor” line, but they failed abysmally and quickly fired the people who should have given them a dominant role in the German market. Now they are back to only about 20 books a year.
Another tendency not stressed by the editors of this volume is that sf in the last few years has “invaded” the mainstream. Non-genre writers do not shy away from using sf tropes, and they are successful with it. Raphaela Edelbauer won the Austrian Book Award in 2021with Dave, a sophisticated hard sf novel about the creation of an artificial intelligence, and Xaver Bayer, another Austrian writer, won in 2020 with a collection of short stories, Geschichten mit Marianne [Stories with Marianne], which includes some sf themes. Clemens J. Setz is another prominent Austrian literary writer who often refers to and uses sf images and themes. Of the writers discussed in this book, only Theresa Hannig is an (aspiring) sf writer published in an sf series. The others, such as Karen Duve, Christoph Ransmayr, Julia Zeh, and so on, are respected literary writers. Genre writers such as Andreas Eschbach (the most successful German sf author) and Andreas Brandhorst are mentioned in the survey only in the essay by Ingo Cornils that concludes the volume. Others, including Uwe Post, Michael K. Iwoleit, Frank Hebben, and Michael Marrak, are not mentioned at all. A singular case is Dietmar Dath, mentioned in one of the chapters, who is a genuine sf fan with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of sf. His rambling Niegeschichte (Never History, Verlag Matthes and Seitz, 2019), subtitled “Science fiction as an art and thinking machine,” was a broad survey of the history of sf, a personal confession of this own infatuation with sf, and a blueprint of what sf could and should do. Central for him is Robert Musil’s “Möglichkeitsform” (possibility form); he contends that sf should explore possibilities that cannot be verified or falsified in reality. He styles his criticism after theater people such as Peter Hacks and sf critics who are also practitioners of sf, determinedly ignoring “what the leading academic and crypto-academic tribes of literary exegesis and social theory claim to have found as evidence for theories of social and cultural sciences, from Fredric Jameson via Darko Suvin to Samuel R. Delany (Niegeschichte 21). His fiction is decidedly leftist, but his greatest love is for science. Greg Egan is in his opinion the greatest sf writer, but he also admires Joanna Russ, Harlan Ellison, Robert A. Heinlein, and many others. He was an editor with the prestigious Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung [Frankfurt General Newspaper] where he still publishes long analytical obituaries of many important sf writers, and his standing as a reviewer is such that the German press will even print eulogies of Captain Future if he wants to write them. His fiction is published by Suhrkamp, which may still be the most prestigious literary publisher in Germany, but also by houses such as “Verbrecherverlag” (i.e., “Criminals” publisher) and small specialist presses, and he declared it his ambition to be published by Tor in the US. His Die Abschaffung der Arten [The Abolition of Species, 2008], a genuine sf work, was a huge success in Germany and discussed in all the major newspapers, but its English translation went largely unnoticed. Only a few books mentioned here have had any English-language translations, and fewer seem to have made any impression.
The contributions in this anthology are grouped into four sections: “New Inspirations,” “New Criticism,” “New Identities,” and “New Boundaries,” their common catchword being that everything must be “new,” but otherwise the classifications seem rather arbitrary. The “New Inspirations” deal with a Netflix series and a number of sf films. “Going Round in Cycles: Time Travel and Determinism in the Netflix Show Dark” by Juliane Blank discusses the well-received Netflix series which combines general issues of time-travel stories such as the interrelationship of past and future, philosophical questions of personal history, the inability to change history in a broader sense, and the possibility of free will, in a German small-town setting. “Popular German Science Fiction Film and European Migration” by Gabrielle Mueller and “White German Agency in the Science Fiction Films Transfer (2010), Die kommenden Tage (2010), Hell (2011)” by Evan Torner analyze the treatment of migration in sf, topics which also fill the daily press. Racism, capitalism and its ills, such as the exploitation of immigrants and the recurrence of the fascist past of “blood and soil” in a beleaguered “fortress Europe,” are typical topics of the films Mueller and Torner discuss. For instance, Transfer (2010) imagines a body swap that allows rich old sick white people to transfer into healthy black bodies.
Ecological deterioration up to the end of the world is the common theme of the “New Criticism,” which includes “Apocalyptic Greeneries: Climate, Vegetation, and the End of the World” by Solvejg Nitzke, “The Language of Ice in the Anthropocene: German Science Fiction and Eco-Literature” by Matteo Gallo Stampino, and the self-explanatory “Environmental Destruction and Misogyny in Karen Duve’s Novel Macht” by Clarisa Novello. Books discussed in this section include Christoph Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara (1995, trans. as The Dog King 2010), Christian Kracht’s Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten [I will be here in the sunshine and in the shade, 2008], and Valerie Fritsch’s Winters Garten (2015). Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara is an alternate-world novel in which the Morgenthau plan for the de-industrialization of Germany has been put into effect. The books deploy climate and vegetation as agents of dystopic human futures. It seems doubtful that many of the texts discussed by Stampino are even remotely sf, since its fascination with ice goes back to the pseudoscientific world-ice theories of the engineer Hörbiger and reports of polar expeditions.
More interesting are the novels analyzed under “New Identities.” The near-future medical dictatorship in Juli Zeh’s Corpus Delicti (2009) defines human beings according to a brutal and somewhat old-fashioned standard of bodily “health” that does not take into account standards of mental well-being, explored in “The Paradoxes of Illness and Health in Juli Zeh’s Corpus Delicti” by Mylène Branco. Roland Innerhofer in “The End of Humanity’s Monotony: Posthumanism and Artificial Life in Dietmar Dath’s The Abolition of Species and Venus’ Victory” discusses fundamental biological and cultural changes in posthumanist texts, especially Dietmar Dath’s Die Abschaffung der Arten (2008, trans. as The Abolition of Species, 2012), which combine artificial biological changes aimed at reducing the “claimed monotony” of humanity with the critical theory of Horkheimer and Adorno. Dath welcomes this development enthusiastically as offering new chances, reaching far out into the future and to other planets, and envisioning a future full of gigantic conflicts between biologically adapted and mechanical species, as well as promising co-operation reminiscent of Alfred Döblin’s Berge, Meere und Giganten [Mountains, Seas and Giants, 1924] or Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930). For Hanna Schumacher in “Coming to Terms with the Present: Critical Theory and Critical Posthumanism in Contemporary German Science Fiction,” Reinhard Jirgl’s Nichts von Euch auf Erden [Nothing from you on earth, 2012] takes a more pessimistic view: the past remains forever present and attached to the idea of the “eternal return of the same.” “Optimizing the Human: A Posthuman Taxonomy in the Works of Theresa Hannig” by Lars Schmeink examines two sf novels by Theresa Hannig that appeared in a popular sf series: Die Optimierer [The Optimizers, 2017] and Die Unvollkommenen [The Imperfect Ones, 2019]. Both discuss the possibilities of enhancing human beings and their interaction with machines, the problem of intelligent robots, and evaluating different positions toward posthumanism and various possibilities of our becoming posthuman.
“New Boundaries” collects pieces that do not fall easily into the previous groups: “Marc-Uwe Kling’s QualityLand:: Funny Dystopia as Social and Political Commentary” by Joscha Klüppel, “Beyond the ‘Last Man’ Narrative: Notes on Thomas Glavinic’s Night Work (2008)” by Kristina Mateescu, “A Utopianism That Transcends Books: Dirk C. Fleck’s Ecological Science Fiction” by Peter Seyferth, and a conclusion by Ingo Cornils, “Dark Mirrors? German Science Fiction in the Twenty-First Century.”
The essays, all by established or aspiring literary scholars, present sound analyses of the books and stories discussed, but most of them seem not to be familiar with sf in a broader sense, and unaware that the texts discussed are hardly representative of German sf as a whole but rather are forays by literary writers into the sf field; only the two novels by Theresa Hannig have been published as sf. If we believe the overall picture of German sf given in this collection, “German SF in the twenty-first century, as the essays in this volume demonstrate, tends to see the dystopian form as the ideal vehicle to explore the social and psychological consequences of scientific and technological progress” (286-87).
Only Cornil’s conclusion suggests the possibility that there might be other forms of sf at all, such as the space operas that dominate much of Anglophone sf, and mentions, more in passing, Andreas Eschbach and Andreas Brandhorst, the two most popular German genre writers, the former noted especially for his many futuristic thrillers, the second for his space operas à la Alastair Reynolds or Peter F. Hamilton. The Perry Rhodan series still continues (now over 3200 booklets; there even is a book length “biography” of Perry Rhodan by Andreas Eschbach). The volume gives the impression that German sf consists only of high-brow literary works that discuss deep philosophical and urgent social issues in a very sophisticated manner, both intellectually and artistically, which, alas, is not characteristic of most of German sf. This volume, which certainly has its merits of scholarly interpretation, is comparable to a book on English language sf which considers only such writers as William Golding, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Mitchell, and Ian McEwan. —Franz Rottensteiner
Metamorphoses of Darko Suvin.
Darko Suvin. Disputing the Deluge: Collected 21st Century Writings on Utopia, Narration, and Survival. Ed. Hugh C. O’Connell. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. viii+361 pp. $156 hc, $39.95 pbk.
It has been over fifty years since Darko Suvin’s essay “Cognition and Estrangement: An Approach to the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre” appeared in both SF Commentary (#26) and Foundation (#2), not to mention a version in College English (all 1972), which of course led to his widely influential Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre in 1979. Since then, the term “cognitive estrangement” has evolved into one of the most widely cited pocket definitions of sf, even though there is a great deal more to that book and to Suvin’s well-earned reputation as the field’s premier Marxist critic and historian. An excellent reminder of how and why he gained that reputation can be found in the 24 pieces that make up Disputing the Deluge, all dating from 1999 or later, with the latest as recent as 2020. But as editor Hugh C. O’Connell notes in his introduction, ”Suvin’s name is frequently invoked in a ready-made fashion, filtered down through many layers of commentary and hardened into an increasingly narrow set of claims” (1). In other words, Suvin sometimes seems trapped within the sphere of his own influence, even as his ideas have evolved in response to later developments, from Trumpism to the resurgence of dystopian fiction and the increasing focus of sf on the hazards of the Anthropocene (or in Suvin’s preferred term, the Capitalocene). For those who have come to view him as a rather chilly theorist, the new collection also highlights his more personal side, including some 16 poems collectively titled “Poems of Old Age” as well as memories of his own academic career, his attraction to Brecht and his early radicalization, and tributes to lost friends such as Frederik Pohl and especially Ursula K. Le Guin (who is the subject of one of the most moving poems). He also proves generous in acknowledging the contributions of fellow critics such as Sylvia Kelso, John Clute, Gwyneth Jones, and Brian Aldiss, though not surprisingly he seems particularly aligned with political and Marxist scholars such as Jack Zipes and Tom Moylan, bringing well-deserved attention to their important works. And of course he pays homage to spiritual and intellectual mentors such as Walter Benjamin, Raymond Williams, and of course Marx.
At the same time, Disputing the Deluge is not an introduction to Suvin for anyone unfamiliar with his prior work. At several points, both in the four interviews included and in his own notes on the selections, he sends the reader back to his earlier essays and books (“I must respectfully ask the reader to look them up” [128]). In fact, one of the most substantive essays in the book, “Considering the Sense of ‘Fantasy’ or ‘Fantastic Fiction’: On Ahistorical Alternate Worlds,” is a rethinking of his long-standing intolerance of fantasy as opposed to sf, partly because of the sheer volume of fantasy produced over the last several decades, and (more interesting) partly because of how fantasy can contribute to his other long-standing notion, that parable is “a key form for understanding SF and other ‘metaphysical’ genres.” “Let me therefore revoke, probably to general regret, my blanket rejection of fantastic fiction” (54). He goes on to offer an interesting new periodization of fantasy and to develop a persuasive argument that fantasy is largely a creature of history. One can understand his impatience with much of the genre simply because there are so many bad examples of it, but Suvin also constrains his own discussion by persistently dividing fantasy into two categories, Heroic Fantasy and Horror Fantasy (with a third sort of catch-all called Wonderland), even though he mentions a few writers, such as Mervyn Peake, who do not quite fit the scheme. In another essay, he examines Le Guin’s “second Earthsea trilogy” (Tehanu, Tales from Earthsea, The Other Wind [1990-2001]), cheerfully admitting that they achieve levels of cognition that he had previously claimed only for sf. “I am in a quandary here,” he writes, “as I’ve been forever and a day committed to the split between SF and fantasy” (196). This is about as close as he comes to addressing the rampant genre-mixing of the past few decades.
The second substantive essay takes on a different topic altogether. “Of Starship Troopers and Refuseniks: War and Militarism in U.S. Science Fiction (An Overview),” which begins with a rather bemused but worthwhile question as to why American sf has so long seemed obsessed by the topic, proceeds to offer Suvin’s own definitions of war and militarism, argues that American sf wavers between two extremes—a fatalistic acceptance of inevitable mass slaughter or a deep distrust of militarism and war—and goes on to consider several specific texts. Obviously, Heinlein features prominently in this discussion, but Suvin also touches upon work by Ballard, Disch, Spinrad, Dick, Haldeman, Le Guin, Card, Bujold, Shirley, Slonczewki, Piercy, and—inevitably, though with visible impatience—Niven and Pournelle. The essay is perhaps the most extended example of practical criticism in the book.
A third major focus of Disputing the Deluge is Suvin’s re-examination of utopian and dystopian literature, developed in the last three essays, all dating from 2019 and 2020. “Orwell and 1984 Today: Genius and Tunnel Vision” is perhaps the best of the many revisitings of that novel in the wake of Trumpism—Suvin reminds us that sales went through the roof during the first week of the Trump administration—since it begins by placing the novel in the context of Orwell’s other work, often problematical in terms of women and colonialism, and concludes that the novel simply “lacks wisdom” (283). Suvin clearly finds it inferior to Animal Farm (1945) and, not surprisingly, to Zamyatin’s We (1924). “Utopia or Bust: Capitalocene and Our Existential Antiutopia” develops his ideas of the Capitalocene, “the epoch of huge and extreme plutocracy” (290), and the antiutopia, which, as opposed to the far more commonly discussed dystopia, represents “a denunciation and negation of affirming eutopian orientation and strivings” (300; emphasis in original), an idea which he credits largely to Lyman Tower Sargent. The final essay, “Antiutopia in Coronisation Times: Captitalocene and Death,” sets out to place the Coronavirus pandemic in the context of his earlier arguments, suggesting the term “coronisation,” partly to remind us that human agency is involved. I doubt this term will catch on, but Suvin’s argument that “capitalocene produces epidemics” (324) is provocative. These last couple of essays largely shift focus away from literature and occasionally lapse into the dense theoretical prose that some Suvin readers find intimidating, but they dramatically underline one of Suvin’s persistent and most important themes: that we cannot separate our cultural productions, even our favorite genres, from the historical and economic circumstances of their origins. Like most of the other essays, it is supplemented by extensive notes and a detailed bibliography.
If Disputing the Deluge seems in part a mixed bag of the personal, the critical, and the broadly theoretical, at times reminiscent of the 2011 special issue of Paradoxa, Darko Suvin: A Life in Letters, the overall tone is anything but valedictory. There are indeed some ave atque vale moments; one of his more recent poems includes the lines “Once life was adventure, knowledge, glory/Now it’s anxiety, a wandering recollection, /Disappointment, protest, and reflection ... ”(259-60). But as Hugh O’Connell points out in his introduction, the final words of the book, deliberately re-appropriated and repurposed from Margaret Thatcher, are “There Is No Alternative!” (343), a phrase resonant with major themes throughout the book, from war to the capitalocene to utopia/antiutopia to climate change and pandemics. It is a reminder that, for all his reputation as a fiercely rigorous (and sometimes rigid) theorist, Suvin has never been less than an activist, and never less than passionate.—Gary Wolfe, Locus Foundation
Gender, Tech, and SF.
Sherryl Vint and Sümeyra Buran, eds. Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction. Palgrave MacMillan, 2022. 353 pp. $130 hc, $33.38 ebk.
Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction, by Sherryl Vint and Sümeyra Buran, is a strong collection of essays examining feminist sf with a particular focus on its narratives’ engagement with technology, especially to the potentially liberatory and/or oppressive effects of developments within reproductive technology. Chapter 1, the book’s introduction, “Sociotechnical Design and the Future of Gender,” does an excellent job of positioning and justifying the study and opens, appropriately, with an invocation of Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985); the authors announce that, like Haraway’s work, their study “begins from this same set of concerns about the relationships among women, technology, sociotechnical practice, lived social relations, and the capacity of fiction to illuminate and shape these entanglements” (1). Thus, the essays here grapple with existing as well as potential or imagined technologies, including reproductive technologies, that challenge our understandings of what is possible and promise to affect our lives in fundamental ways.
In its investigation of how narrative can capture and/or impact the relationships between women and technology, the book is divided into four sections: “Reproductive Technologies,” “Reimagining the Woman,” “Queering Gender,” and “Posthuman Females.” The first section is perhaps the most compelling, as the analyses go beyond identifying which technologies are “good” or “bad” for women to grapple substantively with representations of the ways in which existing or potential technologies such as assisted reproduction and ectogenesis might shore up or disrupt the patriarchal status quo. Essays in this section thus engage with texts that reconceptualize family structures and roles as well as examine the relationships among reproductive technologies, environmentalism, and power. The first piece, Anna McFarlane’s “Ectogenesis on the NHS: Reproduction and Privatization in Twenty-first Century British Science Fiction,” stands out as a useful history of the thinking around ectogenesis, including understanding gestation outside of a human body as a tool for women’s liberation, as well as to “entrench pre-existing inequalities and to contribute to a trend that sees medicine as a force for commodification while challenging bodily autonomy in reproduction” (22). The second essay, “Being an Artificial Womb Machine-Human” by Sümeyra Buran, offers further intriguing perspectives on how gender and family roles might shift as the result of advances in reproductive technologies. The next essay in this section, “Environmental Sterilization through Reproductive Sterilization in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army” by Pelin Kümbet, looks at how Hall’s 2007 novel describes an imagined authoritarian regime’s control over women’s reproduction and, in deploying forced sterilization as a response to environmental problems, renders women “controllable bio-subjects” (70). The final essay in this section, “Groomed for Survival: Queer Reproductive Technologies and Cross-Species Assemblages in Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu” by Julia Gatermann, examines how Lai’s novel “envisions alternative reproductive technologies from a marginalized, queer, subaltern point of view” (92) in order to suggest a reconceptualization of what it means to be human (92).
Part II, “Reimagining the Woman,” looks at the category of woman as a “cultural construction” (12) and takes on domestic work and automation, motherhood, and depictions of female societies. Caroline Edwards’s “A Housewife’s Dream? Automation and the Problem of Women’s Free Time,” considers the promise of automation as freedom from domestic drudgery, although, as Edwards points out, embedded inequities remain, despite automation; Edwards examines nineteenth- and twentieth-century utopian texts that explore these concepts. The next essay, a highlight of the collection, is Jimena Escudero Pérez’s “Motherhood Beyond Woman: I Am [a Good] Mother and Predecessors Onscreen,” in which Perez acknowledges that “a striking characteristic of motherhood in much sf cinema has been its absence” (140) and argues that in Grant Sputore’s film, motherhood “becomes vindicated” (151). “Gender and Reproduction in the Dystopian Works of Sakaya Murata” by Chiara Sautto follows, and Sautto positions Murata’s work within the context of contemporary Japanese debates around gender equity and reproduction. This section concludes with Chikako Takeshita’s “Cyborg Separatism: Feminist Utopia in Athena’s Choice,” in which Takeshita argues that Adam Boostrom’s work “provides an opportunity to examine how separatist feminist novels might be updated in the 21st century and contemplate what a feminist future could mean today” (176).
Part III, “Queering Gender,” begins with a collaborative piece by the Beyond Gender Research Collective, whom the editors describe as “using an experimental and dialogic mode” (13). In this “plural, discordant, and digitally mediated collective voice,” the authors “engage with the watery, mutual gestations of queer feminist SF, deconstructing the normative production of knowledge and subjectivity” (200). The next essay, Sasha Myerson’s “Making the Multiple: Gender and the Technologies of Multiplicity in Cyberpunk Science Fiction,” applies Haraway’s contention that sf writers are “theorists for cyborgs” (qtd. 227) to two 1990s novels, in order to explore how the authors create characters who refuse binaries. The next essay, “Lesbian Cyborgs and the Blueprints for Liberation” by Héloïse Thomas, explores the connection between the figures of the lesbian and the cyborg in contemporary novels, contending that the cyborg is “queer as well,” as it is at once both “close to and estranged from organic humanity” (244; emphasis in original).
Part IV, “Posthuman Females,” takes on issues including AI, disability, utopia and dystopia, food production, and reproductive futurism. A highlight is Rocío Carrasco-Carrasco’s “Becoming Woman: Healing and Posthuman Subjectivity in Garland’s Ex Machina,” in which the author draws fruitful connections between Haraway’s work and the film. Carrasco-Carrasco proposes “the posthuman as a key to understanding the intricate—yet problematic—relationship with the latest innovations in contemporary advanced societies, artificial intelligence and robotics” (261). This essay is followed by “Female Ageing and Technological Reproduction: Feminist Transhuman Embodiment in Jasper Fforde’s The Woman Who Died A Lot” by Miriam Fernández-Santiago, a compelling investigation of the intersections of transhumanist and feminist disability studies. Fernández-Santiago contends that there is an overlap in the belief that “in order to achieve a future utopian reality, there must be a transformation of established knowledge and order of things by means of (discursive) technology” (286). The next article, Nora Castle and Esthie Hugo’s “‘Growgirls’ and Cultured Eggs: Food Futures and Feminism in SF from the Global South,” suggests that the sf texts they consider are crucial in that they present marginalized women’s perspectives on food technology. Finally, and another bright spot in the collection, Kristen Shaw’s “Reproductive Futurism, Indigenous Futurism, and the (Non) Human to Come in Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God” uses Erdrich’s work to delve into understandings of reproductive futurism, biomedicalization, and biopower.
This innovative and important collection will be useful to scholars of sf literature and film, as well as to those particularly interested in the analysis of potentially liberatory or oppressive effects of current and developing technologies. In addition to featuring a diversity of theoretical approaches, including disability studies, postcolonial, and queer theory perspectives, the collection presents international voices, and the various texts analyzed throughout thoroughly evidence the editors’ contention that “the issue of who controls technology, and to what end, is an urgent one” (4).
A shortcoming of the book is a lack of attention to feminist motherhood studies, a discipline relevant to many of the discussions included in this collection, but only glancingly referenced throughout. In addition, though the essays in the aptly titled first section, “Reproductive Technologies,” pursue overlapping or similar concerns, subsequent sections are not as clearly anchored thematically. A tighter focus on reproductive technologies throughout, perhaps even to the exclusion of other discussions, might have served the collection.
Overall, however, this book is an extremely useful and timely intervention and the editors succeed in their announced goal of establishing “the importance of speculative fiction as a feminist cultural response to how technology is reshaping women’s bodies, the politics of social reproduction, and the cultural order of gender” as well as “demonstrating the importance of the genre as a place of feminist theorizing and alternative worldbuilding across a range of national and technoscientific cultures” (8-9).—Sara Hosey, Nassau Community College
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