Science Fiction Studies

#58 = Volume 19, Part 3 = November 1992

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Excursions into New Territory.

Lucy Armitt, ed. Where No Man Has Gone Before: Women and Science Fiction. London & NY: Routledge, 1991. 234p. $59.95 cloth; $16.95 paper.

As a collection of essays, Where No Man Has Gone Before: Women and Science Fiction takes a rather conservative approach to feminist studies, while at the same time it breaks new ground in its focus on a number of relatively unknown writers and their works. Comprised of thirteen essays by both literary critics and SF writers, all of them women and most of them British, it brings a variety of perspectives to bear on a wide range of SF by women writers, most of them also British. In spite of the fact that two of the essays collected here are discussions of SF film and the film industry, the main concerns of this compilation are clearly literary.

The emphasis on British writers is a timely one, since most available critical material has been produced in North America and has tended to focus upon such well-known figures as Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and, more recently, James Tiptree, Jr (Alice Sheldon), the Big Three of the contemporary feminist SF field. In SFS's latest special issue on "Science Fiction by Women" (July 1990), for example, three of the six essays which constitute the main body of the issue are individual-author studies of, respectively, the works of Le Guin, Russ, and Tiptree, while a fourth examines Doris Lessing's SF. Lessing, of course, is critically respectable by any standards, and one can count on the fact that most American readers will be familiar with at least some of her idiosyncratic but extraordinary excursions into SF. For better or worse, and in spite of a long-standing feminist distrust of canon formation, canons appear to be the almost inevitable consequences of most efforts to cultivate a particular domain of critical discourse.

One of the stated goals of Armitt's collection is to build upon Sarah Lefanu's groundbreaking study, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988; reviewed in SFS 16:223-27, #48, July 1989). As an editor of The Women's Press, which publishes an important SF series, Lefanu was in a particularly good position to introduce both British and North American readers to the works of such relatively unfamiliar writers as Josephine Saxton and Zoë Fairbairns. Where No Man Has Gone Before extends Lefanu's overview with essays on, for example, the fiction of Charlotte Haldane, Katherine Burdekin, Maureen Duffy, and Gwyneth Jones. While I appreciate the scope of this collection, and in spite of my own misgivings about the usefulness of literary canons, it strikes me as an unfortunate oversight that Where No Man Has Gone Before passes over the works of Angela Carter and Tanith Lee, two British writers of undeniable importance, with no more than a few glancing references.

I should also note that neither In the Chinks of the World Machine nor Where No Man Has Gone Before manages to resist the--admittedly overwhelming--temptation to re-examine the work of already established writers. Lefanu's study undertakes extended discussions of Le Guin, Russ, Tiptree, and Suzy McKee Charnas, while Armitt's collection includes essays on both Le Guin and Lessing. Within the context of American SF, the most significant essay in Armitt's collection is probably Sarah Gamble's useful study of C.L. Moore's short stories ("'Shambleau . . . and others': The Role of the Female in the Fiction of C.L. Moore"). One of the first women to make an impact on the American SF scene, Moore's work has tended to be neglected until quite recently, at least in part because of its conflation with that of her collaborator and husband, Henry Kuttner.

In her introduction to Where No Man Has Gone Before, Armitt includes a valuable reminder about the particular difficulties faced by SF critics outside North America, difficulties which do much to explain the character of this compilation; in the United States, she writes,

the genre has, of course, been developed and encouraged as an academic discipline for many years, and for this reason materials (both primary and secondary) which are readily available in that country are often still very difficult to obtain elsewhere. (11)

Not surprisingly, a concern with issues of alterity and otherness is central to this collection, just as it is central to both the feminist political project and the development of SF as a particular field of narrative construction. In her discussion of the "escapist literature" label which is frequently attached to forms of popular culture such as SF, Armitt argues that

Women are not located at the centre of contemporary culture and society, but are almost entirely defined from the...negative perspectives of "otherness" or "difference." As such, the need to escape froma society with regard to which they already hold an ex-centric position is clearly an irrelevant one. More appropriate perhaps is the need to escape into--that is, to depict--an alternative society within which centrality is possible. (9)

Where No Man Has Gone Before is involved in the arduous labor of laying foundations. The lack of an established British critical tradition in the field of feminist SF is one very good reason why it focuses exclusively on women writers and why all its contributors are also women. It may also explain to some extent the rather conservative theoretical strategies taken by many of the contributors: references to the writings of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray demonstrate the attractions of an "écriture feminine" approach to the analysis of SF by women (see, for example, Elizabeth Russell's "The Loss of the Feminine Principle in Charlotte Haldane's Man's World and Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night" and Gamble's essay on Moore); and recourse to myth criticism and Jungian archetypal analysis also indicates a certain tendency towards essentialist kinds of analytical thinking (see, for example, Susan Bassnett's "Remaking the Old World: Ursula Le Guin and the American Tradition" and Lisa Tuttle's "Pets and Monsters: Metamorphoses in Recent Science Fiction"). Context being all, however, it is obviously a less than useful strategy to undertake the deconstruction of a particular subject while it is still undergoing construction; an essentialist approach to its subject matter is appropriate to the aims of this particular collection.

The scarcity of critical studies emphasizing the work of British women SF writers also helps to explain the occasionally rather defensive tone of Armitt's introduction, which tends to valorize the work of women SF writers at the expense of male writers and critics, most of whom are cast--not without reason, of course--as lackeys of a conservative-minded patriarchal SF establishment. It is this rather beleaguered note which perhaps most succinctly characterizes the collection as a whole, although in itself this is not necessarily a drawback. Erica Sheen's fine historical-materialist overview of the film industry ("'I'm not in the business: I am the business': Women at Work in Hollywood Science Fiction") and Josephine Saxton's biting personal account of her experiences as an SF writer in Britain ("Goodbye to All That . . .")--two strong essays which deploy very different discursive strategies-- demonstrate some of the strengths of this collection. Where No Man Has Gone Before is a valuable introduction to an area of SF by women which is more than overdue for critical attention; it also plays a significant role in the ongoing effort to establish a theoretical-historical framework for feminist SF in Britain.

--VH.

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O Canada!

David Ketterer. Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1992. xiv+208. $27.50.

1.1. And just as the very existence of this volume is important, there can be no doubt that David Ketterer is the right person for the job, given both his long engagement with SF and fantasy of all kinds and his specific scholarly situation in Canada, and in Montréal. He is, in fact, better placed than anyone to provide a perspective on the two, different, traditions of SF and fantasy in this bilingual, bicultural country. Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy is a larger book than most uninitiated readers might expect, but, mirabile dictu, it turns out in fact not to be as large as it could have been or as this reader, upon completing it, wishes it had been. There is much more to the history of Canadian writing in the specific genres and the not-so-specific borderlands between them than most readers and students would have guessed, and we all owe Dr. Ketterer a vote of thanks for giving us at least a quick overview of this hitherto unexplored space.

2.1. But David Ketterer, perhaps a bit like many of the writers he mentions, who work not so much within the confines of definable "genres" (or "sub-genres") but rather in some less defined literary space in between, has given us a book which possibly tries to be too many things at once. Having done an extraordinary amount of research, he has chosen to give us many lists of authors and titles, both in the far and in the near past: in those portions of his book where he does so, he has created a kind of bastard bibliography, lacking only complete publication data. Many pages of Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy are filled with paragraph after paragraph of authors' names and titles, plus single-clause evaluations. Tied to this bibliography manqué is a kind of literary history that tries to do too much at once, both limning the separate developments in French and English Canada of SF and fantasy, and trying to place those developments within the complex histories of both literatures. It's not that Ketterer doesn't know a lot about his material, but rather that the vastness of the enterprise far exceeds the limitations of a single study such as this. Moreover, some of the books, like James De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder and Elizabeth Vonarburg's Le silence de la cité, to choose two novels separated by time and culture, demand critical comment far beyond what even a descriptive bibliography would allow. In such cases, Ketterer inserts little essays, one to seven pages in length, on particular works. These essays contain some of Ketterer's most interesting and provocative writing, but they break the surface of the bibliographic ocean as suddenly and surprisingly as dolphins. The reader does sometimes get a sense of reading two opposing books forced to share the same prison-house.

1.2. And yet, Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy is important for what it has to tell us about the way Canadian writers, many of them until recently uninterested in the genre limitations of the historical SF&F pulp ghetto in US publishing, have entered the realms and entertained the possibilities of non-realistic writing. If Canadian literature is a useful example of colonial and post-colonial writing (and I believe it is), Canada's special geographical relationship to the United States combined with its inherited cultural debts to Great Britain and France have provided its writers with a special sensitivity to, and potential ability to write between, the literatures of the imperial powers. Thus, while many of its writers in both languages shared with their European cousins a sense that an individual writer could write works both realistic and fantastical, and that the latter need not be relegated to a low, popular-culture ghetto, they also could not help feeling the exhilaration that attaches to popular culture in the US. While the older writing, up until the 1930s anyway, tends to follow European models, and quite often to be allegorical, most often in a specifically political fashion, more recent writing happily mixes high and low, generic and non-generic attitudes, and--taking for granted both Heinlein and Ballard, Tolkien and Borges, or in French Canadian writing, both English-language SF and fantasy and the profound inheritances of European surrealism, Kafkaesque allegory, symbolisme, and magic realism--becomes something uniquely itself. Ketterer manages, even within the somewhat rushed cataloguing of much of this book, to demonstrate how these varied influences combine to create a number of innovative fictions.

2.2. But still, his format does force him to imply much more than he actually says about the formal history of such kinds of writing in Canada, and I, for one, suspect he could have gone on at some length about such formal developments if only he had been able to find a place for such a discussion here. The hints he offers, especially in his discussions of such non-genre works as Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage and Anne Hébert's Les Enfants du sabbat and Héloïse, suggest that he has much of value to say about the ways in which genre-identified criticism could bring some new views to the reading of such works, and could be brought to new views of the genre through such readings. This is, of course, not what he has set out to do here, but the possibility is implicit in some of his mini-essays, and it is in some ways more exciting a prospect than what he has given us. However, he has set himself a more specific task, and has assumed that his audience will be readers whose background relates mainly to the conventional popular genres of his title. He therefore gives a lot of weight to those writers who have "made it" in the US magazines and with US genre publishers. He has interesting things to say about A.E. van Vogt and Gordon Dickson, both of whom went to the US, as well as Phyllis Gotlieb, who stayed in Canada but nevertheless was for a long time the best known Canadian SF writer in American SF circles. And in the present, when so many younger English-speaking Canadian writers are making important contributions to the genres, he provides useful if insufficiently full introductions to the works of Guy Gavriel Kay, Charles de Lint, William Gibson, and Robert Charles Wilson.

1.3. And, as if all that isn't enough, he provides an even more helpful and interesting introduction to francophone writing, a wonderfully rich and energetic scene, which, sad to say, remains far too little known outside the borders of Québec, due mainly to a lack of translations. Indeed, perhaps the greatest value of Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy for the majority of its readers (especially those outside Canada) is that it alerts them to new and exciting writers--and not only the francophones but also those English Canadian writers who are well known in Canada as poets and novelists, but whose novels, stories, and poems have escaped notice by general readers of SF and fantasy. For many of us, sadly, although it will be interesting to know that so many French-language texts exist, they will remain beyond our grasp until they achieve translation (thus Vonarburg's The Silent City, Esther Rochon's The Shell, and various short stories collected in the three Tesseracts anthologies are of major importance in presenting many Québec writers to a wider North American audience). I hope, however, that Ketterer's critiques of James de Mille's great 19th-century novel, Howard O'Hagan's Tay John, Gwendolyn MacEwan's wonderful novels and stories, and Timothy Findley's masterful unmaking of the Genesis myth, will tempt readers (W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe is already well known, if only through the film Field of Dreams) to those texts beyond the boundaries of the genre. Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy may do more for Canadian literature as a whole than for its specific reference group of writings if it entices some readers to try the works that don't fit the usual category definitions; if so, I won't complain.

2.3. But again, I can't help feeling that the constraints of trying to cover everything have led Ketterer to undermine the most interesting writing in his book. Personally, I would have preferred a collection of essays on those Canadian novels and stories he found most interesting as examples of the kinds of writing he is discussing here, with a detailed bibliography of everything else in the second part. But such an approach would have interfered with the larger historical canvas he seems to wish to paint, and although I might suggest that a separate essay on historical developments in each literature would have served the purpose well enough, he could logically respond that he wanted to incorporate all the various aspects of his study into one narrative. Nonetheless, with its little histories of Canadian fandom, its sporadic references to children's SF, and an occasional bow to the few examples of criticism, too often this narrative loses focus; and given the quality of the writing when the focus is there, that's too bad. There is also the unavoidable problem of errors of fact in such a wide-ranging study. It is perhaps a matter of sheer bad luck that I am personally involved in two such errors and thus able to point them out: I really do wish that my little monograph on Joanna Russ had been published by T-K Graphics back in 1968, but it wasn't, even though the single bibliography on Canadian SF somehow thought it was; and, although I am a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of Speculative Writing, it was founded by The Copper Pig Writers' Society and not by that board. These are perhaps minor glitches in such a wide-ranging scholarly text, but they point to the unavoidable difficulties of such an effort. Finally, as good as the inserted essays on individual works are, in many cases the constraints of space appear to have forced Ketterer into writing less than he could have. He is good on Gottlieb's SF, but there are a number of complex aspects of her work that he is forced to allude to without providing the kind of critical comment I know he could. Possibly time as much as space forced him to do no more than mention Kay's ground-breaking high fantasy, Tigana, in one short paragraph, after three pages of introductory analysis of The Fionavar Tapestry (a trilogy that itself deserves a more complex reading than he can give it in such limited space). Given the general ignorance among readers of SF and fantasy of the non-generic works mentioned above and of the French Canadian texts, I am pleased that he gives a fair amount of space to them. Yet since his best writing is found in these more specific critical essays, I can't help wishing that he had been given an extra hundred pages or so in which to expand them to a length and complexity concomitant with their subjects.

2.4. And yet, even given all the carps I have registered, Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy must be seen as a major contribution to scholarship, and a convincing rallying cry to Canadian writers. I have not mentioned Ketterer's intriguing and convincing short essay at definitions in his opening chapter--again a piece of writing I wish were longer and more complex and complete than it is--which opens the way for his inclusion of works that might otherwise have seemed outside the boundaries of his inquiry. But it is precisely his ability to place so many disparate works together and demonstrate the qualities that open them to the interested readership of his book that most deserves praise. There are local traditions deserving of attention; there are books and stories of real merit; there are writers who have added much to the international traditions in which they write: Ketterer has shown us something of their contribution here, and I can recommend his study to anyone who wants to know more about the Canadian presence in those traditions.

--Douglas Barbour University of Alberta.

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Approaches to Popular Narrative.

Jerry Palmer. Potboilers: Methods, Concepts, and Case Studies in Popular Fiction. London & NY: Routledge, 1991. viii+219. $69.50 cloth, $16.95 paper.

Harriett Hawkins' Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in High Literature and Popular Modern Genres (University of Toronto Press, 1990) and Thomas J. Roberts' An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (University of Georgia Press, 1990) both mount potent critiques of the conventional elitist assumptions which condemn genre fiction as unworthy of serious study, outlining alternative criteria for evaluating popular literature. Jerry Palmer's Potboilers: Methods, Concepts and Case Studies in Popular Fiction would seem to belong in their company, yet closer scrutiny belies the promise of its title.

The title, as Palmer observes, "refers directly to the notion of narratives as a commodity" (37), yet this fact never really informs his discussion, which seldom analyzes specifically commercial considerations in the production and reception of popular fictions. His approach is primarily textual and, while he does occasionally remark the formal impact commercial institutions have on the material they purvey, he doesn't pursue the matter systematically, and he never engages broader sociological issues involved in the commodification of fictional texts. This is an unfortunate omission and makes his title seem rather arbitrary. Actually, his subtitle comes closer to capturing the animating purpose of the volume.

The book is divided into two major sections: Concepts and Methods, which reviews and synthesizes major approaches to the study of popular fiction (especially structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and Marxism), and Case Studies, which applies these approaches to four selected areas: crime fiction, romance fiction, soap opera, and sitcoms. Palmer construes the category of "fiction" to refer to any example of narrative offered to a mass audience, regardless of the medium; part of the purpose of his book is to elaborate an analytic model adequate to the study of literary, filmic, and television texts. But the effect of this approach is not merely to confuse at times the textual dynamics specific to different media, but more tellingly to raise further questions about his title.

Why, if his model covers any instance of narrative, should he restrict its application to "popular" instances? Precisely what is a popular narrative, by his lights, and in comparison with what? Some sort of assumption about invidious critical borders segregating "high" from "low" culture seems to inform his discussion (his dedication calls for the shattering of the "Berlin Wall" separating the two), but this assumption is never played out in the text, never overtly thematized or debated. Again, the putative focus on "potboilers" seems arbitrary.

The "concepts and methods" Palmer outlines in the first part of the book will be familiar to anyone who knows 1960s French structuralism, particularly the work of Ronald Barthes, Gerard Genette, and Tzvetan Todorov, with their meticulous analyses of the formal elements of narrative; the theories developed at the film journal Screen in the '70s, with their supple fusion of structuralism and psychoanalysis yielding fruitful models of subjectivity; and the more recent efforts of the critics at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham, with their revival and revision of Gramscian theory generating sophisticated accounts of mass culture's imbrication with social power. Palmer summarizes his synthesis of these critical traditions as follows: "narrative produces subject positions, which are manipulative because they tend to slot people into a system of domination; yet they have an element of authenticity because they also defer to people's real emotions about that system" (111). This quote displays the shallow and rather mechanical grasp Palmer has of his "concepts and methods."

As a survey of important contemporary positions in the analysis of narrative, his book does not improve on existing studies, such as Seymour Chatman's Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Cornell UP, 1978) or Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (Methuen, 1983), both of which Palmer relies on fairly heavily in his own account, and of course it cannot hope to replace the excitement and challenge of reading the original sources. Moreover, since, as we have seen, Palmer makes no compelling case for the extrapolation of these positions specifically to the analysis of "popular fiction," his whole book seems rather arbitrary. After all, the critical traditions he rehashes had already applied their methods to popular texts: French structuralism to genre literature, the Screen critics to classical Hollywood cinema, and the Birmingham School to television. In fact, Palmer calls on this work quite often in his "case studies" section, making his volume altogether an unnecessary redaction of analyses conducted better elsewhere. A recent anthology edited by Tony Bennett, Popular Fiction: Technology, Ideology, Production, Reading (Routledge, 1990), draws together much of the case-study material Potboilers merely summarizes (including sections on detective fiction and TV sitcoms), and is recommended over Palmer's tepid overview.

The only section of Palmer's book that is directly relevant to the concerns of SF scholars is his chapter on "Genre," which concludes the first part. Again, this chapter is basically a summary of major contemporary positions, with a few scanty close readings tossed in for illustration. These examples are almost entirely drawn from crime fiction and film, which is only appropriate since Palmer is also the author of Thrillers (Edward Arnold, 1978) a study of the form. Palmer's main purpose in this chapter, besides providing Cliff's Notes to the critical literature, is to distinguish between two broad approaches: "studies in which what is sought is a tight, exclusive definition, where the boundaries between belonging and not belonging to a genre are clear; and studies where a loose definition is sought, where genre is not a precisely ordered group of texts, but...one regime among others of the organization of intertextuality" (121-22). His clear preference is for the first approach, and he offers his own Thrillers as an instance; the second approach is exemplified by Tony Bennett's and Janet Woollacott's Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero(Methuen, 1987), which tracks the figure of James Bond across diverse media, never attempting to fix him within a single genre governed by rigid principles of operation.

Having read both books, I can say that the latter is by far the more wide-ranging and suggestive, offering insights into cultural and sexual politics that a rigorous focus on a single genre would not have yielded. But then, I must admit that I am pretty much convinced by Bennett's attack on exclusivist definitions of genre in his Outside Literature (Routledge, 1990; see especially chapter 4, "The Sociology of Genres: A Critique"). Outside Literature, by the way, also contains a scathing assault on aesthetic definitions of literature which dismantles the elitist categories responsible for, among other things, policing the divisions between high and low cultures. In other words, it does the business (quite incidentally to its main purpose, which is a brilliant critique of the tradition of Marxist aesthetics) that Potboilers seems to promise and never delivers. I would prefer it, as well as the Hawkins and Roberts volumes mentioned above, over Palmer's book, which is essentially a critical potboiler.

--Rob Latham Stanford University.

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A Mexican Study.

Gabriel Trujillo Muñóz. La Ciencia Ficción: Conocimiento y Literatura. Mexicali, B.C.: Instituto de Cultura de Baja California, 1991. 349pp. Price not known.

This comprehensive theoretical study of SF, awarded the 1990 Literary Prize in Baja California, is by one of the most fecund promoters of the genre south of the Rio Grande: Gabriel Trujillo (b. 1958), a surgeon, fiction writer, and scholar. Divided into three major parts (the history of SF, contemporary SF, and science and fiction), the volume, never labyrinthine, always objective with a clear and engaging prose, details the development of fantastic, utopian, philosophical, speculative, and imaginative literature from Plato and Aristotle to H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and onwards. Basing his arguments on the diverse works of Darko Suvin, Tzvetan Todorov, Franco Ferrini, Jean Gattégno, Isaac Asimov, Robert Scholes, and Mark Rose, Trujillo's ambitious goal is to delineate the boundaries of SF vis-à-vis the progress of science and technology from the Enlightenment to the present. And he is not constrained to written texts; some pages are also devoted to the development of futuristic films, from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Although at times he is derivative and unoriginal, the fact that a study like this was produced in Spanish is already a triumph of the spirit.

The book's most important contribution is found in Appendix I, on SF in Latin America, to which, for obvious reasons, I will devote the bulk of this review. Although Trujillo never discusses in depth the various reasons why SF, while popular in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Israel, lacks support across the Rio Grande, he does offer a list of famous practitioners. He begins with Pedro Castera (1838-1906), the Mexican author of Viaje Celeste (Celestial Voyage). A depiction of the epistemological trip of the human soul through the cosmos, the journey begins on Earth, continues on Jupiter and Neptune, and ends when the voyager, disoriented and with the hope of returning home, rides on a comet. Strictly speaking, to consider Castera's text an SF title may be misleading, for one would inevitably be forced to apply the same approach to Primero Sueño (First Dream), a poem written at the end of the 17th century by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, also about a voyage in the tradition of Cicero and Kircher through the natural and supernatural. The two are philosophical portraits of the limits of earthly knowledge, and metaphorical meditations on human life.

The list of titles offered includes the novel Viaje maravilloso del Señor Nic Nac (The Marvelous Voyage of Mr. Nic Nac) by Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg (1852-1937), published in 1875. Then come the poets of the Modernista movement, a sort of late Romanticism with peculiar tones that swept the Hispanic world, from Mexico City to Buenos Aires, and even the Iberian peninsula, from 1885 to 1915. Among its members were the celebrated homme de lettres from Nicaragua, Rubén Darío (1867-1916); the Argentine Leopoldo Lugones (1878-1938), a lover of fantastic tales; and Armado Nervo (1878-1937), a Mexican poet and diplomat. Each of them, as well as others of the time, wrote SF tales that include robots and mad scientists. While Trujillo never studies the aesthetics that marked the work of these literati, he refers to almost unknown material valuable to scholars in the field, including the following stanza (with my translation) from a poem in Nervo's El Gran Viaje (The Great Trip), written in 1918:

Quién será en un futuro no lejano
El Cristóbal Colón de algunos planetas?
Quién logrará, con máquina potente, sondear el
océano del éter y llevarnos de la mano
allí donde llegaron solamente
los osados sueños del poeta?
Who will be in not a distant future
the Christopher Columbus of some planets?
Who will succeed, with a powerful machine, in deciphering
the ocean of ether and take us hand in hand
where only the courageous dreams of poetry have reached?

No doubt a thorough examination of SF among the Modernistas is needed. What is curious, even if Trujillo does not quite address the issue, is the fact that the majority of SF texts written by the founding fathers in Latin America, including Darío and his colleagues, deal with the idea of voyage: the individual struggles to understand reality with the help of dreams, drugs, and imaginative devices that allow him to wander through known and unknown spaces. The result is sometimes inspiring, sometimes humorous, and once in a while pedantic.

What Trujillo does is offer some clues as to the art of the more celebrated practitioners of the futuristic genre in Latin America. Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937), a Uruguayan follower of Poe, was the author of detective and SF stories later emulated by Julio Cortázar, Cristina Peri Rossi, and others. Jorges Luis Borges (1899-1986), a passionate reader of Jules Verne, Thomas More, and Emmanuel Swedenborg, created his famous tale "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" after reading C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet.* [*See my essay "Borges and the Future," SFS 17:77-83, #50, March 1990, reprinted in part in Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers, ed. Noelle Watson and Paul E. Schellinger, 3rd ed. (Chicago & London, 1991), 915-16.] Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914-) has written a number of SF stories and the novel La invención de Morel (1940; Morel's Invention), inspired by H.G. Wells, which Borges described as perfect. Roberto Arlt (1900-1942) was an eccentric like Boris Vian who dreamed bizarre future realities and used them in his shocking novels.

The second part of this appendix is devoted to SF writers of the second half of the 20th century, like Hugo Correa, author of the 1959 Los altísimos (The Tall Ones), Eduardo Goligorsky, the Argentinian author of A la sombra de los bárbaros (1977; In the Shadow of the Barbarians), and Angélica Gorodischer, who published Kalpa Imperial (Imperial Kalpa) in 1983.

Gorodischer, the only woman in the last group and a celebrity of sorts, is also the author of a story translated into English as "Man's Dwelling Place" and often anthologized in the United States and Europe. It begins:

We entered the city at 8:30 a.m. local time. I must bring Your Lordship's attention to the fact that members of the crew under my command seemed uneasy, almost frightened. At times I attributed their condition to the peace and quiet-- I don't think I was mistaken. It was a clear day, the weather was mild, and the sun, the breeze and the grasshopper made us think of a fairly advanced spring. (Alberto Manguel, ed. & trans., Other Fires: Short Fiction by Latin American Women [NY: Clarkson N. Potter, 1986], 88-94)

What follows is an image of an infernal, tantalizing planet. Trujillo does not mention this story in the appendix, nor does he study those he does mention with care: he rushes, as if anxious to get to the end. He has nonetheless made a valuable contribution to the study of SF in opening a window on an area seldom examined by scholars: SF south of the Rio Grande. And although a more rigorous examination of the topic is required, his book, by placing Latin American SF in the context of the genre's development at large, is proof of a passion for the art of Stanislaw Lem and Philip K. Dick, one beyond language, time, and space.

--Ilan Stavans Baruch College

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Toward an Annotated 1984?

Michael Shelden, Orwell: The Authorized Biography. NY: HarperCollins, 1991. xi+497. $25.00. Jonathan Rose, ed. The Revised Orwell. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1992. vii+263. $27.95 cloth, $15.95 paper.

A rapid check through the back issues of SFS indicates that in the 20 years of the journal's existence it has published only two articles on Orwell, which may be explained by the perhaps unjustified feeling that 1984 is not a difficult book and that such study as it needed had already been done by esteemed critics in numerous essays, especially the 11 collected by Raymond Williams in the Twentieth Century Views volume, George Orwell(1974), which should have settled most matters but evidently did not. Michael Sheldon is undoubtedly correct in saying that 1984 is Orwell's most misunderstood work (430), but it seems to me that the misreadings have tended to be tendentious if not willful. In a review-article in SFS #19 (6:327-32, Nov 1979), Robert M. Philmus pointed out the deficiencies in five recent books, ending with the statement, "As long as Orwell continues to attract partisans rather then interpreters, he will not need enemies"--a sentiment echoed by Jonathan Rose in dismissing the flood of 1984 articles on 1984 as concerned, each in its turn, with arguing that if Orwell were still alive he would share the political views of the author (1). This flood did not overflow the banks of SFS: although it did publish in its July 1985 issue (#36) a special section, "To 1984 and Beyond," only one of the five essays was concerned with Orwell's novel. In "Reaction and Nihilism: The Political Genealogy of Orwell's 1984," Nadia Khouri explored the novel's dystopian ancestry more thoroughly than had previously been done, whether or not she undervalued the novel's achievement (as I think she did).

Shelden's masterful biography has been reviewed so widely, so favorably, and (in the six reviews I have read) at such length that there would be little point in my going over the same ground, a temptation I resist in part because I remain enough of a New Critic to doubt the value of biography for the interpretation of a novel, though granting that the interrelations between the author's life and a given novel can be interesting in their own right. To the great body of comment on 1984, Sheldon's main contribution is an explicit account of such interrelations, scattered through the book and summed up in chapter 22.

In his introduction, Jonathan Rose claims value for the articles in The Revised Orwell on the basis that they demonstrate that Orwell "revealed himself in his manuscript revisions; in his inveterate political revisionism; in the refashioning of his name and his persona; in his habit of turning on himself, of challenging and overturning his own convictions; in the way he borrowed and reworked pieces of other texts and incorporated them in his own writings" (2). Except for Rose's own "Eric Blair's School Days," which revises Orwell's own account of his youth in "Such, Such Were the Joys" (a matter treated at greater length and with greater authority by Shelden), the articles on this theme--by Alex Zwerdling, Sue Lonoff, Daniel Kies, Laurence M. Porter, Arthur M. Eckstein, W. Russel Gray--are all worthy efforts to prove something I have never doubted: that Orwell's literary art in 1984 is more conscious, more complex, and more successful than its detractors have found it to be.

The other essays in this collection are less concerned with Orwell's literary art than with his sources and influence. William E. Laskowski Jr's "George Orwell and the Tory-Radical Tradition" should be compared to the Khouri essay mentioned above. Arthur M. Eckstein's "George Orwell's Second Thoughts on Capitalism" makes no mention of an earlier study on much the same subject, Ruth Ann Lief's Homage to Oceania: The Prophetic Vision of George Orwell (1969). In what are perhaps the two most interesting articles in the book, John Rodden deals with the ways in which Orwell has figured in the London literary scene.

Rose's second article in the volume, "The Invisible Sources of 1984," is concerned with books not mentioned in Orwell's writing and, it may be said, not likely to be known to mainstream critics (i.e., British scientific romances that Orwell might have read). Rose seems to have found his titles in I.F. Clarke's Tale of the Future (3d ed., 1978), though he found one likely candidate perhaps not listed by Clarke (it is not listed in the 2d ed.): 1920: Dips into the Near Future (by "Lucian," 1917 in the Nation, 1918 as a booklet). "If you were to take the political ideology laid out in [Stapledon's] Darkness and the Light, and the machinery of totalitarian controls described in 1920, and the plot and characters of [Alfred Noyes'] The Last Man [US title, No Other Man]; and if you then welded these three structural elements together, you would arrive at the complete basic framework" of 1984(146). Perhaps; but as Rose grants before making this proposal, the dystopian fiction of the time had a "pool of traditional motifs, cliches, and conventions," so that if Orwell was widely read in such fiction, "he would have most likely absorbed and reused [such devices] in his own work" (145-46). As one rather widely read in British scientific romance, I may perhaps be permitted to add that the British book that seems to me to anticipate 1984 in more details than any other (with the possible exception of 1920, which I have not read) is one not mentioned by Rose: Victor Rousseau's The Messiah of the Cylinder.

Just as Brave New World is a novel of the great depression, so 1984 is a novel of the wars and politics of the 1930s and '40s. Any academic old enough to have read the novel in the light of first-hand knowledge of the '30s and '40s is likely now to be retired from teaching. This thought came to me upon reading that Victoria Chalikov in 1989 had been the first to "confront Russian readers with the fact that their country was Airstrip Two" (2). It is not clear whether the phrase "Airstrip Two" appears in the essay cited or is Rose's coinage, but at any rate it stands in Rose's introduction without comment, just as if it were an appropriate term for Russia. If 1984 and Brave New World continue to be taught in high school and college (as they deserve to be), annotated editions seem to be needed.

--RDM.

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New SF Study from France.

Roger Bozzetto. L'Obscur objet d'un savoir: Fantastique et science-fiction--deux littératures de l'imaginaire. Aix-en- Provence: Publications de l'Université de Province, Aix-Marseille I, 1992. 279p. 170FF paper.

Professor Bozzetto's 1988 doctoral thesis has finally found its way into print, and the resulting publication is both unique and impressive. I say unique because it stands as one of those rare books which target both the Fantastic (horror) and SF (science and/or speculative fiction). It seeks not only to trace the emergence and evolution of these two genres as parallel examples of Western non-mimetic literature but also to investigate the thematic, stylistic, and socio-historical links between them. I say impressive because of Bozzetto's meticulous and up-to-date scholarship in both realms. Copious notes at the end of each chapter, continual cross-referencing, and an extensive bibliography and index serve to provide a strong critical backbone to his arguments. The study is divided into five parts: 1) Emergence and origins, 2) Historical evolution, 3) Myth and representation, 4) Critical receptions, and 5) Modern mutations. Selected portions of the first two chapters have previously appeared in the pages of SFS ("Intercultural Interplay: SF in France and the US," #50, March 1990, and "Kepler's Somnium, or SF's Missing Link," #52, Nov 1990).

As a wide-ranging yet penetrating literary history of both SF and the Fantastic, I recommend Bozzetto's study. Simultaneously reminiscent of Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science Fiction and Rabkin's The Fantastic in Literature, it charts new critical territory in its attempt to "bridge the gap" between these two (increasingly) disparate areas of literary criticism. One minor complaint, however: as a university press publication, this book is brimming with editorial oversights, typos, and misprints. The author has included an errata sheet, but it doesn't begin to rectify the unusually sloppy copy-editing of the publisher. A real shame: Bozzetto's fine treatise deserved better.

--ABE.

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Reference Reference and Personal Privilege.