Science Fiction Studies

Most magazine writers, Boucher went on to argue, were merely reviewers (here he modestly included himself and, among several others, the longtime reviewer for Astounding/Analog, P. Schuyler Miller), while Knight was unquestionably a critic.

We may no longer entirely accept Boucher's exalted criteria for the critic (which of us now believes in "nearly absolute standards" of judgment?), but I think we can still agree that his distinction is a fruitful one. The genre was lucky during those years to have critics like Knight and Budrys writing book reviews, offering insight into historical trends and helping to establish elevated measures of literary quality. Today, however, save for Norman Spinrad's occasional pieces for Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (see the material collected in Science Fiction in the Real World [So. Illinois UP, 1990]), sf periodicals are dominated by reviewers. This is emphatically true of Tom Easton, who has been Analog's regular book reviewer since 1982, and of his book Periodic Stars, which gathers 250 reviews published in that journal between 1986 and 1992.

Easton's claim, in his subtitle, that his book constitutes an "overview of SF literature in the 1980s and '90s," is thus significantly overblown. An overview implies a general summation--of trends, patterns, themes, etc. Here, no such survey is provided; rather, the book consists of a compendium of individual reviews, alphabetized by author, each roughly a page in length. These reviews have been only minimally edited, and thus constitute Easton's immediate reactions to the volumes he was assigned. His basic goal in evaluation, as he announces in his introduction, was (and presumably still is) "helping my readers decide whether to rush out and buy their own copies" (7). Since many of the titles reviewed are long since out of print, and since those which have survived their initial publication are worthy of being judged by more demanding standards than this essentially utilitarian one, Easton's advice is no longer helpful. If Easton were a major sf author in his own right (as are Knight, Budrys, and Spinrad), his scattered opinions might provide intriguing obiter dicta, but he is not. Frankly, it is difficult to understand why this book was published at all.

Even as a gathering of reviews, Periodic Stars is wanting, since many major titles of the period are not covered. Of the seventeen novels that won the Hugo, Nebula, or John W. Campbell Memorial awards between 1986 and 1992, Easton treats only seven. Moreover, what he does cover generally tends to indicate the adventure and hard-sf orientation of Analog magazine: for example, nine books by Mike Resnick, six by Ben Bova, and five each by Jeffrey A. Carver, Michael P. Kube-McDowell, William T. Quick, Charles Sheffield, and Walter Jon Williams are reviewed, most of them very minor works (Easton even includes titles by these authors in sharecropper series such as ISAAC ASIMOV'S ROBOT CITY and ROGER ZELAZNY'S ALIEN SPEEDWAY). Of course, he does also discuss some important writers (seven titles by Orson Scott Card, six each by Greg Bear and Gene Wolfe, etc.) and even a bit of fantasy, though the latter tends clearly to be personal favorites (seven books by Charles de Lint, four by Esther M. Friesner). But, in general, the coverage is spotty and inconsistent, based not on a judicious gleaning of representative texts but on the deadline-pressure inspection of whatever caught his fancy or crossed his desk during these months.

Happily, Easton knows his limitations, claiming not to be a critic--someone, echoing Boucher, who "dwell[s] upon what a book means, how it stacks up against the author's past performance and against the standards of literature, and whether it deserves to survive for a century or so"--but only a lowly reviewer, whose "job is not to judge books for the ages but to tell readers enough about a book to give them some idea whether they would enjoy it" (9). Going even further than Boucher, however, Easton disclaims performing "interpretation and analysis," which "are the provinces of critics," in favor of basic plot-summary and rudimentary evaluation of character and style. An example of his method, from the very first review in the book:

Stephen J. Dick. The Biological Universe. Cambridge UP, 1996. xvi+578. $54.95.

How did the concept of the alien grow from an outré manifestation in the late 19th century to an icon of popular culture a century later? This history, both biological and literary, traces how the idea came to have great metaphorical power in the hands of both sf writers and imaginative scientists.

H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds and Kurd Lasswitz's enormously influential Auf Zwei Planeten (1897) set the agenda, with Jules Verne playing only a minor role. While Lasswitz wrote out of German idealism, his Martians straight out of Lowell's visions of Mars, he sought to inspire Earthlings with the advanced thought of those who had battled the red deserts with high technology. "I shall never forget how I devoured this novel with curiosity and excitement as a young man," reminisced Wernher von Braun about a text which saw aliens as higher, better. Wells captured the public imagination with malicious invading aliens, and this dominated much sf--though not scientific discourse, luckily--for many decades.

Dick traces knowledgeably the studied reaction of science to ideas about aliens. He is an astronomer and notes the impact Darwin had on even that most aloof of sciences, by introducing an ordering principle to speculations. Whatever odd shape aliens might take, they had been shaped by evolutionary forces to fit planetary or other environments. Dick finds that exobiology is still a protoscience, but one that has profited from orderly speculation, most certainly including science fiction. He cites and examines the classic sf texts, with nods to more recent writers like Stapledon, Clarke, Brin and Forward.

He adroitly overviews the cultural significance of such debates as the UFO controversy and SETI. The characteristic view of a biophysical cosmology, with life as a consequence of impersonal physical laws, lies now ''at the root of an informed worldview--" not only a myth, but perhaps the myth of modern times (554). This is myth in the Joseph Campbell sense of reflecting the deepest beliefs and characteristics of a culture. At the heart lies sf, then, which is our culture's primary way of conveying science to the larger audience.

Though the general thesis will hold no surprises, this is a readable, scholarly study of how a genre came to be crucial to a culture's view of its own position in the universe--a trait singular in history.--Gregory Benford, UC Irvine.

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A Romanian History of Utopian Literature.

Horia Arama. The Collector of Islands. 1981, 267 pp; The Happy Islands. 1986. 368 pp; An Island in Space. 1990, 384 pages. Index. Bucharest: Cartea Romaneasca, 1981. Paperback. Price not known. [The titles in Courier type are literal translations of the original titles]

In this as yet untranslated trilogy, Romanian "science fantasy" writer Horia Arama has undertaken a massive study of the idea of utopia from its origins to the late twentieth century. One of the first Romanian writers to begin working with sf following the Second World War, Arama was strongly influenced by literary contests and publication opportunities sponsored by the Romanian semimonthly literary supplement Povestiri stiintifico-fantastice (Science-Fantasy Stories) and its powerful editor Adrian Rogoz, himself an sf writer.

Arama has cast his history of utopias as a reading journal, organizing the vast literature of utopia around a few leading Ideas. Observing that innocent utopian beliefs have resulted in the deaths or ruin of many fine writers, Arama notes that shipwreck forms a characteristic opening for both classical and modern utopias. In his first volume, The Collector of lslands, Arama goes on to explore relationships between discontent and longing for the Ideal and continually changing definitions of human values and happiness. In a chapter entitled "The Archeology of Happiness," Arama surveys several definitions of happiness proposed from the times of Homer and Hesiod to Rabelais and the Enlightenment philosophers. A fourth chapter draws on various ways of drawing portraits of the Prince of Utopia from Thomas More's utopist as saint to Gerhardt Rittert's twentieth century utopist as demon in The Demonism of Power (1943). A discussion of utopian economics and longevity gives way to an outline of Roger Mucchielli's theory of three kinds of counterutopias illustrated by such figures as Swift, Huxley, Sade, Briusov, Wells, Zamiatin, Burgess, Bradbury, and Felix Aderca.

In the second volume, The Happy Islands, Arama explores the enormous volume of work and thought that has gone into the characterization of "Earthly Paradise." He takes up in turn myths and legends of the ancients, ideas of the "natural man," accounts of golden ages, the travels of Marco Polo and Cook, Rousseau, childhood, the "great year," the Spanish conquest, the French Revolution, the Palace of Versailles, Fourier, Robert Owen, and Brook Farm.

In the third volume, An Island in Space, Arama turns to the utopian idea of flight, tracing the notion from the ancients to modern dreams of high tech futures yet to come. Examples include Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1621), James Hilton's Lost Horizon, ways of imagining robots, utopian catastrophes, literary utopias, and nineteenth-century utopias. Arama concludes with a plea for the creation of a Romanian utopia, an understandable request given the enormous task of recreating the country following the fall of the dictator Ceauseseu in December of 1989.

The charm of Arama's trilogy lies in its vast erudition as gradually unfolded through the persona of the author himself as a gentle and wise scholar speaking directly to the reader while strolling through his personal library, pausing now and then to muse on a particular volume. It certainly deserves eventual translation into English, where it could be assessed far more thoroughly than I have been able to do here. --Elaine L. Kleiner, Indiana State University, with translation assistance by Angela Vlaicu, Purdue University.

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A Dimly Lit Study

James Craig Holte. Dracula in the Dark: The Dracula Film Adaptations. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy #73. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. xviii+161. $55.00.

It is difficult to decide in what way this book might be worthwhile. In the first place, it makes no original contribution to the already vast bibliographic and critical literature on the vampire theme in fiction or film, and amounts at best to hastily cobbled-together Cliff Notes on extant scholarship. In terms of its nominal subject, the Dracula film adaptations--I say ''nominal'' because it wanders rather far afield at times--it isn't a patch on Gregory A. Waller's excellent The Living and the Undead: From Stoker's ''Dracula'' to Romero's ''Dawn of the Dead'' (U of Illinois P. 1986), from which it largely borrows its structure and rationale: chapters (nine in Waller, six in Holte) on the original novel, on the authorized stage adaptation by John L. Balderston and Hamilton Deane, on early film adaptations such as F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) and Tod Browning's Dracula (1932), on 1950s' Hammer Studios versions and Jesus Franco's El Conde Dracula (1970), on 1970s British and American television treatments, and on more contemporary developments in vampire film (and some fiction), all considered as on-going revisions of a classic ur-text. One would hardly guess from Holte's vacuous coverage, at once thin and padded, that one could possibly derive over 350 pages of rich, cogent analysis from this primary material, but Waller does. Waller's book remains the finest study of its subject to date and is unlikely to be bettered anytime soon, certainly not by Holte's insipid precis.

Waller's book succeeds principally because it has a central thesis: that the vampire film tradition developing out of Stoker's novel is concerned above all with the fate of a ''moral community'' menaced by the vampire and thus requiring defense, both physical and ideological. Holte's book, by contrast, has no thesis to speak of, though it is filled with undefended assertions plucked half-digested from other critics: for example, that ''the Hammer horror films of the late 1950s and 1960s reflected the rise of consumerism, the failure of patriarchal structures to reestablish the prewar order, the growth of the middle class, and the changing role of women in society and the family'' (50). This disconnected list, culled in part from fuller arguments in Peter Hutchings's Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (Manchester UP, 1993), is dropped into the midst of pages of dreary plot-summary, as if it constituted some sort of analysis.

Such, indeed, is Holte's method throughout: a dull rehearsal of basic story elements more or less on the level of journalistic film reviews, spiced up with occasional half-baked references to psychoanalysis, social theory, critiques of ideology, etc. Even with such limited aims, Holte has trouble keeping his facts straight, as when he asserts (79) that John Badham's 1979 Dracula opens with scenes set at Castle Dracula (it doesn't: it begins with the storm at sea that accompanies Dracula's arrival in England). And when Holte does essay his own analyses, they seldom rise above the tritely sophomoric: he argues, for instance, that ''The vampire in legend, literature, and art provides a figure that unites the lust for blood and the lust for sex, and in doing so threatens the foundations of civilization'' (10). As an example of undergraduate writing, I might give the entire effort a C; as an entry in a major press series on genre studies, I shudder to think what grade it deserves--or what it portends for the health of our field.

All that Holte adds to Waller's treatment of the theme are a brief consideration of folkloric and Romantic sources for Stoker's novel, a chapter on female vampires in film (most of which has little to do with his putative subject), and some end matter, including bibliographies covering vampire fiction, anthologies, and works of criticism. These last are nominally annotated, but only nominally; this is the entry on Waller's book: ''A useful overview of vampire films with insightful commentary'' (136). Holte also includes chronological filmographies of Dracula adaptations, of female film vampires, and of ''Other Notable Vampire Films.'' In terms of comprehensiveness and/or penetration, these additions are essentially valueless; one is better off perusing Christopher Frayling's introductory essay to his anthology Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (Faber & Faber, 1991) and the relevant material in Andrea Weiss's Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema (Jonathan Cape, 1992), and canvassing the listings in Martin V. Riccardo's Vampires Unearthed: The Complete Multi-media Vampire and Dracula Bibliography (Garland, 1983), updated by Robert Marrero's Vampire Movies (Fantasma, 1994) and the various end matter in J. Gordon Melton's extremely useful The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead (Visible Ink Press, 1994). Or, if you are interested in cultural studies of the vampire theme, two recent books that are very worthwhile are Ken Gelder's Reading the Vampire (Routledge, 1994) and Nina Auerbach's Our Vampires, Ourselves (U of Chicago P. 1995). Certainly, these last two titles prove that the general subject, despite its recent voluminous coverage, has not quite been done to death or reduced to the reciting of drab trivia or hackneyed surmises--a fact one would never gather from reading Dracula in the Dark.--Rob Latham, University of Iowa.

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Notions: Limited.

Gregory Stephenson. Comic Inferno: The Satirical World of Robert Sheckley. Milford Series #66. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press (909-884-5813), 1997. 144pp. $29.00 cloth, $19.00 paper.

In New Maps of Hell (1960), the first serious critical study of modern science fiction, Kingsley Amis devoted significant attention to the work of Robert Sheckley, which he viewed as a quintessential expression of the tendency towards satirical, sociologically grounded extrapolation that marked much of 1950s American sf. Amis coined the term ''comic inferno'' to describe both this mode of imagination and the kind of fictive futures it evoked--ironic dystopias driven by out-of-control technologies into bizarre, antic exaggerations of human foibles and fears--and Sheckley, along with similar writers such as Frederik Pohl and William Tenn, were celebrated as major innovators who brought a new sophistication and intelligence to the field. Despite this strong brief for his importance to the genre, we have had to wait almost forty years for another substantial discussion of Sheckley's science fiction. Aside from entries in reference volumes and passing mentions in genre histories, Sheckley has been largely ignored by sf critics--that is, until Gregory Stephenson's new book. Indeed, the decade of the 50s, caught between the Golden Age and the New Wave, remains a curious ellipsis in sf scholarship, and one can only applaud any attempt to restore to its major writers and themes the sort of expansive critical attention they so clearly deserve.

That said, it must be admitted that Comic Inferno: The Satirical World of Robert Sheckley is not quite the book one would have hoped for. I suppose it is pointless to complain about its auteurist animus--especially given its publication in a series devoted to single-author studies--but I do think its focus is too narrow: like Stephenson's previous book on J.G. Ballard, Out of the Night and Into the Dream (Greenwood, 1991), it is essentially a thematic study, making no attempt to contextualize Sheckley's writing either within the evolution of modern sf or in relation to contemporary social and cultural history. While he does prominently deploy Amis's term to describe Sheckley's fiction, Stephenson is not interested in the milieu that generated the comic inferno as a major form of American sf: the emergence of new magazine and book markets in the 1950s, the resultant loosening of the hard-sf stranglehold on extrapolation achieved during the 1940s by Campbell's Astounding, the social-critical and even counter-cultural agenda embraced by so many of the major new writers, the consequent rearticulation and revisioning of classic sf themes in terms of their implications for social and personal development, and the amplification of stylistic possibilities available to the genre. Indeed, it seems to me that a study of Sheckley's work (or Pohl's, or Robert Silverberg's, for that matter) could profitably provide a bridge between 1950s ''social sf'' and the 1960s New Wave, highlighting continuities where most genre histories stress ruptures and renovations. But this is not the book Stephenson set out to write, and it is probably idle to chide him for it.

The book he has written is capable, intelligent, and--within its modest compass-- comprehensive, well worth reading by anyone interested in the work of a neglected major author. Its organization is simple: following a detailed chronology of Sheckley's life and work, there are chapters devoted to specific decades of his sf production, from the 1950s through the 1990s, then a chapter covering his work in other genres (principally the suspense thriller and the spy story), and a final overview of his achievement. It is in this last, brief (six-page) chapter that Stephenson introduces Amis's notion of the comic inferno, a rather belated move (especially given the book's title) and one that seems largely perfunctory. In his attempt to apply the term to Sheckley's work, Stephenson so decontextualizes and attenuates it that it becomes fundamentally irrelevant to his overall discussion. Rather than participating in a coherent subgeneric movement, as Amis argued, ''Sheckley's fiction expresses a vision of existence as being at all levels--the individual, the social, and the cosmic--inherently both perilous and humorous, potentially either infernal or comic'' (126). This is quite true, but it is not the same thing as saying that he is a writer of comic infernos. It is here that Stephenson's inattention to the larger context of sf history is most distressingly obvious.

Despite its rather plodding conception, Stephenson's decade-by-decade treatment manages to display several important, linked developments across Sheckley's career: in particular, his growing mastery of longer narrative forms and his gradual transition from social satire to philosophical speculation. The major contribution of this book, I think, is its spirited defense of Sheckley's novels, which have never received the attention, either from fans or critics, that his short fiction has. I must admit that I remain somewhat unpersuaded, valuing the stories in seminal collections like Pilgrimage to Earth (1957) and Notions: Unlimited (1960) over the novels I have read (to be honest, only two: Journey Beyond Tomorrow [1962] and Options [1975]); the latter have seemed to me, for all their wit and invention, too scattered, too inherently shapeless. Stephenson's strategy in defending these texts is at once to code their episodic nature positively--e.g. Journey is ''a fertile melange of topical references, archetypal resonances, parody, pastiche, gags, satire, and parable, with dashes of Voltaire, Nietzsche, Kafka, and the Marx Brothers'' (48)--and at the same time to argue for an underlying structure based on the myth of the questing hero (the theories of Joseph Campbell are cited, though thankfully only in a brief note). While Stephenson never fully convinces me that several of the novels are minor masterpieces, he does discuss them with energy and enthusiasm, whether praising Mindswap's (1966) ''sudden dreamlike shifts of scene and tone, brilliant pastiches, mad metamorphoses and convolutions of logic in a surreal, Carollian spirit'' (51), or extolling the hilarious ''parodies of technical and professional jargon'' running through Crompton Divided (1978). If nothing else, Sheckley has clearly found a warm and sympathetic reader.

Beyond general observations about career development, Comic Inferno has no central thesis to speak of; instead, it is a compendium of more or less close readings of individual texts, drawing out a series of recurrent themes in Sheckley's work. Stephenson is effective at showing how Sheckley, over the course of numerous tales, extends and complicates these themes; for example, he meticulously traces Sheckley's fascination with the intricate agon linking predator and prey--the ''hunt motif''--from classic early stories such as ''Seventh Victim'' (1953) to its mid-career expansion as The 10th Victim (1966) and its later ''sequels,'' Victim Prime (1987) and Hunter/Victim (1988). As Stephenson shows, the hunt begins for Sheckley as a satirical model of social relations, but slowly becomes an emblem of the evolutionary struggle between brute egoism and spiritual values. This larger ethical construction of the theme points to the growing philosophical consciousness in Sheckley's work, his framing of basic existential and epistemological questions in forms ranging from futuristic quests to parodies of space opera. At times, Stephenson makes Sheckley sound like another Philip K. Dick in his obsession with metaphysical speculation, and while I am not entirely convinced that Sheckley's treatments rise to Dickian heights, Stephenson's analysis has inspired me to read more of the author in order to decide. Comic Inferno thus fully succeeds as a spur to engagement with the primary texts, and anyone with an interest in Sheckley's work, whether scholarly or fannish, is certain to profit from reading it.

A final note: Stephenson, a lecturer in English and American literature at Roskilde University in Denmark, has previously authored, along with his tome on Ballard, a critical study of Gregory Corso, and is currently completing a book on the fiction of Robert Stone. While these various subjects might seem rather disparate, it is possible to trace throughout a basic concern for authors whose work expresses a skeptical mistrust of authority and embraces counter-cultural values of social and personal transformation. Stephenson's critical interests thus seem to lie less in sf studies per se than in contemporary literature which may be said to evince this thematic pattern. I for one would encourage him to stretch himself in the future and develop a large-scale argument permitting him to discuss together a series of authors, both genre and mainstream, rather than consistently settling for these small individual portraits, which, though shrewd and finely turned, have rather limited ambitions and rewards.--Rob Latham, University of Iowa.

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