REVIEW-ESSAY
Tom Moylan
Good Days for Irish SF Studies
Richard Howard. Space for Peace: Fragments of the Irish Troubles in the Science Fiction of Bob Shaw and James White. Liverpool UP, 2021. 304 pp. £90 hc and ebk.
In his groundbreaking study, Irish Science Fiction ( 2014), Jack Fennell refers to the received impression that very little sf has been written on the island, much less in the Republic. He also notes the historical lack of scholarly attention to sf and indeed to genre fiction in general within the Irish intellectual sphere. One of the great contributions of Fennell’s volume—and of his recent monograph on horror fiction, The Monstrous in Irish Fiction, 1800 to 2000 (2019)—is to change substantively this simplified understanding. His extensive archival research, in both Irish and English language publications, makes very clear that sf has been written and published in Ireland for over 200 years. This research forms the basis of his monograph but is also reflected in his very helpful A Short Guide to Irish Science Fiction (2019; available Dublin World Con online) and his edited volume of primary works, A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction (2016). More to the point of this review, Fennell’s scholarly analyses of this archive makes clear that the long overdue absence of critical studies has been eradicated. Of course, Fennell’s work is only part of a growing body of scholarship on Irish sf, as seen in the work of Ralph Pordzik, Eoin Flannery, Anne Mulhall, Bernice Murphy, and others. In addition, the successful presentation of the 2019 World Con in Dublin is a further indicator of the lively state of sf writing and reading, creating and thinking, by authors, fans, and scholars in the Irish context (ably organized by program leaders Ian Stockdale and Terry Fong, and academic program head Mike Cosgrave).
And if there was ever any doubt about the viability and volume of Irish sf, the creative output of recent years has been dynamic. The following writers are only a telling indication: the entire body of Ian McDonald’s work; Kevin Barry, City of Bohane (2011); Mike McCormack, Notes from a Coma (2006) and Solar Bones (2016); Jo Zebedee, Inish Carraig (2015) and Abendau’s Heir (2018); R.B. Kelly, The Edge of Heaven (2016); Oisín Fagan, Hostages (2016); Sarah Davis Goff, Last Ones Left Alive (2019); Danny Denton, The Earle King and the Kid in Yellow (2018)—and YA Fiction by Louise O’Neill, Only Ever Yours (2015); Sarah Maria Griffin, Spare and Found Parts (2018); and Iarla MacAodha Bhuí, Domhan Faoi Cheilt (2000).
It is, then, onto this fertile field of Irish sf creativity and criticism that Richard Howard’s Space for Peace: Fragments of the Irish Troubles in the Science Fiction of Bob Shaw and James White arrives as a welcome study that builds and extends this growing body of scholarship. (Here, I want additionally to note the contribution that Liverpool University Press, catalyzed by its strong lines in both sf studies and Irish studies, is making to this development.)
Howard begins his book by acknowledging Fennell’s archival and critical contributions to the study of sf on the island of Ireland, as Fennell calls it, in all its unevenness and complexities as it has appeared in both the Republic and Northern Ireland. Howard then turns to Northern Irish sf, noting that such a study requires closer attention than that delivered by Fennell’s overarching monograph. In this context the author analyzes the sf of Bob Shaw and James White, writers well known to international sf readers but not sufficiently examined and appreciated in their position as Northern writers (and fans) in post-World War II Ireland. Howard tells us that his intention is to address this gap as it repeats across the board in Irish literary studies, Irish sf studies, and generally in sf scholarship. The result brings a rich addition, and challenge, to ongoing work in all three areas. Irish literary studies can only be enriched by proper attention to genre fiction in general and sf in particular, even as Irish sf studies needs the broader context of the cultural and literary study of Irish history and society. This intersected work can bring valuable specific and comparative analyses to the broader field of sf studies.
Howard’s Introduction situates his study of Shaw and White in a consideration of Irish modernity and sf. Whereas Fennell approaches his broader historical study of Irish sf within the terms of a more porous assemblage of speculative fiction (including horror and fantasy) and reads his archive through an interpretive framework indebted to Tatiana Chernyshova’s analytical problematic based in mythmaking, Howard narrows the scale of his analysis of Irish sf to twentieth-century modernity and its unfolding in the technological imaginary of the industrial North, in particular Belfast. Differing from Fennell’s mythic approach (with its consideration of pre-modern as well as ambiguously modern cultural logics), Howard draws on Science and Technology Studies, giving attention to Sheila Janasoff’s sense of the “sociotechnical imaginary” to apprehend sf’s development in the context of postwar industrial capitalism and therefore to emphasize a productive difference in its production and reception in the two parts of the island.
Within this historical and interpretive framework, Howard sharpens his gaze by acknowledging the conjunctural sociopolitical and cultural conditions presented by the realities of Partition between the North and the South and the subsequent Troubles that germinated in the post-World War II years and emerged fully blown by the late 1960s. Within this context, he looks even more closely at the world of Belfast sf. Beginning with a discussion of the Jules Verne-inspired novels of Robert Cromie, A Plunge into Space (1890) and The Crack of Doom (1895), and the anti-Wellsian work of C.S. Lewis in the 1930s and 1940s, he quickly moves to the world of Belfast fandom in the 1940s and 1950s, within which White and then Shaw began their writing, at first with contributions in the late 1940s to the fanzine Slant and then to its successor Hyphen, with Shaw drawing on A.E. Van Vogt and White on E.E. Doc Smith for their initial inspiration. In another resolution of his critical scope, Howard reviews the personal histories of both writers, noting that Shaw was born and raised firmly within the traditions of Belfast Protestantism while White was born to a West Belfast Catholic family; and he further reminds us that Shaw worked as a draftsman and then a designer for the large Belfast aircraft firm Short and Harland, while White worked as a draper and then a technical clerk at Shorts (while, interestingly, his wife was a nurse at the city’s Mater hospital). Coming out of these situations, both writers found an active intellectual and creative life within sf fandom and the epistemology of science fictionality; both were active locally and, as readers of this journal know, internationally. Like the Belfast punk subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s that crossed sectarian and other boundaries, Belfast fandom disavowed sectarianism and, as Howard well puts it, “proposed science fiction as neutral ground in a city riven with division” (14).
This layered account is important to Howard’s reading of the two writers, for it makes evident the provincial social ground upon which they composed but also against which they generated their creative contributions, as seen most specifically in the way Shaw explored “fictional technologies” (Howard 17) that transcended the narrowness of nationalism and White reached again and again for a nonviolent transcendence of the inherent violence of sectarianism and the Troubles. Thus, influenced by the theoretical contributions of Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson, Howard analyzes the sf of both authors as it develops out of its cognitively estranged and productively escapist recasting of its social environment to throw a fresh light on the historical condition that was not available to mundane/realist understanding, thereby negating its anti-utopian context and reaching for an unfulfilled utopian potential.
After this contextualizing Introduction, the book’s four thematic chapters follow from the layered focus of its framing discussion. Chapter 1 discusses the treatment of technology, modernity, and progress in the work of Shaw and White. Influenced by Jameson’s sense of the imbrication of capitalism, modernity, and spatiality, Howard tracks the history of Belfast city from its colonial beginnings in the Ulster Plantation, doubly shaped by religious sectarianism and an ideology of scientific progress, and he argues that the notion of “improvement through engineering” constitutes the driving ideologeme of the city’s society and culture. This collective discourse of what becomes the industrialized north of the island consequently develops in an almost exclusive Protestant context, finds strong legitimation in the shipbuilding industry, and stands in stark opposition to the rural, agricultural, and Catholic south. Howard argues that there are two conflicting “sociotechnical imaginaries” (Janasoff) in play throughout the Irish context. This starkly different relationship to industrial/capitalist/religious modernity consequently leads to a more overtly science-fictional tradition developing in the north than in the south, with its more porous cultural constellation of estranged/speculative forms (as Fennell describes). Shaw and White grew up in this historical reality which, by the 1920s, was shaped by industrial capitalism, advanced engineering production, British militarism, and Partition. Howard ably analyzes this contextual ground to emphasize the importance of the technological imaginary in the development of both authors, noting its capacity for valorizing a sense that the “genuinely new” (47) could inform the authors’ visions of a radical novum (Suvin) that transcended their Belfast-bound world.
After a detailed discussion of the impact of this “engineering culture” on both writers, Howard draws on the work of science and technology studies to develop close readings of works in which both writers explore interactions between humanity and technology, working through the oppressive contradictions toward possible imaginary resolutions. Howard then draws on Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s sense of the sf sublime (146-181) to inform his reading of Shaw’s work (especially Ground Zero Man [1971], Wreath of Stars [1976], and Orbitsville [1975]) and the ways in which it explores a supersession of human failure by way of a scientific renaissance brought about by aliens, who themselves represent a break from human limitations. Turning from science to economics, Howard weaves an analysis of nineteenth-century British political economy and technological development into readings of work by both writers that trace their efforts to problematize the ideology of developmental progress through an ambiguous apprehension of modernity’s potential. In some of the most intriguing textual analyses, Howard traces how both writers drew on the uneven possibilities of science and technology to reach toward a counter or alternative sense of the modern capable of generating a re-functioned view of human agency in possible worlds that are no longer defined by the limits of the North or Belfast.
Chapter 2 continues Howard’s exploration of how Shaw and White work with this sense of an alternative modernity that can break through the historical narrative of the North. He argues that the earlier dynamic of a forward-thinking modernity in the north of the island had given way to what poet Seamus Heaney termed “anachronistic passions,” wherein modernity has collapsed into a regressive order of sectarian struggle between the Catholic and Protestant cultures and traditions, with one side fully dominated by the legitimation of a siege mentality that denied freedom and fulfilment to the other. Growing up within hegemonic Protestant culture, Shaw well knew the power and false promises at work in his social sphere and consequently generated sf narratives (such as Other Days, Other Eyes [1972]) that reach toward a new reality beyond the ideological and material limits of his milieu. On the other hand, White (as in Dream Millennium [1974], The Watch Below [1966], and The Silent Stars Go By [1991]) generated alternative historical narratives that contest the enclosed world of his time, but do so by way of a limited Catholic imaginary.
At this point, Howard develops a helpful reading of Catholicism and sf, drawing on recent work by Jim Clarke in order to support his understanding of White’s depiction of “Catholic futures” (as seen in his Sector General stories [1957-1999]). This leads Howard to conclude that White’s imaginary of an alternative modernity is decidedly conservative, especially in matters of morality and sexuality, thereby working critically against his Northern Irish hegemonic enclosure but in the name of an archaic alternative that ultimately looks backward rather than forward. Against this, he argues, Shaw’s critique of Northern Unionist power and culture emerges in a more progressive light that seeks to transcend the enclosure of not only the North but Earth itself. Howard’s development of this argument in the closing pages of this chapter, with its careful dissection of the vexed relationship between Unionist culture and British hegemony—developed by way of an all too brief analysis of the relationship between naturalist and science fictional writing—is to my mind one of the richest sections of the book. He ends with a reassertion of how Shaw’s transcendent sense of a “non-aligned identity” (see Night Walk [1967] and the Orbitsville series [1975-1990]) offers a novum that pushes against the dominant Northern ideology of identity and history and opens both to new realities that are “provisional, mutable and open to constant change” (161).
Chapter 3 then focuses on the treatment of the alien in the sf of Shaw and White, especially in light of the overwhelming concerns about identity and identity boundaries in Northern culture. Howard begins by considering critical approaches to the alien in sf, particularly those by Patricia Monk and Sherryl Vint; he then brings the discussion to bear on their relevance to the Irish context, here drawing on the work of Colin Graham, Claire Mitchell, and Declan Kiberd as they contend with questions of the Other and Otherness in the context of Catholic/nationalist/republican, Protestant/unionist/loyalist, and colonial/postcolonial Irish culture. He argues that the question of the Other is crucial in critical studies of Northern Irish culture, both locally and internationally: that is, a sense of Otherness pervades the geography, culture, and identity of the North, with borders working as a powerful physical and metaphorical trope. Of course, the figure of the alien is but one more iteration of the Other. Therefore, sf written in this context, as Howard puts it, “cannot help but become a mediation for the structures, relationships, and notions of Otherness that underpinned Northern Irish society” (171). From this theoretical base, he enters into a series of readings of how the figure of the alien in Shaw’s and White’s writing is informed by the rigid structural relations of identity in the region, “whether the physical border of partition or the social borders of religion, class, and culture” (171). Alien figures not only facilitate such anxious mediations but also, in their most “ineffable” renderings, charge contemporary reality with an uncertain “utopian energy” (171). In regard to Shaw, Howard focuses on the author’s mobilization of the “arachnid reaction,” or the instinct towards revulsion that some experience when faced with the otherness of the spider (171), as he studies two texts (“And Isles Where Good Men Lie” [1965], the first story Shaw published professionally, and The Palace of Eternity [1969]) for the way in which each mobilizes the repulsive reaction in narratives of alien encounter/colonization that recalibrate the colonial relationship, staging its reversal but ultimately, in the ongoing drag of the Northern ambience, retaining its structure.
Howard argues that this concern with the binary of conflicted group identity plays out at another level of anxiety when the work of both writers addresses the fear of absorption. He situates this discussion in the context of the general tension in Northern Irish culture over questions of identity mixing, hybridity, border crossing, and other violations of the apparent solidity of the dominant Northern culture. Shaw and White register this dominant fear of a subversion of that stability in their portrayals of alien encounters that consistently challenge the fixed borders of self and Other that regulate their society. In Shaw’s case, such engagements, Howard argues, stop short of a full embrace of radical hybridity and Otherness; and in White’s writing, particularly captured in his reading of the Sector General series, Howard traces another attempt to recalibrate human identity against the cultural norm of his region by way of narratives of alien/human reversal that nevertheless retain a privileging of the human. Howard goes a long way in his analysis of the historical identity tensions in the North in tracing the struggles that both writers carry out in their science-fictional responses by giving us his detailed theoretical and textual analyses. Nevertheless, I have to say that this discussion ends indecisively, as it reflects the limits of Shaw’s and White’s efforts in this regard while leaving me with the feeling that we are one step short of Howard’s own fuller development of how both writers deal with the alien in their Northern reality. Here, I wonder if further work on this analysis by way of gender and sexuality would result in a deeper understanding of this important area.
Howard’s analysis culminates in chapter 4 as he engages the utopian problematic in his capstone interpretation of the work of Shaw and White. Clearly, neither writer produced full-fledged literary utopias, but as Howard convincingly argues there is a utopian dimension running through their work as they push against and beyond the limits of their Northern Irish reality. In this regard, Howard assesses their utopian expression as in keeping with the critical utopian sensibility with which they struggle with both skepticism and hope, even as there are also clear dystopian figurations at work (as seen in White’s Underkill [1979] and Shaw’s Shadow of Heaven [1969]). While Howard is well aware of the potential of the utopian form to figure both critiques of the present and possibilities for the future, he does tend to work with a too rigid binary distinction between redemptive and repressive tendencies in the works he assesses. This formulation is helpful to his project, but to me the lack of a fuller dialectical sense of the utopian continuum (be it the tension between abstract and concrete utopia, program or impulse, blueprint or process) limits the scope of his utopian diagnostic. Nevertheless, his engagement does allow him to draw out the critique of utopian potential in the work of both authors. To this end he mobilizes the concept of the “overview effect,” as coined by space-travel writer Frank White to express the externalized perspective on the planet afforded by stepping beyond it (or what Irish critic Colin Graham has called the “Gagarin point of view” (Graham qtd. in Howard 226): so too, Howard argues, Shaw and White achieve their own overview effect in what I would more comfortably call their world building or indeed their cognitive mapping of Northern problems and possibilities, doing so especially by the figuration of aliens who look down and into Earth’s next reality.
While Howard offers useful readings of colonial/postcolonial tensions as they play out in the utopian continuum explored by both writers, as well as attending to their direct dystopian portrayals, the most developed and interesting utopian tropes that he analyzes are pacifism/nonviolence, nationalism, and the nuclear imaginary. While Howard could have gone further in making a more nuanced distinction between pacifism and nonviolence, his discussion of White’s stand against the violence of his Northern reality and his imaginative efforts peacefully to supersede it is carefully presented. In particular, Howard catches the way in which White’s effort to realize “a peaceful totality” within the narrative structure of the space-opera form is in the end too often compromised by the formal structure and heritage of the form itself (see, for example, his excellent discussion of Underkill). Howard ultimately ascribes White’s inability to realize a full imaginary of nonviolence to the writer’s lingering Catholic sensibility, which cannot fully move beyond his sense of an innate human aggression that cannot be held in check by a desirable pacifism. Overall, then, Howard sees White’s engagement in this case falling short of the redemptive possibilities of his utopian vision. In regard to the engagement of both writers with nationalism, Howard locates their strongest utopian impulse in the desire to “envisage a space beyond which nationalism and xenophobia” rule (256). Here, the readings of Shaw’s Fugitive Worlds (1989) and White’s “Occupation: Warrior” (1959) exemplify the authors’ efforts to take themselves and the readers beyond the “tribal thinking” of their society. Whereas Shaw’s text explores “civilized communities” that move beyond tribalism, White’s narrative takes a step further in its imaginary evocation of the “cosmo-politanism of the galactic federation” (261).
Attending to the contingencies of the historical period in which both writers lived, Howard closes his chapter with a consideration of the engagement of both writers with the overwhelming threat of nuclear destruction (a concern perhaps heightened by the discursive atmosphere shared by both writers in their work at Shorts aircraft factory). In Howard’s assessment, Shaw especially addresses the danger of nuclear proliferation within the Cold War context that pervaded Northern reality in his time. In works such as The Shadow of Heaven and The Two Timers (1968), Shaw exposed the nuclear threat but then short-circuited his own utopian turn by arguing for a false utopian potential embodied in nuclear weapons themselves insofar as they could put an end to the savage and immediate violence of everyday life. He thus takes an ultimately non-utopian “utopian realist” position that, like White’s restricted capacity to enable the full utopian potential of nonviolence, falls back into the dominant logic of nuclear weaponry rather than transgressively superseding it. In the end, Howard’s utopian analysis of the work of both writers ends with the regrettable conclusion that both remained caught in that binary limitation of repressive and redemptive conflict in the utopian imagination, unable to get beyond it as did the critical utopias of a few years later. As Howard so effectively puts it: “Both authors share a conspiratorial ideologeme that reaches to articulate a utopian totality impossible to grasp” and yet both ultimately fail fully to transcend the limits of their own overview effect (269). It seems, then, that while Shaw and White created compelling sf that challenged their given reality, neither was able radically to negate and transcend it.
Drawing on Jameson’s interpretive problematic in his Conclusion, Howard notes that he has attempted to trace instances of “the political unconscious” across the fiction of Shaw and White, thereby elucidating the “milieu” and social structure in which the authors worked and which the authors revealed. In one of his most theoretical declarations, he writes that he has endeavored to demonstrate how both writers “transcoded ... an ideologeme of improvement through technological development” that also registered “anxieties surrounding the position of the human in the human/technology network” (271). He rehearses in summary fashion his close readings of the tensions at play in the sf of both authors, as they imaginatively struggled with provincial malaise and with immiseration and violence. He further identifies the possibilities and limits in the critical imagination of both authors, seeing in Shaw an over-confidence in the possibilities of technology to take society beyond its bourgeois perspectives and nationalist restrictions but that falls just short of an effective progressive transcendence and in White a governing limit on his nonviolent vision for a post-Troubles society that is rooted in the soil of “the bourgeois norms imposed by Catholic values” (271). Nevertheless, Howard argues, both authors evince a stubborn utopian hope that reaches toward a better world. In his final pages, Howard briefly invokes other writers to reaffirm his argument for the long term vitality of Irish sf. He first considers Joseph O’Neill’s anti-fascist novels (Wind from the North [1934], Land Under England [1935], and Day of Wrath [1936]). Then, like Fennell, he offers a useful discussion of the work of Ian McDonald and gives particular attention to his Irish Trilogy (King of Morning, Queen of Day in 1991, Hearts, Hands and Voices in 1992, Sacrifice of Fools in 1996). As with Fennell’s, this limited analysis reminds us that a more extensive study of Ian McDonald in his Northern Irish context is still waiting to be done. Finally, he acknowledges the contemporary Northern Irish sf of Jo Zebedee and R.B. Kelly. Citing Carl Freedman’s recognition of the critical potency of sf, both creatively and critically, Howard ends his book with his assertion that the intensive study of Irish sf is needed for a fuller development of Irish studies as well as for a more open and inclusive understanding of the complex difficulties and promises of contemporary Irish culture and society.
Howard’s Space for Peace is a valuable contribution to the dynamic body of work emerging at the intersections of Irish literary and sf studies. Supporting the analyses in the body of the work, the extensive footnotes, bibliographies of primary and secondary texts, and name and subject index are extremely useful. Howard’s monograph is to be welcomed for its embraided engagement with the overall scholarship in both fields, and for its specific study of Northern Irish sf and, in particular, the lifetime work of Bob Shaw and James White.
WORKS CITED
Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan Jr. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Wesleyan, 2008.
Fennell, Jack. Irish Science Fiction. Liverpool UP, 2014.
Heaney, Seamus. “Delirium of the Brave.” The Listener 27 (1969): 757-59.
Jansoff, Sheila. “Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity.” Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Abrogation of Power. Ed. Sheila Janasoff and Sang-Hyun Kim. Chicago UP, 2015. 1-49.
White, Frank. The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1998.
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