All Your Games Are Belong to Science Fiction

Abstract

495 BOOKS IN REVIEW Looking back at Robinson’s catalogue, it is clear that he is far from finished as a writer. This fact cramps Markley’s proleptic style in the later chapters. This development in the book makes sense to me, especially as Markley opens Kim Stanley Robinson by acknowledging the particular frustration of writing about a living contemporary. With a consistent author such as Robinson, new books are respectively published, written, and conceived in the span of assessing the latest release. Markley several times repeats the phrase “crabbing sideways towards the good” (a point made by other reviewers as well) in increasing frequency toward the end of the book. It becomes one way to described the constellation of Robinson’s corpus, although as Markley points out, many more patterns can resolve when observing the light from that celestial body. I can accept Markley’s reliance on metaphor given the phantasmagoria of the present. Markley’s use of this phrase describes how Robinson steadily elaborates and deepens a mode of writing as conceptual experimentation that began in the early 1980s, even if I might have preferred some stylistic variation. Kim Stanley Robinson leaves future scholars with a solid foundation in Robinson’s work to date. If Robinson’s past consistency is any indication, we have much to look forward to and even more to live up to in the core principle that humanity can begin to change in the face of an alienating and bewildering present. I have titled this review based on one of the most profound insights of Robinson’s work. To the techno-utopian who latches on to the terraforming achievements of the scientists and capitalists in the MARS trilogy, the phrase “Life is a planetary thing. It begins on a planet and is part of that planet …” may seem anti-utopian. To them, I would offer Markley’s words: “Utopia, in [Robinson’s fiction], isn’t for the faint hearted” (6). The premise that “Life is a planetary thing” resonates across Robinson’s work, and it is an abiding principal of any struggle to enact a just, humane, and responsible form of social life in our time.—Brent Ryan Bellamy, Trent University All Your Games Are Belong to Science Fiction. Colin Milburn. Respawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2018. 312 pp. $26.95 pbk. Respawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life came out merely three years after Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter (2015), Colin Milburn’s previous monograph, but it had apparently been in the works for almost a decade. Ten years is a long time in digital culture, but Respawn reads as if it was finished yesterday. Its case studies are not very recent, but nothing in our current media landscape suggests that its observations and diagnoses will become outdated any time soon. Balancing detail and systemic overview, Milburn’s book is one of the most perceptive, incisive, and clear analyses of the dynamic imbrications of sf imaginaries, video games, and contemporary digital culture in a while. At first, Respawn seems deceptively easy, reading quickly and without arcane theoretical apparatus. It invokes fandom jargon and leetspeak, an informal language of online communities combining creative spelling and vocabulary. It even sports a Nyan Cat on the cover, making it very likely the 496 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) first Duke UP cover with an Internet meme. Respawn is also a furiously complex study that moves with assured grace across a number of disciplines: not only science fiction, game, fan, and digital culture studies, but also digital anthropology, sociology, and political philosophy. The depth of its research is awesome in the most basic sense of the word. One fifth of the entire page count is taken up by endnotes and bibliography, there is a fair share of academic theory, and Milburn namechecks all relevant works. Even more impressive, though, is the volume of primary texts: video games may seem, to non-gamers, trivial, but a single academic-grade playthrough of a game typically consumes upwards of 40 or 50 hours. For example, according to several websites measuring completion times, the average length of Final Fantasy VII...