Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the Contemporary Novel by Josie Gill

Abstract

582 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) publication of Oryx and Crake between “speculative fiction” (hers) and “science fiction” (not hers). But the default hierarchy remains in place elsewhere. Oddly enough, there is hardly any discussion of the aesthetics of form and genre in a collection mainly focused on the novel, and most essays take up the thematics of science-in-society in fiction rather instrumentally. I think this is why Kim Stanley Robinson’s SCIENCE IN THE CAPITAL trilogy (2004-2007) features fairly regularly in the collection. It is fine if treated thematically, because the series wears its fieldwork into science research funding in Washington on its sleeve, but no one seems to notice that Robinson consistently distends and breaks open the aesthetic form of the novel in even his most “realistic” works. In fact, he has chosen increasinly to challenge the limits of the Realist novel. The Ministry for the Future (2020) might share our contemporary world and have “realistic” representations of intergovernmental agencies of science, but the book utterly explodes the traditional novel form for an overtly Bakhtinian array of registers, styles, and forms (the lecture, the transcript, the diary, the scientific report, etc.). And Robinson has to do that, because the traditional Realist novel does not have the scale in its characterological and domestic focus to address the climate crisis. These are familiar arguments to sf scholars. Sherryl Vint, in looking at works by Robinson or Nancy Kress or Paolo Bacigalupi, does an admirable job of quietly and politely dismantling the implicit divide that builds up in the collection very effectively, yet largely concurs with the presentist frame of the editors that the blurring of mainstream and sf literature has occurred only in the last 30 years. Victorianist or Modernist literary scholars and historians of science might well beg to differ. There are some strong and informative essays here, nevertheless, including Carol Colatrella on novels depicting women in science through the lens of feminist science studies and a really useful essay by Uwe Schimank, “The Economization of Science,” that defines this as “the increasing importance of explicitly articulated economic considerations for financial costs and profits” (148). It is also helpful in general to witness the process of an attempt at canon formation for the “contemporary science novel” as you read through the collection. But to anyone interested in the embeddedness of science in society and cultural representations of science, the work undertaken in Under the Literary Microscope can only be a small portion of a much larger picture. The limits of the collection are announced from the title onwards, and it may be that the device really needed to explore this field is actually a macroscope.—Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck College, University of London Wanna Be an Antiracist? Keep Science and Fiction Entangled. Josie Gill. Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the Contemporary Novel. Bloomsbury, 2020. x+270 pp. $115 hc, $39.95 pbk. Spending two weeks and 2500 miles of summer 2021 on the Great American College Road TripTM , I was struck that every institution I visited with my high-school senior advertised itself as “interdisciplinary.” The term’s 583 BOOKS IN REVIEW apparent meaning, of course, varied considerably. Most of our predominately undergraduate tour guides offered vague testimony to valuing classes outside one’s major; a few recognized that one discipline might helpfully supplement or critique another. None, however, ventured into the daring realms explored by Josie Gill’s tightly organized and consistently insightful Biofictions. Here, the often illusory nature of disciplinary boundaries themselves come under direct assault. For Gill, unlike many critics of “literature and science,” the issue is not how stories reflect or contort facts. The question is not representation. Nor is the focus on how science “explains” stories. There is no attempt to turn literary criticism into a science in and of itself, whether via big data or distant reading. Instead of utilizing a Venn diagram, Gill is interested in the fundamental illegibility of separate “science” and “fiction” categories. Rather than place terms such as “genetics” and “literature” (or “the humanities,” or “the arts,” or “the liberal arts”) in binary opposition, she recognizes that each field and the forms of knowledge it fosters can...