Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature ed. by Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisèle M. Baxter, and Tara Lee

Abstract

Reviewed by: Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature ed. by Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisèle M. Baxter, and Tara Lee Jack Fennell Grubisic, Brett Josef, Gisèle M. Baxter, and Tara Lee (eds.) Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014. Pp. 480. I found this to be an enjoyable and edifying collection. The breadth of subject matter and variety of critical approaches gathered herein is extremely impressive; I learned a lot from reading these twenty-five essays, and if space were not an issue, each of them would warrant a full review-response of their own. The field of study is North American dystopian literature, a categorization that at first seems a little over-broad; however, not only does this handily allow for the inclusion of Mexican and Canadian texts alongside works from the United States, but it also problematizes the economic homogenization of the continent: all the literature considered here was published after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which came into effect in January 1994. However, my enjoyment was not unqualified. For one thing, with a collection of this size, an index would have been useful. More worryingly, many of the contributors do not seem to realize that utopian studies, incorporating the study of literary dystopias, is an established field with a substantial body of scholarship. A large number of the contributors to this volume neglect to make any reference to that scholarship, and in places, they seem to be unaware of its existence, hence the high number of essays that establish their critical parameters through comparisons to well-known works of dystopian fiction. It is not my intention to be prescriptivist, but some engagement with that scholarship might have made the contributors' jobs a little bit easier. Furthermore, some contributors seem almost afraid of "genre" literature and waste a good bit of effort distancing themselves and their chosen texts from it; others presume that the reader is unacquainted with dystopia and science fiction, and consequently spend more time than is necessary defending those genres. In some cases, contributors stretch the definition of dystopia to make their contributions fit the theme, resulting in some very strong essays that nonetheless might have worked better in a different critical context. This is not just hair-splitting on my part: a dystopia is, to paraphrase Lyman Tower Sargent, a fictional world intended to be interpreted as considerably worse than the author's empirical environment. Obviously, the author cannot control the interpretive process; the reader's subjectivity can make a utopia of a dystopia and vice versa, as surely as cultural change or the passage of time can. Regardless of reader response, though, the point of dystopian literature is not to simply replicate the world as it exists now, even in all its present awfulness. The closest a dystopian work can come to reportage is to emphasize and exaggerate the problems of the day. The collection gets off to a strong start with Janine Tobeck's "The Man in the Klein Blue Suit: Searching for Agency in William Gibson's Bigend Trilogy." Tobeck uses the [End Page 807] figure of the enigmatic arch-conspirator to present a satisfying analysis of the ways in which the human propensity for narrativization and storytelling can be exploited. However, she seems to argue that this propensity can be overridden through artistic innovation; I do not believe such an act of will is possible, but this is a personal philosophical difference rather than a cogent critique of Tobeck's argument. My other quibbles with this essay are down to what I see as missed opportunities: there is space here to (briefly) criticize the idea of a technological singularity, and when she mentions that "the concept of the individual will be a inevitable casualty in the unlegislated future" (40), she does not flag this as an inherent contradiction within the neoliberal ideology she has been critiquing thus far. Still, this essay bodes well for what is to follow. Sharlee Reimer, writing on "Logical Gaps and Capitalism's Seduction in Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl," uses up some space with unnecessary genre defence and...