Dale KnickerbockerLingua Cosmica: Science Fiction from around the World

Abstract

416 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) to, as is the work of Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange [1962] and 1985 [1978]), and of the rather obscure D.G. Barron. The book is at its best when Hammond allows himself two pages on authors (Doris Lessing and Angela Carter) but at its weakest when listing out of context snippets of quotations from D.G. Compton, Richard Cowper, or Christopher Priest, whose works can only be identified in some cases from the notes. Hammond clearly knows a range of obscure books from the 1950s to the 1970s, many of which were published as sf, but is less strong on the dystopian islands of New Worlds (although the New Wave is mentioned in passing) or Interzone. His erudition is impressive—I had no idea that Stanley Johnson, father of British politician, journalist, and Brexiteer Boris Johnson, had written a novel called The Commissioner (1987), which argues for Britain to remain in the European Union to keep Germany under control as well as to fight a Cold War. This brings me to a point where I think I am asking for a different book—I suspect a lot of British fiction written during what Hammond calls the first Cold War, say up to the late 1970s, is overshadowed by the loss of empire and the traumas of the Second World War. Post-traumatic stress and invasion anxieties are there through a range of titles up to the “Hitler Wins” novels of Len Deighton’s SS-GB (1978) and Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1992); with the rise of Thatcher and neoliberalism there is perhaps a generational and political shift. But the momentum of the book is such that it is hard to disagree with its judgments—leaving aside its underlying errors of genre, it tends to move on quickly from text to text before it can any anything disputable. There are a few formatting glitches, where book and film titles lose italics and Hammond likes adding a “sic” to instances of (presumably) gender-neutral “he” and “man,” but mainly I wish he had focused on a smaller range of titles and stuck more closely to his subtitle.—Andrew M. Butler, Canterbury Christ Church University SF as a Global Genre. Dale Knickerbocker, ed. Lingua Cosmica: Science Fiction from around the World. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2018. xxi+236 pp. $29.95 pbk. Dale Knickerbocker’s edited anthology Lingua Cosmica: Science Fiction from Around the World is a wonderful addition to the growing body of criticism about global sf. It contains eleven essays by established sf scholars on authors writing in nine different languages, from eleven countries spread across five continents. The wide scope of this anthology distinguishes it from most recent publications on non-Anglo-American sf. Apart from Sonia Fritzsche’s The Liverpool Companion to World Science Fiction Film (2014), most critical works on non-Anglo-American sf (perhaps rightly) focus on a specific region, country, theme, or critical lens. For example, such works as Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema (2018) edited by Anindita Banerjee, DisOrienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction (2017) edited by Isiah Lavender III, and Latin American Science Fiction: Theory and Practice (2012) edited by Elizabeth Ginway and J. Andrew Brown have a 417 BOOKS IN REVIEW specific regional or national focus. Conversely, works such as Iva Polak’s Futuristic Worlds in Australian Aboriginal Fiction (2017), Eric D. Smith’s Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction: New Maps of Hope (2012), and The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction (2011) edited by Masud Raja, Swaralipi Nandi, and Jason Willis take specific themes and critical issues as their organizing principles. Within these conversations on global sf, Lingua Cosmica stands apart by focusing on individual practitioners of sf, instead of on particular spaces, times, or themes. In this collection, which introduces the readers to important sf voices from around the world, the editor’s goal is indeed ambitious and possibly requires an encyclopaedic corpus to do his aims true justice. Nonetheless, a collection that provides American readers a window, however small, into other sf traditions of the world deserves commendation. The author-centered approach allows...