Desperate Times, Desperate Futures

Abstract

301 BOOKS IN REVIEW also runs the risk of obscuring the vibrant presence of a plethora of other emerging and established First Nation and Métis writers/artists/filmmakers of sf/f/horror, such as Cherie Dimaline (Métis), Gwen Benaway (Anishinaabe/ Métis), Richard van Camp (Dene), Nathan Nigaan Noodin Adler (Lac Des Mille Lacs First Nation), Drew Hayden Taylor (Ojibwe/Curve Lake First Nation), David A. Robertson (Norway House Cree Nation), Chelsea Vowel (Métis), Joshua Whitehead (Oji-Cree), Celu Amberston (Cherokee/Scots-Irish), Sonny Assu (Ligwilda’xw Kwakwaka’wakw), Warren Cariou (Métis/European), and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers (Blackfoot/Sámi). These qualifications aside, this volume deserves a lot of credit for successfully representing diversity and contemporariness while not losing sight of the Canadian sf/f canon. What unites all articles is an acute attention to both historical and cutting-edge debates within the scholarly field, frequently positioning Canada’s relationship with colonialism at the critical forefront and managing to amplify an impressive variety of structurally marginalized voices and potentially emancipatory perspectives. Ransom and Grace’s sweeping, detailed, and perspicacious introduction sets the tone for a variegated engagement with Canadian science fiction, fantasy, and horror that abounds in theoretical linkages, intertextual and critical references, and ample opportunities for dialogue both among the contributions and beyond.—Moritz Ingwersen, University of Konstanz Desperate Times, Desperate Futures. Amanda Rees and Iwan Rhys Morus, eds. Special issue: “Presenting Futures Past: Science Fiction and the History of Science.” Osiris 34 (2019). vi+352 pp. $35. Science and its history have offered much to the development of science fiction (sf). When the achievements of science are circulated and celebrated, or even when their outcomes are catastrophic, they provide endless fuel for the sf imagination. But the reverse is true as well: in complex exchanges of ideas, methods, and lexicons, sf has offered much to the development of science—a newer idea, undoubtedly, but one that is now explored in literary criticism, science and technology studies, discourse analysis, and elsewhere. The recent edition of the annual history of science journal Osiris, titled “Presenting Futures Past: Science Fiction and the History of Science,” brings fresh perspectives to this dialogue. As the editors state in their introduction, “This volume of Osiris had as its inspiration the question of what science fiction could do for the history of science” (1). The “could do” in that sentence is important: rather than cataloguing the various ways in which sf has informed the history of science, this volume is an exploration of possibilities, of how sf could or should inform that discipline, though several articles touch on past interactions as models for future ones. The volume’s uniqueness lies in this historiographic focus which, unlike examinations of the connections between sf and science proper, is largely uncharted territory. The articles showcase a diverse range of interdisciplinary work, all exploring the real and potential connections between sf and the history of science—and not a single one of them disappoints. In “Sleeping Science- 302 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) Fictionally: Nineteenth-Century Utopian Fictions and Contemporary Sleep Research,” for instance, Martin Willis explores the concept of sleep by comparing medical narratives from the nineteenth century with utopian fictions from the same period. Fascinatingly, he anchors the comparison in his own experiences as a participant-observer in a sleep lab at Cardiff University, where he spent time embedded within the institutional and technological machinery of sleep research. He explains that, like Bruno Latour in Laboratory Life (1979), “it is the culture of the sleep laboratory itself that interests me” (267), and that interest leads him to a number of insights. He finds, for example, that due to the need to stay awake all night to analyze the sleep patterns of others, leading to a kind of professional narcolepsy, many sleep researchers view good sleep as a utopian space, a notion that bleeds into the analysis of sleep: “Their own aberrant wakefulness and their desire for participants to sleep well constructs sleep as utopian” (267). He then goes on to trace the concept of utopian sleep across nineteenth-century fictions, including W.H. Hudson’s The Crystal Age (1887), Edward Bellamy...