Exploring the “Circuits” Less-Traveled

Abstract

118 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) BOOKS IN REVIEW Exploring the “Circuits” Less-Traveled. Anindita Banerjee and Sonja Fritzche, eds. Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East. Oxford, UK: Peter Lang, 2018. x+250 pp. $67.75 pbk. In their shrewdly assembled book, editors Anindita Banerjee and Sonja Fritzche bring the exploratory spirit so emblematic of most sf to a collection of intriguing, well-researched essays. Featuring analysis of sf films and novels worldwide, with a special focus on the literatures of Eastern Europe, Asia, and South America, each piece brings a needed spotlight to sf outside the United States and United Kingdom. The book reflects its global nature by being divided into three sections: “An Other Transatlantic,” “Transnationalism Behind the Iron Curtain,” and “Asymptomatic Easts and Subterranean Souths.” Each chapter is fascinating, even though my own area of focus is Japanese sf in translation. With articles focusing on linguistics, historiography, and sociopolitical analysis, this collection has something for any scholar to enjoy. My one complaint about it is that it is not longer. The introduction by the editors sets the stage, reflecting on connections between Del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017) and Belyaman’s earlier film The Amphibian Man (1961) to connect to one of the overarching themes of the collection—i.e., these “circuits” within sf of Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Global South are noteworthy yet underappreciated, and their influence on sf worldwide is essential to considering sf and its place in today’s world (2). The first section focuses on themes of “othering” within these literary traditions. Anindita Banerjee contributes the first chapter, “T/Racing Revolution between Red October and the Black Atlantic,” which elucidates the connections between racialized “others” and the transmogrification of language in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), acknowledged as a great influence on its far more mainstream counterpart, George Orwell’s classic 1984 (1949). Banerjee also looks forward to Afrofuturism, and her citations and analysis of the original Russian text and the English translation are riveting and clever, especially the discussion of the “African-lipped” extraterrestrials, and of the duality between the characters identified with “I/a” and “R,” lost in most English translations (25, 28). The second chapter, “Eugenia: Engineering New Citizens in Mexico’s Laboratory of Socialism” by Miguel Garcia, gives Eduardo Urzaiz’s Mexican sf novel Eugenia (1919) a historicized analysis, doing a deep dive into the eugenics-based logic of the novel and the history of eugenics as a whole. Garcia elucidates how eugenics, often discussed in US and German contexts, could be applied to Mexico’s socialist regime of the time, and how Eugenia functions as an exercise of sorts into just how this could work. The final chapter of the section, Antonio Cordoba’s “Between Moscow and Santa Clara: The Soviet-Cuban Imaginary in Agustin de Rojas’ Espiral (1980),” brings into focus the intimate connection between Cuban and Soviet sf during the Cold War, especially in reference to the networks of scientific research and sf publishing in the Global South (76). This article masterfully 119 BOOKS IN REVIEW connects publishing, socioeconomic, and narrative history in Espiral and other Soviet works translated into Spanish and distributed in Cuba. Cordoba’s meticulous research and ability to make accessible to both well-acquainted and uninitiated audiences (like myself) the nuances in both Soviet and Cuban literature of the Cold War period and their connections to their respective regimes make this a significant contribution. The second section’s chapters, each centering on the transnational exchange between Eastern European and former Soviet works and the West, continue to deliver exceptional analysis. In conversation with Delany and other scholars discussing sf and linguistics, Carl Vanderloos’s chapter “Alien Evolution and Dialectical Materialism in Eastern European Science Fiction” notes how the history of dialectical materialism as a philosophy affected the ways that Soviet sf engaged with the world and with nature differently from American or British sf. His exploration of the origins of dialectical materialism and its contextualization in sf are fascinating, especially his assertion of Soviet sf that “the future was to be human and humanist, not alien or alienated” (105). In his close readings of Ivan Efremov...