Giant Spiders and Zombie Moms: A Guide to Posthuman Science Fiction

Abstract

287 BOOKS IN REVIEW reminding us just how deeply the author was influenced by this tradition himself, as evidenced by his late series of novels—e.g., Cocaine Nights (1996)—that explore the psychopathology of criminal transgression. Paul A. Green’s “The Final Analysis” is a rather silly first-person narrative of a patient who is psychoanalyzed by “Dr. Ballard,” while Stephen E. Andrews’s “Saucer Occupant” is an intermittently engaging creative memoir that blends Ballard (and New Wave sf more generally) with the tabloid fantasies of UFOlogy. Editor McGrath’s own contribution, a vivid vignette of entropic breakdown in a luxury condo building, reads like an outtake from Ballard’s High-Rise. The book also gathers creative work in different media, such as Pippa Tandy’s “Trainsformations,” a series of overdeveloped photos of exurban hinterlands taken from the windows of a speeding train at dusk, and Sam Scoggins’s “Views of the Uncanny Valley,” a cluster of “landscape photographs” digitally produced by a Generative Adversarial Network. The blurry and/or virtual landscapes captured in these two pieces recapitulate the spatial obsessions of Ballard in striking new contexts. Like Scroggins’s piece, Andrew C. Wenaus’s essay “Coping with Zero to a Million Decimals” shows how much Ballard has inspired contemporary digital artists and web designers—here the “Twitterbot” experiments of Mike Bonsell, who uses AI technology to evoke the author’s distinctive ideas and prose style. Bonsell’s Twitter account @JGB_Sentences, for example, generates, twice per day, new “Ballardian” lines, which capture the author’s tone and syntax with uncanny accuracy. The remaining handful of pieces are of largely biographical interest, including a “lost” interview with Ballard that appeared in a 1969 issue of the Illustrated London News and a short story written by a childhood friend of Ballard in 1930s Shanghai. These items are at best intriguing ephemera; more affecting is a photo essay by Karolina Urbaniak that chronicles her trip with Ballard’s daughter, Fay, to revisit the family home in Shepperton, a suburb just outside London. Interleaved with snapshots of the house and surrounding neighborhood are Fay’s fond recollections of her father in various cozily domestic scenes—drinking a beer, walking the dog, and other mundane behaviors that effectively humanize this rather strange and forbidding man. My favorite piece in the volume is an essay by Dominika Oramus—author of the excellent study, Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard (2015), which I reviewed in the July 2016 issue of this journal—that explores Ballard’s friendship with Angela Carter and the similarities between their brilliantly original works of surrealistic science fiction. One of the first classes I taught at the University of Iowa, way back in the mid-1990s, brought together the work of Ballard and Carter, so it is nice to have my sense of their mutual affinity confirmed in this lovely little essay.—Rob Latham, Twentynine Palms Giant Spiders and Zombie Moms: A Guide to Posthuman Science Fiction. Simona Micali. Towards a Posthuman Imagination in Literature and Media: 288 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) Monsters, Mutants, Aliens, Artificial Beings. Oxford, UK: Peter Lang, 2019. xii+246 pp. $60.95 pbk. Towards a Posthuman Imagination is a spectacular occasion for sf enthusiasts to thicken their reading and watching lists. Simona Micali tailors her claims around a robust net of textual evidence that inevitably induces readers to review the classics and to dive into many new texts. This unique handbook to posthuman sf provides readers with a detailed taxonomy of nonhuman figures while problematizing those same categories. Far from being a mere list of typologies of monsters, Micali’s book focuses on those narratives where the distinction between human and non-human is not linear and dichotomous, but rather blurry and thought-provoking. While if a “giant spider must obviously be killed,” it is also true that “shooting our mother who has changed into a zombie and is trying to bite us on the neck will raise plenty of moral problems” (16). The distance between the giant spider and the zombie mom—the discrepancy between these two non-human figures—is the subject of Simona...