Metanarrative Tensions

Abstract

521 BOOKS IN REVIEW in this volume—thirteen of sixteen—originally appeared in this journal. You cannot spell science fiction studies without Science Fiction Studies. We must address the elephant in the room—the exorbitant price of the volume under consideration. By my calculations, if it were possible to buy Volume III separately, at a total of $1100 for the full series that is still $250, far too much for this associate professor’s book budget. The publisher sells other books for reasonable prices, and it would seem that being destined for the reference section in a university library is what explains the price tag. I have accosted every colleague I could, and the best any of us could come up with for this pricing policy is something or other about university research libraries being willing to pay that much for reference works and presses being willing to charge. If a book is really important to me, it goes on the shelf in my office, where it is read and re-read, marked up and dog-eared. The fore-edges get smudged with dirt, and the spine begins to crumble. By the time that has happened, I have a decent grasp of what it is about. What is the fate of a book destined for the reference section, and who is its audience? —Nathaniel Isaacson, North Carolina State University Metanarrative Tensions. Gary Westfahl. The Rise and Fall of American Science Fiction, from the 1920s to the 1960s. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019. x+301 pp. $45 pbk. From Hugo Gernsback to Joseph W. Campbell, from the Golden Age to the rise of paperbacks, the New Wave, cyberpunk, and the dominance of film and TV, the established history of American sf has been told and retold several times now. This is how histories and canons are cemented: by the sustained repetition of a narrative that takes on—slowly, eventually, inexorably—the appearance of objectivity. A cynical approach to reading Gary Westfahl’s new book, a collection of eight previously published chapters, now updated, and six newly written chapters designed to create a “mosaic of my general argument about the genre’s development” (4), would be to summarize it as yet another retelling of the entrenched history of the genre in America, with all of the usual figures and texts that, while crucial to sf’s development, are now so well-known among critics and scholars as to be hardly worth dragging into the spotlight. It would be easy to conclude, rather dismissively, that this history has become a kind of metanarrative, to borrow Lyotard’s term, and that its recapitulation lacks critical and scholarly value. A more generous or level-headed approach is to recognize that Westfahl, who has been a critic, teacher, and historian of sf since the 1990s, was a recipient of the Pilgrim Award in 2003, and played a key role in coordinating the Eaton conferences at the University of Riverside, California, as well as publishing volumes of their noteworthy presentations, has done more than enough here and in past work to justify returning to the canonical history of American sf. Westfahl certainly focuses on well-trodden territory in his mosaic: for instance, on my count discussions of Gernsback, his fiction, and his 522 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) magazines occur on over ninety pages of the collection. But at the same time, the book displays a strong commitment to reading and exploring those aspects of American sf and its history that are too-often sidelined or ignored within critical circles. Several examples stood out in my reading. In a chapter on sf art, updated from a piece published in 2002, Westfahl notes the existence of many books on the subject, but laments that none attempt a critical taxonomy of its forms—“Surely, one might argue, we need a more systematic framework for such discussions” (39), he insists, and then goes on to develop one. In a newly developed section dealing with early sf anthologies, he notes that sf historians recognize the importance of anthologies, citing works such as Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions collections (1967, 1972), but that the vast majority of anthologies, especially from the 1940s...