Speculative Realism and Science Fiction by Brian Willems

Abstract

205 BOOKS IN REVIEW an untheorized shift in a larger structure of feeling that we are beginning to see now. Increasingly, Westfahl suggests, citizens of the twenty-first century have become socially withdrawn and emotionally reserved, more willing to watch others through digital media than to engage with them. Just as he scooped scientists on the satellite, Clarke predicted later social theorists’ work on the weakening of social ties, incorporating these prophecies into his narratives. In many ways, this is a fascinating argument. One wishes that Westfahl had gone a little further, exploring the social fact that science fiction and related fan cultures have long attracted alienated or recessive individuals, including the hikikomori of Japan and the involuntary celibates or incels of the Anglophone Internet. Westfahl might have incorporated a growing body of work on asexuality and aromanticism, as well. Perhaps even more apropos to Westfahl’s study, the Kubrickian coldness of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) also helped inspire the willful opacity and icy remoteness of queer icons such as David Bowie. Astronauts, aliens, and androids obviously appeal to isolates of both circumstance and choice. And yet, there is more to Clarke’s reticence than, say, the widespread waning of affect. Clarke’s restraint was obviously not entirely self-imposed. Even in his Golden and Silver Age works, we can see that desire hides beneath the male homosociality of his futures and, as for his later, more liberated fictions, Clarke undoubtedly knew how the sf market treated authors who wrote too explicitly and feelingly about queer eroticism. Westfahl’s method, however, refuses to travel beyond the overt meaning of Clarke’s texts, tacitly foreclosing the possibility that Clarke’s same-sex colleagues might mean something more while also rejecting the notion that Clarke’s late-career narratives might bear the imprint of more subtle repressions. As a result, the book proves sympathetic to Clarke’s sexuality but unwilling to draw on queer theory to interrogate it. In this regard, Westfahl’s work is indicative of a larger debate in both academic and vernacular sf criticism about what counts as knowledge, one that we often see staged in conference question-and-answer sessions. A certain version of sf criticism treats each author’s body of work as a closed, selfreferential system that holds all of the resources available to understand the texts contained therein. To properly read Clarke using this method means figuring out what Clarke thinks about a topic by moving from one text to another based on shared themes. What falls outside of the author’s oeuvre is passed over in silence. Although these contributions can be incredibly useful to other scholars—we often depend on these thorough overviews—I think we should follow the example of Clarke’s lunar surveyors and dig a little deeper.—Jordan S. Carroll, University of Tampa Ambiguity All the Way Down. Brian Willems. Speculative Realism and Science Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2017. x+223 pp. £85 hc, £19.99 pbk, £85 ebk (PDF), £19.99 ebk (ePub). There are very many things I admire about this first full-length study of the unexpected ways in which speculative realism and science fiction can work in tandem. Speculative Realism and Science Fiction is a well-organized, wide- 206 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) ranging, and very well-researched study, and Willems articulates his often dense and thorny material clearly and straightforwardly. He also maintains a good balance between attention to theory and attention to fiction, teasing out the work of foundational speculative-realist theorists such as Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux through well-chosen stories, and building convincingly original readings of these stories through framing them within the specifics of speculative-realist theory. Willems’s study is part of Edinburgh University Press’s “Speculative Realism” series edited by Graham Harman. In his editor’s preface, he identifies the deceptively simple principle of Willems’s “object-oriented strand of Speculative Realism” that more or less guides the development of this present study: “the object lies somewhere beyond all of our attempts to interact with or speak about it” (viii). As Willems himself convincingly argues, this “beyond” flies in the face of most conventional descriptions...