Sprocket Power

Abstract

383 BOOKS IN REVIEW decisions that inform an adaptation, Wegner writes that by “eschewing the guarantees of success offered in the film, Mitchell relocates utopia elsewhere, into our actions in the present” (214). Yet the film cannot be discounted because it “offers a thrilling example of utopian romanticism, an optimism of the intellect that aims to encourage an optimism of the will to act to realize such a world” (215). Frankly, in a global climate that is defined by “proliferating pessimisms” (207) and a 2016 US election that was “the beginning of the nightmare from which we have not yet awoke” (54), optimism is needed now more than ever. In this vein, Igniting Hope repeatedly reminded me of Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan’s Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (2003), a collection that emerged in the aftermath of the 9/11 event. In my SFS review of that earlier book, I argued that Moylan and Baccolini were actively working “to kick at the dystopian darkness until it bleeds the daylight of [u]topia” (SFS 32 [Mar. 2005]: 188). I recycle the same imagery to describe Wegner’s Invoking Hope: it too is kicking the darkness until it bleeds the daylight of utopia and, in so doing, ends with an uplifting (and very welcome) message that should appeal to everyone: “utopia is never no-where, an imagined perfected future, but in fact always already potentially exists in the concrete now-here, in our collective fidelity to the project of making a world we so desire rather than a world we fear” (218).—Graham J. Murphy, Seneca College Sprocket Power. Jeremy Withers. Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles. Liverpool UP, 2020. 263 pp. $120 hc. Early in Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles, Jeremy Withers briefly gives his book a third protagonist—the pedestrian. The presence of humans without vehicles in public spaces is implied by the book’s subtitle, Contesting the Road in American Science Fiction: foot traffic (including traffic using wheelchairs) forms a visible and significant part of the daily migration patterns in towns and cities, both now and before the advent of either the bicycle or the automobile. Before then, public thoroughfares were, as Withers puts it, “socially constructed as commons” for all to traverse freely at their own pace (31). In the past century, the streets once held in common have become arenas where people are relegated to the role of spectators in a combat between machines—a combination road rally and demolition derby that invites its sidewalk-bound onlookers to take sides and cheer for a winner. Withers is not shy about declaring his preference for the bicycle: this allegiance can hardly come as a shock to readers of SFS who have read his article “Bicycles Across the Galaxy: Attacking Automobility in 1950s Science Fiction” (44.3 [2017]). An expanded version of this article serves as the centerpiece of Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles. At the same time, it pumps up the volume on Withers’s cheerleading, as evidenced by its new title—“Murderous Cars, Space Bikes, and Alien Bicycles in the Golden Age.” Readers who can tune out the toned-up rhetoric in this chapter will find it easier to appreciate one of Withers’s real strengths: his flair for finding bicycles parked in entertaining and unlikely out-of-the-way locales in sf. The 384 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) Twilight Zone-ish creepiness of Avram Davidson’s story “Or All the Seas with Oysters” (1958), with its repair shop full of sentient and possibly malevolent bicycles, deserves further investigation as part of a study of sf’s conversion of familiar inanimate objects into threatening life forms. Likewise, the pedalpowered spaceship of Poul Anderson’s “A Bicycle Built for Brew” (1958) is a tempting starting point for a survey of works that lampoon the ridiculous excesses of the Gyro Gearloose-style kludging practiced by sf’s lesser heroes and authors. Even so, the rhetoric is never far from these bits of detective work, and it has a tendency to produce one-sided interpretations of the source material. Withers’s analysis of Robert Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones (1952) is one example of this...