The Worlds of Science-Fiction Criticism

Abstract

Brian Attebery. The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. 212 + viii pp. H. Bruce Franklin. Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. 232 + ix pp. Wayne L. Johnson. Ray Bradbury. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980.173 + xiii pp. John J. Teunissen, ed. Other Worlds: Fantasy and Science Fiction Since 1939. Winnipeg: The University of Manitoba, 1980. 225 + xiv pp. Explorations into science fiction have become symptomatic of a growing desire to investigate its origins, genres and subgenres, its uses and meta- morphoses. We are indeed very far from that crypto-cliquish fandom of the '30s for which only apocryphal stories about miracle-working gadgets and cheap-thrilling tales about robots and interplanetary invasions made true science fiction. The cultural phenomenon has since then ramified and graduated into schools, colleges and universities. Arguments about the pre- history, traditions and categories of science fiction began to multiply. The archaeological unearthing revealed a much older history than what Hugo Gernsback, the "father" of a type of technological science fiction (but by profession a designer of batteries) presented as an aboriginal freak in his launching of the magazine Modern Electrics (1908). For instance, some critics will claim that the first space opera is to be found as far back as the second century A.D. (around 125-85), in the True History of the Greek writer Lucian of Samosata. Others will establish the ancestry of modern science fiction with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Others will argue that in every mythical tale are to be found ingredients of conjectural fiction of which science fiction is an outgrowth. Yet what characterizes the cultural criticism of science fiction is an effort to provide a meaningful synthesis for all these trends. The point here is not merely to compile data as with an encyclopedia, but to attempt to circumscribe the field while disclosing its contradictions, to explain its diversified nature while establishing the history of the genre, to analyze its extent and limitations and to study its social significance.