400 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) narratives: the resilience of basic decency and of moral virtues such as courage and hope in highly adverse circumstances. In all, Science Fiction, Ethics and the Human Condition is a consistently solid, often astute, collection. It achieves a commendable balance between discussing prose fiction and the visual media, longer and shorter narrative forms, broad ideas and their embodiments in specific narratives, genre sf (aimed at a specialized sf audience) and sf by predominantly mainstream authors, and so on. If one body of work receives unusual prominence, it is films directed by Ridley Scott, particularly Alien, Blade Runner, and Prometheus. This is not, however, especially intrusive when so much else receives careful attention. There is an emphasis on dystopian or desolate futures (including Blade Runner, but also much more) and on sf-horror scenarios (including, but not limited to Alien). This is noticeable, if not exactly intrusive, but understandable in a book devoted to sf’s engagement with ethical issues and visions of the human condition. Very often, these thematic elements are brought vividly to life in stories about extreme, frightening situations. Ultimately, I have no serious reservations about this collection. Some chapters do contain material that struck me as trite or lazy, such as references to “scientism,” as if it were clear what that chameleon-like word means and why scientism, whatever it amounts to, is a bad thing. Likewise, Christian Baron claims, with no substantiation, that the distinction between “hard” and “soft” sf relies on an alleged “positivist conception of science that has long been rendered obsolete by the findings of historians and sociologists of science” (19). I doubt that any such “positivist” understanding of science has been, or could be, so easily disposed of. In any event, the loose distinction between hard and soft sf need not rely on any controversial theory of science itself. But these are relatively minor and scattered irritations within a substantial book. Thankfully, Science Fiction, Ethics and the Human Condition is also well written and edited. Some small glitches recur, but they are relatively minor: for example, the authors and editors often struggle with the idea that subjects and verbs are supposed to agree in number, but this does not produce any unintelligible or distractingly awkward prose. On the whole, the contributors to this volume, most of them from Denmark, seem scientifically and philosophically informed. At the same time, their papers are accessible to non-specialists. As a bonus, most contributors also demonstrate a strong overall grasp of the sf field, something that cannot be taken for granted at a time of increasing academic hyperspecialization. —Russell Blackford, University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia Ethics in the Sf Mega-Text. Russell Blackford. Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination: Visions, Minds, Ethics. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, SCIENCE AND FICTION, 2017. xi+204 pp. $19.99 pbk. Early in Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination Russell Blackford contends that “it is more strictly accurate to describe science fiction as a 401 BOOKS IN REVIEW narrative mode rather than, more vaguely, as a narrative genre” (10). Although he will remind us twice later that sf is really a mode (58, 105), he also says he finds it more convenient to refer to sf as a genre, as it is more familiarly known. Indeed, the second chapter is entitled “Science Fiction: A Short History of a Literary Genre” (21). Still, his early references to narrative modes that define sf in terms of “the sorts of events that can take place and, more specifically, the sorts of action that the characters can perform,” and to sf generally as a field whose distinctiveness derives from “the expanded, yet bounded, range of things that can happen and things that its characters can do” (10-11; emphasis in original), are important. For the subject of this book is the ethical implications of those “things” that can happen in sf or that its characters can do. Blackford’s reference to modes is also interesting for other reasons. He says that he derived the term from Northrop Frye’s classic study Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), in which Frye begins his discussion of five “modes” of literature...
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Jan 1, 2022
Maria Mariola Glavan 
Open Access
