Fictional Community Research Articles

EPILEPTIC By David B 2005. London: Jonathan Cape. Price £16.99 ISBN 0-22407502-0 SATURDAY By Ian McEwan 2005. London: Jonathan Cape. Price £17.99 ISBN 0-22407299-4 THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME By Mark Haddon 2004. London: Vintage. Price £6.99 Paperback ISBN 0-09945025-9

Depictions of neurological illnesses in literature prompt questions as to how such representations can inform lay readers about the realities of neurological disease and what relevance such books have for the neurologist. Medicine and literature make regular bedfellows. Characterizations of disease abound in fiction and serve either to embellish descriptive prose, to illustrate elements of the human condition or, perhaps more interestingly, to provide social or political allegory. A disease, after all, is a deviation from normality and may thus be a synonym for a whole manner of human struggles. A fictional plague in a mid-European town is the basis for political commentary in Albert Camus' The Plague . An unusual form of epidemic ‘white blindness’ allows Jose Saramago to study late twentieth century society in his novel Blindness in which chaos descends on a fictional community revealing the true nature of society's sightlessness. The disturbance of vision, one of the most fundamental of neurological functions, is perhaps the commonest of allegories used in literature. Neurology lends itself well to such tales for the brain is the seat of knowledge, the ‘soul’ and creativity. Many an author has written on how creativity and freedom of expression can be dulled by various forms of brain manipulation. In Yevgeny Zamyatin's futuristic novel, We , free will is suppressed by surgical removal of imagination; and in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange , the Ludovico technique is used to ‘brainwash’ miscreant youths. Social faults are again highlighted in Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog in which neuroendocrine tissue from a human is transferred into a dog that subsequently takes on a corrupt persona. Such illnesses and neurological treatments are fictitious, but what of the depiction of real illnesses in literature? Oliver Sacks popularized neurological science with descriptions of various disorders in The Man who …

Early Modern Literary Communities: Madeleine Des Roches's City of Women

The poetry of Madeleine Des Roches (ca. 1520-87) exhibits a concern with literary community. In Ode 3, from the 1578/79 Œuvres, she draws on a rich tradition of writings about women and postulates a new community for women writers. The interest in community extends to her sources, which were written by members of important literary groups or which create fictional communities. Des Roches distinguishes herself from predecessors who include Louise Labe, Giovanni Boccaccio, and the Pleiade poets. This article argues in particular for Des Roches's knowledge of Christine de Pizan's Livre de la Cite des Dames; both authors reformulate the story of Carmentis to self-referential ends. Des Roches's reworking of another source, Du Bellay's La Musagnoeomachie, plays on images of urban architecture. Through these and other intertextual references, Des Roches figures herself within the text and presents a compelling argument in favor of both writing and community.

Slashing the Romance Narrative

We, the women of the RSM, in an effort to form a really loose confederation of passionately uncommitted rational anarchists, accept no rules and no limits. We have no boundaries. We do not explain ourselves. We do not accept American Express . . . We reserve the right to slash anyone, anywhere, at anytime. Suze These lines are from the Manifesto of the Renegade Militia (RSM), a group of slash writers and readers, and can be found on their Web page along with their fiction recommendations, a list of their members, and various sassy essays on fandom, listserv politics, and the writing process. Although not representative of slash Web pages, as the Militia includes no actual stories, this quotation does capture the playful transgression at the heart of the slash fiction community. The term slash fiction refers to stories, written by amateur authors (who are almost solely heterosexual women), that involve placing two television or film characters of the same gender, usually male, into noncanonical romantic relationships with each other. Although part of a long history of activities, slash offers its own particular challenge to normative constructions of gender and romance, as it allows women to construct narratives that subvert patriarchy by reappropriating those prototypical hero characters who usually reproduce women's position of social disempowerment. Whether these narratives actually can change the material conditions of women's lives, the fact remains that groups like the RSM are writing out a story that is radically different from standard romance traditions, and they are having a wonderful time in the process. fiction and writing originated in science fiction fandom (from fan and kingdom: the group of people involved in the activities surrounding a particular film, television series, or book and the texts that they produce) around the works of Isaac Asimov and Jules Verne (Verba 1). Fan writing or fiction is the practice of using characters from a professionally published text (a source product) in an original story. Fan fiction is written by amateur authors and was originally published only in fanzines (or zines, magazines) that were compilations of fiction, poems, articles, and art whose price was set only high enough to recoup printing costs. In the zine publishing system, an author submits his or her story to a zine editor, and that story will be published only if it follows the theme of the zine, meets the structural standards of the editor, and follows the aesthetic tradition that has been established by previously published zine stories (Bacon-Smith 7-44). During this zine publishing period, slash emerged from Star Trek fiction, although there is some speculation as to whether there may have been unpublished The Wild Wild West slash fiction even before Star Trek slash developed (Bright, Harmon, and Knight Smeg). Within Star Trek fiction, a tradition had been established wherein authors explored the deep friendship between Captain Kirk and First Officer Spock. These stories usually were labeled hurt/comfort because they involved one of the characters being physically or emotionally wounded and then receiving comfort from the other. These nonsexual friendship-based narratives are now called smarm to distinguish them from slash. came about when authors began to use the hurt/ comfort narrative to make Kirk and Spock's relationship sexual. The term slash, therefore, comes from the / mark placed between the words Kirk and Spock (Kirk/Spock) at the beginning of a story to tell readers that it contains a sexual and romantic relationship between the two characters. As time went on, slash spread to other fandoms like Starsky and Hutch, Blake's 7, and The Professionals (Jenkins 288-306). Slash no longer referred only to Kirk/Spock, but to the more general m/m or male/male designation that could be used in any fandom. …

Forging the Community: Explorations of Memory in Two Novels by Jesus Moncada

This article discusses two novels by the Catalan writer Jesus Moncada: Cami de Sirga (first published 1988) and Estremida memoria (1997). Both revolve around the same fictionalized community, and Moncada's exploration of the processes involved in maintaining and enhancing that community in the face of different challenges is one of the most interesting aspects of his work. Here, the role of memory in this exploration is discussed, with the aid of selected psychological and sociological theories, from two different perspectives: the workings of individual autobiographical memory, and the creation of collective memories of the events which shape the fictional community of Mequinensa.

Charlotte Bronte on the Pleasure of Hating

Hatred underwrites citizenship in Charlotte Brontë's fiction. None of her protagonists discovers what it means to be sociable without experiencing "an almost insuperable repugnance" for other people. 1 Such aversion surpasses interpersonal conflict, proving endemic to her fictional communities. And though the moral education of countless Victorian protagonists lies in their renouncing such extreme feeling, few novelists of the time state so eloquently or stubbornly that our obligations to others are a burden we long--but generally fail--to relinquish. Representing aggression as inseparable from society, Brontë intensified the demands that many nineteenth-century characters endure when living with distant, sometimes heartless relatives--a common trope from the eighteenth century that Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Dickens helped popularize in the nineteenth. Since Brontë's protagonists suffer greater hardships while holding tenaciously to their principles, their struggle with renunciation is more traumatic and socially revealing.

Bleak Houses and Secret Cities: Alternative Communities in Young Adult Fiction.

This essay examines novels in which children or teens in an urban environment, left on their own for a variety of reasons (such as poverty, war, plague, nuclear disaster, or technological breakdown), join together to form a community that explores alternative versions of home and family. The urban survival novel, to distinguish it from the more popular wilderness survival story, encompasses a wide variety of genres, including fantasy, satire, science fiction, social realism, and historical fiction. These novels involve dramatic shifts of perspective—inside/outside, above/below, before/after—which challenge protagonists (and readers) to see the world around them differently and to confront other points of view. The 1970s ushered in a wave of urban survival fiction that has continued to the present; I speculate on why these survival scenarios have proved so compelling for young adult readers.

Camelot’s Killers: Gordon Dickson’s Rhetorical Cleansing of America

Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King – Else, wherefore born… Tennyson, Idylls of the King Writing Around the TableThe idea of Camelot was a lance stuck in the side of American culture – the erup­tion that followed spilled some of the best and the brightest blood in Southeast Asia and Africa. In the science fiction community, Gordon Dickson’s well-liked Childe Cycle1 published between 1960 and 1994, made a fictional Camelot that paralleled Kennedy’s New Frontier. In this paper, I argue that the series functions to make war bloodless and palatable, to mirror the rhetorical postures of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and its political aftermath. A line can be drawn from Kennedy’s rhetoric to the creation of the Peace Corps, the space race, and the deepening involvement in Vietnam. This paper understands Kennedy’s rhetoric to be a step in the direction of American foreign policy that began in Vietnam and extended to other global conflicts. However, Dickson’s writing reflects the early heroic part of the mission: the part we most typically associate with Kennedy’s New Frontier.

Fortress Dystopia: Representations of Gated Communities in Comtemporary Fiction

Fortress Dystopia: Representations of Gated Communities in Comtemporary Fiction

“Your Sister in St. Scully”: An Electronic Community of Female Fans of The X-Files

They have been described as avid, extreme, hardcore, freakish, and obsessed. Amidst the vast subculture (including a virtual university) devoted to the intricacies of the Fox network drama The X-Files, online fans of the television show, which began its eight-season run in 1993, have designed hundreds of thousands of Web pages devoted to the series.1 Fan cultures and communities, and the formation of fan groups by women in particular, have received more attention in scholarly circles recently. For example, Janice Radway and Helen Taylor have explored women's subversive use of romance novels and Gone with the Wind, respectively, for several years, Nancy K. Baym has examined how a rhetori-online discussion forum of soap opera aficionados. Similarly, the well-known work of Camille Bacon-Smith, John Fiske, and Henry Jenkins has drawn attention to the dynamics of television fandom and how fans create new discourses out of their fascination with specific series.2 They focus especially on the science fiction community: “cons” (the shorthand for conventions), online bulletin boards and list-servs, fanzines, and the genre of slash (writing involving same-sex relationships).3

Brier Country: Stories from Blue Valley by Elaine Fowler Palencia (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS OPINIONS AND REVIEWS Elaine Fowler Palencia. Brier Country: Stories from Blue Valley. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. 165 pages, $17.95 paper. In 1993, during one of his many lectures on Appalachian literature, Jim Wayne Miller encouraged his audience to compare the new short stories collected in Chris Offutt's Kentucky Straight to those in Elaine Fowler Palencia's Small Caucasian Woman. Stories in both collections were located in similar Appalachian communities, based on the authors' hometowns near Morehead in Rowan County, Kentucky. Although characters in both collections used the term "Hidy" to greet one another, that is where their similarities ended. With his nucleus of menacing forces charging the dark and violent ways of the men who live on the ridgetops and in the hollers of his fictional community, Offutt created a wake of literary controversy among his Appalachian readers. Meanwhile, Palencia, like her stories, remained quietly committed to her fictional community of "Blue Valley, the county seat of Moore county in eastern Kentucky," where "[bjehind every story whispers another story." Picking up where Small Caucasian Woman left off, Palencia resumes her short story cycle in this new collection. As the epigraph explains, Brier Country takes its title from Jim Wayne Miller's persona, Brier, and Miller's poem "The Country of Conscience": "A land and people finds it has a voice, / discovers a tongue to say itself. ..." At the heart of these sixteen new stories are the carefully drawn characters who inhabit sleepy Blue Valley and the discoveries of their undeniable connections to their place and to one another. Brier Country is about what happens to people when they bump into one another in a small town. "The Shoe Woman: is an epistolary exchange between two aging southern belles. The transplanted Julia Bone teaches English at Blue Valley College and delights in "finding bits of local eastern Kentucky color" for her friend's amusement. Julia Bone abhors the local people but crashes head first into their lives through a series of encounters with an illiterate woman who is wearing Julia's cast off "blue and white spectator pumps, the ones [she] ruined at President Gray's lawn party." The encounters mark Julia irrevocably. These outsider/insider crashes provide the basis for much of the conflict in these stories. In "The Long-Haired Dictionary" a professor from the north (on a one66 year appointment in Blue Valley, having been denied tenure at U. Mass. because halfway "through the book he was writing on Virginia Woolf, he had discovered that he had nothing to say.,") is romantically involved with, according to him, the only intelligent, cultured local woman around. But their culture-clashes only reinforce the stereotypes held by the "long-haired" professor. He asks himself, "Did he want to spend another year in a place where he couldn't even listen to NPR? The hills blocked the reception." But the best example of culture clashes occurs in the story titled "Briers," told in the voice of the brambles, the briers, which encircle the old Forrester farm. This narration is both a tribute to and a twist on Miller's Brier that readers will find engaging. Mr. and Mrs. Forrester, recurring characters in both Small Caucasian Woman and this collection, had raised their family on the farm, but moved away in old age to live with their daughter Dreama. When a young couple comes "in a shiny new car " to rent the Forrester farm for a year, the briers quickly observe that the "new people were wrong for us. We could tell by their smell, a smell of flowers killed in moonshine. We could tell by their soft hands." The man intends to write his book "about getting away from it all in a forgotten corner of Appalachia," and to learn to play a dulcimer he orders from New York which arrives "bright and shiny like it had been dipped in honey." The woman is a mean-spirited version of Lisa Douglas in Green Acres, another twist on the Brier theme Miller would have appreciated. "God, " she wails, "where am I going to get arugula?" The briers watch and grow, creeping toward the couple. "We tolerated...

Folk and Urban Communities in African-American Women's Fiction: Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower

FOLK AND URBAN COMMUNITIES IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN'S FICTION: OCTAVIA BUTLER'S PARABLE OF THE SOWER Madhu Dubey Brown University In "The Politics ofFiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston," first published in 1991, Hazel Carby seeks to account for the recent academic revival of Zora Neale Hurston' s southern folk aesthetic . Carby argues that Hurston's writing, locating authentic black community in the rural south, displaced the difficulties ofrepresenting the complex and contested black culture that was taking shape in the cities and that the current academic reclamation of Hurston' s work illustrates a parallel logic of displacement. Carby concludes with the suggestion that present-day critics of African-American literature and culture "begin to acknowledge the complexity of [their] own discursive displacement of contemporary conflict and cultural transformation in the search for black cultural authenticity. The privileging of Hurston ... at a moment of intense urban crisis and conflict is perhaps a sign of that displacement."1 Carby's provocative argument can be extended beyond its specific reference to the academic recovery of Zora Neale Hurston, and applied to the turn toward southern folk culture taken in so much of the criticism surrounding novels by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and others. Although most of these writers have published city novels, criticism on these novelists has tended to privilege those selected texts and textual elements that help consolidate a black feminine literary tradition derived from southern folk culture .2 Following Carby's logic, we might argue that these critical texts are executing a "discursive displacement" of problems of urban literary representation, but this displacement is itself an oblique form of response to the widely prevalent rhetoric of contemporary urban crisis . This rhetoric, magnetized around the notorious term "underclass," tends to frame the issue of urban crisis essentially as a crisis in black culture and community. In popular media and academic discourses, the underclass is commonly represented as a recalcitrant urban mass polarized against an expanding black middle class and caught in an illicit culture ofpoverty.3 Given the public sway ofthese discourses, it is not surprising that so much recent African-American literature is 104MadhuDubey framing urban crisis as a problem ofrepresentation, and grappling with the questions of whether and how the writer can bridge class divides and speak for, as well as to, a wider black urban community. This problem of representation is exacerbated by the fact that contemporary literary readerships are highly specialized and restricted as well as racially and culturally diverse, and are certainly not coextensive with "the black community." The southern folk aesthetic exemplifies a "discursive displacement" of this crisis in literary representation in the sense that, if black community is perceived to be irreparably fractured in the contemporary city, the folk domain ofthe rural south operates as a site where integral black communities can be imaginatively restored. These face-to-face models of community are typically bound together by ties of place, distinctive cultural modes ofknowing (clustered around the term "conjuring ") and styles of communication (oral tradition). The turn toward southern folk culture works essentially to guarantee the writer's ability to identify, address, and speak for a wider black community. For example, Alice Walker declares, in a much-quoted passage from her essay "The Black Writer and the Southern Experience," that "what the black Southern writer inherits as a natural right is a sense of community . Something simple but surprisingly hard, especially these days, to come by."4 Ifwe accredit current discourses ofurban crisis, black community does appear surprisingly hard to come by these days, requiring as it does difficult acts of mediation across intraracial class, regional, and cultural distinctions. The literary turn toward a rural southern past helps short-circuit this labor of mediation, furnishing community as the writer's "natural right." Alice Walker's remembered image of wholesome southern community hinges on a "cooperative ethos"5 that mitigates intraracial class divisions, precisely the ethos that is often said to have dissolved in the contemporary city. Houston Baker, in his study of black women novelists, specifies the type of community implicit in the southern folk aesthetic, as he opposes the "mulattoization"—or racial dilution—of black urban...

Gravity's Rainbow, Operation Crossbow and the Culture of Containment

Since its publication in 1973, Gravity's Rainbow has attracted critics interested in the representation of film in Pynchon's third novel. The novel contains numerous allusions to actual films and film actors and a fictional film community directed by Gerhardt von Goll and starring Greta Erdmann and Max Schlepzig. In one of the novel's more memorable moments, Slothrop and Greta re-enact a scene from von Goll's masterpiece, Alpdrucken, which re-enactment dissolves into the experience Franz Pokier had of viewing Alpdrucken when it was first released. Pynchon shows a special interest in film and in the play between the real and the reel. For some readers, the closing scene in the Orpheus Theatre signifies that we have always been at the movies in Gravity's Rainbow. Nonetheless, most of the previous critical work on film in Gravity's Rainbow has focused primarily on the films alluded to and on their relation to the thematic arguments in the novel. In this essay, I explore a different cinematic path and suggest some ways Gravity's Rainbow relates to a film released during the time of its writing, the 1965 film Operation Crossbow.

Newspaper Stories: Creating a Newspaper for a Fictional Community

Newspaper Stories: Creating a Newspaper for a Fictional Community

Le populisme et la science politique du mirage conceptuel aux vrais problèmes

Populism and political science. From conceptual mirage to the real problems, Pierre-andré Taguieff. Populism, a word-suitcase, is an un-tried concept, a bastard outgrowth of an undecided "people". It can be reduced neither to a particular political régime nor to fixed ideological contents. From Russian populists of last century to today's omniprésent "telepopulists", political science has tried to delimit its devastating manifestations. Pierre-André Taguieff has drawn up the typology of this defensive system for fictional communities. Canovan, Gellner, Laclau, Weffort and others have been summoned to zero in on this rebellious entity.

Cosmic engineers: a study of hard science fiction

The first comprehensive critical study of hard science fiction, this book reveals how the term hard science fiction originated, and how arguments about its range and nature have unfolded. Westfahl shows that hard science fiction is generally characterized by the author's extreme concern for scientific accuracy and logic. Identifying two characteristic forms of hard science fiction, Westfahl closely examines several representative works: Arthur C. Clarke's A Fall of Moondust, Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, and Charles Sheffield's Between the Strokes of Midnight. This book offers new insights into hard science fiction and provides a wealth of information about what members of the science fiction community have said about this relatively recent genre.

Nowherelands: Utopian Communities in BC Fiction

Nowherelands: Utopian Communities in BC Fiction

Experimentation and Planning in Community Care

ABSTRACT The dominant ideology in services for people with learning disabilities is clearly normalisation, or social role valorisation, as it has recently been termed. The emphasis is on the role that a person has within society. However, in Western society, what seems to be valued is power, individualism, enterprise, wealth, beauty and so on. It is not yet clear how we will be able to help people with learning disabilities to achieve such valued social roles. An alternative may be to consider whether we can design communities which value co-operation, affection and interdependence (rather than independence) and I shall describe first a fictional community which has such ideals, and then a real (albeit small) community, in Mexico, where conditions are arranged such that these ideals may be realised. I will then go on to outline some aspects of the philosophy which underpins these communities and which might be relevant to designing co-operative communities. These include the importance of setting objectiv...

A Prairie home companionand the fabrication of community

On the live variety radio program A Prairie Home Companion, host Garrison Keillor fabricates the fictional community of Lake Wobegon. In doing so, he also addresses another fabricated community, the baby boom generation. The weekly monologues portray Keillor's persona moving from nostalgia and bitterness to acceptance of the conditions of community as they are. Consequently, they reflect and encourage a passive and uncritical approach toward community life in an audience that has outgrown activism and is searching for an alternative.

Gynocentric Mythmaking in Joan Vinge’s The Snow Queen

■ In her 1983 essay “Canopus in the Classroom.” Lee Cullen Khanna notes that in the past fifteen years a number of women writers of utopian and science fiction novels have presented in their works “an explicitly female vision of the ‘society’” ; as Khanna observes, such fictional communities usually are characterized by “genuine egalitarianism, fluid political structures, integration of individual and community development, harmony among various forms of life. and. perhaps most significant, respect for process.” 1 In her essay Khanna focuses on the articulation of this explicitly female or gynocentric vision in the recent “space fiction” of Doris Lessing: however, her generalizations apply equally to such works as Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge o f Time, Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed.” Ursula K. Le G uins The Left Hand o f Darkness. and Joan D. Vinge’s The Snow Queen. In each of these works, the author suggests that androcentric societies are violent and unjust because they consider men and so-called “masculine” character traits to be superior to women and supposedly “feminine” characteristics. For instance, in androcentric societies rationality and autonomy generally are valued more highly than are intuition and emotion, interdependence and collectivity. Moreover, each of these authors presents as a positive alternative to real and fictional patriarchies an imaginary gynocentric society. As Khanna suggests, these latter societies differ from androcentric ones not because they invert the existing hierarchy but because they are non-hierarchical. treating women and men with equal respect and reveling in the complexity and diversity of human beings. Of these writers— each of whom is making important contributions to feminist thought and to science fiction as a literary genre— Vinge has received the least attention from scholars. An accomplished science fiction writer who has won two Hugos and who is regularly represented in “Best of the Year” science fiction short story anthologies. Vinge draws upon a diverse body of literary and mythic material to present a unique vision of present-day ills and

Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy , and: The End of the World , and: The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy, and: The End of the World, and: The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction Curtis C. Smith George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes , eds. Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983. 209 pp. $19.95. Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander , eds. The End of the World. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983. 219 pp. $19.95. Thomas P. Dunn and Richard D. Erlich , eds. The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 1. Westport: Greenwood, 1982. 284 pp. $29.95. We might expect three more works from the growing list of science fiction criticism from Southern Illinois and Greenwood Press to rehash old ideas. Instead, these volumes are innovative. The most general and theoretical of the three is Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy, gathering essays from the Eaton Conference. As is usual in such a collection, the essays vary in quality. Gerald Prince, for example, admits that he has not read much science fiction; nonetheless, he proceeds to make generalizations about the degree of "newness" in the genre. Other essays, such as Robert Hunt's on Atlas Shrugged, make dubious and inflated claims about the works they discuss. But the more successful essays see science fiction as reflective of broader social trends. Bruce Franklin in "America as Science Fiction" discusses, among other things, the New York World's Fair of 1939 as a kind of science fiction. Susan Gubar, in "She in Herland: Feminism as Fantasy," not only makes extensive comments on Haggard and Gilman but considers feminism itself as a kind of fantasy; and by fantasy she means a broad, ennobling power of the sort mentioned by Eric Rabkin, who concludes in another fine essay that "it is by well made fantasy that homo sapiens shapes the world." In his essay on Jules Verne, Mark Rose characterizes science fiction broadly as containing the tension between materialism and spiritualism. Two essays should be singled out: Gary K. Wolfe's "Autoplastic and Alloplastic Adaptations in Science Fiction: 'Waldo' and 'Desertion'" and Leslie Fiedler's "The Criticism of Science Fiction." The former is the best essay on science fiction fandom that I have seen. Wolfe suggests that what science fiction fans find attractive in the genre is that it provides images of autoplastic and alloplastic adaptations of deformed people to their environments, the classic case being Heinlein's character Waldo using mechanical hands to cover his own [End Page 462] weakness (hence the term "waldoes"). Wolfe concludes that such themes show that science fiction provides more than escape, and that: [Science fiction] is not exclusively a literature about mechanization and technological appropriation of the universe, that its roots do not necessarily lie in fantasies of power and subjugation, that it does not serve its readers wholly as a means of escape or as a device for intellectual game-playing, that it is not antihuman. Instead, says Wolfe, the works he has discussed provide "structural models of integration." Fiedler's essay, also, is arresting, if only in that it allows us by indirection to find direction out. In the science fiction community there has been a longstanding disagreement about the worth of science fiction's growing respectability. The slogan "let's get science fiction back in the gutter where it belongs" has made the rounds of the conventions. Now here is Fiedler to tell us that science fiction never left the gutter after all. Even the best science fiction differs from mainstream literature in its effects, he says, and must accordingly be judged by different standards: "If, therefore, Stapledon [for example] moves . . . us, it is not . . . as Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka . . . move us." Rather, Stapledon—like other science fiction—is "sub or para literature." Fresh from books on freaks and on Olaf Stapledon, Fiedler would lump science fiction with the previous two. In Stapledon, though, Fiedler picks a poor example to make his point, as recognition of Stapledon's (conventional) literary quality is growing. Coordinates is on the whole a valuable book, but Fiedler reminds us that latecomers to academic science fiction criticism have often...