Sf Texts Research Articles

The Joy of Queer Science Fiction Reading, or: Will Queers Destroy Science Fiction?

The paper seeks to examine the connections between “queer reading” and “science fiction reading” from the perspective of readers’ recollections of their juvenile experiences of “looking for clues” in queer sf narratives. Using Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading, I discuss the idea of queer adolescent reading as a possibly transformative experience that offers exciting theoretical opportunities for academic scholarship on the fantastic. By turning attention to selected testaments of adolescent queer readerly experiences, written by both writers and fans, I hope to demonstrate both the personal (individual) and collective nature of queer self-recognition through these intense and affective engagements with sf texts. A closer examination of a collection of short essays in which authors reflect on the provocative idea of “queers destroying sf,”also based on individual recollections of engaging with sf as young readers, expands the discussion to incorporate fan activity and the question of queer canon-forming.

Readings in queer pleasure

This article analyzes the queer pleasures of the 2015 sf movie by the Wachowski sisters, Jupiter Ascending . We find that these pleasures operate on two intertwined levels: the movie’s campy villains and over-the-top aesthetics reflect the themes of queer temporality and reproduction on the textual level, while the straight romance of the protagonist draws on the queer archive of fan fiction. We engage with queer studies and fan studies as critical frameworks that allow us to center affective pleasures of recognizing well-established romantic tropes and character archetypes. Critical debates surrounding Jupiter Ascending point to a larger discussion concerning the space for pleasure within sf texts and sf fan communities, while the movie’s commitment to fan fiction tropes and narrative practices anticipates recent changes in media consumption and production patterns.

Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life by Steven Shaviro

Reviewed by: Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life by Steven Shaviro Roger Luckhurst Life, Jim, But Not as We Know It. Steven Shaviro. Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life. Goldsmiths, 2021. 181 pp. £17.50. This elegant and lucid book modestly offers eight chapters of eight close readings of science-fiction texts, structured around questions of life and embodiment—or what the British sociologist Nikolas Rose would call “the politics of life itself,” as it becomes a scientifically manipulable, controllable, and commodifiable thing with the advances of the biosciences. In typical Shaviro style (this is his eleventh book), the short stories, novellas, novels, and one Afrofuturist hip-hop album considered are principally instruments for [End Page 126] reading science-fictional futures in a philosophical mode. These are not genre studies or cultural histories of sf texts but, as the minimalist introduction states, texts read as “thought experiments” (1). The readings here share a theoretical frame and reading practice with those critical theorists loosely associated with speculative realism or object-oriented ontology (OOO), such as Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker. Indeed, Harman’s pleasingly odd exercise in close readings of Lovecraft’s stories in Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (2012) might be the model for Shaviro’s approach here. Eugene Thacker talked about writing not a philosophy of horror, but about the horror of philosophy, its very limits, pushing to expose the unthought of its system of thought, using Gothic fiction and occult grimoires as theory-fictions to break open the constraints of disciplinary knowledge. Similarly, Shaviro is not writing philosophy through sf, but reading sf as a kind of philosophical speculation, thus testing the limits of both philosophy and literary or textual criticism. Whether you get on with this mode or not, these close readings are always worth the time and will be vital reference points for those exploring these texts and writers. The first two chapters explore the limits of the Kantian philosophy of human cognition in two texts that stage dramas of explicit breeches of Kant’s transcendental frames of human thought. These are Charles Harness’s “The New Reality” (1950) and Adam Roberts’s audacious working out of Kant’s limits of philosophy in The Thing Itself (2015). The philosophical ground of this attempt to think beyond the Kantian frames of thought will be familiar to those well-versed in their OOO or willing to spend time with post-post-post-structuralists such as Quentin Meillassoux. This is the critique of limits of correlationism, the fatal mistake, so the OOO crew argue, introduced into Western philosophy by Kant that the world can only be understood through human frames, given the phenomenological prison of our limited conceptions of time and space. Sf as a vehicle for post-Kantian thought can stage moments of the sublime that exceed Kant’s act to recuperate even these moments of cognitive limit or collapse. These moments in sf hint at genuine alterity, or else dramatize the impossibility of representation of what Meillassoux calls “the great outside,” that rich world of things themselves that carry on perfectly well beyond human limits. So far, so familiar: Shaviro has expertly explored this conceptual terrain in previous works, such as The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (2014) and Discognition (2016). Chapters three and four focus on Clifford Simak’s “Shadow Show” (1953) and Ann Halam’s Dr Franklin’s Island (Gwyneth Jones’s 2002 YA rewrite of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau [1896]). This pair explores how “life itself” might become a manipulable object of oppressive conjunctures of bioscience and corporate capitalism, while suggesting that there is a kind of darkness or alien alterity to life that escapes this capture. These are science-fictional spins on work in Gothic or horror studies that explore how terror can be generated out of this sense of life as an alien vitalist force that surges up and through the human body, transforming and remaking it. But where Lovecraft’s response is a reactionary and racialized terror at hybridity or [End Page 127] trans-species genetic transfer, Simak’s short story exposes the Cold War ideological fusion of biological sciences with the militiarization of research...

After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin by Thomas Connolly

Reviewed by: After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin by Thomas Connolly Anna McFarlane Posthumanism Before Posthumanism. Thomas Connolly. After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin. Liverpool UP, Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies, 2021. viii+ 227 pp. $130 hc. [End Page 558] The relationship between posthumanism and science fiction is well established. The project of posthumanism—to rethink the figure of the "human" and to find something that might come after that figure—has now developed into a critical posthumanism that does not simply try to think of what comes after the human, but thinks of posthumanism as a critical tool for deconstructing the human historically and aesthetically. Science fiction has never been far away from these developments. Donna Haraway famously drew on speculative fiction in her "Manifesto for Cyborgs" (1984), taking inspiration from authors such as Octavia Butler and Marge Piercy. N. Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman (1999) contains a critical reading of embodiment and transcendence in William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984). While this relationship between science fiction and (critical) posthumanism is suggestive, the tendency has been for scholars of posthumanism to draw upon contemporary sf texts, only occasionally recognizing the longer history of posthuman forms in the genre, perhaps through texts such as James Tiptree Jr.'s "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973) or Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953). In After Human, Thomas Connolly seeks to redress this oversight with a study of posthumanism in sf from the nineteenth century to the 1970s. He uses posthumanism as "a hermeneutical principle aimed at assessing the ideas, values, and notions that surround the human or non-human in these works" (21), a move described as analogous to Ernst Bloch's theory of the utopian function or Tom Moylan's concept of the "critical utopia." Connolly uses the figure of the Oncomouse™ as a way into the knotty terrain of critical posthumanism and its stakes. The Oncomouse™ is a genetically mutated mouse, created by a Harvard research laboratory and designed to produce tumors at an accelerated rate, allowing scientists to quickly produce cancerous growths for experimentation under lab conditions. This lifeform was trademarked upon its creation in the 1990s and became a focal point for cultural critics, who tended to view the Oncomouse™ as either "a Frankensteinian threat to the sanctity of human life, or as a locus of subversive resistance to the very techno-industries that created it" (12). Connolly aims to pave a third way that allows the relationship between "nature" and "culture" to be navigated in a more nuanced fashion. He begins by clearly mapping out the terrain of critical posthumanism in exceptionally clear writing. This is a contested and developing academic field, and Connolly is adept at honing in on the most important issues at stake and introducing readers to some of the key thinkers in the field, including Rosi Braidotti and N. Katherine Hayles. He then undertakes something of a whistlestop tour of some of critical posthumanism's philosophical forebears, with a particular focus on the appearance of techné and technicity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical thinking. Situating critical posthumanism within a longer philosophical tradition is clearly important to Connolly's project as he seeks out posthumanism avant la lettre in his chosen texts, and some of these figures doubtless loom large, particularly Martin Heidegger. Others, however, such as Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, are less significant for Connolly's study, [End Page 559] although name-dropping them here perhaps opens future lines of research in establishing the roots of critical posthumanism. Connolly's introduction is particularly strong in its description of the role that "new" or "vital" materialism has come to play in critical posthumanism. In Connolly's narrative, posthumanism becomes a tool for moving beyond the linguistic turn, for recognizing the importance of materiality and entanglement, becoming a place to query distinctions between the natural and the cultural, the individual and the "environment." Connolly's understanding of science fiction, then, as a literature habitually preoccupied with technology (17), allows him to weave sf and...

Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium by Rachel S. Cordasco

Reviewed by: Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium by Rachel S. Cordasco Michael A. Morrison Rachel S. Cordasco Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium Urbana. University of Illinois Press. 2021. 316 pages. DURING ROUGHLY THE first half of the twentieth century, the literature of the fantastic in English was subdivided into well-delineated genres—science fiction, fantasy, horror—with forms such as surrealism and magical realism lumped into the catch-all category "literature." In subsequent decades, however, these categorizations became increasingly inappropriate, as authors began to merge genres and mainstream authors began to incorporate tropes from various genres. Thus was born the collective cross-genre label "speculative fiction" (SF). This worldwide phenomenon is the topic of Rachel S. Cordasco's remarkable book, Out of This World. To appreciate this unique book, you need to be aware of its scope, content, and approach. For this is no mere annotated bibliography. Rather, each chapter is a guided tour through speculative fiction in translation (SFT) from a "source language" into English. Those fourteen languages are Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. Although a handful of works of SFT have been widely read since (at least) the 1871 translation of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), the first major wave of SFT began in the mid-twentieth century. Accordingly, Cordasco focuses primarily on books (not short stories) of SFT published since the 1960s. Each chapter begins with a short, invited introduction by an author, scholar, translator, or editor; these introductions provide a (very brief) contextual overview of SF in that chapter's source language. The rest of each chapter consists of discussions of individual SF texts that have been translated into English. In addition to providing brief plot information, Cordasco situates each book in the author's body of SFT and illuminates extraliterary influences that shaped the work and its selection for translation—also including, as appropriate, cultural and linguistic factors that affect translation. The most relevant such influences, unsurprisingly, are politics (Russian, Chinese), commerce (French, Czech), attitudes of the country's mainstream literary establishment toward SF (German, Korean), and influences of Western (anglophone) SF on the countries' SF (Finnish, German). Rather more surprisingly, some languages' inherent properties render translation into English especially difficult. An especially interesting example is modern Hebrew, whose structure and semantics differ radically from those of English. As Cordasco explains: "Hebrew is … a writing system in which the vowels are implicit. Thus, any given sentence [leaves] the reader to determine word function and meaning based on context or common sense." So, while the inherent nature of Hebrew "becomes a powerful strategy for reference and allusion, direction and misdirection, that can be so effective in SF," these very qualities "often lead more to obfuscation or fabulation than to clarity," a challenge for any translator. Most chapters treat a sequence of individual texts that constitute SFT from that chapter's source language. In others, where appropriate, Cordasco devotes a significant portion of a chapter to the oeuvre of a single, important, widely translated author. For example, a significant part of her chapter on Polish SFT concerns the works of Stanisław Lem, whose nineteen books of SFT encompass a bewildering range of topics and forms, from his science fiction novel Solaris (1961) to his collection of introductions to nonexistent books, Imaginary Magnitude (1984). To guide readers through this intriguing maze, Cordasco begins with an overview of Lem's primary themes. She then divides his translated works into three categories and begins discussion of each category by identifying their key concerns and qualities. All this sets the stage for treatment of individual works in that category. This approach is perfect for readers seeking to sample Lem's work but put off by their number and diversity. We live in something of a golden age for SFT, more and more of which is becoming available with every passing year. Beyond invaluable contributions of small presses, this abundance is due to the internet: blogs, ebooks, online translations, self-publishing, and so...

Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction by Sami Ahmad Khan

Reviewed by: Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction by Sami Ahmad Khan Abhijit Gupta Indian SF: The Next Generation? Sami Ahmad Khan. Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction. U of Wales P, New Dimensions in Science Fiction, 2021. xx+ 252 pp. £60 hc & ebk. It has been a good time for Indian sf in English (ISFE) recently, as a number of young writers make their mark, winning a clutch of nominations and awards. As I write, S.B. Divya's Machinehood (2021) has become the first South Asian novel to be shortlisted in the Nebula best novel category. It has also been a good time for critical writing on Indian sf. Over the last two years, there have been several full-length studies, including books by Pablo Mukherjee (2020), Suparno Banerjee (2020), Urvashi Kuhad (2021), and Ritwik Bhattacharjee and Shweta Khilnani, eds. (forthcoming, 2022). Such has been the volume of recent critical writing that one gets the sense of the genre [End Page 571] furiously footnoting itself, creating its own scholarly arcana almost as soon as new works see the light of day. Part of this output is explained by the academic imperative of publish-orperish that seems finally to have made landfall on South Asian shores. In the English department where I teach, the number of research proposals on Indian sf has increased by leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. There is a palpable sense of excitement among young researchers as they get to grips with new materials and methodologies and experiment with newly minted academic protocols that are both serious and fun. This is not an easy trick to pull off. But Sami Ahmad Khan's study of Anglophone sf in India succeeds in doing precisely that. It is a theoretically supple, analytically inventive, and above all, refreshingly accessible engagement with a genre still in the throes of making and unmaking. In his writing, Khan simultaneously dons the hats of both scholar and fan, moving effortlessly between high theory and a gratifying stream of Star Trek references. Anyone writing on Anglophone Indian sf has to deal with a number of competing paradigms. First, there is the fairly long-standing tradition of sf in Indian languages other than English, with its own ecosystem of magazines and webzines, and its history of false dawns and aborted beginnings. Then there is the osmosis of elements from Indian epic and mythological corpora, both in film and print. Finally, there is the anxiety of western sf's influence on its Indian counterpart. Khan tabulates these impulses in a brilliantly playful summa of texts and their souls (atman), ranged in a deca-kilo-mega-yotta progression. Thus, sf in India is "Kilo-atman: 103," "an aggregation of the atmans of various languages within the same genre/mode and national paradigm." The smallest subset is ISFE, designated as "Deca-atman: 101," and comprising texts from the "same language, nation and genre/mode" (36-37). But Khan's cartography is not one of rigid boundaries and generic silos. Khan is more interested in delivering an "untidy parcel," loosely tied up in two theoretical strands. The first is the "IN situ model" (202), a broad tent which tries to "map sf texts in specific networks" and proposes three nodes/theses—the transMIT, antekaal, and neoMONSTERS (22). The current study is concerned with only the first of the triad, in which mythology, ideology, and technology (thus MIT) converge to create, vivify, and sustain Indian sf in English. In considering the origins of ISFE, which despite an early start in the 1830s struggled to match the volume of sf in other Indian languages, Khan proposes an "SF threshold" which any language must reach before its textual production becomes meaningful (23). It is obvious that Khan considers ISFE to have reached such a threshold, and considers this a sign of maturity for Indian writing in English (IWE). Khan notes perceptively that the recent spurt in ISFE is a sign that it has finally grown out "of the shadow of the (anti) hegemonic, postcolonial agenda" of...

Cross-Infections of Vegetal-Human Bodies in Science Fiction

It is particularly disturbing when seemingly inert plants escape the category of nourishing food and instead become transmitters of vegetal diseases infecting our human bodies or transforming us into plant-human hybrids or even plant-infused zombies. This article analyzes the ecological and alimentary implications of three sf texts in which plants infect human bodies or use them as a kind of walking soil from which to sprout: Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Windup Girl (2009), Olivia Vieweg's German-language graphic novel, EndZeit [EndTime, 2018], and Nnedi Okorafor's graphic novel LaGuardia (2019). Presenting plant-human relations as either utopian and kinship-based or as horrific cross-species disease vectors creating human-plant zombies, these texts reveal aspects of the ecological fact that human bodies are always monstrously chimerical. All living things are, in fact, composed of multispecies entanglements with other beings such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi, as well as the species they consume, as described by Anna Tsing et al. in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017). Bacigalupi, Vieweg, and Okorafor transform our ecological entanglements with and dependence on plants into both disturbing and celebratory sf visions of bodily invasion.

The Modern and the Unknown: A Study of Science Fiction in the Late Qing Dynasty by Jia Liyuan

Reviewed by: The Modern and the Unknown: A Study of Science Fiction in the Late Qing Dynastyby Jia Liyuan Shaoming Duan Excavating Early SF in China. Jia Liyuan. "Xian Dai" yu "Wei Zhi": Wan Qing Ke Huan Ziao Shuo Yan Jiu[ The Modern and the Unknown: A Study of Science Fiction in the Late Qing Dynasty]. Beijing UP, 2021. 316 pp. ¥59.00 pbk. Jia Liyuan is a professor in the School of Literature at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His monograph focuses on science fiction in the late Qing dynasty (1840-1912) from the thematic perspective of "the modern and the unknown," suggesting the difficulty and complexity of using "modern" visions to explore "unknown" space-times, and demonstrating the excitement and confusion of novelists in the late Qing period when trying to imagine the future Datong[Great Unity] world and the possibilities of interstellar exploration. Focusing on sf texts written by intellectuals, Jia's monograph enables readers clearly to understand the attitude of these elites toward science. The fundamental purpose of science fiction in that era was to save a backward and corrupt government, and its mission was to publicize science and technology. Jia argues that the motif of "soul separated from body" that concerned novelists at that time still appears in contemporary Chinese sf. The relationship between "heart" and "body" (to which I return below) in these early fictions later became the motif of Chinese sf in the twentieth century (276). In the final days of the Qing dynasty, when ancient and modern ideas collided fiercely, intellectuals looked at social changes with new eyes and began to speculate in their fictions about future worlds. At this time there was no entry for "science fiction" in Chinese dictionaries. The subtitle of Jia's monograph, Science Fiction in the Late Qing Dynasty, is obviously a retrospective identification of its origins in China, something of great interest to Chinese researchers nowadays. Jia's study looks at late Qing sf from three perspectives: sf's origins in the late Qing era, the ways in which sf was expressed in these early writings, and the sf themes that were of particular interest to these early writers. The Modern and the Unknownis comprised of an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. Jia's introduction is entitled "What Is Science Fiction in the Late Qing Dynasty?" During this period, the Dowager Empress Cixi and her ministers decided to introduce elements of modern western civilization, hoping to reform the state system and reinvigorate China. The intellectuals began to learn new methods of observing the world, such as theories of evolution and [End Page 399]scientific positivism. For these writers, the exploration and conquest of unknown islands or planets was the "panacea" for China's rejuvenation and the guarantee that China would lead humanity into the Datong world (roughly equivalent to pantisocracy) after becoming world ruler (3). The novelists of the late Qing outlined imaginative future worlds in the hopes of enlightening a benighted people and inspiring them to take action. Jia's first chapter is entitled "Liang Qichao: The Precursor of Chinese Science Fiction." In 1902, Liang Qichao wrote his only work of fiction, The Future of New China, in which he imagined that 60 years into the future China has become prosperous and strong. Representatives from countries all over the world have gathered in the capital Nanjing to hold a peace conference. Because of disputes over the sovereignty of Tibet and Mongolia, the Qing government has gone to war with Russia. At the end of the novel, through the mediation of Hungary, the contradiction is resolved. The action is presented as set in a "revolutionary past" that is being recalled from the "future." The Future of New Chinademonstrated a modern consciousness and a new aesthetic attitude towards the future, providing a beautiful vision to be filled in by a future humanity. The second chapter is entitled "Mirror and Image: New Stone Storyand Wu Jianren's Ways of Observation." Wu Jianren published important works in the journal The New Novel, founded by Liang Qichao, and Wu became the main writing force of the journal. Among his many works, his novel New Story of...

„Jutro należy do kotów”. Problemy (eco) science fiction w powieści Bernarda Werbera

Why tomorrow should not belong to humans, but to another species? Science fiction seems to answer this question with alarmingly accurate arguments. SF texts often seem like prophecies that predict the future. We most willingly accept visions in which man is the author of innovative technologies as well as cultural and economic progress. What if this development is not ascribed to the human race, but for example: to monkeys or cats? The classic repertoire of science fiction heroes, apart from humans, includes robots, cyborgs, androids or newcomers from another planet (aliens). Their humanoid character — anthropomorphic features of appearance, behavior, development of the species in the form of created (or mid creation) civilization and culture — is designed to break the anthropocentric view of man. The function of the Other in science fiction can, however, be taken over by a creature much closer and longer known to man than a newcomer from a foreign planet or a creature of highly developed technology — an animal. The essay is an attempt to analyze Bernard Werber’s novel Tomorrow the cats from the perspective of general science fiction and ecofiction issues. At the same time, the issue of species chauvinism and the ways in which it manifests itself in literature are discussed.

Genre Nuances: “Finding the Right Tool for the Job” in Young Adult Literature

474 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) Broderick writes a long-winded description of the “Miracle of the Sun” at Fátima in 1917, which he suggests is “undeniably a UFO” (207). Broderick asserts the veracity of the event by observing, “Needless to say, this erratic celestial object was not the sun.... or was it a contagious hallucination” (208). He then goes on to discuss the “Fátima UFOs” (209) as though his readers have accepted his argument without any additional evidence that they are timetravelling and/or extraterrestrial vessels. Granted, reading a book about time travel presented “as entertainment, as speculation” (14) should be undertaken with an open mind and with suspension of disbelief, but skeptical readers may find this assertion (among many others in this chapter) a bit hard to swallow. Furthermore, and once again, this section of the book has very little to do with the other two. All of the literature Broderick discusses in the second portion of the volume seems forgotten. Indeed, this final section on UFO sightings feels out of place as a conclusion to a book about time-travel science fiction. Despite its structural problems, there are positives in this work. As mentioned above, the first section gives a readable explanation of the scientific theories behind time-travel narratives, making technical concepts accessible to lay readers; and the second section provides an enjoyable overview of many of the most thought-provoking and classic works in the subgenre. The anthologylike structure of the work should appeal both to seasoned readers of sf wanting to revisit some of their favorite stories as well as newcomers looking for suggestions of what to read. Most of all, The Time Machine Hypothesis captures the wonder that so many readers of sf feel when they first learn that scientists in the real world actually do study the possibility of time travel and that there may be something to these fantastic stories after all.—James Hamby, Middle Tennessee State University Genre Nuances: “Finding the Right Tool for the Job” in Young Adult Literature. Joseph W. Campbell. The Order and the Other: Young Adult Dystopian Literature and Science Fiction. Jackson, MI: UP of Mississippi, 2019. viii+191 pp. $30 pbk. While the inclusion of sf texts in both secondary and tertiary curricula has increased since the emergence of sf into academia in the mid-twentieth century, the use of sf and other speculative genres in classrooms is still largely undertheorized . Even more neglected is focused work on young adult science fiction (YASF), as attention is more commonly given to texts written for adults but read by youth on the rare occasions that speculative genres are explored pedagogically. Compoundingthe problem, dystopian fiction for young adults has dominated the young adult (YA) market for the first two decades of this century, but still remains sorely under-explored in educational research. In light of this, Joseph W. Campbell’s study makes an important contribution both to YASF and YA dystopian literature, placing pedagogy at the center of a nuanced examination of YA fiction, genre, and the critical potential of YASF and YA dystopian literature as catalysts for social critique and change in educational spaces. Writing for critics, librarians, and educators alike, Campbell offers a framework for text selection when working with youth, including a thoughtful 475 BOOKS IN REVIEW navigation of genre and a plethora of fictional and practice-based examples that help him to challenge common approaches to the teaching of YA fiction and to offer purposeful alternatives. In his introduction, Campbell begins to unpack the conflated treatment of YASF and YA dystopian literature, asserting that part of the challenge with teaching these texts comes from the notion that dystopia is a subgenre of sf. He views genre as a tool towards social critique, and he argues that sf and dystopia do different things, in particular in terms of “othering” (sf) and power (dystopia). To misclassify or merge texts in these genres undermines their critical potential, particularly as teaching tools for adolescents, given how these genres contribute to processes of subject formation. Attentive to the history of both genres, Campbell positions a thoughtful consideration of genre and the distinct contributions of these genres...

Genre Nuances: “Finding the Right Tool for the Job” in Young Adult Literature

474 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) Broderick writes a long-winded description of the “Miracle of the Sun” at Fátima in 1917, which he suggests is “undeniably a UFO” (207). Broderick asserts the veracity of the event by observing, “Needless to say, this erratic celestial object was not the sun.... or was it a contagious hallucination” (208). He then goes on to discuss the “Fátima UFOs” (209) as though his readers have accepted his argument without any additional evidence that they are timetravelling and/or extraterrestrial vessels. Granted, reading a book about time travel presented “as entertainment, as speculation” (14) should be undertaken with an open mind and with suspension of disbelief, but skeptical readers may find this assertion (among many others in this chapter) a bit hard to swallow. Furthermore, and once again, this section of the book has very little to do with the other two. All of the literature Broderick discusses in the second portion of the volume seems forgotten. Indeed, this final section on UFO sightings feels out of place as a conclusion to a book about time-travel science fiction. Despite its structural problems, there are positives in this work. As mentioned above, the first section gives a readable explanation of the scientific theories behind time-travel narratives, making technical concepts accessible to lay readers; and the second section provides an enjoyable overview of many of the most thought-provoking and classic works in the subgenre. The anthologylike structure of the work should appeal both to seasoned readers of sf wanting to revisit some of their favorite stories as well as newcomers looking for suggestions of what to read. Most of all, The Time Machine Hypothesis captures the wonder that so many readers of sf feel when they first learn that scientists in the real world actually do study the possibility of time travel and that there may be something to these fantastic stories after all.—James Hamby, Middle Tennessee State University Genre Nuances: “Finding the Right Tool for the Job” in Young Adult Literature. Joseph W. Campbell. The Order and the Other: Young Adult Dystopian Literature and Science Fiction. Jackson, MI: UP of Mississippi, 2019. viii+191 pp. $30 pbk. While the inclusion of sf texts in both secondary and tertiary curricula has increased since the emergence of sf into academia in the mid-twentieth century, the use of sf and other speculative genres in classrooms is still largely undertheorized . Even more neglected is focused work on young adult science fiction (YASF), as attention is more commonly given to texts written for adults but read by youth on the rare occasions that speculative genres are explored pedagogically. Compoundingthe problem, dystopian fiction for young adults has dominated the young adult (YA) market for the first two decades of this century, but still remains sorely under-explored in educational research. In light of this, Joseph W. Campbell’s study makes an important contribution both to YASF and YA dystopian literature, placing pedagogy at the center of a nuanced examination of YA fiction, genre, and the critical potential of YASF and YA dystopian literature as catalysts for social critique and change in educational spaces. Writing for critics, librarians, and educators alike, Campbell offers a framework for text selection when working with youth, including a thoughtful 475 BOOKS IN REVIEW navigation of genre and a plethora of fictional and practice-based examples that help him to challenge common approaches to the teaching of YA fiction and to offer purposeful alternatives. In his introduction, Campbell begins to unpack the conflated treatment of YASF and YA dystopian literature, asserting that part of the challenge with teaching these texts comes from the notion that dystopia is a subgenre of sf. He views genre as a tool towards social critique, and he argues that sf and dystopia do different things, in particular in terms of “othering” (sf) and power (dystopia). To misclassify or merge texts in these genres undermines their critical potential, particularly as teaching tools for adolescents, given how these genres contribute to processes of subject formation. Attentive to the history of both genres, Campbell positions a thoughtful consideration of genre and the distinct contributions of these genres...

(Post)human Temporalities: Science Fiction in the Anthropocene

AbstractAlthough many SF texts proceed from the speculative premise that our species will continue to develop technologically, and hence become increasingly posthuman, our species’ continuance into even the next century is by no means assured. Rather, the Anthropocene exerts a new temporal logic; it is an age defined by an intensification of geological timescales. It is therefore noteworthy that many contemporary SF texts are ecologically interventionist and figure apocalyptic future temporalities which curtail the posthuman predilection common to the genre. This article analyses a tetrad of literary texts, written at various points during the last three decades, which summatively reveal the mutations of the (post)human temporalities figured by cli-fi texts. These four texts are: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (1992-1996); Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007); Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things (2014); and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015).

Quotidian Science Fiction: Posthuman Dreams of Emancipation

This article argues that Science Fiction is a posthuman art form, whose texts posit a utopian dream which emphasises that the process of becoming posthuman is both incremental, and conditional upon the equitable cultural, social, and environmental evolution of our societies. The genre provides a transient dreamscape for visitation by the (post)human mind, by which the reader gains an expanded perception of not only their own empirical environment, but also of posthuman possibility. This posthuman dream however, is not a simply literalised by SF’s estranging narrative strategy, but rather is located in the intersection between the SF narrative and its generic form. Through the decay of their initially defamiliarizing nova into data which are cognitively explicable by their (post)human audience, SF texts dramatize our species’ continuous journey of becoming posthuman. This fundamentally posthuman model of the SF genre therefore challenges the model of cognitive estrangement proposed by Darko Suvin, and so proposes that SF exerts a pragmatic utopian dream that avoids being deterministic or teleological.

Dans la vallée des tombes temporelles : monumentalité, temporalité et histoire dans la science-fiction

Modern and contemporary artists working in relation to monumentality have sometimes positioned their works in relation to sf, and at other times works of monumental sculpture have been labeled as science-fictional by audiences to whom these monumental forms appear alien or displaced in time. While art history has sometimes examined the influence of sf ideas on modern and contemporary artists, a more sustained consideration of the relationship between monumentality and sf is lacking. One necessary step in advancing this understanding is a consideration of how monuments themselves have been represented in sf literature. This article examines the representations and roles of monuments in a number of sf works, including H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936), Robert Charles Wilson’s The Chronoliths (2001), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge (1984). The ways in which monuments appear in these and other sf texts foreground a set of questions about the perception of inevitability, the shape of time, and the mutability of history. These works explore how the relationship between past and future can be reconfigured through encounters with monumental forms that create new bridges and chronologies across cosmic and historical scales of time.

Marianne Kac-Vergne Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema: Cyborgs, Troopers and Other Men of the Future

636 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) ecological emergency, and Idema does a great service in highlighting their work, summarizing it clearly and elegantly, and juxtaposing it with the sf texts that are his main concern. All in all, Stages of Transmutation is a valuable book, not only for its new readings of important sf texts, but also for the way that it restores the importance of scientific speculation in sf without privileging the reductionist dogmas of oldschool “hard sf.” My hope is that the concept of environmental posthumanism will gain wider currency, both in terms of theoretical understandings and as a way to approach other (and less-well-known sf texts). Idema can be faulted for saying almost nothing about how recent speculative fiction has so powerfully and innovatively dealt with issues of race, gender, and sexual minorities, alongside the financial logic of capital; but I strongly believe that a future, posthumanist science fiction worthy of the name needs to incorporate the biological and environmental concerns addressed here alongside these more obviously political concerns. One concluding note: this is no fault of the author, but I cannot forbear mentioning that the price of the volume is way too high for a book that is less than two hundred pages long and written in accessible prose.—Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University Hegemonic Masculinity is Back. Marianne Kac-Vergne. Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema: Cyborgs, Troopers and Other Men of the Future. London: I.B. Tauris, 2018. x+246 pp. $95 hc. Here in the early twenty-first century, studies of masculinities in sf action cinema are both necessary and pressing. Due to recent trends in Hollywood action cinema—the increasing number of male action heroes over 50 years old, the increase in female superheroes, and diverse casts that include people of color (and, if sf cinema continues to trend toward more representational content, LGBTQ+ characters)—the sf blockbuster may have entered a new era. But before we start parsing out the significance of these shifts in filmmaking, it will be helpful to reconsider the sf action heroes of the last 35 years or so. Marianne Kac-Vergne, an associate professor at the Université de Picardie in France, brings us up to speed on contemporary action stars in sf cinema. In Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, her focus is largely on the men and women who punch and kick and shoot their way through their stories (with a few exceptions). Kac-Vergne assembles films from Hollywood’s sf action cycle from the 1980s to 2014 and places them in conversation with one another to produce a readable and well-researched addition to the field of masculinities studies and cinema, as developed by scholars such as Yvonne Tasker in Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and Action Cinema (1993). Moreover, KacVergne ’s interrogation of the sf action hero marks her study as an original contribution to an understudied area. Raewyn Connell’s theory of “hegemonic masculinity” (see Gender & Society 19.6 [2005]: 829–859) more or less dominates the Cultural Studies approach to understanding masculinities, and Kac-Vergne follows this tradition. By doing so, she provides a clear foundation for her study: Hollywood’s sf blockbusters attempt to present the white hard-bodied male as the embodiment of a universal Man that 637 BOOKS IN REVIEW stands in for “humanity as a whole” (5). Beginning with this problem of hegemonic masculinity allows Kac-Vergne to assess a variety of topics in contemporary sf cinema: depictions of hypermasculinity in the 1980s and 1990s, the “sidelined” women, black masculinities (particularly Will Smith’s vehicles), and masculinity crises in the post-Clinton era. The author’s aim, however, is not to articulate the means by which Hollywood unabashedly creates characters who either do or do not neatly fit hegemonic masculinity, but “to deuniversalise white men and uncover the specific and changeable sets of norms embodied by male science fiction heroes” (5). According to the author, an attempt to literalize hegemonic masculinity in the form of a science-fiction action hero inevitably undermines itself by virtue of the untenable conception of monolithic masculinity. After a short introduction that outlines the scope and stakes of the book...

In the Valley of the Time Tombs: Monumentality, Temporality, and History in Science Fiction

Modern and contemporary artists working in relation to monumentality have sometimes positioned their works in relation to sf, and at other times works of monumental sculpture have been labeled as science-fictional by audiences to whom these monumental forms appear alien or displaced in time. While art history has sometimes examined the influence of sf ideas on modern and contemporary artists, a more sustained consideration of the relationship between monumentality and sf is lacking. One necessary step in advancing this understanding is a consideration of how monuments themselves have been represented in sf literature. This article examines the representations and roles of monuments in a number of sf works, including H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (1936), Robert Charles Wilson's The Chronoliths (2001), and Kim Stanley Robinson's Icehenge (1984). The ways in which monuments appear in these and other sf texts foreground a set of questions about the perception of inevitability, the shape of time, and the mutability of history. These works explore how the relationship between past and future can be reconfigured through encounters with monumental forms that create new bridges and chronologies across cosmic and historical scales of time.

Star-Begotten: A Life Lived in Science Fiction by James Gunn

175 BOOKS IN REVIEW analyzes their representation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and American fantastic literature. Turning next to Desde Júpiter, Cano compares this work with Nic-Nac for their respective treatments of spiritism and evolutionism and discusses both texts’ relationship to prevailing SpanishAmerican literary and popular aesthetics (Desde Júpiter, Cano argues, is better for having paid heed to the public’s taste for light entertainment, though it does not resist the temptation to lecture). Here is where Cano looks more deeply at how the serialization of popular fiction led to stylistic features such as repetition, cliff-hanger endings, and uniform chapters in early sf works. The last of the three long chapters is primarily interested in how Querens exemplifies early Spanish-American sf’s divergence from that of Europe and Anglo-America by privileging an elitist, socially detached attitude toward art (Latin American Modernism) that for over a half-century kept sf from being intentionally cultivated or widely read and enjoyed. There is one component of Los espíritus de la ciencia ficción, not represented in the book’s subtitle (“Spiritism, journalism and popular culture”), that felt somewhat tacked on and made me curious about why and when Cano decided to make it a subject of study, and that is the role of the female characters in these early Spanish American sf texts. Cano’s analysis of the presence of women in these narratives and how they figure both in the materialism/spiritism debate and in their authors’ visions of national development is certainly laudatory and valuable for future study, but with the exception of the chapter on Querens, these discussions seemed less wellintegrated into the author’s overall project than they could have been. The extensive scholarship evident on virtually every page of Los espíritus de la ciencia ficción rewards the diligent reader; Cano shares such a wealth of information and interpretation and argues his points so convincingly that it is hard to fault him for being a bit formal and wordy. A highly original scholarly work best appreciated by other scholars, I consider Los espíritus de la ciencia ficción to be an essential contribution of great value to anyone interested in the history of Spanish American science fiction and popular culture.—Andrea Bell, Hamline University A Grand Master’s Story. James Gunn. Star-Begotten: A Life Lived in Science Fiction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017. 233pp. $25 pbk. Noted sf writer, critic, academic, and SFWA Grand Master James Gunn’s autobiography is the author’s working-through and making meaning of ninetyfive years of life. In his brief introduction, after explaining that the book’s title comes from a 1937 novel by H.G. Wells, Gunn clarifies that, although one might assume that autobiographies are written because a specific person’s life is interesting, in fact “all lives are interesting, even unusual and instructive, if you look at them intently enough” (1). Through the minutiae of his everyday life, covered more or less chronologically over thirteen chapters, Gunn traces the web of connections and events that have comprised his life to date. In the last few years, perhaps as a result of entering his nineties and contemplating his mortality, Gunn’s focus has been more often on the social role of science 176 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) fiction, summarized in his remarks at his 2015 induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame: “It’s the job of science fiction, it’s our job, to observe [the world’s] changes and consider the implications for human lives and maybe even do something to make those lives better, more livable, more human.... Let’s save the world through science fiction” (189). The text of this autobiography, unfortunately printed in miniscule type, is interleaved with comments such as this one, written in a different typeface to differentiate them from the regular text. They include excerpts from various speeches, remembrances written years later and presented at reunions, and summaries of some overseas trips where he acted as an ambassador of sf. They often overlap with previously provided information, but I found that having the complete text of Gunn’s 2007 acceptance...

“Absolute Alterity”? The Alien Animal, the Human Alien, and the Limits of Posthumanism in Star Trek1

As humanity defines itself through an animal other, one could likewise claim that the human in sf texts is demarcated by being non-alien. This viewpoint establishes an intimate connection between alien and animal, both representing the other, that which, in Jacques Derrida’s definition of “absolute alterity,” cannot return the human gaze. While one might expect that this absolute alterity harbors the posthuman potential for overcoming the species boundary through an alien-animal bond, the interactions between alien and animal alterns in Star Trek actually belie the franchise's utopian promise of multispecies community. Examining alien-pet relations in Star Trek: The Original Series, The Animated Series, and The Next Generation through a triangular structure of interconnected becomings, this paper argues that, while convergent and divergent becomings complicate established dualisms, the affective alien-pet interrelations in Star Trek ultimately effect a becoming-human for humanoid aliens while they mark the nonhuman animal as absolute other. Complementing Star Trek scholarship that calls the series’ status as inclusive utopia into question, this article likewise unmasks Star Trek as a distinctly humanist utopia that eventually promotes an anthropocentric position in the representation of animals as much as in the representation of other alterns.

‘Food from Nowhere’: Food, Fuel and the Fantastical

Science fiction (sf) has repeatedly explored the social and environmental consequences of technological developments in food and energy production. Never before have these explorations been of more importance and significance; recent shifts in resource extraction and processing (by both fossil fuel and ‘biofuel’ companies) have dramatically increased the reach and destructiveness of industrial food and energy production, as well as the extent of their entanglement. This article will begin by giving an indication of the reach and impacts of modern biofuel production, followed by a brief examination of the ‘food sovereignty’ movement and the theoretical frameworks and practical strategies that underpin it.Through the lens of the ‘food sovereignty’ movement, the article examines the ways in which sf writing and culture has explored the entanglement of food and energy regimes. Taking three aspects developed from the ‘six pillars’ of food sovereignty – political power, ecological integration and the fantastical – I examine three sf texts which place at their centre concerns over the entanglement of food and energy regimes. As I go on to demonstrate, all three texts – Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), the British post-apocalyptic TV show Survivors (1975–7), and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) – use elements of the fantastical to explore and make visible effects which are rarely seen or only understood in the abstract language of international political economy. I then conclude by reflecting on the urgent need apply these insights in the struggle for a fairer and more sustainable food system.

Classical Traditions in Science Fiction ed. by Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens (review)

Reviewed by: Classical Traditions in Science Fiction ed. by Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens Sarah Annes Brown Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens (eds.). Classical Traditions in Science Fiction. Classical Presences. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xiii, 380. $35.00 (pb.). ISBN 978–0-19–022833–0. The fourteen essays which this volume comprises explore different intersections between two fields that might at first seem worlds apart. However, there is a long tradition of harking back to the classical past when speculating about humanity’s possible future. Explorations both backwards and forwards in time are, in their different ways, speculative journeys to an “undiscovered country” (7): “The strangeness of images of the ancient past is marked by the ‘cognitive estrangement’ of futures imagined in modern SF” (18). Frankenstein, subtitled “The Modern Prometheus,” is a locus classicus of this synergy between the classics and SF. An equally apt illustration is Mary Shelley’s less well known novel, The Last Man: the frame narrative, set in Shelley’s present, documents the chance discovery of a cache of Sibylline documents from the distant past which reveal mankind’s future extinction in the twenty-first century. The volume opens with four essays on “SF’s Rosy-Fingered Dawn” before addressing more recent examples of classical presences in television, film, and literary science fiction. Whereas some contributors focus on SF texts whose debt to classical culture is unmissable, others track looser ties between these two traditions, and demonstrate how each may become an illuminating lens through which to view the other. Rebecca Raphael and Brett M. Rogers offer thought-provoking discussions of shifts in the way hybridity and post-human identity have been conceptualized. George Kovacs proposes an irresistible parallel between myth-making in the classical world and Star Trek’s later myth-building. In both cases the “mythology” [End Page 131] first develops organically, before being refined in a more self-conscious age; Hellenistic sophisticates and avid Star Trek fans alike are fully aware of the divergences, contradictions, and subtexts within their traditions (203). Sometimes, where a more direct link is claimed between a SF text and a classical source, the argument seems more tenuous. Although he has interesting things to say about both works, some of the connections Joel P. Christensen identifies between Dune and the Iliad are a little generic. Erik Grayson draws suggestive parallels between the fall of Rome and the post-apocalyptic America of Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz but seems to be clutching at straws in some of his attempts to tease significance out of Miller’s classicizing names. Jesse Weiner’s evidence for identifying Lucretius as a key intertext for Frankenstein is strained in places. He makes a better case, however, for the presence of Lucan’s necromantic witch Erichtho in the novel, a parallel that amplifies the monstrosity of Frankenstein himself. Although it rests on just three quotations from the Aeneid, Benjamin Eldon Stevens’ essay on Journey to the Center of the Earth presents a meticulously argued case for seeing Verne’s narrator, Axel, as a “rewritten epic hero” (91) whose own katabasis offers not a prophetic glimpse of his people’s future (as granted to Aeneas), but a scientific revelation of humanity’s past through the living fossils who dwell in the underworld. The monstrous proto-human who shepherds mastodons is a figurative father figure who replaces the ghostly presence of Anchises. There are many other highlights in this consistently stimulating collection. Tony Keen makes a thoroughly convincing case for Lucian as a significant influence on H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. Marian Makins demonstrates how Panem, the dystopian society of The Hunger Games, synthesizes elements from both the historical Rome and “misrepresentations” of Rome in American popular culture in order to create “a carefully constructed hybrid reconfiguration that implicates aspects of contemporary society” (304). Gaël Grobéty offers a crisply argued analysis of how Dan Simmons, in Ilium and Olympos, both restages Homeric epiphanies and demystifies them, replacing awe at divine intervention with wonder at human ingenuity. Inevitably, any reader who already has an interest in both classical traditions and science fiction will...