148 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) of that particular volume are free of further instances of typographical laxity. McLuhan’s Galaxies contains so many errors in spelling, grammar, and idiomatic English usage that it is difficult to distinguish the products of carelessness from those of downright ignorance. This is compounded by unintentional inaccuracies in quotations from secondary sources: to take one example, readers would probably rather mentally rearrange “garhis” into “garish” in the newspaper or online version of Jumble than in an academic monograph (Skweres 79). It is also hard to sort out lapses in proofreading from lapses in fact-checking. “Edgar Rice Burrough” [sic] is probably a typo; giving the original publication date for John Carter of Mars as 1964, fourteen years after Burroughs’s death, is a bit more difficult to fathom (77). Ordinarily a reader should subscribe to Oliver Goldsmith’s maxim from The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) that “a book may be very amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity,” but when a book with numerous errors also has the self-congratulatory tone of McLuhan’s Galaxies, it very quickly loses its power to amuse, much less inform. This is unfortunate, because there is certainly cause for credit if not quite congratulation in this work. Skweres’s choice to focus on sf movie franchises rather than individual films creates scope for future investigations into broader patterns in the current cinematic and televisual instantiations of sf. When McLuhan suggested, in The Medium Is the Massage, that media and culture live in a rear view mirror, he invoked the long-running TV western Bonanza as the reflected image that guides their journey. As was the case with Bonanza and its kinfolk, many of today’s sf film and TV franchises play out in front of a uniformly familiar aesthetic and thematic backdrop. Skweres gestures at this backdrop ten lines into McLuhan’s Galaxies: “it could be argued that many of the works of science fiction are derivative in nature” (xi). In doing so, he unconsciously points the way forward, while engaging in a peculiar McLuhanesque irony. Whatever galaxy McLuhan may now be looking at us from, he might crack a wry smile at the idea that an experimenter like himself can be deployed as a means of understanding work that sometimes makes a virtue of being recognizably formulaic.—Rick Cousins, Trent University Law as Monstrous Technology. Kieran Tranter. Living in Technical Legality: Science Fiction and Law as Technology. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh UP, 2018. x+242 pp. £75.00/$110.00 hc, £75.00 ebk. Kieran Tranter’s book is emphatically not about law in literature. Throughout Living in Technical Legality’s two parts and six chapters, we encounter the formula, “it might seem that [insert sf text] is devoid of legal content, but beneath the surface ….” Instead of being fooled by the apparent “general lawlessness of science fiction” (7) or distracted by “the fleeting jurisdictional and temporal specificities of lawyers, controversies, and doctrines” (9), Tranter’s interest is in a literary philosophy of law. In short, his book asks, “What does sf say is law’s nature and its purpose—especially in an age of ubiquitous technicity?” Part I’s primary answer is that sf reveals law as a monstrous technology unto itself. Once expected to save humanity from the Frankensteins creating 149 BOOKS IN REVIEW chaos with their horrific assemblages, law as imagined by sf instead emerges as its own technology, one particularly obsessed with controlling death and time. Chapter 1 puts Shelley’s 1818 novel in conversation with technological triumphs such as the 1996 birth of Dolly the sheep, showing how she could only be received via “the negative images, tropes, and narratives associated with science fiction’s ‘clone canon,’” and that in effect, “science fiction provided the content through which Dolly was transmuted into law” (18). Indeed, whether the discussion is about Dolly, Sputnik, or nanotechnology, Tranter shows how the West, its science fictions, and subsequent legal actions render “the dark of technology” as “human and light” (32). In Chapter 2, we turn to Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) and its five sequels, as well as its...