Science Fiction Studies

#78 = Volume 26, Part 2 = July 1999

Veronica Hollinger
Contemporary Trends in Science Fiction Criticism, 1980-
1999
It is not that we are connoisseurs of chaos, but that we are surrounded by it, and equipped
for co-existence with it only by our fictive powers.Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending:
Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967, 67)
The past two decades have seen an explosion of critical writing about sf beyond what
anyone might have expected. On the academic side, sf has come to be perceived as
centrally relevant in many explorations of contemporary culture, evidenced, for
instance, in the institutional "respectability" of journals like SFS and Extrapolation;
in the growing number of sf and sf-related courses in colleges and universities (over
400 courses listed in the special section on "Science Fiction in Academe" in the Nov.
1996 issue of SFS); and in the proliferation of cultural studies of science and
cyberculture which routinely include references to science fiction. At the same time,
sophisticated and complex full-length studies devoted to science fiction are filling
our shelves in ever greater numbers. Outside the academic arena, the establishment
of publications likeScience Fiction Eye and The New York Review of Science Fiction, as
well as the continuity of magazines like Asimovs, Analog, and the BritishInterzone,
all of which regularly feature critical material, have provided a range of venues for
ongoing commentary by sf writers, readers, and fans. While there still remains
something of a division between academic and popular commentaries in the field,
both Science Fiction Eye andNYRSF welcome contributions from the academic
community, and Extrapolation and SFS publish interviews with and occasional
essays by a fair number of professional writers. (Another notable source of interview
material is the long-running Locus: The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field, which
appears monthly and includes at least one author interview per issue.) The British
journal Foundation resolutely straddles the divide, balancing contributions from all
available sources. And new journals, devoted at least in part to sf, continue to appear,
including the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (a publication of the International
Association for the Fantastic in the Arts) and Para-Doxa (devoted to wide-ranging
literary and paraliterary genre studies). To make any kind of sense out of this
wonderful chaos is to challenge ones fictive powers to the fullest. Out of necessity,
Ive organized my selections according to some quite specific criteria.
Ive confined my discussion to works available in English, for instance, and most of
them are full-length studies. Since Im not much of an internet surfer, theres not a
single website address to be found here. Being relatively unfamiliar with the various
non-academic sf communities, most of my highlighted studies are scholarly ones.
And I am, by inclination, attracted to theoretically-inflected analyses, which also
influenced my selections. Ive divided my material into the following sections: 1)
"Mapping the Field," which recommends some histories, genre studies, media sf
studies, and reference guides; 2) "Sf Writers on Sf," which calls attention to a number
of non-fiction and critical works by sf authors, as well as to some author interviews;
3) and "When It Changed," which discusses a variety of both feminist and
postmodern studies of sf. In some instances, my decisions about where to situate
specific titles have been unavoidably arbitrary. H. Bruce Franklins Robert A.
Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (1980), for example, combines single-author
study, cultural history, and genre critique, and defies tidy classification (this is the
only author study Ive included, because it tells us as much about the history of the
genre as it does about one particular science-fiction career). I invite readers to
undertake their own cross-referencing between and among these listings, and to
decide for themselves what Ive left out, as well as what I should never have included
in the first place. Projects like this one are nothing if not interactive.
I. Mapping the Field: Histories, Genre Studies, Media Studies, and Research Guides
This selective overview of sf criticism since 1980 should really begin one year earlier,
with the publication of Darko Suvins Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the
Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979), discussed in some detail above by
Donald M. Hassler. This remains one of the most significant full-length studies of
the genre written to date. Although it has attracted as much argument as agreement
(given, among other things, its dismissal of most genre sf as relatively worthless), no
theoretical construction has enjoyed as much deserved attention as Suvins definition
of sf as "a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence
and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an
imaginative framework alternative to the authors empirical environment" (7-8).
Applying a concept developed by Ernst Bloch, Suvin builds on this definition by
arguing that "SF is distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a
fictional novum (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic" (63). One of the
most currently contentious issues in Suvins account of sf is, as his subtitle indicates,
his characterization of sf as a literary genre. Here is scholarship making a case for
intrinsic worth based upon the twin qualities of intellectual content and aesthetic
accomplishment. This remains a hotly debated issue, of course: if we are to make a
case for our own work in science fiction, must we also make a case for its intrinsic
worth, based upon some set of values which are fixed and unchanging? These
questions have haunted the field of sf studies for at least the past twenty years. More
than any other study, Suvins Metamorphoses is the significant forerunner of all the
major examinations of the genre produced in that time. See also Suvins very detailed
critical and bibliographical guide,Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses
of Knowledge and of Power (1983), an informed and informative overview of sfs
nineteenth-century British ancestry.
I.1. Histories
In this first section I want to call attention to some of the wealth of historical work on
sf which has appeared since 1980, works which explore the "origins" of the genre or
which focus on particular features of the field in some detail, as well as a variety of
studies which offer significant histories of the field as a whole. My first
recommendation is a single-author study which contributes much to our
understanding of American sf. This is H. Bruce Franklins Robert A. Heinlein:
America as Science Fiction (1980). Its relevance, as its title indicates, lies in Franklins
historical-materialist reading of Heinleins career within the context of the American
socio-political and cultural scene which, in part, shaped him as one of the most
successful sf writers of all time. As Franklin argues, "Heinlein was the principal
American responsible for leading some science fiction out of the ghetto, first to
become integrated into American popular culture and later to gain token acceptance
in high-class literary neighborhoods" (67). Although this may not be the definitive
overview of Heinleins body of writing, given that it was published before the
authors death, it remains one of the most useful studies of any sf writer published to
date. Franklin studies Heinleins career as paradigmatic of the fortunes of both
American sf and America itself over the course of much of the twentieth century, and
he provides strong and convincing readings of the individual fictions which go to
make up this exemplary sf career. I also recommend Franklins War Stars: The
Superweapon and the American Imagination (1988), which continues his cogent study
of the American cultural imaginary.
Colin Greenlands The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British "New
Wave" in Science Fiction (1983) is an unusually concentrated history of one key
moment in the development of Anglo-American sf, the British New Wave
phenomenon of the late 1960s and 1970s as it cohered in the pages of New
Worlds magazine under the editorship of Michael Moorcock. Greenland offers a
detailed survey of the fiction and the literary manifestos of the period, and he
devotes individual chapters to the very different but equally influential careers of
Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, and Moorcock himself. While acknowledging the ultimate
dissipation of the creative and political energies of the New Wave writers, Greenland
also notes their on-going influence on the literary achievements of more recent sf.
His construction of the New Worlds phenomenon is developed around what he sees
as "the central paradox of the NW group: the conviction that form is degenerating and
energy dissipating, asserted with remarkable formal resourcefulness and an energy
of expression so compelling we may well call it exhibitionist" (194). The elegaic tone
of this study is interestingly colored by the fact of its publication one year before the
appearance of William Gibsons Neuromancer and the ensuing construction in the
USA of the very different but equally explosive cyberpunk movement.
Thomas D. Claresons Some Kind of Paradise: The Emergence of American Science
Fiction (1985), a companion volume to his annotated bibliography, Science Fiction in
America, 1870s-1930s (1984), is history with a specifically American focus. Clareson
was one of the academic communitys most indefatigable promoters of sf, involved
in organizing the first sf seminar at the MLA, in founding the Science Fiction
Research Association, and in establishing Extrapolation. In Some Kind of Paradise he
usefully situates early American sf within the context of the impact of technological
changes between 1870 and 1910, and proceeds to read a wealth of titles (sometimes
overdoing the plot summaries) from the perspective of their early roots in ghost and
horror stories. He then moves on to concentrate on future war fictions, stories of
science and technology, the thematics of utopia and catastrophe, and journeys to both
unknown lands and unknown worlds. Although this is a study which emphasizes
scope rather than complexity, Claresons coverage is excellent, as is his delineation of
the parallels between American and British sf in the forty or so years which are his
focus. Another useful examination of specifically American sf is John
Huntingtons Rationalizing Genius: Ideological Strategies in the Classic American
Short Story (1989), which takes as its representative sample the stories collected
in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume I (1971).
A good historical study emphasizing British sf, which appeared at the same time as
Claresons, is Brian Stablefords Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950 (1985).
Stableford is a sociologist, an sf writer who has published dozens of well-received
novels, and one of the most astute critical voices in the field. His thesis is that
"scientific romance" was a particular kind of generic writing which flourished for
about sixty years in Britain, constituting a tradition quite separate from American sf
of the same period. Stablefords construction of this literary tradition goes much
further than simply a review of the early novels of H.G. Wells, including as it does an
overview of authors such as George Griffith, Arthur Conan Doyle, and J.D. Beresford
in the pre-war period, S. Fowler Wright, Olaf Stapledon, and John Gloag in the
period between the wars, and ending with the post-war works of writers like C.S.
Lewis and Gerald Heard. After a relatively brief post-war period, according to
Stableford, scientific romance fused with the more influential streams of American-
style sf and virtually disappeared as a separate entity. Stableford makes a convincing
argument about the particular character of the scientific romance (as opposed to
science fiction); for instance, its fascination with and treatments of evolutionary
theory (the implications of which tended to be avoided by most early American sf
writers). For Stableford, "Scientific romance is the romance of the disenchanted
universe: a universe in which new things can and must appear by virtue of the
discoveries of scientists and the ingenuity of inventors, and a universe where alien
places are populated according to the logic of the theory of evolution" (9).
The following year saw the publication of one of the most comprehensive
introductions to the field, Brian W. Aldisss (and David Wingroves)Trillion Year
Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1986). This updating and expansion of Aldisss
1973 Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction, written from the inside by
one of sfs most celebrated British authors, is both intelligent and
contentious. Trillion Year Spreedevelops from two convincingly argued but not
unproblematic theses: 1) that Frankenstein is the first "real" sf novel; and 2) that sf can
be defined as "the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe
which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is
characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode" (25). It is divided into two
sections: "Out of the Gothic," an overview beginning with Shelley and continuing
into the 1940s with John W. Campbells editorship of Astounding; and "Into the Big
Time," covering the 1950s to the 1980s. The penultimate chapter, "How to be a
Dinosaur," offers a series of cogent (re)evaluations of the continuing popularity of
writers like Asimov, Heinlein, Herbert, and Clarke, whose work continues to
represent sf for many readers while new directions in the genre tend to be
overlooked. Trillion Year Spree itself tends to overlook the impact of feminist sf,
including its virtual revitalization in the 1970s of utopian fiction, but this
shortcoming does not detract from its significance as one of the most authoritative sf
histories written to date.
Perhaps the best recent history of early proto-sf is Paul K. Alkons Origins of
Futuristic Fiction (1987), which demonstrates how various forerunner modes of
futuristic fiction and aesthetic developments, arising mostly in France, provided a
basis for the eventual development in the nineteenth century of sf as a specific genre.
Alkon includes detailed readings of early texts such as Jacques Guttins Epigone,
histoire du sicle future (1659); Louis-Sbastien Merciers LAn 2440 (1771); Samuel
Maddens Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733); Louis Geoffreys Napolon et la
conqute du monde1812 1832Histoire de la monarchie universelle (1836); and
Flix Bodins Le Roman de lavenir (1834). He also offers a close look at Bodins
insights into "a poetics for futuristic fiction." Alkons study constructs a significant
history of the search for a style in which to write about the future. His position,
which offers a relatively unconventional outlook on the "origins" of sf, is that the
context for early future fictions was less technological than it was aesthetic,
psychological, and philosophical; thus he reads these early works as solutions to
formal problems, rather than as resolutions of socio-cultural conflicts. Alkon
concludes, however, that it was science which "suggested the possibility of a new
aesthetics, with corresponding forms such as the future history, based upon reversal
of hitherto-accepted connections between plausibility and verisimilitude" (114).
David Ketterers Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy (1992) is both literary history
and cultural history, written by a Montral-based scholar who has long been a
presence in the field of sf studies. It is also an attempt to disentangle, if only for the
sake of argument, Canadian sf and fantasy from their American counterparts. After a
brief theoretical introduction to the genres of non-realist narrative, Ketterer takes
readers through a historical sweep which includes James De Milles classic A Strange
Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888)arguably the first Canadian sf
novelas well as little-known works such as Ralph Centenniuss The Dominion in
1983 (1883) and Jules-Paul Tardivels Pour la patrie: Roman du XX
e
sicle (1895), two
early utopian novels. Moving back and forth between science fiction and fantasy,
and between English-speaking and French-speaking Canada (with few exceptions,
Qubec writers, mostly untranslated, have consistently produced the really ground-
breaking sf in Canada), this study contains more lists and plot synopses than it does
analysis; this is probably inevitable, given that most of this material has never been
gathered together in one place before. It also raises important questions about the
feasibility of its own enterprise, questions which are particularly relevant to
contemporary Canadian concerns about cultural identity. What exactly is Canadian sf
or Canadian fantasy? How/where can one locate provenance and identity? While
Canadas efforts to retain its own cultural identity may be doomed to failure, the
questions raised here are pressing, given the present world-wide tensions between
nationalism(s) and globalization.
Origins of Futuristic Fiction provides much of the background material for Paul K.
Alkons Science Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology (1994). Alkons
overview of pre-twentieth century sf, which focuses on developments in England
("New Viewpoints"), France ("Technophilia"), and America ("Technophobia"), is both
concise and informative. Rather than undertake a wide survey of his field of interest,
he traces the beginnings of the genre in the context of the voyages extraordinaires and
other precursor texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and then reads a
series of key texts in detailincluding Shelleys Frankenstein, Vernes Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Robidas Le Vingtime sicle, and Twains A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Courtin order to suggest sfs "advent as a
distinct genre" (xii). Alkon makes good use of the rather rigid format required by
Twayne in this particular critical seriesopening with a relevant Chronology,
followed by four chapters of analysis, and concluding with a Bibliographic Essay and
Recommended Titles (this same format shapes the 1997 study on 20th-century sf by
Brooks Landon which functions, to some extent, as a sequel to Science Fiction Before
1900 [see below]). I also recommend David Seeds edited collection Anticipations:
Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Precursors (1995), which offers generous
coverage of a range of mostly nineteenth-century precursor texts.
Edward James Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (1994) is even-handed,
accessible, and comprehensive, and, as a British historian (and editor of Foundation:
The Review of Science Fiction), James includes a good close look at the British sf
world as well as its American counterpart. This is a very well organized study,
quickly sketching out the late-nineteenth-century origins of the genre, including
details about publishing history and market realities, and taking into account as well
the rise and influence of the various fan communities. Jamess position outside the
American academic orbit is emphasized in his report on "The Victory of American
SF, 1940-1960," and his cautious take on the "postmodernization" of sf leads to
equally cautious conclusions about the current state of the field (either "maturity" or
"decadence," and only time will tell). Science Fiction in the Twentieth
Century includes a very useful chapter on "Reading Science Fiction," which explores
in detail various theoretical reading strategies pertinent to the genre. This is an
excellent study through which to introduce non-specialists to the field. The fact that
its available in paperback is also worth noting, since so much other potentially
effective classroom material is either unaffordable or out of print.
The latest history of genre sf to appear to date is Brooks Landons Science Fiction
After 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars (1997). This is both a sequel of sorts to
Alkons Science Fiction Before 1900 and a unique history of the genre constructed in
the context of contemporary theory. Like Alkons, Landons Twayne study provides a
Chronology of sf titles and includes five chapters of historical analysis: "The Culture
of Science FictionRationalizing Genre"; "From the Steam Man to the Stars";
"Science Fiction outside Genre SF"; "Countercultures of Science FictionResisting
Genre"; and "New and Newer Waves." It also includes a Bibliographic Essay and a
list of Recommended Titles. Landon is a critic familiar with the tangles of
postmodernist theory and his history, which pays ample attention to feminist
challenges to mainstream sf, the uncertainties of Dickian ontology, and the radical
premises and promises of cyberpunk, is itself a postmodern product, built up
through a series of careful layerings and circlings. In his detailed Preface, he sets the
scene through an emphasis on sf as a "literature of change" (xi), invoking Octavia
Butlers representation, in Parable of the Sower, of change as the only lasting truth,
and pinpointing what he calls "science fiction thinking" (xiii), which has propelled sf
past the formal limits of literary genre into a mode and a discourse which have
infiltrated Western culture at large. In conjunction with James more straightforward
history, Landons Science Fiction After 1900 provides an indispensable overview of
twentieth-century genre sf.
I.2. Genre Studies
Much more than a literary history, Suvins Metamorphoses of Science Fiction also
stands as a benchmark genre study, and the past two decades have seen the
appearance of many more scholarly inquiries aimed at explaining what sf is and how
it works. The sheer diversity of these readings, however, demonstrates a lack of
consensus about sf which is frustrating, fascinating (at least to me), and, no doubt,
inevitable: is sf a narrative genre? a field of discourse? a mode of thinking? a body of
literary texts? the compendium of mediatized entertainments which have grown up
around the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises? Where exactly are its borders (does it
have borders)? Is there something like an sf effect? When, if ever, should we call it
science fiction, speculative fiction, sf? What do we do when we read sf? And whats it
got to do with anything outside itself?
One of the best of the early-1980s genre studies is Mark Roses Alien Encounters:
Anatomy of Science Fiction (1981). Roses approach, which might be characterized as
"pre-postmodern," is influenced by structuralist methodology and examines sf from
the twin poles of extrapolation and metaphoricity, focusing, for the most part, on the
shift in emphasis of sfs "modernist" writers from the former to the latter. Looking
ahead, Rose traces the outlines of what has since become a recognizable shift in the
genre, towards what Bruce Sterling calls "slipstream" sf (see below), and which Rose
tentatively identifies as "a third phase in the genres development" (17), tracked as
the shift from metonymy to metaphor in sfs later phases. He concludes that "science
fictions history as a distinct genre may be approaching its end" (23) as it shifts from
genre to mode. Alien Encounters thus signals a transformation in thinking about sf
which has since become the focus of much contemporary criticism. Developing his
readings of individual texts around the paradigmatic opposition between the human
and the nonhuman, and consequent subversions of this paradigm, Rose offers a
wealth of intelligent analysesof, among others, H.G. Wellss The Time Machine,
Pamela Zolines "The Heat Death of the Universe," which functions for him as a kind
of limit-text, Stanislaw Lems Solaris, and J.G. Ballards The Drowned Worldin
chapters demarcated by the broad categories of "space," "time, "machine" and
"monster."
This period saw the publication of a variety of notable genre studies. Two works
which were deservedly influential when they first appeared, and which continue to
offer much to sf studies, are Patrick Parrinders genre introduction, Science Fiction:
Its Criticism and Teaching (1980), and Gary K. Wolfes The Known and the Unknown:
The Iconography of Science Fiction (1979). And see also Carl D. Malmgrens more
recent formal study,Worlds Apart: Narratology of Science Fiction (1991), which, in
spite of its title, is more influenced by structuralist reading strategies than by
theories of narratology.
Although only tangentially concerned with sf, Rosemary Jacksons Fantasy: The
Literature of Subversion (1981) is perhaps the best general study of the fantastic
published in the last twenty years, and it provides a complex and compelling
background against which to consider sf as a fantastic sub-genre (Jackson uses
"fantasy" in the expansive sense more often connoted by "the fantastic"). While
Jackson begins with Todorovs influential theoretical work on the fantastic, she
develops it and extends it; her theoretical context owes much to Freud, Lacan, Cixous,
and Foucault. For Jackson, fantasy, as the "other" side of realism, is a literature of
desire, of otherness, of the marginal and the repressed; it is also a potentially
powerful imaginative mode through which to critique and subvert dominant forms
of reality (although Jackson does not claim that allfantasy aims to subvert dominant
ideological systems): "Far from construing [fantasys] attempt at erosion [of
hegemonic ideology] as a mere embrace of barbarism or of chaos, it is possible to
discern it as a desire for something excluded from cultural ordermore specifically,
for all that is in opposition to the capitalist and patriarchal order which has been
dominant in Western society over the last two centuries" (176). Kathryn
Humes Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature (1984) is
another wide-ranging study which also situates sf within the broader field of
fantastic literature.
W. Warren Wagars Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things (1982) announces
as its task the study of how "a dying culturein this case, the national-bourgeois
culture of the post-Christian Westhas chosen to express the loss or decline of its
faith in itself" (xiii). This is an indispensable study of the "literature of last things" as
it has come to be expressed in speculative writings of the past two centuries. After
providing a brief but sweeping overview of eschatological narratives in Western
history, Wagar turns his attention to the secularization of these narratives, reading
Mary Shelleys The Last Man as an exemplary terminal (re)vision. Wagars readings
of stories like Wellss The Time Machineand the disaster novels of J.G. Ballard, in
which our waning trust in nature as caring mother feeds the scenarios of apocalypse,
are particularly interesting. He makes a strong case for the fact that, when history
overtakes myth as the context for the apocalyptic imagination, speculative fiction
becomes the new locus for the narratives of eschatology. Wagars Terminal
Visions concludes with a listing of over 300 relevant novels, stories, plays, and poems
published over the past 175 years. See also Martha Bartters more narrowly-focused
genre study, The Way to Ground Zero: The Atomic Bomb in American Science
Fiction (1988), as well as Paul Brians bibliographical guide, Nuclear Holocausts:
Atomic War in Fiction, 1895-1984 (1987).
Moving from Wagars sweeping Terminal Visions to a more specific, but equally
terminal, vision of sf, I want to call attention to Fredric Jamesons "Progress Versus
Utopia, or Can We Imagine the Future?" (1982). This is a theoretical meditation
undertaken in the context of Jamesons ongoing critique of contemporary
multinational capitalism, and his long-standing interest in the possibilities of the
utopian imagination. Jameson argues that sf as a narrative mode is inherently
contradictory, extending as it does into a (limitless) future while nevertheless being
constrained to arrive at some kind of novelistic resolution which functions as "the
mark of that boundary or limit beyond which thought cannot go" (148). Jameson
argues that "The common-sense position on the anticipatory nature of science fiction
as a genre is what we would today call a representationalone" (150), that the work of
contemporary science fiction is, in fact, "to defamiliarize and restructure our
experience of our own present" (151); he concludes that sfs "multiple mock futures,"
rather than attempting to imagine any kind of "real" future, "serve the quite different
function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet
to come" (152). As a result, Jameson argues, sf more properly functions as a marker of
our present imaginative limitations than as any kind of future anticipation. For him,
this demonstrates the contemporary failure of the utopian imagination; as a genre, sf
"becomes transformed into a contemplation of our own absolute limits" (153).
In the context of sfs intersections with utopian fiction, Tom Moylans Demand the
Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (1986) deserves special
attention. This important study examines four major sf novels of the 1970s which
almost single-handedly revived the flagging tradition of utopian literature. Moylan
reads these novelsRusss The Female Man, Le Guins The Dispossessed,
Piercys Woman on the Edge of Time, and Delanys Tritonas "critical utopias," as
texts which "keep the utopian impulse alive by challenging it and deconstructing it
within its very pages" (46). Moylan examines the utopian tradition from within a
contemporary Marxist theoretical framework, arguing convincingly for the particular
oppositional function of twentieth-century utopian texts. Demand the Impossible is
divided into two parts: the first is a theoretical discussion of both the utopian
imagination (building upon the work of Foucault and Jameson, Mannheim, Bloch,
and Marcuse)and the literary utopia (considering its particular textual functions and
effects); the second situates Moylans four selected novels within these contexts,
reading them as paradigmatic instances of the twentieth-century critical utopia:
"Critical utopias can be read as metaphorical displacements arising out of current
contradictions within the political unconscious. The utopian societies imaged in
critical utopias ultimately refer to something other than a predictable alternative
paradigm, for at their core they identify self-critical utopian discourse itself as a
process that can tear apart the dominant ideological web" (213).
Darko Suvins Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (1988) brings together
important essays by one of the fields most demanding theoreticians and critics,
collecting pieces published between 1973 and 1984, including "For a Social Theory
of Literature and Paraliterature: Some Programmatic Reflections" (1980); "Science
Fiction and Utopian Fiction: Degrees of Kinship" (1974); and "SF as Metaphor,
Parable and Chronotope (with the Bad Conscience of Reaganism)" (1984). Suvins
discussions of the field emphasize the importance of sociological and ideological
analyses which take into account the contingency of history; and they develop within
his own very influential theory of "cognitive estrangement" as the central effect of
sfs fictions. Like Stanislaw Lem (see below), Suvin has little patience with the
"weaker" examples of the field, and he focuses attention on the inherent tension
between its potential as radical critique and the socio-economic pressures which
discourage subversive practice. Suvin works to fuse formal and sociological
discussions of sf, and to think about what critics and academics are doing/should be
doing when we do sf studies (thus he includes in this collection, "On Teaching SF
Critically" [1979], written with Charles Elkins).
Damien Brodericks "SF as a Megatext" (1992) is a brief semiotic study with broad
implications for our understanding of both the writerly andreaderly conventions of
the sf genre. Broderick identifies and discusses what he sees as the "the extensive
generic [sf] mega-text built up over fifty years, even a century, of mutually layered sf
texts" (9). The result is a kind of conceptual "universe," in Brodericks terms a more or
less heterogeneous world of icons, images, and ideas which constitute the
intertextual material through which sf writers build their imaginative worlds, and
through which sf readers, applying their competence as readers, come to their
undertanding of those imaginative worlds. Broderick bases his analysis in part on
the concept of "megastory" or "parallel story" applied by Christine Brooke-Rose to
her structuralist examination of the techniques and functions of the realist text in A
Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the
Fantastic (1981). He argues convincingly that this concept is also relevant to sf, since
the genre now constitutes a heterogeneous "universe" of themes and tropes which are
available to writers and readers both within and outside the field. Among other
things, Brodericks article provides a conceptually accessible method through which
to introduce non-specialist readers to the demands of sfs specific reading protocols
and generic conventions. He develops these ideas in more detail in his Reading by
Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (1995), which, in spite of its title, is more useful
as a study of Samuel R. Delanys influential theoretical writing about sf than it is as
an analysis of conventional concepts of postmodernism.
Nicholas Ruddicks Ultimate Island: On the Nature of British Science Fiction (1993) is
an excellent examination of the specific nature of British sf defined as a literary field
(rather than a genre). Ruddick constructs a convincing picture of the homology
between British "literature" and British sf, based upon the key narrative motifs of the
island and the catastrophe. Consciously working out his own position against Brian
StablefordsScientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950, Ruddick identifies an ongoing
intertextual dialogue among British literary and sf texts; in the process he
distinguishes this intertextual development from the historical discontinuities more
evident in the American sf tradition. Ruddick provides an informed review of the
critical discourses which have previously helped to construct the field of British sf
and is consciously involved in dialogue with the likes of C.S. Lewis, Kingsley Amis,
Stableford, and Brian Aldiss, among others. He also provides cogent overviews of the
treatment of islands and catastrophes in British fiction before and after WWII.
Central to Ruddicks work are key texts by H.G. Wells, William Golding, and J.G.
Ballard, and he is particularly good in his analyses of Ballards fiction, concluding
with readings of Crash and High-Rise. Ruddicks Ultimate Island, whether or not one
finally agrees with its very specific construction of British sf, is a rich study which
deserves to be widely read.
I want to end this section with yet another "terminal vision," Roger Luckhursts "The
Many Deaths of Science Fiction: A Polemic" (1994). This self-proclaimed polemic
traces some of the crises and transformations which have fueled the many and
recurring lamentations over the "death" of science fiction. One central strand of sfs
history, for instance, recounts sfs yearning to dissolve itself (back) into the
mainstream, thus achieving literary respectability: "The SF history strenuously seeks
to elaborate a fantasy of non-origin, of being indistinguishable, identical, to the
mainstream: in such narratives of embedding SF into a larger historical unfolding
there is clearly a desire to return to an earlier state of things, before the genre divide,
before the boundary of high and low" (42). Luckhursts theoretical frame for his
ironic examination of sfs death wish is Freudian theory as elucidated, for instance,
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and he undertakes a kind of parodic psychoanalytic
reading of sfs generic unconscious. Reactions to each of the genres many
movements, such as the New Wave or feminist sf, have been symptomatic of sfs
contradictory desires: each has been welcomed, on the one hand, as working to
demolish those ghetto walls, and, on the other hand, each has been anxiously
constructed as a perversion of sfs generic specificity: "SF moves from crisis to crisis,
but it is not clear that such crises come from outside to threaten a once stable and
coherent entity. SF is produced from crisis, from its intense self-reflexive anxiety over
its status as literature...." (47).
I.3. Media Studies
The past twenty years have seen the publication of a number of very good studies
which focus on sf in film and on television. This is an area of growing importance,
because, in fact, most sf fans are viewers, not readers. While for many scholars in the
field, the term science fiction refers most obviously to a body of literature, for many
people it means Star Trek, Babylon 5, Independence Day, and The Matrix, or perhaps
such relatively "high culture" products as Metropolis, 2001: A Space Odyssey,
and Blade Runner. In any case, it is only relatively recently that sf scholarship has
taken account of the fact that media sf is more than simply an offshootfrequently
constructed as both dismal and banalof a more complex and intelligent literary
field. As a result, there is a small but growing body of critical work which focuses on
the very specific aesthetic features and formal requirements of media sf.
Vivian Sobchacks Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (1987) is an
expanded edition of her The Limits of Infinity: The American Science Fiction Film ,
1950-1975 (1980). A most important addition to Sobchacks original study is the final
long chapter, "Postfuturism," which reads contemporary sf film through the lens of
Fredric Jamesons analyses of postmodernism as "the cultural logic of late
capitalism," and in the context of the explosive popularity of late-seventies sf films,
in particular George Lucas Star Wars and Steven Spielbergs Close Encounters of the
Third Kind. For Sobchack, these films were responsible for ushering in a new period
in the history of American sf film, one strongly shaped both by expanding
technological possibilities and by expanding commodity culture. Sobchacks earlier
chapters already make up one of the best studies to date of the sf films formal
structures; they include detailed examinations of the range of visual iconography, as
well as the use of sound (dialogue, sound effects, and musical scores). In contrast,
"Postfuturism" details some of the ways in which the spatiality of sfs filmic images
is influenced by and linked to the spatiality of contemporary Western consciousness,
as theorized in Jamesons very influential writings on postmodernism. As Sobchack
argues, "Our contemporary cultural inflation of the value of space and surface has
several existential and aesthetic consequences, which ... find symbolic dramatization
in the formal structures and narrative thematics of the contemporary SF film" (272). I
also recommend George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkins edited collection, Shadows of
the Magic Lamp: Fantasy and Science Fiction in Film (1985), for an informative
introduction to some of the technologies and thematics of sf as cinema.
Brooks Landons The Aesthetics of Ambivalence: Rethinking Science Fiction Film in the
Age of Electronic (Re)Production (1992) is another significant entry in the field of sf
film studies. Landon, a scholar conversant with both literary and film/video sf
cultures, and interested in thinking about how they are and are not like each other,
suggests some stimulating conclusions here, not least of which is that sf film is in the
process of taking a back seat to other forms of visual technologies requiring
concommitantly different critical strategies. For Landon, there is a science
fiction of the cinemathat is, the sf films non-narrative elementsas well as science
fiction in the cinema: "To the traditional consideration of the metaphoric function of
action, characterization, and icons within the semblances of SF film I want to add the
metonymic consideration of the technologies and implications of the film production
practice itself" (xxiii). Landon concludes that the increasingly sophisticated
capabilities of video technologies (computer-generated special effects) are steadily
outstripping the sf films rather limited narrative capacity and he foresees a gradual
transformation in these narratives as they adapt to the pressures and possibilities of
their own formal techno-logic. As film study, The Aesthetics of Ambivalence is rather
a hybrid product, but its both convincing and original in its examinations of sf
fiction and sf film as, finally, quite different kinds of science fiction. Annette Kuhns
edited collection, Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction
Cinema (1990), is also of interest here, as is J.P. Telottes just published A Distant
Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age (1999). This latter fills a gap in
film scholarship by concentrating on international sf film of the 1930s, specifically in
the context of modernisms hopes for and anxieties about technology.
Henry Jenkins Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992) is
an excellent introduction to the phenomenon known as "media fandom." Jenkins
writes as a participant-observer, and his ethnography was undertaken with the
support of many individual fans. Jenkins observes in his discussion of fan writing
that "Most academic studies of fan writing have focused primarily ... on Star
Trek zines.... This focus reflects the important role of Trek fandom in developing the
conventions and setting the standards for media zine publishing" (161); Star
Trek fandom is more or less central to Textual Poachers, as providing a kind of
paradigmatic instance of such popular communities. Jenkins also emphasizes the
"origins" of sf fandom and fan writing in the letter columns of Hugo Gernsbacks
pulp magazines. This is a richly detailed work that covers areas of interest such as
"slash" writing and the gender questions raised by such writing; it also addresses
some of the more negative stereotypes associated with fan culture, such as the long-
standing criticisms aimed at those whose attachment to the products of "mass"
culture is deemed to be too extreme. Textual Poachers is an important introduction to
an aspect of the sf field which many scholars would, perhaps, prefer to ignore, and it
balances sympathetic appreciation with intellectual rigor. Like Michel de Certeau,
from whose theoretical work he has borrowed the term "textual poaching," Jenkins
argues for the counter-hegemonic possibilities of individual involvement in popular
culture: "Fans construct their cultural and social identity through borrowing and
inflecting mass culture images, articulating concerns which often go unvoiced within
the dominant media" (23). Readers interested in the formations and activities of sf
fandom will find the following studies also worth consulting: Joe Sanders edited
collection, Science Fiction Fandom (1994), and Constance Penleys recent NASA/TREK:
Popular Science and Sex in America (1997).
I.4. Research Guides
This section recommends some research guides which provide crucial support and
information for anyone working in sf studies. Bibliographies and encyclopedias
provide our most detailed maps of what has become an expansive and diverse
geography and the last twenty years have seen a proliferation of excellent critical and
research guides. All I can do here is suggest something of the wealth of material
which has appeared in that time. I should note as well that there are a range of quite
specialized materials which are also well worth looking into: one of the most useful,
for instance, is Gary K. Wolfes Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A
Glossary and Guide to Scholarship (1986); another is Walter M. Meyers study of
linguistics in science fiction, Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science
Fiction (1980).
Everett F. Bleilers Science-Fiction, The Early Years: A Full Description of more than
3000 Science-Fiction Stories from Earliest Times to the Appearance of the Genre
Magazines in 1930, with Author, Title, and Motif Indexes (1990) is a vast survey which
fulfills the impressive promises made in its subtitle. In addition, it provides a section
on "Background Books" which aims to contextualize the historical and intellectual
currents for these thousands of sf stories, novels, and plays. Bleilers index of motifs
in fact amounts to a massive taxonomy of themes, concepts, and story elements. As
well as the very useful annotations and indexes, Bleiler also provides an introduction
which offers a brief history of the development of the genres, story clusters, and
motifs through which he makes sense of his material, from sfs origins in the
seventeenth century to the Gernsback moment which, for Bleiler, is the moment at
which sf began to take shape as a viable commercial enterprise. Science-Fiction, The
Early Years is an indispensable source of information for the student of sfs history.
Most impressive, perhaps, is the fact that Bleiler used no secondary sources in
preparing his entries; he actually read, over the course of six years, all the stories
which he describes here. Note also Bleilers most recent bibliographical project,
undertaken with the assistance of Richard Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Gernsback
Years (1998).
Another impressive bibliographical guide is Eric Garber and Lyn Paleos Uranian
Worlds: A Guide to Alternative Sexuality in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and
Horror (1990). This is an annotated bibliography of hundreds of works dealing with
"variant" sexuality by two of the editors ofWorlds Apart: An Anthology of Lesbian and
Gay Science Fiction and Fantasy (1986). Uranian Worlds provides a powerful
challenge to the conventional notion of fantastic literature as a more or less
conventionally heterosexual body of writing. As such, it serves a political as well as a
scholarly purpose, and brief introductory essays by Samuel R. Delany and Joanna
Russ highlight the important contribution which Uranian Worlds makes to
bibliographical studies in sf and fantasy. Coverage ranges from 200 A.D.
(Lucians True History) to 1989 and includes classics like Polidoris The Vampyre,
Lefanus "Carmilla," Gilmans Herland, and Stapledons Odd John, as well as works
by Russ and Delany, along with other such familiar sf writers as Robert Silverberg,
Thomas Disch, Ursula Le Guin, J.G. Ballard, and Octavia Butler. Garber and Paleo
provide a chronological as well as an alphabetical index; they also supply some very
helpful appendices, including "Selected Anthologies, "Selected Films and Videos,"
and "Selected Fan Organizations." In their Preface, Garber and Paleo point out
that Uranian Worlds does not confine itself to gay and lesbian texts only, but aims to
call attention to the many and varied treatments, especially positive ones, of non-
normative genders and sexualites which have appeared over the centuries in the the
literature of the fantastic.
John Clute and Peter Nicholls The Encylopedia of Science Fiction (1993), the updated
version of Peter Nicholls 1978 Encylopedia of Science Fiction, is perhaps the single
most important reference work ever published about sf. Aided by contributing editor
Brian Stableford and technical editor John Grant, Clute and Nicholls have produced
a massive compendium of nearly everything having to do with science fiction, its
history, its generic properties, its thematic focuses, its individual authors and texts,
its forays into film and television, its interactions with neighbor genres such as
realism and fantasy ... and on and on and on. Amazingly, Clute, Nicholls, and
Stableford are responsible for about 85% of the writing. Just look at the numbers:
over 1,300,000 words, covering over 4300 entries and approximately 2100 cross-
references. Theres little point in my trying to describe The Encyclopedia of Science
Fiction in more detail: if you are already aware of it, then you know how significant
it is; if you are not familiar with it, then make a point of buying a copy as soon as
possible; it may be the best one hundred dollars youve ever invested. There is also a
CD-ROM version available from Grolier which is not without its glitches, but which
is, nevertheless, also worth having for those who prefer on-screen research and/or
multi-media add-ons.
My final recommendation in this section is perhaps the only work that can rival the
Clute/Nicholls Encyclopedia for sheer indispensability. Produced by Barron and a
pool of contributors including James Gunn, Brian Stableford, and Gary K. Wolfe,
Neil Barrons Anatomy of Wonder 4: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction (1995) is the
latest edition of one of the sine qua nons of the fields research tools (as I confirmed
for myself while working on this present project). Divided into two broad sections
listing primary and secondary titles, it contains introductory essays to, and annotated
listings of, a vast range of materials, including (in the section on primary texts) essays
on specific historical periods, young adult science fiction, and sf poetry, and (in the
listings of secondary and research materials) publishing and libraries, general
reference works, history and criticism, media sf (film, television, and radio), and
information about library research collections, as well as information about relevant
comics, magazines, and teaching materials. Anatomy of Wonder 4 includes critical
evaluations of over 2100 works of fiction (from the sixteenth century through 1994)
and 800 works of nonfiction; and it provides superb indexes which make it easy to
find individual author and title entries. Virtually the only drawback to this present
edition is its eliminationdue to lack of spaceof coverage of sf not already
translated into English.
II. Sf Writers on Sf
Sf writers and editors have, almost from the beginning, also written about sf, and
many such accounts have appeared since 1980, including a few by writers who no
longer associate themselves with sf. The best of these commentaries have provided
an important arena of intelligent and sophisticated debate about the field, and they
have also on occasion offered perspectives which are intriguingly different from
those we find in academic studies. Before turning to some of these writerly
commentaries, however, I want to call attention to two collections of interviews
which allow us to hear the voices of a wide variety of sf writers. The first is Charles
Platts two-volume Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science
Fiction (1980); and Dream Makers, Volume II: The Uncommon Men and Women Who
Write Science Fiction (1983). Platt, an sf writer and critical commentator, has put
together an impressive array of relatively brief but telling author interviews which
range across some of the most important terrain of American and British sf as it
developed during the 1960s and 1970s. The list of interviewees in the first volume
reads like a Whos Who of the New Wave: among its twenty-nine names are Thomas
Disch, Samuel Delany, Barry Malzberg, Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock, J. G.
Ballard, Ian Watson, and Brian Aldiss. This first volume isnt simply an ode to the
New Wave, however: its subjects also include Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Alfred
Bester, Philip Jos Farmer, Robert Sheckley, John Brunner, Philip K. Dick, and A.E.
van Vogt. Platts second volume of interviews, all of them conducted in the early
1980s, suffers somewhat in its neglect of the many women writers who, by 1980, were
having such an influence on the field, but it does at least include Joanna Russ, Joan
Vinge, James Tiptree, Jr., and Andre Norton, among others. It also contains some
surprises, such as interviews with John Sladek, D.M. Thomas, and L. Ron Hubbard.
While Platts interviews are neither as lengthy nor as detailed as those in Larry
McCafferys Across the Wounded Galaxies, the scope of his two volumes makes them
an invaluable resource.
The second collection of interviews I recommend is Larry McCafferys Across the
Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction
Writers (1990), a collection put together by the scholar who has done more than
anyone else in the American pop-cultural scene to link sf and postmodernism. Across
the Wounded Galaxies contains fascinating conversations with Gregory Benford,
William Burroughs, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Thomas Disch, William Gibson,
Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Bruce Sterling, and Gene Wolfe. McCafferys
attention to contemporary sf as it had developed by the late 1980s is amply
demonstrated by the diversity of his interview subjects and their varied politics,
aesthetics, and thematics. One significant feature of most of these interviews is the
extent to which these writers represent a generation more or less self-consciously
building upon and altering already-extent generic conventions. Across the Wounded
Galaxies was published at the height of the postmodern excitement of the late 1980s,
which clearly influenced McCafferys choice of interview subjects. As he writes in
his introduction, "This focus ... has the benefit of creating a ready-made subtext
having to do with the interaction between SF, the pop underground, and
postmodernism" (5). At the same time, its spacious enough to accommodate a fine
discussion with Benford, whose writing McCaffery characterizes as "a particularly
successful example of the modernist branch of contemporary SF" (9). It also includes
a conversation with Gene Wolfe, whose allegorical originality tends to defy all
efforts at categorization.
For a rare full-length sf autobiography, a kind of extended interview, see Jack
Williamsons Wonders Child: My Life in Science Fiction [1984], an account of one of
the longest-running careers in American sf by a writer who began publishing within
two years of the launch of GernsbacksAmazing Stories, and who is still writing and
publishing today.
A relatively early series of articles on sf has been collected in Barry N.
Malzbergs The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties (1982). The pieces
gathered here were written in 1979/80 by a prolific writer and editor who more or less
gave up writing sf at the end of the decade. Both a loving and an anguished
discussion of the sf field, these pieces provide insight into the careers of sf authors as
producers of mass-market cultural products. Malzberg has included personal
recollectionsa moving description of his meeting an aged John W. Campbell, for
instancecommentary on the sf magazines and the early publishing scene, and a
wealth of commentary on the 1950s. This is a decade which Malzberg both valorizes
and criticizes, comparing it to his own moment in the late 1970s when, at least for
him, the future for serious sf writing seems particularly unpromising. This collection
of brief and fragmentary essays adds up to a valuable textual whole; its a personal,
passionate, and ambivalent look back at a loved and scorned genre by a writer who
perhaps felt himself to have reached the end of his own career in the field.
Malzbergs final piece, "Corridors," is a fictional attempt to capture the inevitable
failure but also the real effort of the professional sf writer to celebrate the fact that
"in whatever form the spirit could yet sing amidst the engines of the night" (17).
Stanislaw Lems Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy (1984)
demonstrates that, as well as being one of the worlds most respected science fiction
writers, Polish intellectual Stanislaw Lem has always been one of the fields most
demanding and least satisfied critics. His European perspective and his
curmudgeonly view of the field make his work both exhilarating and annoying; what
is never in doubt is the original and incisive nature of Lems critical ideas. This
collection draws together some of Lems most significant critical pieces published
between 1970 and 1984, including "On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction";
"Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans"; "The Time-Travel Story and
Related Matters of Science-Fiction Structuring"; and "Metafantasia: The Possibilities
of Science Fiction." Microworldsprovides a broad overview of Lems efforts to
balance sfs generic possibilities with its continual shortcomings, especially as they
are manifested in American sf. During the course of his polemical critique of sf
fiction and criticism, Lem identifies himself as both a satirist and a humanist, driven,
like Swift and Voltaire, "to despair and anger by the conduct of mankind" (29). Lem
has, more recently, sworn off any further involvement with sf.
We get an editorial rather than a writerly perspective in David G. Hartwells Age of
Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (1985). Hartwell is one of sfs most
experienced editorsand a founding editor of The New York Review of Science
Fictionand his understanding of the realities of sf as a commercial enterprise is
probably unmatched. Age of Wonders is his history of sf in the market and in the fan
communities, the world of sf writers and readers. "Sense of Wonder" is central to his
construction of the sf project: "Science fiction stories are performances, just like the
Christian mystery plays of the Middle Ages.... A science fiction story clothes and
enacts in narrative a wonder" (52). Like many others, Hartwell notes the science-
fictionalization of the present, influenced as it is by the never-ending circulation of sf
images in popular film and television. He also notes, from his vantage point in the
early-to-mid 1980s, the diffusion and fragmentation of the field as it was then
occurringalthough cyberpunk, the next "new" thing, doesnt actually make an
appearancesensibly situating this dispersal as yet one more example of the various
crises which have marked sf since its beginnings. Hartwells reading of sf valorizes it
as a literature of historical change and cultural flexibility and Age of Wonders is
equally optimistic and expansive, concluding that "The golden age of science fiction
is the present" (199). A slightly revised and expanded second edition of Age of
Wonders appeared in 1996, notable especially for its addition of several appendices,
including recommendations for further reading and an essay on hard sf co-written
with Kathryn Cramer.
This section on sf writers writing about sf would be incomplete if it did not also call
attention to the entire first issue of Stephen P. BrownsScience Fiction Eye (Winter
1987). This first issue quickly established the character of the magazine, which
functioned for quite a few years as sfs hip, alternative, counter-cultural voice, one
strongly marked, at least in the beginning, by the cyberpunk phenomenon, as well as
by other areas of "cutting edge" culture which were helping to shape the sf field.
Bruce Sterling, Takayuki Tatsumi, John Shirley, William Gibson, John Kessel, and
"Sue Denim" (Lewis Shiner) all contributed to SF Eye #1, which, among other things,
includes an interview with Gibson, the first of Sterlings many "Catscan" features,
the transcript of a contentious panel discussion on "Cyberpunk or Cyberjunk" (from
the 1986 SFRA Conference in San Diego), Kessels "Humanist Manifesto" (a critical
response to cyberpunk), and Tatsumis report on the fortunes of
GibsonsNeuromancer in Japan. Reading that first issue of SF Eye was eye-opening, to
say the least: we can see how writers like Sterling and Shirley, as well as critics like
Tatsumi, were in the process of constructing "cyberpunk" as an sf category even as
they also initiated some of the terms of the critical debate which was in the process of
developing around this self-styled "new" sf. (While Science Fiction Eye has not
officially ceased publication, it has appeared only infrequently over the past few
years; the most recent issue appeared in Fall 1997.)
Ursula K. Le Guins Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women,
Places (1989) is a collection of wide-ranging non-fiction pieces by one of the most
respected American sf writers. Dancing provides a satisfying update on Le Guins
ideas about language, writing, feminism, gender, and science fiction (her first
collection of essays, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction,
edited by Susan Wood, appeared in 1980). The revision of her 1976 essay on language
in The Left Hand of Darkness, "Is Gender Necessary?," is particularly significant: in
"Is Gender Necessary? Redux," Le Guin rethinks her relationship to the gendered
language of this classic sf novel. Equally usefulis her construction of "The Carrier
Bag Theory of Fiction," which suggests alternative models to the masculinist
narratives of competition, stress, struggle, and conflict to which we have become
accustomed in conventional literature of all kinds: "Science fiction properly
conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what
is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything
else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb
of things that were, this unending story" (170). Also of interest is the final section,
"Reviews," a selection of Le Guins critical responses to a range of texts, including
Doris Lessings Shikasta, Mervyn Peakes Peakes Progress, and Italo
Calvinos Difficult Loves. As always, Le Guins writing is graceful, her grasp of ideas
is generous, and her intelligence is gratifying.
Another worthwhile collection of essays is Norman Spinrads Science Fiction in the
Real World (1990). A long-time sf writer and one of the important voices of the
American New Wave, Sprinrad has for many years also published a regular column
in Asimovs Magazine. Most of the pieces collected here, with very few exceptions,
were published in that venue between 1985 and 1988. They constitute a series of
valuable insights and observations about the field, including Spinrads influential
first essay on cyberpunk, collected here as "The Neuromantic Cyberpunks"; "Inside,
Outside," which pays intelligent attention to the cross-over phenomenon of
mainstream writers like Russell Hoban and demonstrates Sprinrads very sensible
grasp of the parameters of the sf field; and "The Emperor of Everything," a wise
meditation upon the nature of some of sfs central wish-fulfillment fantasies.
Spinrads discussions of the interactions "between publishing realities and aesthetic
imperatives" (219) are particularly good and demonstrate his familiarity with the
institutional face of popular publishing. However, Spinrad appears to be remarkably
oblivious to the work of women writers, especially those who began publishing in
the 1970s. In this, of course, he is not alone. I am reminded of Samuel R. Delanys
critique of the cyberpunks for a simliar "forgetting" of their feminist "mothers."
Samuel R. Delanys Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and
Some Comics (1994) offers an update on another long sf career, this time taking the
form of a collection of written interviews. One of American sfs most honored
writers, Delany is also familiar with the discourses of critical theory and he is well
aware of the more "distanced" nature of this particular material, at once so very
personal and yet so carefully constructed. In all, Silent Interviews is composed of an
introductory essay on the nature of the written interview; ten interviews with
Delany, most of them conducted during the mid-1980s (one by the fictional critic K.
Leslie Steiner); and an an interview conducted by Delany himself in 1986with
Anthony Davis, composer of the opera, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. Delany
makes a case for his own sf novels as a form of sf criticism, involved with textual
interpretation and attempting to recount new and more interesting critical "plots"
about the genre. Silent Interviews contains some of Delanys most interesting
statements about the field, including Takayuki Tatsumis interview "Some Real
Mothers ..."; "The Semiology of Silence: The Science-Fiction Studies Interview"; and
the Camera Obscura interview, "Sword & Sorcery, S/M, and The Economics of
Adequation." Among other things, Silent Interviews adds up to a very personal
account of Delanys long fascination with the complexities of critical theory, and
develops his thoughts about literary theory, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and
deconstruction as they intersect with his interests in sf. Other critical collections by
Delany, only the former of which emphasizes sf, include Starboard Wine: More Notes
on the Language of Science Fiction (1984) and Longer Views: Extended Essays (1996).
John Clutes Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews (1995) is comprised of pieces
published between 1987 and 1995 by one of the fields foremost wordsmiths; its a
more than satisfactory follow-up to his earlier Strokes: Essays and Reviews, 1966-
1986 (1988). Based for many years in London, Clute is a long-time, and award-
winning, sf reviewer and critic, and sometime sf writer, closely involved with
both Interzone andFoundation; his critical writing amounts to a highly original and
acerbic ongoing commentary on the fortunes of sf. Look at the Evidence collects
several of Clutes conference and convention presentations, a wide array of
individual and survey review-articles, and a range of other pieces written for various
collections, newspapers, and magazines, both specialized and general, all of which
material is organized according to year of original publication. Clutes opening essay,
"Necessary Golems," is his reviewers manifesto: "Reviewers who will not tell the
truth are like cholesterol. They are lumps of fat. They starve the heart" (3). Look at the
Evidence, as might be expected from a critic who has never been one to pull his
punches, is both good for the arteries and simulating for the brain, offering a
veritable low-fat feast of critical observation and incisive commentary. For Clute, sf
"has become, once again, and after a long intermission in the coils of nostalgia, a
literature of the future, or (now that we have come out of the monocular glare of the
old First SF programme) the futures. Once again, now that we know we are
differently futured, we can learn from sf" (278).
It seems ironically appropriate to complete this section of critical works by sf writers
with Thomas M. Dischs The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction
Conquered the World (1998), which identifies its task as "to show in what respect the
science fiction of the last half-century ... [prophesies] to the converted and [assists] in
the deceptions of the self-deceived" (39). This is a witty and acerbic polemic by an
erstwhile sf writer who has also worked as an editor, a poet, and a theatre and literary
critic. For Disch, sf is an Adornoesque cultural phenomenon representative of the
lowest kinds of popular fantasy which nevertheless enjoys unprecedented influence:
"It is my contention that some of the most remarkable features of the present
historical moment have their roots in a way of thinking that we have learned from
science fiction" (12). Unfortunately, for Disch these features include the rise of
millennial cults, Oliver North, Madonnas wardrobe, and toxic waste cover-ups. The
Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of is guaranteed to annoy and provoke. Consider, for
instance, Dischs contention that no one would have read Frankenstein if Mary
Shelley hadnt had the right family connections; or his conclusion that even if
Octavia Butlers work is politically incorrect, no one would dare to point it out to
her. The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of is as short-sighted as it is intelligent, as clever
as it is annoyingand it is always entertaining.
III. When It Changed: Feminism and Postmodernism
The title for this section is borrowed from Joanna Russs short story, "When It
Changed" (1972), one of the classics of feminist science fiction. Russs story is about a
planet of women whose centuries-old way of life is threatened with destruction by
the arrival of male astronauts from Earth. The story follows the growing awareness of
Russs characters that, inevitably, they will be confronted by transformations in
everything they hold dear both as individuals and as a society. Intriguingly, in
William Gibsons Mona Lisa Overdrive (New York: Bantam,1988), the final novel in
his Sprawl trilogy, "When It Changed" is the phrase used by "the old cowboys" (127)
to refer to the techno-transcendent coming-into-being of mysterious intelligences in
cyberspacesignaling, perhaps, cyberpunks recognition of its literary debt to earlier
feminist writers. Both the feminist consciousness represented by Russs story and the
postmodern aesthetic of Gibsons writing influenced the development of important
new perspectives in sf studies. While neither feminism nor postmodernism can claim
to have effected the kind of radical change which is the subject both of Russs story
and Gibsons novel, each has left ineradicable, if very different, marks on the field.
III.1. Feminist Studies
Feminist critics have produced an important body of writing over the past twenty
years, and have had a positive influence on sf scholarshipss growing maturity and
sophistication. One of the first signs of what was to become a large and complex
body of critical work appeared in 1981, with the publication of Marleen S.
Barrs Future Females: A Critical Anthology. Although occasional critical pieces had
appeared before 1980 attesting to the increasing influence of womens and feminist
voices in the fieldsuch as Pamela Sargents fine introductions to her three-
volume Women of Wonder collectionFuture Females marks the first major critical
enterprise devoted to the work of women sf writers. As Barr wrote in her
introduction, "Science fiction, the realm of bulging blobs who devour partially
undressed, distressed damsels, is also the home of speculations about future females.
Science fiction should form a major current in the contemporary stream of feminist
thought" (4). Barr was right: the emergence of womens voices in sf during the 1960s
and 1970s was, and continues to be, one of the most significant developments in the
field, and feminist scholarship has responded to this development, focusing on
feminist and womens writing in particular, but by no means neglecting the field as a
whole. One of the more exciting aspects of the feminist contribution has been the
(re)discovery of many works by women who wrote sf before there was anything like
a coherent feminist movement.
Feminist criticism recognizes that there are political stakes in scholarly work (just as
there are in all aspects of our social and cultural lives). It is the kind of criticism
which insists on re-inserting the object of study back into the world, in the same
sense that Marxism reinserts its objects of study back into the world of
institutionalized discourses and power formations. Feminism itselfagain like
Marxism, although Marxist critics might not welcome the comparisonis an
intensely utopian enterprise, one which finds a singularly appropriate imaginative
location in the field of sf studies. It is also worth noting the relatively recent
appearance of other kinds of politically-engaged criticism at least in part encouraged
and made possible by the existence of a flourishing body of feminist criticism. While
considerations of race issues, for instance, have long been neglected in sf studiesin
spite of the fact that the figure of the alien which is so central to sf narratives would
seem to invite such considerationstwo recent publications suggest that perhaps this
is in the process of changing: Elizabeth Anne Leonards edited collection, Into
Darkness Peering: Race and Color in the Fantastic (1997), and Daniel Leonard
Bernardis Star Trek and History: Race-ing Toward a White Future(1998).
Barrs Future Females: A Critical Anthology (1981) is an admirably pragmatic
collection, and its up-front political engagement, coming as it did at a time when the
most significant political readings of the field tended to be Marxist-inflected,
remains refreshing. Barr, who has made her career as a feminist critic of sf, prefaces
this collection with the kind of qualifying statement that I like to think is no longer
necessary: "if the mere mention of this genre [sf] causes a ruffling of academic
feathers, then, relating it to women is analogous to placing all those simply ruffled
feathers in front of a wind machine" (1). Of the sixteen pieces in Future Females,
Joanna Russs "Recent Feminist Utopias" is probably the best known. Also of interest
is Roger Schlobins "Selected Checklist through 1979," a ten-page listing of selected
titles by women sf writers. Other participants in this early feminist project include
Suzy McKee Charnas, Norman N. Holland, Susan Kress, Carol Pearson, Eric S.
Rabkin, Scott Sanders, Robert Scholes, and Lyman Tower Sargent. Barr recently
edited a companion volume, Future Females: New Voices and Velocities (Boulder, CO:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). To date, her most substantial full-length study has
been Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction (1992), in which she argues, not
always convincingly, for the abolition of feminist sf as a category in favor of the
broader and more inclusive "feminist fabulation."
The first significant full-length study of womens and feminist sf did not appear
until several years after Barrs collection was published. Sarah Lefanus In The Chinks
of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988) argues that "the plasticity
of science fiction and its openness to other literary genres allow an apparent
contradiction ... it makes possible, and encourages (despite its colonisation by male
writers), the inscription of women as subjects free from the constraints of mundane
fiction; and it also offers the possibilities of interrogating that very inscription,
questioning the basis of gendered subjectivity" (9). In the Chinks of the World
Machine is divided into two sections, the most useful of which is a generous
overview organized around a series of issues and areas of concern, including
considerations of textual representation, varieties of utopia and dystopia, an all-too-
brief study of the treatment of romantic love, and analyses of the tensions between
authority and sentiment. Lefanus second section offers close readings of the works
of James Tiptree, Jr., Ursula Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas, and Joanna Russ. For
Lefanu, sf can offer feminist writers a particularly useful narrative form through
which to construct imaginative resistances to the limitations of gender representation
in realist fiction. She relates this to the ability of sf to estrange aspects of the "real"
while, at the same time, to pose at least a potential challenge to the structures of the
"real": "Feminism questions a given order in political terms, while science fiction
questions it in imaginative terms.... If science fiction demands our acceptance of a
relativistic universe, then feminism demands, no less, our acceptance of a relativistic
social order. Nothing, in these terms, is natural, least of all the cultural notions of
woman and man." (100).
The ways in which feminism(s) might (or might not) intersect with postmodernism(s)
have long been a source of critical debate, and this question of potential intersections
is the focus of Jenny Wolmarks Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and
Postmodernism (1994). Mapping both the various parallels as well as the
incontrovertible contradictions between feminist and postmodernist positions,
Wolmark explores what she terms their "shared theoretical moments" (20). In a very
useful introductory chapter, she lays out the context for her readings of specific texts
which make up the bulk of Aliens and Others, constructing this framework through a
dialogue with postmodern theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and
Linda Hutcheon, and feminist theorists such as Meaghan Morris, Sandra Harding,
Nancy Fraser, and Linda J. Nicholson. As Wolmark states early on, Aliens and
Others is "primarily a study of the ways in which feminist science fiction addresses
questions of subjectivity, identity and difference, and challenges the dual definition
of the alien as other and of the other as always being alien" (2). These issues, to a
greater or lesser extent, are also central to postmodernism. The four chapters that
follow her introduction"Unpredictable Aliens," "Destabilizing Gender and Genre,"
"Troubles in Womens Country," and "Cyberpunk, Cyborgs and Feminist Science
Fiction"read a wide range of texts to demonstrate how, in the context of feminist sf,
"the decentring of the modernist legacy, along with the decentring of the unitary
subject, have been of immense importance as far as feminism and feminist cultural
production is concerned, enabling the question of gendered subjectivity to become
part of the postmodern agenda" (11).
Joanna Russs To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction (1995)
is a particularly valuable document in the history of feminist sf criticism. It reprints
some of the most important essays of this very influential sf writer and critic,
including "Towards an Aesthetics of Science Fiction" (1975), "Amor Vincet Foeminam:
The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction" (1980), and "Recent Feminist Utopias"
(1981). In addition, there are fine discussions here about H.P. Lovecraft, the
contemporary gothic romance, and Charlotte Perkins Gilmans "The Yellow
Wallpaper." Russs thinking cuts through potential piles of verbiage to arrive at
witty, intelligent, and thought-provoking conclusions. To Write Like a
Womanchallenges feminist readersindeed, it challenges all serious readersto
apply continuous and resistant pressure on the power structures which help to define
the field of science fiction: "Once a radical politics (or literary criticism) is limited
and diluted to the point where it can safely become part of the establishment, it can
also be dispensed with" (166). Russ is one of the few writerswe can also include
Samuel R. Delany and Monique Wittigwho demonstrates in both her fiction and
her criticism an astute and critical approach to gender issues in general and queer
issues in particular. In the words of my most esteemed colleague, R.D. Mullen, "this
book is special, if only because we need to have available all the work, fiction and
nonfiction alike, of this brilliant but not especially prolific writer" (SFS 23.2 [July
1996]: 286).
Jane Donawerths Frankensteins Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction (1997)
proposes Frankenstein as a paradigm of womens sf writing and identifies three
crucial "problems" which Shelleys novel both introduces and addresses (and which
serve to organize the three sections into which Donawerth divides her study): "In
creating the genre of science fiction, in fusing the romance with enlightenment
rationality, Shelley created a genre that gave women writers enormous freedoms....
But Shelley also created a genre inheriting the limitations of her patriarchal society: a
society in which women were denied education and careers in science, in which
women were constructed as aliens, and in which men retained the license to speak
and control the stories" (xxvi). While Donawerths subsequent discussions of the
fictional constructions of "utopian science" and "alien monster-women" by women sf
writers responding to these perceived limitations may not add substantially to
previously published critical work, they nevertheless serve to (re)introduce readers to
a broad cross-section of women writers, many of whom, like Jayge Carr, Carol
Emshwiller, Cynthia Felice, Rebecca Ore, and Cherry Wilder, have not yet attracted
much critical attention. Donawerths third section, on the "cross-dressing" strategies
of women who "speak through" male narrators, focuses attention on a crucialand
very interesting"problem" in narrative construction about which there has been, to
date, a paucity of critical analysis. Donawerth avoids essentializing "feminist sf" by
calling attention to the fact that the narrative strategies which are her focus are not
"innately female, but instead [are] narrative strategies that work as resistance because
they are also similar to the conventions of realistic science fiction narrative" (135).
Donawerth is also co-editor, with Carol A. Kolmerten, of Utopian and Science Fiction
by Women: Worlds of Difference (1994), a well-organized collection of essays that
traces the historical development of womens utopian writing from the sixteenth
century to the present.
By far the most influential document in the case of feminist sf studies appeared less
than five years after the publication of Future Females, and, although it contained
passing references to writers like Joanna Russ and Samuel R. Delany, it seemed at
first to have little directly to do with sf. This is Donna J. Haraways "A Cyborg
Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century" (1985). Rarely has any single article so helped to shape so much ensuing
critical work. The "Manifesto," "an ironic dream of a common language for women in
the integrated circuit" (149), is an early example of Haraways ability to suggest
resonant allegorical figures with weirdly unsettled ontologies as a means to construct
narratives that explore the implications for life in the context of technoculture. Her
cyborg is an exemplary figure, appealing to us as both material and fantastic. The
"Manifesto" is one of the first, and remains one of the most powerful, statements of a
feminism which recognizes technoculture as an ineluctable presence and a crucially
shaping influence. It has also become recognized as one of the most influential
theoretical constructions of postmodernism written to date (perhaps only Fredric
Jamesons "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," noted below,
has equalled its impact on theoretical constructions of "the postmodern condition").
"A Cyborg Manifesto" initiated another metamorphosis in the sf critical project: the
cyborg has become an increasingly familiar figure in the landscape of technoculture,
imaginatively embodying a wide range of perspectives on the nature of the human
subject in the context of contemporary technological developments. See, for example,
Anne Balsamos Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (1996)
and N. Katherine HaylesHow We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics (1999).
III.2. Postmodernism
Haraways "Manifesto" appeared within a year of the publication not only of Fredric
Jamesons massively influential essay "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism," but also of William Gibsons quintessential cyberpunk
novel, Neuromancer. This concatenation of events helped to propel sf in the direction
of a postmodernity which suggested, for some students of the field, new ways to
configure sfs relationship to contemporary reality. Many readers and critics began to
see in this erstwhile product of a ghettoized popular culture an image-bank and a
discourse through which to construct new understandings of life at the end of the
twentieth century. When even the Wall Street Journal was publishing articles and
interviews about cyberpunk, it became obvious that Gibsons novel, whether or not it
fit comfortably into any particular "movement," had hit a cultural nerve. Only five
years after the appearance of Suvins Metamorphoses, and ably abetted by the
manifestos and polemics of a range of postmodern theorists, Neuromancer helped to
direct sf criticism into the broader context of contemporary cultural critique.
"Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (1984) is Jamesons classic
annunciation of postmodernism as our contemporary cultural dominant, an essay
which can claim to have constructed many current ideas about the postmodern even
as it set out to map them. In his introduction, Jameson famously identifies "an
inverted millennarianism" (53) as one defining feature of postmodernity, and he then
goes on to note "the effacement ... of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier
between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture" (54) as central to the
postmodernist aesthetic. Science fiction is only one of many popular cultural forms
which have been incorporated into contemporary cultural production as the
conventional modernist boundaries between high and low have become, if not
downright demolished, then at least eroded and subverted. Another particularly
resonant observation which Jameson offers, significant to any study of sf, is that
postmodernity marks the collapse of historicity and a cultural "fall" into a kind of
surface-model spatiality. In the terms of Jamesons critique, the future itself, like the
past, seems to have been placed under a kind of erasure, a construction which has at
least theoretical ramifications for sf as a future-oriented literary genre. In the "final"
analysis, for Jameson, "every position on postmodernism in culture ... is also at one
and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the
nature of multinational capitalism today" (55).
In contrast, a particularly European take on the postmodern is offered in Jean
Baudrillards "Two Essays" ("Simulacra and Science Fiction" and "Ballards Crash,"
1991). These two brief pieces by the apocalyptically-minded French social and
cultural theorist make explicit the interest in sf and sf-related perspectives which has
long been implicit in his theoretical writing. The first piece is a restatement of
Baudrillards construction of the "three orders of simulacra," while the second
emphasizes his conviction that J.G. Ballards 1973 novel offers a paradigm for
speculative fictions account of "technology [as] the deadly deconstruction of the
body" (313). In "Simulacra and Science Fiction," Baudrillard argues that the world of
postmodern and global commodity culture is dominated by the order of "simulation
simulacra ... [whose] aim is maximum operationality, hyperreality, total control";
among other things, this has resulted in the death of the "good old SF imagination":
"True SF, in this case, would not be fiction in expansion, with all the freedom and
navet which gave it a certain charm of discovery. It would, rather, evolve
implosively, in the same way as our image of the universe. It would seek to
revitalize, to reactualize, to rebanalize fragments of simulationfragments of this
universal simulation which our presumed real world has now become for us" (311).
For Baudrillard, Ballards Crash is exemplary of the new sf imagination: "In Crash,
there is neither fiction nor realitya kind of hyper-reality has abolished
both.... Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation" (319). While
readers may find much to disagree with in both Baudrillards pronouncements on the
"death" of conventional sf, and in his elevation of the more disturbing aspects of
Ballards self-proclaimed novel of technological pornography to some kind of
apotheosis of hyperreality, these statements about the intersections of sf and the
imploding universe of simulation reward thoughtful reading and suggest new
perspectives on the genre within the context of postmodern technoculture.
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.s "The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway" (1991),
which appeared in the same issue of SFS as Baudrillards two essays, is a densely
argued interpretation of the theoretical writings of Jean Baudrillard and Donna
Haraway as examples of a particular kind of sf writing. Csicsery-Ronays starting
point is that sf "is not a genre of literary entertainment only, but a mode of
awareness, a complex hesitation about the relationship between imaginary
conceptions and historical reality unfolding into the future" (388). He suggests that
we can understand the work of Baudrillard and Harawaycritical theorists who both
make use of sf as a central trope in their cultural analysesas examples of how sf has
been transformed from narrative genre into discursive practice, and he proceeds to
read the work of these two very different figures in the context of "the science-
fictionalization of theory" (389). Csicsery-Ronays discussion is an extremely
informative evaluation of two theoretical "moments" which have had immense
influence on the postmodernization of sf. Discussing Baudrillard, he argues, for
instance, that, in Baudrillards terms, "science fiction is dead because it is fiction. SF
exists, in no small part, because theoretical discourse like Baudrillards (and
Haraways) discerns the problematic topology that SF is called upon to articulate"
(391). In contrast to the ironic nihilism of Baudrillards position, Haraways work is
both politically engaged and optimistic: "For Haraway, SF is ... the necessary
hopefulness that comes with knowing that neither the initial conditions ... nor the
outcome ... of any process, no matter how highly rationalized, can be determined"
(394). Haraways cyborg exists in the theoretical site of an open-ended future. "The SF
of Theory" identifies an important way in which sf-as-discourse functions
(allegorically) as a strategy of cognitive estrangement in some influential
constructions of "the postmodern condition." At the same time, it offers, at least in
outline, a convincing reconsideration of the nature and function of sf at the end of
the twentieth century.
Slipstream fiction (see the reference to Sterlings "slipstream" article below) is a
centrally important presence in Brian McHales Postmodernist Fiction (1987),
although the term wasnt yet available to McHale. This is one of the first attempts to
map, more or less comprehensively, the aesthetics, formal strategies, thematics, and
ontological obsessions of postmodernist literature. Its relevance to sf studies arises
from its by-now familiar construction of science fiction as "postmodernisms
noncanonized or low art double, its sister-genre in the same sense that the popular
detective thriller is modernist fictions sister-genre" (59). As McHale argues in his
introduction, "Science fiction ... is to postmodernism what detective fiction was to
modernism: it is the ontological genre par excellence (as the detective story is the
epistemological genre par excellence), and so serves as a source of materials and
models for postmodernist writers (including William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut,
Italo Calvino, Pynchon, even Beckett and Nabokov)" (16). In sections entitled "The
science-fictionalization of postmodernism" and "The postmodernization of science
fiction," McHale offers an overview of slipstream texts such as Burroughs The Soft
Machine and Richard Brautigans In Watermelon Sugar, reading these in conjunction
with what he identifies as postmodernist sf texts such as Philip K. Dicks The Man in
the High Castle, the early disaster novels of J.G. Ballard, and New Wave novels like
Samuel R. Delanys Dhalgren. While McHales study tends to maintain the
conventional divide between "high" and "low" cultural production, his insertion of sf
as a genre into the cultural territory of postmodernism continues to provide useful
ways to think about sf in contemporary theoretical terms. McHales later
study, Constructing Postmodernism (1992), concludes with two detailed chapters on
cyberpunk sf.
Bruce Sterlings "Slipstream" (1989),a brief article which appeared in the "Beyond
Cyberpunk" issue of Science Fiction Eye, introduces a very helpful term with which
to identify the rapidly increasing number of non-sf texts by more-or-less mainstream
writers which "appropriate" sf tropes, images, and themes. Slipstream texts are
(probably) not sf, although they are clearly relatedmost obviously, the relationship
is one of "high" and mainstream culture borrowing from the tropes of popular
culture; they are also, arguably, prime examples of postmodern literature. Slipstream
texts include everything from J.G. Ballards Crash to Angela Carters The Passion of
New Eve to Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale to Joseph McElroys Plus to Jeff
Noons Pollen. In his discussion, Sterling suggests that "the heart of slipstream is an
attitude of peculiar aggression against reality. These are fantasies of a kind, but not
fantasies which are futuristic or beyond the fields we know. These books tend to
sarcastically tear at the structure of everyday life" (78). While Sterling assumed that
his category term would never catch on, it has in fact become quite familiar in sf
critical discourseand is even occasionally used in bookstoresespecially since the
slipstream itself continues to expand as a narrative field. Sterling thoughtfully
provided a "slipstream list" of well over a hundred titles to accompany his article;
that list would be much longer by now, given the continuing proliferation of
slipstream fiction.
The original version of Larry McCafferys Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of
Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (1991) was published in 1988 as a special
issue of the Mississippi Review, and, in its ambitious scope and coverage,
McCafferys "casebook" is an important document in the history of the
postmodernization of sf. If McHales study imports sf into postmodernist literature,
then Storming the Reality Studio imports postmodernism into the sf field. In his
introduction, McCaffery identifies as its context "the recent evolution of what I will
call postmodern science fiction" (2) and the concurrent appearance of "experimental,
quasi-SF works" (2) by major mainstream writers (Sterlings slipstream). McCafferys
densely-packed collection of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction is significant for a
variety of reasons. Most obviously, it is itself a postmodern project, a collage of
fictional styles, of voices, of theoretical statements. The fiction section contains
representative samples from the writings of Acker, Ballard, Burroughs, Laidlaw,
Pynchon, Rucker, Sterling, and Vollman, among others; and the non-fiction section
contains writing by Baudrillard, Derrida, Jameson, Leary, Lyotard, Porush, and
Suvin, to mention some of the most notable. McCafferys collection perfectly
captures the hip, cool, rather macho excitement which surrounded both cyberpunk
and postmodern theory at the end of the 1980s; and the tone of his introduction
demonstrates the rather ironic pessimism associated with one version of
postmodernityits significant, for example, that Baudrillard is represented here,
while Haraway is not. Storming the Reality Studio can be characterized as an exercise
in literary/critical sampling, analogous to the sampling practices of much
contemporary music. Nothing else quite like it has ever been assembled in the field
of sf scholarship, and it attracted both high praise and high dudgeon when it was
first published. It is, in itself, as postmodern an artifact as the sf which it claims as
"the breakthrough realism of our time" (16). Although certainly not as pyrotechnical,
I also recommend the collection edited by George Slusser and Tom Shippey, Fiction
2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative (1992), which contains several excellent
articles on cyberpunk, especially on Gibsons Neuromancer.
Scott Bukatmans Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science
Fiction (1993) is perhaps the most extensive and coherent study of contemporary sf
published in the past decade. Bukatman plugs into the products of both popular
culture and critical theory in order to construct the subject of postmodern
technoculture from the perspective of the genrescience fictionwhich is currently
providing that technoculture with some of its most powerful descriptive metaphors.
He convincingly demonstrates how we inhabit a time/space which we perceive
as alreadyscience-fictional. Terminal Identity is his examination, through an
impressively wide range of cultural forms and discoursesfiction, film, video,
comics, critical and cultural theoryof how "The discourses of science fiction and
philosophy have constructed a metaphorical subject redefined to permit its situation
as a biological being within an electronic world" (301). Terminal Identity is an
attempt to explore some of the pressures, and some of the resistances to those
pressures, which go into the constitution of the postmodern self, that dispersed,
fragmented, processual, indeterminate, and problematized subject which is, at least
in part, the product of an increasingly pervasive technology. Bukatman comes at his
postmodern subject from several directions, to each of which he devotes a section of
his study: "Terminal Image," "Terminal Space," "Terminal Penetration," "Terminal
Flesh," and "Terminal Resistance/Cyborg Acceptance." Perhaps the most important
work that Terminal Identityundertakes is to raise crucial questions about the
possibilities for individual resistance to the very real attractions of spectacle, static
sublimity, and technologization to which contemporary culture is currently
subjecting us with almost unimaginable force. Dystopian fiction conventionally
carries the warning "if this goes on." Terminal Identity, whose title puns both on
computer culture and millennial extremity, assures us that it will. An excellent
companion piece to Bukatmans quite dense study is Mark Derys very
accessible Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (1996), a fascinating
report on the contemporary technoscene which situates sf as one element within the
broader complex of cyberculture trends and communities.
(In)conclusion
Sfs ongoing generic "metamorphoses" have been at least partially responsible for the
increasing heterogeneity of the contemporary critical enterprise. "Sf" no longer refers
only to a literary subgenre: it is also a particularly popular kind of cinema and
television; it provides the visual stimulus for a whole range of video games; it spills
over into slipstream fiction; its aliens and spaceships feed into some of our cultures
most acute millennial anxieties. As both a body of imagery and a field of discourse, it
provides particularly apt imaginative portrayals of contemporary technoculture. The
late 1980s and early 1990s were remarkable for the intensity of interest generated by
cyberpunk, for instance. Both the professional and academic communities engaged in
contentious debates about the nature of this soi-disant "new" breed of sf, while many
theoretically-oriented critics saw in cyberpunk, whether for good or ill, the
"apotheosis of postmodernism." I have already mentioned the large number of sf and
sf-related courses currently being taught in colleges and universities, and the recent
establishment of the Modern Language Associations Discussion Group on Science
Fiction, Utopian, and Fantastic Literature is another indication of the increasing
academic acceptance of sf studies (however, as this is not the first time that such a
group has been formed within the MLA, it is all too possible that some reversal of
cultural fortune might again turn things around).
The widespread attention which cyberpunk attracted from outside the sf field has
been one important factor in its growing prominence as an object of study in a
variety of disciplines. New perspectives in critical and theoretical workinfluenced,
for example, by post-structuralism, by feminism, by race and gender studies, and by
the multiplex of postmodernismshave also found in sf an especially rich source of
cultural material. In particular, sf is increasingly featured in the expanding areas of
cyberculture studies (see Derys Escape Velocity, for example) and cultural studies of
science and technology (such as Balsamos Technologies of the Gendered Body). What
should we make of sfs incorporation into such a variety of disparate theoretical
discourses? Are they a promise that sf studies will continue to develop and to
expand? Or are they threats that sf studiesas the specific study of a specific literary
fieldwill disappear as it becomes dispersed over a variety of other academic sites
(even as the literary product itself threatens to disappear into the vast terrain of
multi-media sf)? It is not difficult to feel a certain scholarly anxiety in the face of
such apparent disarray. One might easily be tempted to work at delimiting the field
according to very specific generic criteria, to place conceptual guards at the borders to
control sfs "appropriation" by everyone from Jean Baudrillard to feminist critics of
science. But resistance is probably futile, and it will be fascinating to follow the
fortunes of sf and of sf studies into the new millennium, that site of the near future
which stubbornly remains, no matter how closely it looms, such a product of the sf
imagination.

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