Foundation Review of Science Fiction 127 Foundation the International Review of Science Fiction
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The InternationalFoundation Review of Science Fiction 127 Foundation The International Review of Science Fiction In this issue: Foundation Essay prize winner Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay on Indian women’s sf Thomas Connolly and Patrick Parrinder on the countryside and tragicomedy in H.G. Wells Xueping Li’s ecofeminist response to ‘Ursula Le Guin and translation’ Jennifer Woodward on R.C. Sherriff and ‘transformative disaster fiction’ Foundation David Ketterer adds a note to ‘The Complete Midwich Cuckoos’ Maureen Kincaid Speller remembers Michael Levy 127 2017 46.2 No. vol. Claude Lalumière explores the mosaic of J.G. Ballard’s Vermilion Sands Two short essays by Zoran Živković on time travel Paul March-Russell goes Into the Unknown Conference reports by Mylène Branco, Emily Cox and Monica Guerrasio In addition, there are reviews by: Jeremy Brett, Sarah Brown, Jane CoomberSewell, Edward James, Yasmin Khan, Kate Macdonald, Farah Mendlesohn, Andy Sawyer, David Seed and Alison Tedman Of books by: Naomi Alderman, William Sims Bainbridge, Chris Beckett, Hassan Blasim, George Saunders, Tom Shippey, Brian Stableford, Michael Swanwick, Andrew Tate, and Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp Cover image/credit: Into the Unknown: A Journey through Science Fiction, Barbican International Enterprises. Photography by Dan Tobin Smith, design by Praline. All rights reserved. Foundation is published three times a year by the Science Fiction Foundation (Registered Charity no. 1041052). It is typeset and printed by The Lavenham Press Ltd., 47 Water Street, Lavenham, Suffolk, CO10 9RD. Foundation is a peer-reviewed journal. Subscription rates for 2017 Individuals (three numbers) United Kingdom £22.00 Europe (inc. Eire) £24.00 Rest of the world £27.50 / $42.00 (U.S.A.) Student discount £15.00 / $23.00 (U.S.A.) Institutions (three numbers) Anywhere £45.00 / $70.00 (U.S.A.) Airmail surcharge £7.50 / $12.00 (U.S.A.) Single issues of Foundation can also be bought for £7.50 / $12.00 (U.S.A.). All cheques should be made payable to The Science Fiction Foundation. All subscriptions are for one calendar year; please specify year of commencement. Address for subscriptions: The Science Fiction Foundation, c/o 75 Rosslyn Avenue, Harold Wood, Essex, RM3 0RG, U.K. Email: Roger Robinson, [email protected] – all messages should include ‘SFF’ in the subject line. Back issues can be obtained from Andy Sawyer – see contact details below. Editorial address (for submissions, correspondence, advertising): Dr Paul March-Russell, [email protected] Articles should be approx. 6000 words in length, double-spaced and written in accordance with the style sheet available at the SF Foundation website (www.sf-foundation.org). Books for review: Please send to Andy Sawyer, Science Fiction Foundation Collection, Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool, PO Box 123, Liverpool, L69 4DA, UK. Please clearly mark ‘For Review’. Reviews (up to 1500 words in length) should be sent to [email protected] All contents copyright © 2017 by the Science Fiction Foundation on behalf of the original contributors ISSN 0306-4964258 Foundation The International Review of Science Fiction Editor: Paul March-Russell Book Reviews Editor: Andy Sawyer Editorial Team: Cait Coker, Dean Conrad, Andrew Ferguson, Heather Osborne, Maureen Speller Contents Volume 46.2, number 127, 2017 Paul March-Russell 3 Editorial Maureen Kincaid Speller 5 Michael M. Levy (1950-2017) Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay 6 Speculative Utopianism in Kalpavigyan: Mythologerm and Women’s Science Fiction Thomas Connolly 20 Utopia and the Countryside in H.G. Wells’ Scientific Romances Patrick Parrinder 33 Men Who Could Work Miracles: The Tragicomedy of Wellsian Science Fiction Jennifer Woodward 43 R.C. Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript and Transformative Disaster Fiction Xueping Li 58 Rethinking ‘Ursula K. Le Guin and Translation’: An Ecofeminist Perspective David Ketterer 72 Note to The Complete Midwich Cuckoos 1 1 Features Claude Lalumière 74 The Fourfold Library (5): J.G. Ballard Zoran Živković 77 Two Essays on Time Travel Paul March-Russell 84 Into the Unknown: Exhibition Review Conference Reports Emily Cox 89 Philip K. Dick and Vast Narrative Monica Guerrasio 91 Performing Fantastika Mylène Branco 94 Dystopia Now Book Reviews Sarah Brown 97 Andrew Tate, Apocalyptic Fiction Edward James 99 Tom Shippey, Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction Andy Sawyer 102 Brian Stableford, The Plurality of Imaginary Worlds Alison Tedman 105 William Sims Bainbridge, Star Worlds Jeremy Brett 108 Michael Swanwick, Chasing the Phoenix Jane CoomberSewell 112 Chris Beckett, Daughter of Eden Yasmin Khan 114 Hassan Blasim, ed. Iraq +100 Kate Macdonald 116 Naomi Alderman, The Power Farah Mendlesohn 119 Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp, eds. Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction David Seed 121 George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo 2 Editorial Paul March-Russell I’m writing this on 6th June. We are two days away from the UK electorate going to the polls for the third time in three years. Political rhetoric has descended not only into soundbites but alliterative soundbites – ‘strong and stable’, ‘weak and wobbly’, ‘coalition of chaos’. On Saturday, there was the third terror attack in as many months. Donald Trump is now engaged in a bizarre twitter spat with the Mayor of London who, one would have thought, would have more pressing matters than dealing with someone who can’t spell the word ‘coffee’. And meanwhile, despite all obvious appearances as gales lash my office window, the planet slowly burns… How are we to make sense of this air of unreality? What narratives can we fashion to give this unbearable lightness a semblance of coherence and meaning? In his Fourfold Library essay, the Canadian author Claude Lalumière describes the influences that have acted upon his latest work, which he describes as a ‘mosaic’. The inclusion of Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station on this year’s Clarke Award shortlist – and, here, I am giving nothing away – has caused interest by not appearing to be bound to the conventions of a novel. At Tor.com, Angela Slatter has defended it by describing it as a ‘mosaic novel’. What does this mean and how viable is it as a critical term, let alone as a mode of expression? According to Jeffrey Prucher’s Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, the term was coined by George R.R. Martin in 1986 to describe the first of his collaborative ventures, Wild Cards. The definition that Prucher gives however, ‘a book of short stories that share a common setting or characters and which taken together form a larger narrative’, describes what short story critics, beginning with Forrest Ingram in 1971, have called a ‘short story cycle’. Ivan Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (1852), James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) are perhaps the exemplary models for the narrative form. Subsequently, short story critics have elaborated upon Ingram’s taxonomy, adding new labels such as ‘short story sequence’, ‘composite novel’ or, most paradoxically, ‘short story novel’. But, never it seems, ‘mosaic novel’ which appears to be a coinage solely within the sf genre and unaware of parallel developments within short story criticism. Its coinage, however, made commercial sense – short story collections do not, historically, sell as well as novels, so calling Wild Cards a ‘novel’, however tenuous, was a pragmatic choice. The term, though, appears to contradict what 2 3 traditionally has been the central preoccupation of the novel; ‘the large fresco’ as the scholar of Arabic short fiction, Sabry Hafez, has described it. So, if ‘mosaic novel’ is not exactly oxymoronic, it is a profoundly ironic concept, in the sense of sustaining two contradictory ideas within the same thought or expression. The German aesthetes, who laid the theoretical foundations for Romantic irony, had a relatively new (or shall we say updated?) form in mind for articulating the cruel absurdities of modern life – the novelle – as practiced by such writers as Clemens Brentano, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Heinrich von Kleist and Ludwig Tieck. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ (1817), besides serving as the template for Sigmund Freud’s theory of the Uncanny, is also arguably a forerunner of the doubles – more specifically ‘gynoids’ – which proliferate in modern sf, most notably in such recent films as Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015), as well as the figure of Carmel in Tidhar’s book. Perhaps, then, ‘mosaic novel’ is itself just the latest update of a literary form, perched vicariously between longer and shorter narrative schema, and written in response to the vertigo of modern life. Perhaps sf has, however unwittingly, supplied us with another means of making sense of what our reality is and who we are. These questions haunt the current exhibition, Into the Unknown, at the Barbican Centre which the SF Foundation has supported with material from our collection at the University of Liverpool. Besides my review of the exhibition, we have a round-up of recent conferences and, in addition to Claude Lalumière’s piece, I am delighted to feature two short, previously untranslated essays on the subject of time travel by Zoran Živković. Maureen Speller remembers our friend and colleague at Extrapolation, Michael Levy, and our selection of articles are headed by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay’s prize-winning contribution on Indian women’s sf. Next year’s prize has already been announced, when we will also be publishing a special commemorative issue on the Frankenstein myth. Lastly, it is with regret that Andy Sawyer has announced his decision to stand down as Book Reviews Editor, a post he has held since 1996. Andy will be retiring from his position at the University of Liverpool next year and so has begun to make preparations for his departure. He won’t be leaving Foundation just yet (thank goodness!) but we will need to have a new Book Reviews Editor in post before he leaves.