312 Spring 2015
Editor
Chris Pak SFRA University of Lancaster, Bailrigg, Lan- A publicationRe of the Scienceview Fiction Research Association caster LA1 4YW. [email protected]
Managing Editor In this issue Lars Schmeink Universität Hamburg, Institut für Anglis- SFRA Review Business tik und Amerikanistik, Von Melle Park 6 Gearing Up...... 2 20146 Hamburg. W. [email protected] SFRA Business Nonfiction Editor #SFRA2015...... 2 Dominick Grace Live Long and Prosper...... 3 Brescia University College, 1285 Western Sideways in Time [conference report] ...... 3 Rd, London ON, N6G 3R4, Canada phone: 519-432-8353 ext. 28244. BSLS: British Society for Literature and Science [conference report] ...... 5 [email protected] Feature 101 Assistant Nonfiction Editor Teaching Science Fiction...... 7 Kevin Pinkham College of Arts and Sciences, Nyack To Bottom Out: An Incomplete Guide to the New Venezuelan SF ...... 14 College, 1 South Boulevard, Nyack, NY 10960, phone: 845-675-4526845-675- 4526. Nonfiction Reviews [email protected] The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch...... 21 Fiction Editor Space and Place in The Hunger Games: New Readings of the Novels ...... 23 Jeremy Brett The Liverpool Companion to World Science Fiction Film ...... 24 Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A&M University, Cushing Memo- Discworld and the Disciplines: Critical Approaches to the Terry Pratchett rial Library & Archives, 5000 TAMU Works...... 26 College Station, TX 77843. [email protected] Fiction Reviews Media Editor The Very Best of Kate Elliott...... 28 Leimar Garcia-Siino Ancillary Sword ...... 29 Department of English, 19-23 Abercrom- by Square, School of the Arts, University We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves ...... 30 of Liverpool, L69 7ZG. [email protected] Media Reviews witzend [comic]...... 32 Submissions The SFRA Review encourages submissions of SF-Worlds and the First-Person Perspective...... 33 reviews, review essays that cover several related The Signal [film]...... 36 texts, interviews, and feature articles. Submis- sion guidelines are available at http://www.sfra. org/ or by inquiry to the appropriate editor. All submitters must be current SFRA members. Announcements Contact the Editors for other submissions or for correspondence. Call for Papers—Conference...... 38 Call for Papers—Articles...... 39 The SFRA Review (ISSN 1068-395X) is pub- lished four times a year by the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA), and distributed to SFRA members. Individual issues are not for sale; however, all issues after 256 are published to SFRA’s Website (http://www.sfra.org/). PB SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 1 SFRA Review Business this year. However, I wanted to announce that I will be organising next year’s conference at The University EDITORS’ MESSAGE of Liverpool in the UK. This will be a joint conference with CRSF: Current Research in Speculative Fictions, Gearing Up and will take place from the 27th-30th June, 2016. The theme will be “Systems and Knowledge.” I will be releas- Chris Pak ing more details via the usual channels, including the next issue of the Review. In the meantime, to all those I WANTED TO congratulate all of this year’s SFRA who are attending SFRA 2015, enjoy the conference; to award winners and to thank the judges who deliberated those who aren’t, do take advantage of the social media over our candidates. The awards will, of course, be pre- coverage of the event - see Craig’s column for details. sented at this year’s SFRA conference, which is fast ap- And to everyone, enjoy the summer. I’ll look forward to proaching. Ritch Calvin is currently planning an edited meeting you next year in Liverpool. collection of papers presented at this year’s conference, which will be published through Wales University Press. So to all those who are presenting at SFRA 2015, do con- sider submitting your paper to Ritch for inclusion in the SFRA Business collection. We also have two new editors who have joined the PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE SFRA Review editorial board as of this issue. Jim Da- vis has stepped down and Jeremy Brett, the curator of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Collection at #SFRA2015 Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A&M Craig Jacobsen University, has joined us as our new fiction editor. Lei- mar Garcia-Siino, a PhD researcher at Liverpool Uni- versity, has taken over the reins from Ritch as our new THE SFRA’S ANNUAL CONFERENCE is central to the media reviews editor. I wanted to thank both Jim and association’s mission. We gather to share our scholarship Ritch for their work on the Review, and to warmly wel- and our fellowship, to attach faces to names, to recog- come our two new editors to their role. As I’m sure nize excellence in our field, and to begin or add install- you’ll agree, they’ve done an excellent job on their debut ments to highly episodic relationships. But, of course, issue. I’d also like to take the opportunity to invite you we can’t all be there. Or not entirely there, anyway. all to share your reviews with us through the SFRA Re- This year’s conference will be in Stony Brook, New view, and to consider submitting feature and pedagogi- York, from June 25th through the 27th (www.sfra.org/ cal articles, interviews, conference or project reports to sfra2015). I look forward to spending a few days with the publication. If you’ve an idea for an article that you as many of you as can attend, and to involve many of haven’t seen in the Review before, please do get in touch! you who cannot get there in person. We are making a We have another packed issue this quarter. In his Fea- concerted effort to use a range of social media to help ture 101 article, Brian Baker discusses his experiences members (and non-members) experience some of the “Teaching Science Fiction” at Lancaster University and conference. We’ll be posting photos to Instagram (@sci- offers important thoughts on the relationship between encefictionresearch), and tweeting from both the gen- the teacher and the student. In “To Bottom Out: An eral SFRA Twitter account (@sfranews) and the confer- Incomplete Guide to the New Venezuelan Science Fic- ence-specific account (@sfra2015), so if you’re active on tion,” Rowan Lozada-Aguilera provides a survey of Ven- either of those, add us to your feed. Anyone who wants ezuelan sf, offering throughout his engaging discussion to pitch in on whatever social media channels they traf- his own translations of extracts from various works. fic should use the hashtag #sfra2015. Of course the Sci- We also have our regular run of reviews and announce- ence Fiction Research Association Facebook page will ments, along with two conference reports courtesy of be active as well, if you’re following us there. myself. We’re not livestreaming any events, nor will the ban- Sadly, I will not be joining you all at Stony Brook quet be available to enjoy via your virtual reality goggles,
2 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 3 but we’re working to make SFRA 2015 at least a bit more itics of SF and the science fiction of Politics rage ever technologized. If you’re a long-time subscriber to the on, we can do worse than keep doing what we do in the SFRA listserv (now at mail.vtlibraries.com/mailman/ study of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Spock is still dead listinfo/sfra-l_vtlibraries.com in case you lost track of it so in the meantime, live long and prosper. And see you during its recent server relocation), but otherwise firmly in New York! embedded in your luddite skepticism, let this year’s con- ference be your excuse to add another channel to your information feed. SFRA Business Whether you’ll be there in person or virtually/vicari- Sideways in Time ously, I hope that many of you will participate in this year’s exploration of “The SF We Don’t (Usually) See: [conference report] Suppressed Histories, Liminal Voices, Emerging Media.” Chris Pak
I ATTENDED the first day of a two day conference about VICE-PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE alternative histories, Sideways in Time, held on the 30th and 31st of March 2015 at the University of Liverpool. This event was co-organised by Glyn Morgan (Univer- Live Long and Prosper sity of Liverpool, founder of CRSF: Current Research Keren Omry in Speculative Fictions) and Chuckie (Charul) Patel (Lancaster University, founder of the Fantastika series THERE’S NOTHING LIKE a blackout to make you ap- of conferences), and was partly sponsored by Lancaster preciate technology. As you’ll all have noticed, our SFRA University. Keynotes included Karen Hellekson, author listserve is finally back after weeks of radio silence. A lot of the critical text The Alternate History: Refiguring His- has happened since we were last in touch: Spock died; torical Time (2000), Stephen Baxter and Adam Roberts. Le Guin lambasted Ishiguro who may or may not have An author event was hosted on the Sunday before the written a Fantasy novel, Puppies – both Sad and Rabid conference at Waterstones One, a discussion between – seem to have taken over the Hugos, sparking a “Pup- Stephen Baxter and Adam Roberts that set the tone for pygate” uproar; the score for an SF Video Game scored the conference to follow. This charming and fascinating top ranks in a Classical Music survey; news and trailers conversation about the process of writing alternate his- are out for a new Star Wars, a new Terminator, a new tories was both enjoyable and a welcome insight into the Blade Runner, the provocative Ex-Machina, and a pleth- work of two authors whose contributions to alternative ora of new Superhero films that promise to extend and history have been wide-ranging. revise the SF cinematic canon. In other science fictional The conference began with Hellekson’s keynote en- news, liquid water may have been found on Mars, fe- titled “Agency and Contingency in Televisual Alternate male chimpanzees have been documented using spears History Texts.” Hellekson presented an overview of her to hunt, and Google is working on a Robot army (as if structural anatomy of the alternate history detailed in ever we were in doubt that Wells, Clark, Asimov, and her book and applied this reading to several works of sf others of their ilk weren’t the parents of the Contempo- television, including Charlie Jade (2005), Fringe (2008-) rary!). The good news is that the absence has given us and An Englishman’s Castle (1978). Hellekson notes that opportunity to miss one another. The even better news televisual alternative histories are not about history but is that it’s given us the chance to realize it might be time are focused upon the individual’s agency and upon self- to flex our technological muscles and expand our use of contingency. She draws on Richard Rorty’s formulation the various platforms we have available. This is some- of contingency, irony and solidarity and points to how thing that the EC is working on but I’d like to encourage we create stories or narratives to explain one’s origins you all to share your CFPs, your questions, your com- and to trace cause and effect relationships. Contingen- ments, and thoughts on the SFRA Facebook page or cy is thus a narrative and temporal construction with Twitter account. which to frame agency. In his own keynote titled “Alter- As the debates on genre wars continue, and the pol- nate Cosmologies,” Stephen Baxter discusses the place of the Sidewise award, for which he is one of the judges,
2 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 3 and surveys a wide range of alternate conceptions of the Enlightenment by presenting futures that restrict the universe in sf, including some of his own contribu- scientific development on the one hand, or that position tions as well as (with many collegial jokes) Roberts’ own Catholicism as addressing the anxieties surrounding Swiftly: A Novel (2004). Malthusian overpopulation and unbridled technologi- The first panel, “Examining Female Perspectives of cal development on the other. Alternate History,” featured papers by Amanda Dillon, Panel three, “Moments and People of Power,” featured (University of East Anglia), Rosie M. Lewis (Durham papers by Francis Gene-Rowe, (Birkbeck College, UK), University) and Sarah Lohmann (Durham University) Fred Smoler (Sarah Lawrence College, US) and Jona- (all in the UK). In “Speaking Unspoken Timelines: Fem- than Rayner (University of Sheffield, UK). In “Blasting inist Time Travel and Alternate Histories in Kage Bak- Open the Historical Continuum: Antihistoricism in er’s The Company,” Dillon explores the use of alternative Benjamin, Dick & Le Guin,” Gene-Rowe cites Walter history in a specific work by Baker in order to highlight Benjamin’s call for historicism to be resisted and reads how female oriented time travel narratives view the past works such as Valis (1981) and “The Lathe of Heaven” as fixed, thus limiting female agency and highlighting (1971) against his conception of utopia and the accu- how history is subject to male authorship. Lewis’ “Re- mulation of debris. Smoler analyses the question of the envisioning Female Subjectivity, Aesthetics and Col- dominance of great men in (alternative) history in “Re- lective Resistance in Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames” figuring the Heroic in Two Alternate Histories: Stephen examines Borden’s innovative cinematic portrayal of a Vincent Benét and Harry Turtledove,” focusing primar- dystopian future where a women’s radical feminist revo- ily on Benét’s “The Curfew Tolls” (1937) and Harry Tur- lutionary army exposes the racism of a patriarchal US tledove’s “Counting Potsherds” (1989) Rayner explores state. Lohmann’s “On the Edge of Time: Feminist Uto- the contemporary imagination of an alternate Japanese pias, Complexity Theory and Parallel Future Histories” history in anime in “‘Forever Being Yamato’: Alternative reads the dynamism of the critical utopia Woman on the Pacific War Histories in Japanese Film and Anime,” fo- Edge of Time (1976) in terms of complexity theory to cusing particular attention on the place of the flagship address the interrelations of time, space and utopia in Yamato, a battleship commissioned during World War the novel. II, in film and anime. “Responses to the Enlightenment,” panel two, fea- The last panel of the first day, “Alternate History in tured fascinating papers by Alex Broadhead (Univer- Europe,” featured papers by Mikhaylo Nazarenko (Taras sity of Liverpool) and Jim Clarke (Coventry University) Shevchenko Kyiv National University, Ukraine), Mar- (both in the UK). Broadhead discussed Nathaniel Haw- zena Sokołowska-Paryż (University of Warsaw, Poland) thorne’s “P.’s Correspondence” (1845) – the first fictional and myself (Lancaster University, UK). Nazarenko ex- English language alternative history – in his talk “The plained in his illuminating survey of Ukranian alternate Romantics in Alternate History from Hawthorne to histories, “Post-Colonial Alternate History: The Case of Card: Beyond Enlightenment Historiography.” Broad- Ukrainian Literature,” that such works are examples of head describes how the lives of the Romantics offered a “Chimerical Prose” and are written in both Ukrainian rich source of material for the imagination of alternate and Russian. The Ukranian appellation for alternate histories and that this has continued to the present day histories translates as “wishful thinking.” Nazarenko ex- in works such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s plains that the history of conflict in Ukraine has meant The Difference Engine (1990), Orson Scott Card’s Alvin that its history is effectively mysterious and infrequently Maker series (1987-2014), Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan discussed. Nazarenko’s survey points to several works of Strange and Mr Norrell (2004) and, as was raised in the Ukranian alternate history that speak back to questions question and answer session, Dan Simmons’ Hyperion of national identity and conflict that have a special reso- duology (1989-1990). In “Unwriting the Reformation: nance in the context of the current civil war in Ukraine. Anti-Catholic Uchronias in Science Fiction,” Jim Clarke To conclude, Nazarenko argues that in order to go for- explores Catholicism and its oppositional relationship ward, Ukrainian alternate histories have attempted to to Enlightenment values in such works as Keith Roberts’ address the need to construct a past as a guide to the Pavane (1968), Kingsley Amis’ The Alteration (1976), future. Sokołowska-Paryż’s “Ideological (Mis)Uses of Anthony Burgess’ The Wanting Seed (1962) and Wal- Genre: Dystopian Visions of the ‘Past-Present’ in Daniel ter Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959). He shows Quinn’s and Stephen Fry’s Alternate Histories” explores how these alternate histories unravel the influence of one of the most popular forms of alternate history, the 4 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 5 Nazi victory in World War II. Sokołowska-Paryż ex- searchers working on sf. This report will account for the plores representations of history, the third Reich and sf elements at the conference and will therefore neces- Jewishness against the context of René Girard’s genera- sarily elide some of the fascinating research into the re- tive mimetic scapegoat mechanism and Michael Gold- lationship between literature and science in other liter- berg’s multidirectional memory. In my paper, “‘It Is One ary domains that is currently being conducted. Story’: Writing a Global Alternative History in Kim On the first day of the conference, I presented a pa- Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt,” I explore per on the “Environmentalism and Climate Change” Robinson’s use of the alternate history to interrogate the panel with Alan Rauch (UNC Charlotte, US) and An- assumptions underlying conceptions of nationalism, ton Kirchhofer and Anna Auguscik (University of Old- race and history itself. enburg, Germany). Rauch’s paper, “Terra Rima: W. H. The first day of Sideways in Time was an illuminat- Hudson, Environmentalism, and the Collapse of Na- ing exploration of the rich diversity of alternate his- ture” explored the work of the naturalist and writer of tories throughout time. As I mentioned above, I was the speculative utopian fictionsA Crystal Age (1887) regretfully unable to attend the second day, which fea- and Green Mansions (1904). Although an extremely tured Adam Roberts’ keynote and papers by Andrew popular writer whose Green Mansions has been adapted M. Butler (a keynote at CRSF 2015), Chloe Alexandra for film (starring Audrey Hepburn as Rima), there has Germaine Buckley, Molly Cobb, Daniel Dohrn, Laura been little contemporary research conducted into the Ettenfield, Leimar Garcia-Siino, Hellen Giblin-Jowett, significance of Hudson’s work for ecologically inflected Alan Gregory and Dawn Stobart, Pascal Lemaire, Anna sf. I presented a paper based on my work on terrafor- McFarlane, Matt Mitrovich, Ursula Troche and Rachel ming, entitled “‘The Rich Sun, / The Power of Growth, Mizsei Ward. An edited collection of essays based upon the Lever of the Future’: Climate Change, Biospheres the papers presented at this conference is currently be- and Sunlight in Science Fiction.” Focusing on Frederick ing planned. Sideways in Time is another excellent ex- Turner’s epic poem of terraforming, Genesis (1988), and ample of the contemporary research into speculative Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (2012), I show how these fictions being conducted internationally, and it further works use the motif of sunlight to represent the expan- illustrates the importance of the University of Liverpool sion into the solar system in terms of the enlargement as a centre for the study of the mode, along with Lan- of a terran biosphere. Although they explain that they caster University as a valuable and supportive partner in are not currently working on sf, Kirchhofer and Augus- expanding research in speculative fictions. cik’s “Visions of the Immoral Scientist: Morality and the Perception of Science in Ian McEwan’s Solar and other Contemporary Climate Change Stories” takes a reader- response approach to fiction by analysing reviews of BSLS: British Society for works in a manner that chimes with Joan Haran’s call for more attention to reviews in her article “A Multi-Sited Literature and Science Reader Response Archive” in The Eaton Journal of Ar- [conference report] chival Research in Science Fiction
1 contributed, looking at the film images and thinking Brian Baker about the ethical implications of empathy as a marker of difference between human and replicant. At the end of the lecture, a few students came down to ask ques- YESTERDAY I GAVE a lecture on Blade Runner to a tions, several of them about issues of post-coloniality, cohort of first-year English Literature students on their the replicants as subordinate others, Baty (and perhaps core literature course. Blade Runner has been worked on Deckard) as a slave. A few more followed up the lecture that course for a few years now as a film text that can with an email, asking about further reading; one, who be discussed in the light of key ideas and theories about confessed he hadn’t read much sf but was enjoying Do postmodernism. The day before, the students had been Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, asked me whether I treated to an introductory lecture on the postmodern by could recommend some other sf texts to him as it had Professor Terry Eagleton; it was my job to follow this up, really made him interested in the genre. show a clip or two from the film, and suggest how they Such responses, in a core literature course for first year could think about postmodernism through Blade Run- undergraduates, many of whom would have little expe- ner, and Blade Runner through postmodernism. rience or interest in sf, is of course very pleasing. It’s sur- And so I began with Fredric Jameson, attempting to prising how quickly one can engage undergraduate stu- historicise the idea both through Jameson’s own propos- dents of English in sf, in courses which are not specialist al of a ‘rupture’ around 1968-73, making manifest the genre-based modules but instead are thematic, survey, emergent pressures and cultural formations that can be period, or form-based. On a second-year course in Lit- identified with a period of postmodernity: erature and Film, taught by two 90-minute interactive lecture-workshops per week, a week is given over to sf, New types of consumption; planned obsoles- where we have looked at Dick’s ‘The Minority Report’ cence; an ever more rapid rhythm of fashion and and Spielberg’s 2002 film. Again, the responses are ex- styling changes; the penetration of advertising, cellent: thoughtful, engaged, inquisitive. We look at the television and the media generally to a hitherto ways in which the short story is adapted, and (through unparalleled degree throughout society; the re- watching and discussion of film clips) we think through placement of the old tension between city and ethical issues of pre-emption, the biopolitical, time and country, center and province, by the suburb and determinism; film spectacle, contemporary cinematic by universal standardization; the growth of the sf, and the rhetorical strategies of persuasion that are great networks of superhighways and the arrival central to the film; and how film sf and the sf short story of automobile culture – these are some of the fea- differ formally. tures which would seem to mark a radical break In the “Design, Delivery and Evaluation” essay that with that older prewar society (‘Postmodernism closes Teaching Science Fiction (2011), Andy Sawyer and and Consumer Society’, Foster 1983: 124-5). Peter Wright note that ‘most students are familiar with sf in its televisual and cinematic forms’ (235), and rather In the course of the lecture I asked the students to think than attempting to disabuse them of ideas of what sf about the film, and in particular the representation of might be and enable them to discover what sf “really” is, the city, through the shift in relations of production it’s important to work with the body of knowledge and and consumption identified by Jameson, and especially experience the students already have at their disposal, in relation to the condition of the replicants as artifi- their frames of reference or what I call their “internal li- cial subjects. We began at the beginning, looking at the braries”. In a book-based discipline, English literature, it opening sequence of the Los Angeles of 2019, the cen- would be tempting to privilege the complex and some- trality of the idea, and then the Voight-Kampff scene be- times difficult matter of science fiction (literature) texts, tween Holden and Leon. What is the difference between rather than the pleasures of televisual or cinematic sf. 1 Department of English and Creative Writing, Lan- I like to work across disciplinary boundaries, as must caster University. already be evident, and foregrounding what the stu- 6 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 7 dents bring to the seminar table enables them to think a dynamic which will help maintain a spirit of open en- through their own approaches to the genre, to become quiry and participation – but I do expect them to be more self-aware as scholars of the genre. As all teachers present, and not just in the classroom. Understanding know, getting past the initial ‘I don’t like this’ response and acknowledging the ground upon which you stand to any kind of literary or film text (especially ones that is crucial to what I do as an academic and scholar, and challenge mainstream patterns or normalised responses that’s what I encourage with regard to my students’ en- and reception) is one of the things you first learn to deal gagement with the course. with. With students of sf, it’s often a matter of the re- James Gunn, writing about teaching science fiction on verse, of course: allowing oneself to be critical of what the Gunn Center website, suggests three ways in which one likes. one could approach teaching science fiction: The exposure to ideas and scholarship about sf is re- ally helpful (to me), I think, when students choose their The first might be called “the great books” course, optional classes for their third year. My module in sci- in which the focus would be on novels and their ence fiction (which looks at literary and film sf) is -al critical analysis and what made them great. The ways very popular, recruits excellently, is very lively and second might be called “the ideas in science fic- great fun to teach, and produces excellent work. It is, tion” course, dealing with how SF stories can be in some senses, an “ideas” course, and my intention is used to dramatize contemporary problems. The not simply to ask students to consider the generic spe- third would be the historical approach—what is cifics of science fiction in both textual and filmic forms, science fiction and how did it get to be that way? but to face outwards onto the worlds that produce those (http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/teaching.htm) texts and films. There’s more depth to discussion and deeper wells of knowledge to engage, as you would ex- Sawyer and Wright, referring to Gunn, suggest a fourth: pect from a third-year class who either like sf already or ‘teaching another subject […] by considering how these find the prospect of finding out more intriguing. But in subjects had been treated in science fiction’ (2011: 220). some senses my approach to the class is similar to when Gunn confesses that he ‘got trapped into the great books I teach Blade Runner to first-year students: how do is- approach in 1969 when my son and a friend organized sues of class, gender, ethnicity, power, ethics, biopoli- a course, and asked me to be the teacher of record’, but tics, space, violence and so on work through this text we quickly shifted his approach to something that ‘would have, what does it say and not say, how does it make us focus on the historic development of science fiction so think differently about the world? that the students would be able to place their SF reading As Sawyer and Wright insist, Darko Suvin’s ‘concep- in better context and continue their later reading with tion of science fiction as “cognitive estrangement” is [...] greater understanding’. essential’ (233-4) in setting out the conceptual ground Gunn’s suspicion of a “great books” approach is re- for students coming to sf as a field of study in an under- flected by my own. Creating a viable syllabus which will graduate degree program. When I teach science fiction engage students, encourage dialogue between texts and as a discrete module, it’s never just about sf, and nor is allow a developmental sense of the genre (allowing for it about the relation between the text and its time and chronology without ones’ choices being determined by place of production, nor even what it reveals about “our” strictly linear historical placement) is far more impor- world by imagining another. tant to me than any sense of the “value” of an sf text When I teach sf, I hope to bring the students along to or otherwise, particularly as the critical history of sf, as a sense of ourselves in that time and space, in that class- Sawyer and Wright note, ‘has engaged in a distinct ar- room, with those backgrounds, with those experiences. gument with traditional literary studies [and] primarily I neither wish nor expect students to aspire to or achieve against the idea of the canon and the liberal-humanist a kind of objectivity with regard to their relation to the approach of studying the “best”’ books (2011: 233). My texts. I’m committed as a tutor, to them and to the work approach would most closely approximate Gunn’s sec- in hand and to a way of studying literature (not just sci- ond suggestion, the ‘ideas in science fiction’, but perhaps ence fiction), and my politics are entirely up front. I couched more as ‘ideas through or negotiated by science don’t expect students to agree with me – in fact, in the fiction’, indicating that sf sometimes carries ideological very first session I like to set up an informal atmosphere or cultural freight of which it is unconscious. of open discussion and (friendly, collegiate) contention, As I wrote above, it is in what texts do not or cannot 8 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 9 say, as much as what they explicitly and intentionally only as a discussion forum but in the shared experience imagine, that the work of the seminar takes place. In of watching a film together. The unusual technical and this, I draw from the work of Pierre Macherey, and in formal aspects of La Jetée also allow an interesting ap- particular his 1978 text A Theory of Literary Production, proach to the formal differences of sf more generally. I on which I lecture elsewhere on the English Literature have sometimes followed this up with a separate session degree program. In a chapter called ‘The Spoken and the on Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995), a re-make of Mark- Unspoken’, Macherey argues that ‘the speech of the book er’s film, but within very different cinematic codes. Both comes from a certain silence [….] [T]he book is not self films generate interesting discussions about the relation sufficient; it is necessarily accompanied by certaina ab- between narrative chronology and the means by which sence, without which it could not exist’ (85); the inter- the story is told, what Gerard Genette in Narrative Dis- relation of speech and silence indicates the gaps, the ab- course (1980) called ‘histoire’ (the underlying chronolo- sences, ‘the precise conditions for the appearance of any gy) and ‘récit’ (the form in which it is narrated), or what utterance’ that are part of any text (86). These silences Russian Formalist critics named the ‘fabula’ and ‘syu- are, he suggests, ‘what the work cannot say’ (87). The zhet’. The uncoupling of narrative time and chronologi- work of the critic, then, is to ‘make this silence speak’, to cal time is, of course, present in all narratives, but time reveal the gaps and investigate what cultural and ideo- travel texts explicitly thematize the textual apparatus of logical limits form the very fabric of the text (86). narrative and are meta-textual, in some senses. Of course, considering what I suggested above about [2] Gender, genre and trauma. I have often taught Au- the class becoming aware of their own space and time drey Niffennegger’sThe Time Traveler’s Wife (2004) as and place in cultural production, what we should also part of the time travel ‘cluster’, partly to ask the students become aware of (through thinking about and with es- to test the generic limits of sf (is it a romance?), partly trangement) is our own silences, what we cannot say. because it’s an excellent teaching text and engages the What do we talk about, then? About the books and students very easily, and partly because its complicated films and all their detailed, complicated, contradictory and doubling narrative opens up some very interesting matter, of course. But certain ideas, themes and issues lines of discussion. Some students express unease about recur. Some of these have to do with my own interests, the text, feeling that the masculine protagonist, Henry and I’ve deliberately chosen texts that reflect those, or deTamble, ‘grooms’ his future wife Claire in their meet- current research, in order to discuss with students what ings when she is a child; but it is also clearly a novel they think, to bring different readings as well as testing about loss, and dislocation, and the physical and emo- my own. As well as working in the field of science fiction, tional trauma that time travel creates. A “classic” text I’ve also published two monographs on cultural rep- like Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959), another text I resentations of masculinity, Masculinity in Fiction and regularly schedule, works particularly well when ap- Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres, 1945-2000 proached through discussions of masculinity, discipline (Continuum, 2006) and Contemporary Masculinities and punishment and the construction of the subject in Fiction, Film and Television (Bloomsbury Academic, (often with recourse to the work of Michel Foucault), 2015), and so this has been a recurrent touchstone in as well as its more overt Cold War themes. I am also terms of discussion, as well as in terms of discussions of very aware of the need, when composing the syllabus, to gender representation in the genre more widely. There reflect an inclusive gender balance and to look beyond would be a long list if I were to enumerate all the ideas the work of the white, male “classic” writers of the “twin that have informed seminar discussions over the years – tradition”, though my approach to this varies. some of which have surprised me, or connections which [3] Empire / the colony / evolution. Both The Time have only become apparent in retrospect – but here are Machine (and, more overtly, The War of the Worlds) a few more. and Starship Troopers allow a direct introduction to [1] Time and time travel. I have sometimes created a themes of Empire and constructions of otherness, and ‘cluster’ of texts which re-work the theme of time travel, discussion of the roots of British sf in particular in the and these have usually been kicked off by a focus onThe scientific romance, and parallels between that and the Time Machine (1895), although I have recently often adventure narratives of the Imperial romance. Here I used Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a 30-minute film shown recommend the critical work of John Rieder. Evolution- in the first session (2 hours in length) as a kind of ice- ary themes, central to Wells’s imaginary, are taken up in breaker, allowing the class to develop a dynamic not a range of later texts, from Ballard’s The Drowned World 8 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 9 (1963), Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the markers of radical biological difference in the film Alien Kubrick film (all of which appear regularly on course (1979) to a politicised reading in Monsters. I have also, syllabi), to the Gareth Edwards film Monsters (2011), through Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1998) as well in which motifs of invasion, biological difference, and as Foucault, introduced material to do with biopolitics white ‘Westerners’ travelling across other spaces are giv- into discussions of contemporary sf in particular, such en a particular War on Terror complexion. as Code 46 (2003) or Never Let Me Go (film, 2010). [4] The Machine. Following on from Roger Luckhurst’s Having been asked to write an article about teaching reading of the centrality of the machine to the imaginary science fiction, it allowed me to go back over my time as of science fiction, different modulations of technology a lecturer in higher education and, through the wonders in changing historical periods allow good comparative of a digital archive that has been passed through the hard discussion, from the robot (classic manifestation such as drives of at least 4 home computers and as many again in Asimov’s stories, to a very interesting articulation of at work, to look at the schedules and texts that I’ve put machine sentience and autonomy and struggles for ‘hu- on science fiction modules here at Lancaster University man rights’ in ‘The Second Renaissance’ short fromThe (where I have taught since 2006) and, before that, at the Animatrix (2000), to the cyborg or android (particularly University of Chester (2001-2005). There has been quite in cyberpunk) and AI. Through estrangement strate- a lot of consistency, I find, but also significant change. gies, this often provokes very interesting discussion with The first sf courses I taught at Chester were more -ex regard to constructions of ‘the human’ and the markers plicitly organised around dystopian fiction, the subject of difference – the artificial subject as ‘other’. of my own doctoral work and area which I have half- [5] Cinema, spectacle and the visionary. As I teach consciously underplayed as a formal concern in my sf literature and film, it is important for literature stu- teaching until recently, through over-familiarity with dents to grasp, even at a simple level, the different for- the materials. I should say, at this point, that course mal operation of film narration, and in particular the structures and syllabi change year-on-year not only in importance of visual composition, editing, sound, and response to direct student feedback, and how I myself for sf cinema in particular, spectacle. This means that have felt about how certain sessions have gone or how in weeks in which we are studying a film text, although one text or another might fit into the dialogue between they will have seen the film prior to attending class, the texts, but also to keep my own responses fresh. Over- majority of the work in the seminar room is organised familiarity is a great deadener in the seminar room. around the direct analysis of film clips, using those as a The first course at Chester, in the early Spring of 2002, springboard for discussion. Even for students untrained began with an introduction on cities, spaces and dysto- in film studies, a high level of visual and cinematic lit- pia; a week on Gibson’s Sprawl in the Burning Chrome eracy can be engaged quite easily with slow, detailed and collection; and then a week on Suvin, Fredric Jameson, thorough unpacking of key scenes or even single imag- and imagining Utopia. I then organised three “clusters”, es. With a film such as 2001, a discussion of the StarGate with a central text a week with supporting material and sequence returns us back to what can and cannot be said contextual discussion: on Brave New World (1932), or shown: how to represent or evoke the transcendent, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and The or God? Where effects become not simply spectacle but Handmaid’s Tale (1984), with a concluding week for dis- an index of the divine, or the sublime (referring to Scott cussion and revision. The next year, I added Le Guin’s Bukatmen’s work on this in Matters of Gravity (2003)) The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and altered the or- opens up interesting areas of discussion. der, removing a couple of the more general sessions, [6] The Other. I have used Murray Leinster’s classic as I remember feeling that the students (particularly “First Contact” (1945) as an opening gambit with re- those with less familiarity with the genre) had difficulty gard to thinking about sf’s representation of the other, dealing with abstractions and were much more happy or even discussions about whether sf can truly do so. when able to discuss conceptual matters through direct (At my first institution, I taught a course, not designed relation to the text itself. This was a valuable lesson to by me, on sf, Gothic and horror film called ‘Represent- learn, in terms of lesson-planning and scheduling, and ing the Other’.) Wells, and particularly the Time Trav- in terms of pedagogical method. I will return to those eller’s misapprehensions about himself and the world issues shortly. of the future, open up the debate about the hidden or The third year marked a shift of ground, and this was repressed connections between self and other, from the due to a re-organisation of courses. A colleague took 10 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 11 over the utopias/dystopias course, and I planned and Machine because of a clash with another course; The introduced a separate module on science fiction, begin- Drowned World has made regular appearances, while ning with The Time Machine(which would stay on my Philip K. Dick has dropped off; and Lem’s Solaris (1961), science fiction module until 2011), followed by Dick’s Beukes’s Moxyland (2012), Neuromancer (1984), Tip- Ubik (1969), Starship Troopers (which I would teach at tree’s stories, and the filmMonsters have variously been Lancaster from 2007 to 2014), weeks on the time travel scheduled. In 2016 I am changing things more radical- and first contact short stories, and finishing with Iain M. ly, with the inclusion of The Dispossessed(1974), in the Banks’ Excession (1996), which I had personally enjoyed hope that I am able to manage discussion of Le Guin but which students found very difficult. better than in the past; The Forever War (1974); and the This was another valuable lesson to do with personal filmsChildren of Men (2006) and Akira (1988). investment in texts and materials and in responding to Representation, of course, remains an issue, despite other readers whose experience of the text was mark- my attempts to emphasise global manifestations and edly different from your own. In teaching, understand- traditions of sf, and to find some kind of balance with ing why a particular session might not have worked as regard to gender. I should say that the academic year at well as hoped, even if precisely the same strategies or Lancaster University is organised in terms, and I teach texts had worked marvellously before, is vital in how a science fiction as a one-term module for third-year stu- tutor learns herself to gauge and engage the dynamics of dents of English Literature, and that is likely to remain a seminar group, each of which will be very different. (I the case, despite regular student feedback which de- have had some who have been lively to the point of row- clares that the course should run all year. If only it could. diness, and some who need coaxing a bit more, even if As you can see, my selection of texts is very far from a the depth of the discussion might exceed the more exu- “great books” syllabus, but attempts to give some flavour berant class). of different modes and periods of sf without aspiring or The next year saw the introduction ofThe Time Travel- claiming to offer “coverage”. A syllabus is always a nego- er’s Wife, which I would teach regularly up to 2013, and tiation between what you would like to look at, what is the return of The Left Hand of Darkness, which again, available (though less of an issue now than it once was), students unfamiliar with the genre had found dense and what works to form a coherent structure, coherent to difficult, but which I was determined to try again. And students as well as myself. I’m particularly interested in would fail again. sf’s borderlands and border texts, as this is an effective When I came to Lancaster University in 2006, the sci- way through which to approach what it is that consti- ence fiction module took a shape which has proved very tutes, if not perhaps what defines, sf. successful, with variations. This is the list: I have often begun a course by putting students into groups and asking them to produce a one- or two-line Texts definition of science fiction, which they then share and H.G. Wells, The Time Machine(1895) discuss with the group. It’s a very useful exercise, not Audrey Niffenegger,The Time Traveller’s Wife(2004) least to emphasise the problem of definition that has Clarke, Arthur. C, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) haunted critical discourse on sf since its inception. It Dick, Philip. K, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? also helps foster a group dynamic and the emphasis on (1968) sharing knowledge and ideas which is not always a pri- Gibson, William, Burning Chrome (1986) (Voyager, mary motivation to arts and humanities students, whose 1995) assessment tends to be individual and a matter between Heinlein, Robert. A, Starship Troopers (1959) student and marker. This can lead to a “hoarding” men- tality with regard to class participation, that students Films are reluctant to share and discuss their analyses because La Jetée (1962); Twelve Monkeys (1995) they feel it would put them at a competitive disadvan- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) tage (particularly if they feel that other students are not Alien (1979) collaborating in good faith). Blade Runner: the Director’s Cut (1991) In the assessment for my science fiction module, I try The Matrix(1999) to tackle this individualistic (indeed selfish) culture, an approach which has reaped great dividends. The assess- Over time, The War of the Worlds has replaced The Time ment is two-part: there is a summative essay of 3000 10 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 11 words, which constitutes 60% of their course mark, to temporary Literature, on which I give a couple of lec- be submitted at the end of the course; but there is also tures (on Ballard’s experimental short story “The Beach a seminar paper of 1500 words, in which the student Murders” (1966) and on Watchmen (1987)), in which writes a shorter analysis of a scene or idea from a film the relation between sf (and fantasy) and literary fic- or text. This is chosen by the student and is submitted tions, as well as forms such as the graphic novel, can be prior to the week in which that particular film or text is explored in a plurality of ways. Students often explore studied in the seminar. I mark the paper and return it to sf in their third-year dissertations, and also in the core the student in the class, giving them formative feedback, second-year course on the Theory and Practice of Criti- and I also ask the writer of the seminar paper to take a cism, in which they can choose the subject for their final more directly leading role in terms of class discussion. project. This helpfully suggests, of course, that I need not Two or three papers are submitted each week, and I ask worry unduly about the “coverage” in my own sf course: them to liaise with one another to avoid overlap. What there are plenty of other opportunities for students to makes this different from the essay is that when I have develop their own studies and independently research received all the papers electronically for the week, I post into the genre. them on the course VLE site for all the other students In a department of English and Creative Writing, to read prior to the session. (The marking process, of where I collaborate with Creative Writing colleagues on course, remains confidential.) This has worked excel- research and writing projects and also in the design, de- lently over a number of years, and regularly receives livery and assessment of courses (such as on New Me- great praise in student feedback. In “Design, Delivery dia and Narrative), the proliferation of writing in and and Evaluation”, Sawyer and Wright propose an end-of- on science fiction lends a particular flavour to study- course student conference in which they can present (an ing, and teaching the genre. Many of my students write excellent idea in itself); in a 10-week term, there is no creatively and some write sf; many read widely in sf/f, space for such an event, but the seminar paper works and in the last few years a science fiction reading group to similar effect, with the addition that students receive has emerged, founded and run by undergraduate and formative feedback and annotations that will help them postgraduate students. (I attend when work allows to in preparation for the longer essay. show my support, but take a back seat in discussion.) I The seminar paper also, when working at its best, en- write a blog about science fiction and other things called ables an emphasis on student-led discussion and investi- (SF)365 (http://sciencefiction365.blogspot.co.uk) which gation which emphasises the non-hierarchical and open began as a means by which to write informal posts in manner in which I conduct the seminars. I occasion- support of the science fiction course (its number is, hap- ally receive requests for mini-lectures but resist, as this pily, ENGL365), but has strayed off into other things, would tend to compound the sense of me as “teacher” but I know some students read it, and some former stu- and the students as “learners”, when we are really dis- dents still do. cussing and exploring the texts as peers. As any tutor of This is cheering, but for me emphasises a necessary an sf class will know, there will always be students who breaking down of boundaries between academic schol- have read more deeply in certain areas than you, have arship and study, and a personal interest or investment seen films or read books or know something you do not, in sf that is crucial to sf readerships and communities, and that is not a source of embarrassment but an oppor- from reading groups to conventions to blogs and fo- tunity both to learn and to incorporate the student’s “in- rums. Even in a research culture that, in the UK, is ever- ternal library” into the framework of discussion. In the more fixated on measurable “impact” upon the wider last 5 years or so, discussion of gaming in relation to sf community, much sf scholarship, published in academic often takes place at the borders of the seminar, before it journals that reside behind paywalls, or in books or col- starts formally or during a short interval, and although lections of articles that never go beyond a hardback run my knowledge in this field is severely limited, I try to that might cost £80 each or an e-book at £50, will have a draw this form of the sf imaginary into discussion, to very limited readership. open it up to the kind of analysis we bring to bear on the TheSFRA Review then fills an admirable role in reach- course texts. ing across this gap. The excellent ‘101’ series has recently The borders of the seminar, then, are porous, as are been collected into a very affordable e-bookSF 101: A the borders of the genre and of the course. My science Guide to Teaching and Studying Science Fiction, edited fiction course runs alongside a full-year course on Con- by Rich Calvin, Doug Davis, Karen Hellekson and Craig 12 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 13 Jacobsen, and its very title points towards the connec- the genre and of the dynamics of education change over tion between teaching and learning, teaching as learn- the years and, hopefully, keep on developing. ing, which is central to my own experience and prac- tice. A colleague in Film Studies at Lancaster, Dr Bruce Works Cited Bennett, has recently talked to me about the French philosopher Jacques Ranciere and the figure of ‘the ig- Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and norant schoolmaster’. Ranciere investigated the work of Bare Life. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, a 19th-century lecturer in French literature, Joseph Ja- 1998. cotot, who, when teaching French to Flemish students Baker, Brian. Contemporary Masculinities in Fiction, in 1818, having no Flemish himself, gave his students a Film and Television. London: Bloomsbury Academic, dual-language copy of a French novel and asked the stu- 2015. dents to learn it by heart, using the Flemish translation Baker, Brian. Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Represent- to help. What he found was that the students learned to ing Men in Popular Genres, 1945-2000. London and write good grammatical French without instruction. New York: Continuum, 2006. Ranciere, in his readings of Jacotot, proposes that the Baker, Brian. Science Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to Essen- educational relationship between tutor and student is tial Criticism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. one deeply invested in power. “Explication”, teaching Bukatman, Scott. Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and the student in a position of mastery over the subject and Supermen in the 20th Century. Durham NC and Lon- imparting knowledge, is then one which enforces a po- don: Duke, 2003. sition of powerlessness on the learner. Instead, Ranciere Calvin, Rich, Doug Davis, Karen Hellekson and Craig suggests, which gives the title to his book The Ignorant Jacobsen, eds. SF 101: A Guide to Teaching and Schoolmaster (1987), the teacher must be “ignorant”, Studying Science Fiction. Kindle ebook. Science Fic- enabling the learning of the student by abandoning the tion Research Association, 2014. superiority of the “master”, allowing a participatory in- Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the vestigative process among equals. When the tutor asks Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Pen- a question, then, it is not to lead the student toward guin, 1991. his or her own mode of understanding and acquired Gunn, James. ‘Teaching Science Fiction’. KU Gunn Cen- knowledge; rather, it is in attempting to open up the ter for the Study of Science Fiction. http://www.sfcen- students’ own path of investigation, to hear what they ter.ku.edu/teaching.htm. 2 April 2015. really think. It is only this shared participation among Jameson, Fredric. ‘Postmodernism and Consumer So- intellectual equals that produces what Jacotot describes ciety’. In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern as “emancipation”. Culture. Hal Foster, ed. Port Townsend WA: Bay This may sound utopian, and when students in the Press, 1983. pp. 111-125. UK now pay £9000 per year for tuition, to proclaim that Luckhurst, Roger. Science Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, one has nothing to teach might seem strange or even of- 2005. fensive. But what interests me about the idea of the “ig- Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. norant schoolmaster” is that I’m not “teaching” science Trans. Geoffrey Wall. London and New York: Rout- fiction but learning about it, each time I go into a semi- ledge, 1978. nar room with a group of third-year students. As I wrote Ranciere, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Les- above, often the course makes a different sense at the sons in Intellectual Emancipation. Stanford CA: Stan- end of it, because the class has shared in a process, and ford University Press, 1991. I’ve learned a lot from it – perhaps different things, but Sawyer, Andy and Peter Wright. ‘Design, Delivery and still learning. If I were asked in a year or two to write this Evaluation’. In Teaching Science Fiction. Andy Sawyer article, it would take a very different shape, or I hope it and Peter Wright, eds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Mac- would. Through the practices of learning as teaching, of millan, 2011. pp. 219-246. shared investigation and analysis, my understanding of
12 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 13 To Bottom Out: An Incomplete Indeed, Garmendia’s tale made reference to such a de- vice, but only as a fake gadget which is being sold by a Guide to the New Venezuelan scammer. Alas, it is not a really functional machine; it is Science Fiction just a lie, like several of the so-called wonders that many street vendors sell with promises that are never fulfilled, Rowan Lozada-Aguilera simply because they cannot be fulfilled. Evidently a story Hoy Venezuela agoniza Venezuela agonizes to- like this one, yet very respectable, cannot be considered en algún exilio, pero no day in some exile, but science fiction since even when the science or technol- en un exilio geográfico. not in a geographic ogy involved in the genre’s pieces are fictional, they must No, Venezuela se ex- one. No, Venezuela is actually work in the given fictional universe where the tingue aceleradamente rapidly extinguishing story takes place. And this is not in any way the case. On en un exilio de antima- in an exile of antimat- the contrary, “The Surrounding Reality” is just the story teria, sin tiempo ni es- ter, with no time or of a scammer and his victim: pacio. space. Now, I’ve discovered or invented an artificial ca- – Miguel Ángel Landa pacity that advantageously supplies the sponta- neous or natural adaptability. It is a small and LIKE ALMOST ANY OTHER Latin American country, seemingly insignificant device or accessory, of Venezuela was very much involved with the magic re- ingenious composition, simple to use, light- alist movement during the boom of science fiction in weight and small; and I call it “special artificial the United States after its emergence in England. But the ability to incontinently adapt to conditions of fact that science fiction was not popular in this country existence, the environment and the surrounding until relatively recently does not mean that there was no reality” (Garmendia, 2008, 58, own translation). science fiction at all during the reign of the aforemen- tioned autochthonous genre. Of course there was sci- That is the way in which the scammer describes his so- ence fiction, but it only manifested in very sporadic and called invention in Garmendia’s short story, and it ac- timid approaches. Even if they are not as related to the tually sounds pretty much like a typical science fiction current wave of Venezuelan science fiction as anyone black box. He even talks later on about a concept he calls might think at first, it is still worthy to begin with them. ‘scientific adaptation to real life’ (59), but on the other So underground they were, that it is actually hard to hand, the tale ends like this: ‘There it is, still today, on set a birth date for the Venezuelan variety of the genre the table where I write, and ever will have served me—I since most specialists give as a fact that the first national don’t deny it— as paperweight on the leaves of a new science fiction ever is a short story by Julio Garmendia, implausible story...’’ (60). Those are the words of the cus- included in his first bookLa tienda de muñecos (The tomer of the device, the character who serves as story- Doll Shop), originally published in 1927 with the title La teller and the person who indirectly admits in the very realidad circundante (“The Surrounding Reality”). Re- end that he has been scammed after purchasing a use- garding this, Jorge de Abreu, for instance, states: less artifact. So, again, this is not a science fiction story, but a tale about the infamous near-sorcery-art of con- Julio Garmendia (1898-1977), one of the pre- ning, and it was almost certainly never intended to be cursors of Fantastic Realism in Spanish America any different. with The Doll Shop (1927) also opens the science Among the precursors—and it is better to consider fiction in Venezuela with the story “The Sur- them as precursors rather than pioneers—of Venezuelan rounding Reality”, minor work that integrates science fiction, it is commonplace to find names such as the famous collection. In “The Surrounding Bernardo Nuñez, with books like La galera de Tiberio Reality” Garmendia postulates the use of a gim- (Tiberius’ Galley), published in 1932, and Julio Garmen- mick to modify human adaptability to the varied dia himself. Nevertheless, and even if he is certainly not and changing physical, cultural or social condi- the first Venezuelan who dabbled in science fiction, Luis tions of the environment (2007, 4, own transla- Britto García may be considered the first major Ven- tion). ezuelan science fiction writer, particularly because of short stories such as Futuro (“Future”), included in the 14 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 15 anthology Lo mejor de la ciencia ficción latinoamericana by Armando José Sequera. (The Best of Latin American Science Fiction), published As for film, there is not much to tell about. The so- in 1981. In his story, Britto García reflects upon the fu- called first Venezuelan science fiction film ever is, again, ture of the human species, which is extinguished shortly not an actual science fiction piece, but is widely rec- after achieving the long-sought goal of a perfect society: ognized as such among the specialists in the country. The movie from 1965 by Maurice Odreman, titledEF - Freed from work, freed from hunger, freed from PEUM—an acronym which stands for the Spanish for sex, freed from death, the human brain was “Functional Structure To Find Oneself”—is a circa 30 about to throw in the face of what created its minute long film about a building designed for such most powerful fruit: the one that would not be purposes. There is technology involved in the project, born of any urgency of the viscera, of any ap- of course, but the core of it is alchemy, a discipline more petite of meat. A huge event was about to come related to magic rather than science. ‘To achieve this […] Indeed, the human brain, also no longer you must become an Architect-Alchemist’ (1965), is an necessary, got atrophied as well and finally dis- actual line from the film. From then on, it turns into a appeared (Britto García, 2007, 13, own transla- sort of mystical story. tion). So it is around the 1980s when Venezuelan science fic- tion actually starts by its own law, even if not yet at full Even if he is not a dedicated science fiction writer, he is throttle. It is then when a new generation of authors take definitely a recurring one. Also, references to the genre’s over the genre and start to create their own stories, sto- imagery can be found throughout much of his lifetime’s ries in which the science fiction elements are no longer work, and through him some other writers made their incidental but are the core itself. It is a rupture, however, own entries into the genre. In 1979, the so-called first because the members of this new generation hardly read Venezuelan science fiction short story compilation the previous one, at least not until long after having writ- ever, Ciencia-ficción venezolana (Venezuelan Science- ten their own pieces, precisely because those works were Fiction), edited by Julio Miranda, was published. This hidden too deep in the underground for them to be dis- book unites a series of tales by different authors, most of covered in time. It is a fresh start, a generation with no whom made that contribution their only incursion into literary parents inside the country, but inspired mostly the genre. However, most of the stories are not actual by foreigners and, of course, by their changing reality. science fiction, but fantastic pieces with elements related In fact, as science fiction itself was born from a rup- to the genre, much like the aforementioned story by Ju- ture called the Industrial Revolution, it is fair to say that lio Garmendia. Jorge de Abreu himself points this out in Venezuelan science fiction—with its entire letters—was his previously quoted article: born from another, quite different rupture, not only re- lated to the generational issue just described, but also a Most of the works in the anthology are the au- much bigger change: the crack of the Venezuelan econ- thor’s only entries into the genre; very few have omy on February 18th 1983, a day known domestically the courage to relapse. In general, the stories as “The Black Friday”, which Melvin Nava summarizes are essentially fantastic and the element of SF this way in the website Venelogía: is often incidental. Due to the limited nature of SF literature when editing VENEZUELAN The Black Friday is a milestone in Venezuela, SCENCE-FICTION, this anthology has almost which changed our economic history […] Since exhaustive connotations (2007, 4). that day, the constant devaluation of the Bolivar [the Venezuelan currency], complications with That compilation includes authors such as Humberto payment of external debt, accelerated deteriora- Mata, Francisco de Venanzi, José Balza, Pascual and Ed- tion of purchasing power and the implementa- nodio Quintero, among others. Also published during tion of an exchange control […] made the ex- that generation were works related to the genre, like the change rate stability of the Venezuelan currency short story books Quorum, by David Alizio; Andamiaje vanish (Nava, 2010, ¶3, own translation). (Scaffolding), by José Gregorio Porras; and Me pare- ció que saltaba por el espacio como una hoja muerta (I Further on, the article continues with this: Thought that I Jumped into the Space like a Dead Leaf), 14 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 15 From this day, known as “The Black Friday”, magazine ever, Cygnus, which focused both on articles monetary policy in the country has been char- related to the genre and short stories by novel authors. If acterized by high interest rates, high inflation there is a group of people that truly deserves to be called (currently the highest in America and one of the pioneers of Venezuelan science fiction, it is precisely the largest in the world), devaluation, capital flight, one formed by the founders of UBIK: César Villanueva, exchange controls, corruption, compensation José Ramón Morales, Imre Mikoss, Yamil Madi, Víctor to depositors under inflation, and uncertainty Pineda and the aforementioned Jorge De Abreu. They (¶10). started a stream that inspired others to create more, so Cygnus was the first national magazine of the genre, but It may sound merely like an economic problem but the it would not be the last one. In the following years, more fact is that the Venezuelan economy has not been ca- publications appeared, such as Koinos, Solaris, QUBIT, pable—even more than 30 years later—to recover from Nostromo and Erídano, among others. Even if most of it. On the contrary, it gets worse and worse, and what them had a very short lifespan of usually no more than started as an economic crisis has led to a series of social five issues, and were produced mostly by amateur fans problems such as unemployment, poverty, rising crime rather than by professionals, these magazines served the and shortages of every kind; which have significantly undeniable purpose of being the incubator of the new damaged quality of life in the country and, probably the generation, consisting of more or less dedicated authors most important, produced a cataclysm of perspectives and academicians. on the future. This is something that clearly affected the Indeed, that was the spark that started societies like universes imagined by the new generation of authors, the AVECFF, acronym in Spanish for Venezuelan As- whom, in most cases, set their stories in utterly pessimis- sociation for Science Fiction and Fantasy, and ALFA, tic scenarios. Venezuelan science fiction concentrated the Venezuelan Free Association for Anticipatory Fic- heavily—but not exclusively—on the country’s growing tion. From this last one would be born the first cathedra contemporary problems, which would be extrapolated dedicated entirely to the genre, the Cathedra of Science into grim, dystopian futures. Into societies that would Fiction Cinema of the Mass Communication College in ultimately bottom out. Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB for its acro- Fantasmas computarizados (Computarized Ghosts), nym in Spanish), established in 1992 by Professor Fran- published in 1988, is another compilation of short sto- cisco A. Pellegrino, also inspired by 1991’s very first do- ries, which pieces are mostly fantasy horror related to mestic Science Fiction Narrative Workshop, organized computers. Nevertheless, there are also a couple of ac- by the Rómulo Gallegos Center for Latin American tual science fiction stories: 2084, by Juan Nuño; and Las Studies (CELARG for its acronym in Spanish) and lec- tribulaciones de Bajin Sija (Bajin Sija’s Tribulations). The tured by Julio Miguel Vivas. In the same vein, there also first one is some sort of spiritual sequel to the famous appeared the national Star Wars Fan Club and the Star novel 1984 by George Orwell, this time in the context Trek one, both of which organized and promoted activi- of a future Venezuelan dystopia that heavily resembles ties not only related to their respective franchises, but 1984’s Airstrip One (Capriles et al, 1988). The second also to the science fiction genre in general. one is a story set in a fictional Caribbean country ruled From then on, science fiction started to become— by a military government, which uses an advanced arti- slowly but firmly—a regular feature in Venezuelan ficial intelligence system to try to find the most qualified media. There is a developing community of authors individual to preside over the nation in the near future, working in the genre’s territory both in literature and but the AI ends fooling everybody and ultimately taking film. Committed writers such as Ronald Delgado, Il- the power itself. eana Gómez Berbesí, César Oropeza, Susana Sussman The period between the mid 1980s and early 1990s and the aforementioned Jorge de Abreu; among others, is arguably the most active era for Venezuelan science have been constantly producing novels and short sto- fiction, even if not the most mature. In those years the ries mostly set in dystopian universes, futuristic or not, first national science fiction associations, like the Simón related with local or global present-time issues. Even if Bolívar University Science Fiction Club, named UBIK their works are not yet well known or highly popular, after the 1969 novel by Phillip K. Dick, were formed. these authors have been able to make a number of al- UBIK was officially formed in 1984, and two years later legorical yet accurate portraits and dissections of the so- began to edit the very first Venezuelan science fiction ciety where they are living: 16 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 17 For instance, the previous excerpt of Ronald Delgado’s Although there was indeed a shy little group of Conciencia recuperada (Retrieved Consciousness) por- believers in the hereafter, none of the inhabitants trays a future world in which is possible to live forever of the metropolis had the slightest suspicion that thanks to the bioengineering technology. Yet not tragic the alien invasion had begun. But this did not itself, the resolution of the story outlines that, exactly as happen in the sensed and announced way. There in the more obscure periods of human history, health were no flashing lights or balls of fire falling is still a privilege of the rich. Anyway, not everything from the sky. No noises or electronic effects, no is grim in the Venezuelan science fiction futures. There fragments of twelve-tone music or close encoun- is a rare example of a utopian Caracas, the capital city ters of any kind. The only thing that was happen- of Venezuela in Blanca Strepponi’s Caracas, 2050. How- ing every morning was that the atmosphere was ever, this happy new world is only possible after a night- overloaded and a dense and warm fog clouded marish period. Again, after the nation bottomed out: the sky, both in the capital and in other large cit- ies (Gómez Berbesí, 2007, 22, own translation). Frequently the proud Caraquenians, famous worldwide for their good humor and venera- The previous paragraph is an excerpt from Ileana Gó- tion of beauty, gather without any distinction mez Berbesí’s short story Los invasores del siglo XXI to participate in the big and emotional restitu- (“The Invaders of the 21st Century”), in which she made tion ceremonies during which they honor their a sort of chronicle of the advent and rise of chavismo in ancestors, the ones that endured the continuous front of the unaware eyes of Venezuelan media, political suffering of a society that never matured defi- parties and society. Of course, she did not write a lit- nitely, and heaping of frustration sought refuge eral recounting of those events, but an allegory in which in failed leaders. There, under the light of novae chavismo itself is replaced by the spread of an alien at the flashing plains of chalk produced by plas- amoeba throughout the country’s air that ends chang- tic biodegradation, before the beautiful synthet- ing—much for the worse—not only the lifestyles of the ic monument to citizen, they all sing the anthem population but also their minds. of the universal community: all you need is love But not all Venezuelan science fiction is about Ven- (2012, ¶ 7, own translation). ezuela and its calamities. Authors such as the aforemen- tioned Ronald Delgado and Susana Sussman rather pre- So it looks like even in the best scenarios, the Ven- fer storylines about the future of mankind in general, ezuelan future is signed by a quite tragic stage. Fortu- usually with tragicomic connotations: nately—as the old saying goes—when darker is the sky, closer is the dawn; so the dystopia is frequently the set “Don’t worry, Mister Archer” the doctor in- yet not necessarily the ultimate outcome in Venezuelan terrupted. “You had an accident in your plane anticipatory science fiction. In fact, there are even some and, sadly, you suffered too many injuries. We humorous approaches, made by non-dedicated authors, couldn’t save your body but, fortunately, we such as the fake-news website El Chigüire bipolar (The could download your consciousness on time”. Bipolar Capybara) and the comedy collective Santo Ro- “I died again?” Archer asked with a cheerful bot (Robot Saint). The first one being much more criti- voice. Everyone smiled. cal of the social and political situation of the country, “Yes, Mister Archer. You died again”. has many entries related to time travelling, in which the “There!” he said. “What remained of me is still protagonists voyage using a time machine to either pasts reusable?” or future times of Venezuela. There are stories like the The doctor looked at the carcass lying on the one of a man who built the aforementioned device dur- gurney. ing the general strike of 2002 only to arrive to an even “I don’t think so, Mister Archer. You will have to more economically depressed 2013, one that relates the clone a new one”. story of a scientist who traveled to the country’s colonial The computer sighed. times to kill the first Venezuelan who skipped a queue “Nothing that a few millions can’t solve, right?” and with that manages to change the future and return (Delgado, 2007, 52-53, own translation) to a present-time in which the nation is a world eco- nomic power, or one in which an intern of the website 16 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 17 travels to the distant future to discover that chavismo questions about human nature and reality itself. On the has become a whole religion. On the other hand, San- same line, and also produced in the UCV’s College of to Robot has only rarely focused on political issues. Its Arts, is Asdrubal Barrios’ Monica Electrónica (Electronic two science fiction video entries, both from 2013, are Monique) from 2010. This piece draws from many sci- one titled El súper imbécil (The Super Imbecile), about a ence fiction classics, mainly from George Lucas’ THX genetic experiment to create the ultimate breed of the 1138, but also from worlds as divergent as Ridley Scott’s imbecile man; and a second one titled Viajero del tiem- Blade Runner and Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek. In es- po del sentido común (Common Sense’s Time Traveler), sence, the short film tells the story of a man who works about a person who travels from the future to kill people as a slave for an almighty company in a dystopian cor- that had particularly stupid ideas in the past, such as poration-ruled future and falls in love with a colleague the creator of the Harlem Shake, the executive producer he has only met by video chat. However, assuming that of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and even this incipient relationship could mean problems for the Lindsay Lohan’s drug-dealer. efficiency of its employee, the company sends him a sur- Now, precisely after discussing those videos, it is op- rogate of his beloved colleague. Of course things do not portune to introduce the audiovisual branch of Ven- go well and ultimately both he and his colleague must ezuelan science fiction. After the aforementioned EF- escape from the control of the company. PEUM, wrongly considered the very first Venezuelan On other the hand, there are also some productions film in history, there was not much of anything related from the students of UCAB’s College of Mass Commu- to the genre in the domestic cinematic scene, with some nication. There are at least a couple of particularly well exceptions during the late 1980s and early 1990s, repre- executed short movies both in terms of production and sented by student short films so experimental they are storyline. One of them is Julio Ottaviano’s 10-09-2008, a hard to classify withi the genre unreservedly. However, found-footage film from 2010 about the experience of a there is something really important about those short group of friends during and immediately after a contact films, and it is where they were produced. Indeed, most with some sort of unidentified—presumably alien—life of the Venezuelan science fiction cinematic entries come form. Another one is Víctor Hernández’s AER, a piece from these incubators: the College of Arts of the Central from 2012 made with the specific intention of recreating University of Venezuela (UCV) and the College of Mass the aesthetics of the average 1980’s dystopian universes, Communication of the Andrés Bello Catholic Univer- sets its story in a future where the effects of climate sity (UCAB). Both the previously referred to generation change have destroyed the capacity of plants to produce of amateur filmmakers and the current, more mature oxygen, so it is up to a group of mutants—themselves even if not necessarily yet professional, come from these being a consequence of the change—and a brilliant yet two institutions. It was necessary, though, to wait until amoral scientist to try to restore the life in the planet. well into the 2000s to watch the first actual science fic- Though pieces such as the previously mentioned ones tion films produced in Venezuela. are the sole and only entries of its authors in the genre And in the same vein as the literary entries, the Vene- and were produced by students rather than profession- zuelan cinematic approaches to genre have been usually als, they represent solid contributions to the configura- grim and pessimistic about the future. Putting aside the tion of science fiction in Venezuelan screens. It is not bunch of not-very-serious short films about zombies coincidence that shortly after the beginning of this that have recently emerged in the country, most of the wave, the firsts professional films started to reach the rest of them are related with universal concerns. One of movie theaters. Probably the most notable one is Alex- the first films of that relatively recent generation isDAT , andra Henao’s La uva (The Grape), a story set in a fu- by Jonás R.G. This ten minute piece from 2006 is more ture Venezuela stricken by climate change, scarcity and focused on aesthetics rather than on an actual storyline, presumably warfare. This short film was included in the yet it presents the trip of a space traveler—or inter-di- 2011 feature Cortos Interruptus, consisting of a total of mensional, the issue is not completely clear—who ar- five short films,La uva being the only science fiction rives to Caracas after a journey in his pod. The movie, one. Both the piece and the whole feature had a fairly yet with the limitations of an independent, student film, positive reception from domestic audiences, which can tries to resemble the visuals and paces of masterpieces only mean more incentive to produce Venezuelan sci- such as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and ence fiction. In fact, there are a couple of science fic- Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solyaris, and also to outline similar tion feature films in production at the moment, both 18 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 19 zombie-related, that would be the first feature length If the development of a science fiction movement science fiction movies in the history of Venezuelan cin- among Venezuela’s authors can be considered a step for- ema. These are Manuel Pifano’s Z and César Oropeza’s ward through this crisis, then it is something positive. I Love Zombies, this last one based on a novel with the If science fiction—or at least anticipatory science fic- same title and by the same author. And naturally, none tion—originates from a concern about the future, then of this is the end, but just part of a new and hopefully it is something tremendously good that Venezuelan au- definitive start for the genre in Venezuela. thors are in fact starting to do so, to create stories that Today, besides the film and literary productions men- serve as an instrument to meditate on the world—or the tioned above, science fiction has its space in many other country—of tomorrow as a direct consequence of the activities, such as the science fiction narrative work- acts and decisions of the present. Indeed, some people shops organized by Asociación Civil Corriente Alterna consider anticipation as a vaccine against the woes that and CELARG, currently lectured by Ileana Gómez Ber- could affect society in the future, so creating science fic- besí and Ronald Delgado, respectively; the Cathedra of tion is also creating awareness about what could happen Science Fiction Cinema of UCAB’s Mass Communica- tomorrow as a result of what is happening today. If a tion College, lectured by Francisco A. Pellegrino; and severe crisis was necessary to let that occur in Venezu- the Science Fiction, Fantasy And Horror Bull Sessions ela, it is still not a price too high to pay for. Because that hosted by Susana Sussman; all of them with several means that, ultimately, the future will not be as grim as editions and years of work under their belts. Also, it is the present, not in reality if fiction actually serves as a worth mentioning the Solsticios First Venezuelan Con- proper vaccine. test of Fantasy and Science Fiction Literatures (Sol- Transforming a national crisis into its own signature, stices), inaugurated in 2014, and which winner in the Venezuelan science fiction is living today its most re- science fiction category was Rafael E. Figueredo with markable moment yet, and that is something that was Epidermis, a short story on the cyberpunk subgenre, à la hopefully be proven here. It does not matter if it is still Venezuelan. Moreover, if there is a best part in all of this, delayed in comparison with the original latitudes of the it is—despite the redundancy—that all of this is just an genre, the Anglo-Saxon world, and is more or less go- small part of all that is still hidden in the underground. ing through the same process that science fiction expe- They say that with a crisis there is always something rienced during the 1930s in America with the boom of good waiting to happen. Blissfully, such an assertion has the pulp magazines—this time with a bunch of indepen- its foundations in history itself, and that is not anything dent and mostly amateur authors, publishers and elec- to be disregarded. The evolution of human societies has tronic journals—while that only means living its own been possible to a large degree because of the stages of stages of maturity, catching up on and, surely, growing crisis, the moments at which humanity has faced dead to become something valuable for itself and for its own ends and must, in order to survive, reinvent their cur- society. This is something that is happening—yet slowly rent ways to become something different. Even when and probably shyly—in the Venezuela of today. Late, the outcome is something not necessarily better than yes, but Venezuelans have never been famous for their the prior, it is definitely a step forward, and step by step punctuality anyway. What they seem to have is a capac- is how greater things are discovered, created or, in any ity to overcome their disadvantages, even if—much like case, achieved. a rubber ball—that means to bottom out and rise again. As the Industrial Revolution produced and accen- tuated many kinds of social, economic and ecological Works Cited problems; it also granted humanity the capacity to go beyond and progress in an unprecedented way, and the Abreu, J. (2007). “Ciencia-Ficción Venezolana. Historia dawn of science fiction was part of that progress. Ven- y Prehistoria.” QUBIT 29. pp. 3-8. ezuela, in its turn, is currently going through one of the Barrios, A. (2010). Mónica Electrónica [Short film]. Ven- longest and most serious crises in its history, but that ezuela. UCV. does not mean there is anything good to be taken from Britto García, L. (2007). “Futuro.” QUBIT 29. pp. 12-13. such a certainly painful process. After all, obstacles and Capriles at al. (1988). Fantasmas Computarizados. (First mistakes are there to learn from, something that Ven- edition). Caracas, Venezuela. Ediciones Bexellier. ezuelan society must definitely do, and seems to actually Delgado, R. (2007). “Conciencia Recuperada.” QUBIT be doing. 29. pp. 51-53. 18 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 19 El Chigüire Bipolar. (2013 II). “Chavistas ortodox- Henao, A. (2011). La Uva [Short film]. Venezuela. Soda os del año 4013 critican a quienes comen azúcar, Producciones. leche y mantequilla”. Retrieved on December 6th Hernández, V. (2012). AER [Short film]. Venezuela. 2014. http://www.elchiguirebipolar.net/28-03-2013/ UCAB. chavistas-ortodoxos-del-ano-4013-critican-a- Nava, M. (2010). “18 de febrero de 1983: Viernes negro.” quienes-comen-azucar-leche-y-mantequilla/. Retrieved on December 1st 2014. http://www.vene- El Chigüire Bipolar. (2013 I). “Hombre que viajó del logia.com/archivos/4308/. año 2002 para huir del paro llega al 2013” Retrieved Odreman, M. (1965). EFPEUM [Short Film]. Venezu- on December 6th 2014. http://www.elchiguirebi- ela. Cooperativa Fílmica de Venezuela. polar.net/15-11-2013/hombre-que-viajo-del-ano- Ottaviano, J. (2010). 10-09-2008 [Short film]. Venezu- 2001-para-huir-del-paro-llega-al-2013/. ela. UCAB. El Chigüire Bipolar. (2012). “Viaja al pasado, mata R.G; J. (2006). DAT [Short film]. Venezuela. Kinoki al primer venezolano que se coleó y Venezuela se Films. convierte en potencia económica”. Retrieved on Santo Robot (2013 I). El súper imbécil. Retrieved on December 6th 2014. http://www.elchiguirebipolar. December 6th 2014. https://www.youtube.com/ net/05-12-2012/viaja-al-pasado-mata-al-primer- watch?v=tlm37wLqSrw. venezolano-que-se-coleo-y-venezuela-se-convierte- Santo Robot (2013 II). Viajero del tiempo del sentido en-potencia-economica/. común. Retrieved on December 6th 2014. https:// Garmendia, J. (2008). La Tienda de Muñecos y Otros www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF0t2wP30Xo. Textos. (First edition). Caracas, Venezuela: Fun- Strepponi, B. (2012). “Caracas, 2050.” Crónicas ca- dación Biblioteca Ayacucho. prichosas. Retrieved on January 23th 2014. http:// Gómez Berbesí, I. (2007). “Los Invasores del Siglo XXI.” cronicascaprichosas.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/ca- Erídano 15. pp. 22-27. racas-2050/.
20 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 21 Nonfiction Reviews I find it neither “simplistic” nor “pernicious” (American Shore, 25) to the tale within its much larger context. Like “Angouleme,” history itself is often lost or comes down The American Shore: Meditations to us distorted, misremembered, misrepresented (rather like Picasso’s Weeping Woman, to continue the analo- on a Tale of Science Fiction by gy), a palimpsest of overlapping moments, an alternate Thomas M. Disch world constructed from “the subject’s sum of knowledge of the period he chooses to fix during his first trips”: the Virginia Allen quote being a reference to a drug-induced fantasy such as “Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire” from the Samuel R. Delany. The American Shore: Meditations on re-titled 334: A Novel (Disch, 334, 94). Angouleme (the a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch. – “An- name given to New York on the first European map of gouleme.” Edition: Dragon Press Corrected Reprint, the eastern shore of our continent), by further analogy, 1978. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, is quite a notable moment in the history of cartography 2014. Paperback, 256 pages, $21.18, ISBN-13: 978- that has been reduced to a bronze plate in Manhattan’s 0819567185. Battery Park overlooking New York Harbor, where a group of children on the verge of puberty consecrate Order option(s): Hard | Paper | Kindle their “basic childhood need to grow up and kill some- one” in the story/chapter under analysis (334, 141). If THIS IS A BOOK with a past and future history about you find this paragraph difficult to navigate, you have a the making of histories and theories of science fiction, fair sense of what reading The American Shore feels like. best not read without some understanding of that his- To quote Delany himself from “The Diffused Text” at tory unless your tolerance for ambiguity is thick enough lexeme 24, on retrieving overlapping textual paradigms: to withstand the very real frustration of reading it. In the “We leave the pleasure of its divination to the reader” “Author’s Introduction,” Delany gives fair warning to a (55). reader in need of a preliminary text on SF as a genre to Never quite abandoning his pedagogical commit- “find another book” (xiii), and also gives due acknowl- ments, however, Delany footnotes Robert Sheckley’s edgement to Jean Marc Gawron, Marilyn Hacker, and Journey beyond Tomorrow (Dell 1962), “the exemplary Joanna Russ, who “subjected [him] to an astute and un- thesaurus of such s-f rhetorica.” The jaw-dropping sim- remitting criticism of the entire concept of difficult dis- plicity and elegance with which Sheckley, by way of con- course” while he worked on the original edition back in trast, overlaps and casually distorts Athenian democra- the late 1970’s. Given my own captious intolerance for cy and the founding of the United States is a reminder what Delany refers to as the dangers of “polysyllabic sil- to the doubting reader that science fiction really is an liness” (xi), I confess I should have spent either a good emergent evolutionary event, strikingly rich with pos- deal more time with the text, or a good deal less. I fear sibilities not available to mundane fiction. Delaney’s text I may sound like the art critic who complains that if is brimful of such nuggets: I used the FIND function Picasso were capable of painting Le Gourmet (a won- on my Kindle to good effect to track down themes like derfully realistic image of a child peering into a mixing “The New Sentimentality” and “trivalent discourse” to bowl; as Delany is certainly capable of writing with great impose some order on the diffused text ofThe American clarity and grace), couldn’t he at least do a better job of Shore, to make it more readable. lining up the eyes and noses on the faces of his models? My primary interest has been in the linguistic/seman- Briefly,The American Shore is a line-by-lexeme discur- tic theory, and I do wholeheartedly concur with Patrick sive, diffusive commentary on a chapter, “Angouleme,” Parrinder’s 1979 assessment in “Delany Inspects the by Thomas M. Disch within a concatenated text pub- Word-Beast” (Science Fiction Studies 1979) that the essay lished as 334 by Avon in 1974 and reprinted by Vintage “About 5,750 Words” is a classic, although Delany him- Books in 1999 and again in 2014 under the title 334: A self protested that such a claim was premature (“Some Novel. The reading process is very like following instruc- Reflections on SF Criticism” (SFS 1981), professing his tions for assembling modular furniture, except that you own adherence to Stanley Fish’s rather conventional (so don’t know whether it will turn out to be a bookcase or a to speak) view, which was already a linguistic anachro- chair until the job is done. Despite the author’s assertion, nism when Delaney demurred about taking his rightful 20 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 21 place in the history of rhetorical figuration. Delaney’s among us by borrowing Skinner’s black box and putting problem when he looked at sentences such as “The door a fully formed and functioning linguistic module inside dilated” was that a vocabulary for what he was observ- it. Every normal human child acquires any language to ing had yet to be invented in 1979. which “he” is exposed, automatically and without in- The two-plus-millennia-old tradition of rhetorical fig- struction irrespective of IQ. After the on-set of puberty, uration was grounded in the presumption of a distinc- when Mother Nature assumes the organism has scoped tion between literal and figurative language that stood out the local environment and has the necessary cog- unchallenged until 1980, when Lakoff and Johnson be- nitive tool kit for this particular reality, the language gan to hammer out the first new theory of metaphor acquisition device goes idle as the brain shifts to more since Aristotle in Metaphors We Live By (University of urgent, more local survival interests (i.e., sex). And what Chicago Press). is the Golden Age of Science Fiction? 12. Or maybe 13. What you learned about metaphor from Aristotle’s Po- Everybody knows that. etics is that the ability to make good metaphors is a sign Building on Chomsky’s generative syntax, Katz and of genius in which a like thing (tenor) is compared to an Fodor tried to explain semantic features as the prop- unlike thing (vehicle) astonishing the reader with its apt- erties of words: “nurse” = +human, +female, +adult. ness (more recently recognized as its grammaticality); Well, that didn’t work: “trying to get syntactic blood what you may not have learned from Aristotle’s Rhetoric from naïve metaphysical turnips,” as Geoffrey Pullum is is that the way to make difficult ideas accessible to those fond of saying. When it came to anomalous sentences who haven’t the spark of genius is to frame them as met- (“This tree is very intelligent” and “John is a snake in aphors, which ordinary people find so much easier to the grass”), the whole enterprise collapsed. [See Randy process and understand than plain (literal) speaking. Allen Harris, The Linguistics Wars (Oxford UP, 1993), especially Chomsky’s clash with George Lakoff. See La- The ancient rhetoricians presumed a straightforward koff ’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (Chicago UP distinction between literal and figurative expression. 1987). See Paul Grice’s Studies in the Way of Words (Har- The literal word is mundane, capturing the known world vard UP 1989). See Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber’s with its arbitrary and conventional signifiers; metaphor, Meaning and Relevance (Cambridge UP 2012).] the master trope, is poetic: an exception to the literal The good lord willing and if the river don’t rise, I will expression of the truth of how the world really is, and – attempt to get this review written up in more intelligible oh, by the way – how it might be different, changeable, detail. When we finally get there, Delany will be waiting evolving. Dilating doors do not fit the rhetorical sys- to show us around a science fictional world describable tem of figuration, and Saussure’s linguistics (profoundly with a vocabulary we have already acquired, effortlessly trounced by Chomsky) did not point Delany in a pro- and without instruction. [See “About 5,750 Words,” in ductive direction. Jewel-Hinged Jaw (Weslyan UP, 2009).] I am not able to summarize 20th-century linguistics in My thesis is that when the cognitive linguists hypoth- 1,000 words, but let me say quickly that every attempt to esized metaphor, not as an exception to normal human theorize human language has foundered on the tropes language, but an ordinary evolutionary adaptation, a of ancient rhetoric. Romanticism embraced the excep- product of natural selection in a changing environment, tionality of poetic language and, as a logical entailment, the next stage would necessarily be, not “Big Ideas and an epistemology grounded in subjective experience Dead End Thrills,” as Disch hypothesized (Atlantic watched over by a priesthood of “superior” literary crit- Monthly, February 1992), but a map through the cru- ics. cially contested border land between fantasy and sci- And yet, if language is an evolutionary outcome, a ence fiction where postmodern “knowledge” of the ex- product of natural selection, how could it come about? ternal world is not mere rhetoric, an excuse to indulge a Behaviorism could not explain something as common- critical taste for irrationality, but amenable to discovery. place as ambiguity in sentences, so the New Critics The American Shore doesn’t get us all the way there, made an aesthetic virtue of it. Chomsky wreaked havoc but it’s a good start.
22 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 23 Space and Place in The Hunger can we know how much she has reorganized and edited elements of her story. Hence, there is no packaged, de- Games: New Readings of the finitive meaning but rather an open-ended invitation to Novels consider how we tell our own stories, “striving for au- thenticity, but leaving room for creating an interpretive Thomas J. Morrissey possibility” (41). Anne M. Canavan and Sarah N. Petro- vic compare and contrast narrative choices in the books Garriott, Deidre Anne Evans, Whitney Elaine Jones, versus the first film, concluding in part that the agency and Julie Elizabeth Tyler, Eds. Space and Place in the Katniss developed in the first novel is lost in the film, Hunger Games: New Readings of the Novels. Jefferson, which focuses far more on the nature and function of NC: McFarland, 2014. Paperback. 264 pages, $40.00. Panem’s police state. ISBN: 978-0-7864-7633-6. “Provoking Change and Creating Radical Spaces,” Part II, treats character development. In “Katniss and Order option(s): Paper | Kindle Her Boys,” Whitney Elaine Jones looks at the Katniss- Gale-Peeta triangle as it might influence male readers. ANYONE WHO HAS WITNESSED the torrent of es- She concludes that Katniss’s marriage to Peeta “is a tem- say collections spawned by The Hunger Gamesnovels plate for a future utopian world” (78), one from which a might well ask whether another was needed. In the case young male reader might learn “that a strong masculine of Space and Place in the Hunger Games, the answer is warrior can encapsulate love and compassion, that there most certainly yes. Evans et. al. have compiled and skill- is no line between masculine and feminine, and that we fully arranged eleven essays that in various ways explore are all just jumbles of good traits and bad, and that we the craft, reception, and impact of the trilogy. In the In- can choose which of these traits best define who we are” troduction, entitled “Taking Up and Entering Critical (79). Susan Shau Ming Tan argues that audiences have Space,” the editors present the rationale and methodol- responded positively to Katniss’ maturation as a form ogy for the collection. They first define space and place of rebellion against the stunted growth dictated by the as themes that connect the essays. “Space” and “place” Capital and that in YA fiction at its best, “the YA heroine invoke dimensionality. Space, whether physical or meta- becomes a force so threatening that her presence pos- phorical, is the venue of potential; place is the realiza- sesses the potential to destabilize every aspect of socio- tion of potential: “space and place are not binaries but political life, from state to self” (98). relational: they rely on each other. Space must exist for a Part III, “Experiencing Trauma in Safe Spaces,” fea- place to be imagined and constructed” (1). At the same tures two essays about the potential for The Hunger time, they maintain that their goal was to “create a criti- Games to evoke compassion for the Other. Anne M. M. cal ‘space’ safe enough to welcome a range of scholarly Childs shows how privileged adolescent readers--whose conversations, but ‘radical’ in the sense that the collec- social status is more likely to resemble that of the Capi- tion would challenge and even transgress conventional tal’s citizens than the station of the downtrodden Oth- scholarship” (4). They have accomplished their objec- ers of the trilogy—“can potentially transform their own tive. The editors’ “Conclusion: Where Can We Go and identities becoming compassionate agents of change” What Can We Disrupt from Here?” makes explicit their (122). Adam Levin’s essay deals with the trilogy’s capac- hopes for this collection: “We seek to be a voice, perhaps ity to help adolescent Jewish readers come to grips with one ember to fan the flames of activism and scholarship the almost unimaginable and paralyzing horror of the that emerge from this trilogy” (245). Holocaust. Levin does not claim that Collins has written The essays in Part I, “Identifying and Challenging Holocaust literature but that she has created an engag- Narrative Spaces,” examine the inseparability of ques- ing and accessible story of dystopian cruelty that might tions of narrative form and Katniss’ agency. Julie Eliza- make it easier for young Jews to relate to stories of Ho- beth Tyler’s fascinating exploration of the impact of the locaust survivors. Epilogue on the main narrative and its implications for Part IV, “Popular Responses in Actual Spaces,” helps to the revitalization of Young Adult fiction substantiates add yet another dimension to this collection by discuss- the editors’ claims that they have created a safe place for ing reactions to the text in digital media. Katie Aroste- radical criticism. Temporally, there is no way to know guy gives us a scholarly but personal essay on mothering how old Katniss is when she projects the Epilogue, nor in the books; what makes the essay especially valuable is 22 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 23 her exploration of mothers’ Web responses to the nov- The Liverpool Companion to els. As many critics have pointed out, the Arena, like the Panopticon, is a space in which surveillance plays World Science Fiction Film a pivotal role. Deirdre Anne Evans Garriott gives us a Amy J. Ransom glimpse of the larger digital Panopticon where the nov- els and films have become targets for spectators whose Sonja Fritzsche, ed. The Liverpool Companion to World judgmental critiques would make them ideal citizens Science Fiction Film. Liverpool: Liverpool University of the Capital. Perhaps the most shocking revelations Press, 2014. Hardcover, 290 pages, $120.00, ISBN concern racist reactions to casting people of color in the 978-1-78138-038-3. films. Talk about missing the point. . . . Linda J. Rice and Katie Wrabel expand upon this theme as they examine Order option(s): Hard young people’s reactions to the spectacles of the cult of celebrity and so-called reality television. Included are AMONGST THE BURGEONING NUMBER of hand- important comments by pre-service teachers who see books and companions to science fiction (among other the books as a potential antidote for the Roman Coli- genres) published recently, Sonja Fritzsche’s Liverpool seum mentality that pervades our culture almost to the Companion to World Science Fiction Film stands out. degree it does in Rome and Panem. First, it targets a unique subset of SF and is thus itself Given the largely self-created perils to human hap- unique; second, its publication legitimates that subset as piness and survival, can texts point credibly to a better an object of study. Given the increasing focus on visual future? This is the theme of Part V, “Envisioning Future media and on SF beyond the Anglo-American, recog- Spaces.” Carissa Ann Baker focuses on the novel’s com- nizing “world science fiction film” as a sub-genre seems peting views of nature, specifically Katniss’ comfort with only natural. As a “companion,” Fritzsche’s edited vol- the natural world and the Capital’s falsification of na- ume provides an introduction to SF film outside Holly- ture, especially decorative bio-alteration of people and wood, and its accessible essays offer a starting point for the creation of hybrid monstrosities. Citing the growing scholars and general readers interested in broadening body of eco-feminist criticism, Baker hopes that “young their study and/or consumption of SF film. people will fight for the earth with the same degree of The book’s fourteen chapters are organized into six fervor with which Katniss fought” (218). Bruce Mar- sections by geographical region. Fritzsche’s introduc- tin returns us to the political as he applies theories of tion outlines the volume’s goals and the significance of the early Frankfurt School to his reading of the novels. this rising genre, also offering caveats to the “uniniti- Citing Collins’ comments on her mythic and dystopian ated” (1), positing the sophistication of the “meaning- sources, he establishes that the trilogy carries the “genre making practices” (1) present in a corpus that might be DNA” (236) of the dystopian form, but that the novels dismissed by audiences inured to Hollywood spectacle. also present “a glimpse of hope to offset the overwhelm- It thoughtfully outlines the volume’s goal--“to enable ing evidence of current and future catastrophe” (237). scholars to scrutinize and broaden the established ways This is an excellent collection. There are no weak arti- of talking about science fiction film” (3)--and traces the cles. Notes and bibliographies are extensive. Many of the connections between its various chapters. These chap- authors reference articles appearing in an earlier anthol- ters cover most of the globe, but a certain imbalance ogy from McFarland, Of Bread, Blood and The Hunger appears, with some sections including only one or two Games: Critical Essays on the Suzanne Collins Trilogy, chapters, whereas that on Europe includes six. Certainly, edited by Mary F. Pharr and Leisa A. Clark. Both books this reflects the unequal conditions of film production embody socially conscious criticism, and both consider around the world, as well as different levels of interest the sensibilities of adolescent readers. In fact, the cur- from potential contributors. rent volume reads almost like a co-equal sequel to that Indeed, the first section, on Africa, includes only one earlier text. Both collections are essential reading for essay, Ritch Calvin’s examination of “The Environmen- anyone who teaches and/or researches the YA dystopian tal Dominant in Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi,” a 2009 Kenyan phenomenon. film the title of which translates as “Breath.” Calvin’s es- say is typical of most of the book’s chapters, as it intro- duces the film first within the context of a national film
24 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 25 tradition unfamiliar to most readers and then situates a Butcher Boy (1997), and Martin Duffy’s The Boy From film or corpus of films in relation to the more familiar Mercury (1996) and The Summer of the Flying Saucer body of SF film and/or applies a theoretical approach as- (2008). sociated with SF studies. Calvin examines Pumzi, which Moving to the continent, Daniel Tron’s “Looking for extrapolates the global problem of water scarcity into a French Science Fiction Cinema” traces the genre’s prob- dystopian future, via eco-feminism. Organizationally- lematic status in a nation that associates auteur film- speaking, I might have labeled this section “Africa and making with its own cultural traditions and rejects genre the African Diaspora” and included here the only essay film as both inferior and un-French. After a brief survey in the section on “North America,” Robyn Citizen’s “The jumping from Méliès to the New Wave, Tron demon- Role of Black Women in Political and Cultural Transfor- strates how Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro negoti- mation in Science Fiction from the US, UK, and Cam- ate a compromise between French-ness and science eroon.” Citizen contextualizes black women characters fictionality. Raffaella Baccolini’s overview also reveals in SF film in general, then demonstrates how characters an “Uncomfortable Relationship Between Science Fic- in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), Paul W. S. tion and Italy” where the filmic tradition ofcommedia Anderson’s Alien vs. Predator (2004), and Jean-Pierre all’italiana results largely in SF parodies like Fascists on Bekolo’s Les Saignantes (2005) transcend stereotypes, Mars (2006). In “Gender and Apocalypse in Eastern Eu- becoming heroic subjects. ropean Cinema,” Jason Merrill analyzes three Commu- “Part II: Asia” offers a bit more balance, with three es- nist-era films from Poland and the former Czechoslova- says, one each on China, India, and Japan, nations with kia, and Evan Torner looks at “Multicultural Whiteness varying relationships to the production of SF film. Jie in the East German/ Polish Science Fiction Film Silent Zhang’s chapter makes the case for “Death Ray on Coral Star.” Noting that this 1960 film pre-datesStar Trek’s Island as China’s First Science Fiction Film,” situating multicultural starship crew, Torner critiques the ways this 1980 film within the context of Chinese SF litera- in which its tokenism nonetheless reinscribes the Com- ture and the changing landscape of Chinese politics and munist Bloc’s white racial identity. various regimes’ attitudes to speculative fictions in print Two essays comprise “Part V: South America.” Mari- or on screen. Jessica Langer and Dominic Alessio survey ano Paz looks at “Postcolonial Politics and Cultural the genre on the sub-continent, then examine in greater Hybridity in Argentina’s Goodbye Dear Moon” (2005), detail the blockbuster success of Endhiran (2011). Taka- and Alfredo Suppia offers “A Short History of Brazilian yuki Tatsumi’s ludic contribution is an outlier in the vol- Science Fiction Film and Its Fight for Survival in a Rar- ume. A previously published work translated by Seth Ja- efied Atmosphere.” The volume concludes with perhaps cobowitz, “On the Monstrous Planet, Or How Godzilla its most significant contribution, Pawel Frelik’s chapter Took a Roman Holiday” is intellectual parkour, combin- “Digital Film and Audience,” which addresses not just ing memoir, erudition, and dramatic mental leaps from how the digital age has facilitated the rise of “world sci- Japanese folklore and the Shinto kami to Melville, Oates, ence fiction film” but also how it impacts Hollywood SF and Bradbury’s “Fog,” to trace Gojira’s origins. filmmaking and reception. This essay has broad applica- The largest and most thorough section covers Europe. tions and would be an excellent support text in an array Derek Johnson reveals how Hammer films negotiated of courses, as Frelik outlines how digital technologies cultural tensions over American cultural imperialism and new media have changed film production, the struc- and British national identity in “The Importance of ture of film narratives, the length of SF films (promoting Transmediality in British Science Fiction Film in the the return of the short film), modes of distribution, con- 1950s.” Johnson’s transmedia approach calls attention sumption, and reception (out of the cineplex and onto to Hammer’s adaptation of television successes to the our televisions, computers and hand-held devices), and big screen and mentions the novelization of films. Katie audience practices, as fans actively and creatively engage Moylan looks at “Science Fiction Interventions in Irish with media texts. Cinema,” situating Irish SF cinema since the 1990s with- This volume represents a solid contribution to the de- in the pre- and post-Celtic Tiger economic boom. As veloping field of “world sf film” studies, and Fritzsche’s Fritzsche points out in her introduction, parody repre- useful “Recommended Viewing” list offers a starting sents a common thread across world SF cinema; Moylan point for novice viewers. While a number of these films observes Irish cinema’s tendency toward “kitsch and might be found in the usual outlets, however, a signifi- irony” which crosses over into SF in Neil Jordan’s The cant obstacle appears for some of the works studied 24 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 25 here, which are not distributed internationally and/or ditions of a variety of literary theoretical frameworks’ subtitled in English. Hopefully, as the number of such (3) in order to accommodate the variety of critical work studies grows, increased interest in such films will fuel addressing Pratchett and the Discworld. their release in DVD or in on-line viewing formats. Reflecting Susan Bassnett’s “Is There Hope for the Hu- manities in the 21st Century?” (2000) which argues that Pratchett is ‘a writer whose work encompasses the most important elements of interdisciplinarity’ (3-4), the edi- Discworld and the Disciplines: tors explain this insight is reflected in the variety of es- Critical Approaches to the Terry says contained in this volume. Roderick McGillis’s essay “The Wee Free Men: Politics Pratchett Works and the Art of Noise” explores the Tiffany Aching se- ries of novels and the ‘noise of these books’ children, the Bruce Lindsley Rockwood Nac Mac Feegle or the Wee Free Men,’ as reflecting ‘the exuberance of childhood coupled with the acceptance Discworld and the Disciplines: Critical Approaches to of responsibility’ (15). McGillis argues that the ‘noise the Terry Pratchett Works. Ed. Anne Hiebert Alton that we hear from the Nac Mac Feegle is the noise of the and William C. Spruiell. Jefferson, North Carolina: future in the sense that it prompts us to accept human- McFarland, 2014. Paperback. 244 pages. ISBN-978- ity in all its confusion and discord to go forward with 0-7864-7464-68 (paperback) $40; ISBN-978-1-4766- a sense of life’s loudness, the loudness of togetherness 1601-8 (e-book) $24.99. and community. Pratchett’s work is nothing if not dedi- cated to equality and community’ (16). Suggesting that Order option(s): Paper | Kindle Pratchett’s work is ‘forward-looking–in a word, futurist,’ THIS COLLECTION OF ESSAYS and reference materi- McGillis argues that a 1913 letter by the Futurist painter als on Terry Pratchett’s extensive body of work and the Luigi Russolo to Francesco Balilla Pratella ‘offers a use- growing body of criticism about it is a useful starting ful entrance’ to Discworld and in particular to the Nac point for readers interested in Pratchett who are seek- Mac Feegle. (16) Citing Perry Nodelman’s The Hidden ing to conduct their own research building on what has Adult, which describes forty-five qualities of children’s come before. The turtle moves, and keeping up with it in books, McGillis adds that books for children are ‘noisier criticism is increasingly difficult, so this work provides a than books for adults’ (18), and he then discusses how valuable overview for those seeking to engage with this the Nac Mac Feegle ‘are transgressive: they lie and steal fascinating and important writer’s contribution to our and drink to excess [. . .] but they are also loyal, persis- genre. tent, and joyous [. . . .] [They] teach us that to be human The core of this collection consists of six essays ad- is to err, but they also teach us to engage in life whole- dressing a diverse range of Pratchett’s works (including heartedly’ (19). many ancillaries), each of which contains its own end- The second essay in this collection, “Coloring in notes and detailed list of works cited. Extensive biblio- Octarine: Visual Semiotics and Discworld,” by Anne graphical material follows, along with short abstracts of Hiebert Alton, is a detailed and careful examination of seventy-six ‘articles, chapters and monographs’ and lists the interaction of the art work connected to the primary of relevant interviews, MA theses, and dissertations. No texts of Discworld --- the book covers of Josh Kirby and doubt that list is cut off by the publication date of this Paul Kidby, decorative art found in the various novels volume, but its range of authors, scholars and resources and ancillary works like the Almanacs and maps, and should enable anyone seriously pursuing further re- the illustrated novels where the art work is planned as a search and with access to an academic library database complete and important contributing part of the story: to have a solid foundation for bringing it up to date and The Illustrated Wee Free Men, and The Last Hero for ex- zooming in on one’s particular area of interest. ample. The art helps ‘to solidify the ways that Discworld In their introduction, the editors emphasize the broad and its inhabitants appear in our imaginations’ (26) and range of works by Terry Pratchett, either alone or in col- ‘consequently they contain an implicit element of trans- laboration, his international and broad appeal to diverse lation of medium as they move from the written word to cultures, and the need to ‘redefine our notions of what the visual image’ (27). She references the ‘picture book exactly constitutes a “text” [. . .] in keeping with the tra- theorist Lawrence Sipe, who notes the necessity of in- 26 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 27 voking interdisciplinary approaches in considering vi- of exploring the treatment of ‘race and human percep- sual literacy [. . .] Sipe argues that when we read pictures tions of the Other’ (92) and resulting potential for eth- and text, we use a kind of filling-in-the-gap process,’ nic conflict in Thud!, The Fifth Elephant, Jingo and other where each fills in gaps left by the other, and the whole works where satire is at play and an implicit critique of is a ‘fuller meaning’ than either alone (30). contemporary global politics is an on-going theme in Alton applies this process to a thorough reading of the Pratchett’s work. Noting the classic work of Johan Huiz- visual works and their connection to the texts, supple- inga, Homo Ludens (1949), Webb recognizes and ex- mented by thirteen illustrations and one figure, but im- plores the role games and art play in resolving conflict: plicitly relying on the reader’s familiarity with the works deflecting not only the dwarfs and trolls from renewed themselves or necessarily requiring a visit to the library war at Koom Valley, but defusing Sally and Angua’s vis- or bookstore to reflect on her insights by reviewing the ceral distrust with the potential for mud-wrestling (98) artwork. She explores the connection of Kirby’s style to and using Commander Vimes’ story-telling to his son Titian, Rubens, Hogarth, and Bosch (32) and describes from Where’s My Cow? as a means to channel his anger how many of the illustrations remind one of famil- and prevent himself from yielding to his ‘Summoning iar paintings and photographs which give the reader Dark’ urges (104-106). a comfortable feeling of a semblance of realism in the The most unusual paper in the volume, “Counting stories they are bound to: Paul Kidby’s cover for Night Dangerous Beans,” by William C. Spruiell, seeks to ex- Watch that mirrors Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, or his plore Pratchett’s style without resort to conventional cover for Monstrous Regiment that provides an ironic forms of interpretation, by applying techniques of “cor- contrast to the famous World War II photograph “Rais- pus linguistics”1–that is, ‘word-counts’ to examine in- ing the Flag on Iwo Jima” (38). Following on McGil- stances of ‘discrete items’ such as ‘type-nouns’ or ‘verbs lis’s insight into the role of “noise” in the works, Alton indicating amplitude modulation (sighed, yelled) or type notes the ‘hectic activity’ found in the Kirby illustrations of utterance (stated, demanded, asked)’ to test some ‘hy- (32) – clearly, sound and fury are key components of potheses’ about Pratchett’s style. The paper also looks at Pratchett’s stories. Discussing the maps of Discworld, Pratchett’s use of (often unusual) names and how they she raises the question of whether they constrain or re- may ‘violate likely reader expectations’ (109-110). The strict the author or reader (66-67), but points out that essay includes definitions of terms used, an extensive Pratchett has said they are ‘not completely accurate,’ and explication of methodology, statistics, and conclusions I agree that on balance they are both beautiful and help- with two Appendices which I will leave to those in the ful, without restricting the creative opportunities that field to evaluate. The essay raises, in my mind, the ques- remain for further explorations in the geography of Dis- tion of determining authorship, or changing style of cworld. ‘The map is not the territory’ (Alfred Korzyb- authorship over time, reflected in the debate over who ski, 1931) after all. wrote the Book of Isaiah, which seems to have three dif- Gray Kochhar-Lindgren’s short “Tell It Slant” initiates ferent authors, based on textual and historical analysis. an exploration of the religious, philosophical and politi- My own reading of Pratchett suggests a change in style cal perspectives and satire in novels such as Monstrous over time which could reflect maturation of his writing Regiment, Hogfather, and Small Gods. He writes Pratch- style, but also the role played by his collaborators (such ett ‘requires not adherence to an ideology [. . .] but, rath- as the work of the artists discussed in this volume) in er, a quirky kind of faith, a belief, we might say, in the changing how he thinks about his characters and ap- possibility of belief by one [. . .] in the magic of language. proaches his work; would corpus linguistics provide a [. . .] Without fictionalizing, in fact, there would be no way of exploring these questions? I do not know. real. The truth must be told, but it must, as Emily Dick- The final paper in the volume, Gideon Haberkorn’s inson has reminded us, be told “slant”’ (81). He explores “Debugging the Mind: The Rhetoric of Humor and Pratchett’s works in relation to Hegel, Heidegger, John the Poetics of Fantasy,” explores how the mind makes Knox, Aristotle, and Derrida, concluding that Pratchett, meaning (Paul Valéry) and the relationship of humor by ‘not acceding to the given (of perception, tradition, and fantasy in the Discworld novels. Haberkorn exam- or ideology), enables us to experience the world anew by ines Pratchett’s use of puns and other wordplay (includ- asking questions [. . .] about the apparently given’ (90). Caroline Webb’s “The Watchman and the Hippopota- 1 [A primer on corpus linguistics can be found in the mus: Art, Play and Otherness in Thud!” does a nice job SFRA Review 311. –ED] 26 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 27 ing understatements, similes, and the use of discursive essays previously), I was disappointed. A volume of footnotes), and the works’ relationship to magic realism. “the very best” promises a useful introduction, though He argues that Pratchett’s novels become ‘theoretical fic- I suppose it is that, but also a cohesive body of work, a tion, i.e., self-reflexive fiction, fiction about fiction’ or key to understanding an author’s oeuvre in brief. Elliott metafiction, using inFeet of Clay the case of golems who suggests this collection is one such in her introductory, can make their own words as a concluding example: autobiographical essay about her life as a reader and ‘Pratchett uses the Discworld to explore the role of the writer. “... I chose to write the epic fantasy and science words in our heads, and how they control us. And how fiction I wanted to see, not the epic SFF I had been sold we can make up our own’ (183-184). as the only authentic brand. I chose to write women at Overall, Discworld and the Disciplines is a comprehen- the center of my narratives. I chose to create space for sive, interesting and challenging collection that belongs myself, by which I meant all of the people I did not see in academic reference collections and points to areas in these stories,” she writes (8). This sounds both lauda- of further research while being accessible (for the most tory and wonderful, but seems to overlook the dozens part) to the general reader interested in Pratchett’s work. of women writers who have done the same thing past (Joanna Russ, Anne McCaffrey, Robin McKinley) and present (Elizabeth Bear, Elizabeth Moon, N.K. Jemisin). Perhaps this only speaks to a need for a wider celebra- tion of such authors and topics. Fiction Reviews The characteristic most of the stories share is that of women rescuing themselves. In “With God to Guard Her,” a pseudo-medieval fable, the heroine fends off a The Very Best of Kate Elliott powerful lord, saving both herself and her family. In “Leaf and Branch and Grass and Vine” the narrator saves Cait Coker her country by rescuing a famous general. In contrast, the heroine realizes that no one can be saved from fame Elliott, Kate. The Very Best of Kate Elliott. San Fran- or corruption in “Sunseeker.” The story, “My Voice Is cisco: Tachyon Publications, 2015. 384 pages, paper, In My Sword” describes the misadventures of a galaxy- $15.95. ISBN 978-1616961794. travelling actors’ troupe that performs Macbeth as part of a diplomatic mission to a new race; that something Order option(s): Paper | Kindle should go wrong with the Scottish play in this context is a surprise only to the characters. These are the stand-out SHORT HIGH FANTASY is a subgenre that has been pieces; the other stories are, unfortunately, rather forget- neglected in recent years, not least because of the table. shrinking number of venues that offer such work. The By far the strongest part of the collection is the four retrospective The Very Best of Kate Elliott collects some essays that conclude the book: “The Omniscient Breasts: of that author’s shorter works across the past twenty The Male Gaze through Female Eyes,” “The Narrative of years. The majority of them originally appeared in vari- Women in Fear and Pain,” “And Pharaoh’s Heart Hard- ous anthologies rather than magazines (only one piece, ened,” and “The Status Quo Does Not Need World- aside from the introduction, is published here for the Building.” Each of these previously appeared online, first time). Elliott is an accomplished novelist, with no but having them in print form will be useful for future fewer than five trilogies and series in print, and several access. These are also the pieces I would use in a class- of the stories in this collection appear in the worlds of room, either for a class on science fiction or for creative those other books. That is this collection’s strength and writing (and for the first two pieces,especially for cre- weakness–if one is familiar with his author, this volume ative writing) as they discuss common-to-the-point-of- is an excellent addition to one’s library, and if one is not, cliche problems in fiction generally and speculative fic- it is not. Little holds the stories together thematically, tion specifically. These essays also seem to articulate the and many of them feel not-quite fleshed-out and not- author’s viewpoint on and problems with genre more quite finished. clearly than the introduction did, and I wish they had As a reader new to Elliott (though after the fact I real- appeared before the short stories rather than after, as ized I had read one of the short stories and two of the an illustration of theory and then practice. Perhaps The 28 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 29 Very Best of Kate Elliott is most useful for what it repre- accidents when she arrives at the Athoek system. Her sents than what it says. The past several years have wit- ship, Mercy of Kalr, is mistaken for an enemy by a Rad- nessed numerous schisms in SFF, not least and most re- chaai warship already on station, and shortly thereafter cently Puppygate. That this book provocatively sets itself ancillaries of the same warship kill a translator for the in opposition to the traditional, white male narratives of alien species Presger, which Breq fears may bring on a story and authorship says more about the current state war the Radchaai cannot win. of fiction than the actual stories do. Breq soon finds herself enmeshed in local politics as well. Athoek was annexed by the Radchaai some six centuries previously, and the tea plantations are con- trolled by local elites who extract labor from conquered peoples who have been transported to the planet. When Ancillary Sword Breq rejects the romantic advances of a wealthy planta- tion owner’s daughter, she finds herself the target of an Bill Dynes assassination attempt. Investigating that attempt, Breq begins to suspect that there is an important connection Leckie, Ann. Ancillary Sword. Hachette Book Group, between these local and personal disputes and the vast New York, 2014. 356 pages, paperback, $16. ISBN interstellar struggles that threaten the Radchaai empire 978-0-316-24665-1. itself. This interweaving of the personal and the public is a Order option(s): Hard | Paper | Kindle | Audible | CD powerful aspect of Leckie’s fiction.Ancillary Justice drew a good deal of critical attention, for example, for its in- ANN LECKIE’S 2013 celebrated debut, Ancillary Justice, triguing approach to gender. Breq, as a Radchaai, doesn’t swept the Hugo, the Nebula, the BSFA, and the Arthur distinguish gender, and consistently uses feminine pro- C. Clarke awards for best novel. Her 2014 sequel, Ancil- nouns in describing herself and other characters, only lary Sword, falls prey to some of the familiar challenges switching to male pronouns when talking with non- of the “middle child” in a trilogy, but is nevertheless a Radch or when specific evidence demands it. Ironically, satisfying and thoroughly engaging space opera. Much what made this element so interesting in Justice was its of the success of Ancillary Sword derives from Leckie’s lack of significance, and that remains true inSword . The willingness to avoid merely repeating what worked so gender of Leckie’s characters is rarely of central concern; well in the first novel, but instead to move her story in in Sword, Breq is surprised by the decorations of the new directions. Sword builds on the themes and ideas of Athoek “Genitalia Festival,” and later has to adjust her Justice, but employs a more streamlined narrative struc- language when addressing the transported workers who ture that allows Leckie to develop her protagonist more have been involved in the plot on her life. She makes the fully and to explore questions about authority, power, correction simply to acknowledge the workers’ language and dependency in thoughtful ways. and sense of self, however. The planter’s daughter whom Ancillary Sword begins shortly after the conclusion Breq rejected has been taking advantage of the power- of the previous novel. The Radchaai dominate an inter- less workers, and whether the victims are male or female stellar empire through their “ancillaries,” human beings does not affect Breq’s moral outrage. who have been networked so that they are essentially By drawing our attention to gender only to downplay extensions of the AIs that control vast warships. Leckie’s its significance, Leckie ties Breq’s ambiguity to larger protagonist, Breq, was once one of these ships, but is now themes of identity and awareness. Breq is less haunted an isolated individual, no longer an ancillary but more by the loss of her broader self as the troop carrier Jus- than merely human. After the events of Ancillary Justice, tice of Toren than she was in the previous novel, but her Breq is given the rank of Fleet Captain and dispatched to struggles to understand others are nevertheless poignant the planet Athoek, where factional fighting is endanger- and compelling throughout her adventures at Athoek. ing the lucrative tea export. Breq’s interest in the mis- Cybernetic implants give her access to everything that sion is more personal; she hopes to make amends there her ship’s AI knows about all of her crew – she can see with Basnaaid, whose sister Lieutenant Awn Breq killed through their eyes, measure their heartbeats, or assess at the orders of the Lord of the Radchaai. Breq’s personal their REM patterns as they sleep. But she has difficulty quest is compromised, however, by a series of suspicious understanding those to whom she is not networked, and 28 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 29 while she can draw upon some two thousand years of We Are All Completely Beside experience with other people, this doesn’t always give her the insight that she craves. The quick pace of the Ourselves novel doesn’t give Breq, or the reader, much time to Chris Pak dwell on these philosophical questions, but they inform Breq’s quest for justice in consistently interesting ways. Fowler, Karen Joy. We Are All Completely Beside Our- That pacing is a substantive difference between Justice selves. London: Penguin, 2014. Paperback, £3.85, 323 and Sword. The first novel tells its story by shuttling -be pages, ISBN 978-1-84668-966-6. tween two chronologies – the narrative of Breq’s quest for revenge against the Lord of the Radch is informed Order option(s): Hard | Paper | Kindle | Audible | CD by the backstory of her loss of her Justice of Toren iden- tity. Ancillary Sword is a more straightforward adven- PUBLISHED IN 2013 and released last year in the UK ture, weaving the military action continued from Justice in hardback and softcover, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All with the political intrigue of the plantation owners and Completely Beside Ourselves has received much acclaim, their serfs. Breq’s entanglement with Raughd, the plan- winning the 2014 Pen/Faulkner award and the 2014 tation owner’s daughter who won’t take no for an an- California Book Award for Fiction, and having been swer, appears at first to be a distracting interlude. Leckie, nominated for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and the 2013 however, quickly weaves it into the larger narrative in Nebula Award. It tells the story of a family that has been a manner that continues the plot’s momentum yet also torn apart by the necessity of separation. Our narrator, permits the reader a closer look at the Radchaai’s meth- Rosemary Cooke, recounts her formative experiences as ods of maintaining order and discipline across their em- a child growing up with her sister Fern – so close in age pire. This linear plot structure can occasionally give the and upbringing that they could almost be twins – and reader the sense that Leckie is simply anxious to get all her older brother Lowell, whom she greatly admires. In the necessary pieces in place for the trilogy’s conclusion, 1979, when Rosemary is five years old, Fern is mysteri- but Breq’s adventures on Athoek are more than compel- ously taken away without explanation, and her family ling enough to keep us thoroughly entertained. life dramatically changes: ‘a rupture in the space-time Fans of Ancillary Justice praised Leckie’s ability to de- continuum of the Cooke family’ (62). Lowell absconds, velop the familiar structures of space opera in ways that a double loss that leaves her mother traumatized and her allowed her to engage big questions of identity, indi- father turning to drink. Rosemary, once an extremely viduality, and commitment. That novel will presumably talkative child, becomes silent and detached from her have a place on any syllabi of classes surveying science peers and her parents and, when she enrolls into col- fiction or focused on topics such as gender, the human/ lege, she moves halfway across the continent from In- technology interface, or narration and self. As a sequel, diana to UC Davis, California, in an attempt to escape Ancillary Sword may not be quite as valuable as a class- her past. Reviewers have found it difficult to discuss the room text; it really is not a stand-alone novel. But it is novel without compromising its lauded narrative twist. clear that Leckie has lost none of her touch here, taking This review will explore the details of that twist after the fresh directions even within a narrower scope. Ancil- following paragraph. lary Sword ratchets up the pace and tightens the focus. The narrative is Rosemary’s memoir of the mysterious Scholars interested in the contemporary space opera territory of her past, told from a moment in the present subgenre will likely be comparing Leckie with writers as she approaches her fortieth year. The narrative itself is such as the late Ian M. Banks and Alastair Reynolds, non-linear, jumping backwards and forwards from the while Leckie’s approach to gender compels references to events of her childhood and her experiences at univer- Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr., Ursula K. Le Guin, and sity. She takes her father’s advice, given to her when she perhaps Joanna Russ. What is most clear is that we have was a talkative child so as to shorten her stories, and every reason to look forward to the conclusion of Breq’s begins in the middle in 1996 when she was enrolled at millennium-spanning adventures when the final novel UC Davis. This allows Rosemary to probe her past by appears this fall. circling around these events from different perspectives, inviting subtle shifts in significance and contributing to the impact of several surprising and sometimes shock-
30 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 31 ing revelations. Rosemary’s deferment of the much pub- human aversion to things that look almost but not quite licized twist to the novel is part of her storytelling tech- like people’ (102). nique. It is her attempt to make the reader understand The history of primate studies brings other stories into and vicariously experience – as much as is possible – her the orbit of Rosemary’s narrative. Rosemary lists several perspective toward the circumstances of her childhood tragic real-world human-ape studies, from Gua and the without compromising the veridicality of those experi- Kelloggs family, Washoe and Nim Chimpsky, and she ences. She attempts, in other words, to avoid springing frequently reflects on animal experimentation and even the trap of widely-held assumptions that might over- cites the use of chimps in space to highlight a history of whelm the truth of her experience. Her memoir is a kind primate exploitation. Fowler’s 2002 story, “What I Didn’t of recovery of speech and memory that surprises even See,” with its allusion to James Tiptree Jr’s “The Women the teller: her memory, as she discovers, has itself been Men Don’t See,” shows how the issue of perspective and under revision as much as the narrative itself revises the relationship between the human and other have been these experiences from the reference point of her almost longstanding themes for Fowler, and have long found a forty year old self. The revisionary status of memory in ground in its instantiation in the relationship between the wake of trauma and the novel’s narrative structure humankind and apes. Donna Haraway’s Primate Vi- – with its constant re-circling of themes and events that sions, too, dialogizes extremely well with Fowler’s narra- present another aspect for the reader to reflect upon – tive, which is no surprise: at the SFRA 2011 conference folds together the narrator’s attempt to explore that lost in Poland, during which Donna Haraway received the terrain, along with the reader’s induction into her past. Pilgrim award, Fowler explains that “What I Didn’t See” The twist to the narrative is fundamental to this story- is a response to Primate Visions (https://www.youtube. telling strategy and exemplifies the way new information com/watch?v=42HisZwKAqQ). We Are All Completely leads readers to dramatically revise their understand- Beside Ourselves is in part an extension of that response. ing of Rosemary’s life. Fern is a chimpanzee, who was Rosemary’s reflection on her relationship with Fern adopted by Rosemary’s parents and paired with their is an interrogation of the species boundary and of the own child as part of a contrastive study on language possibilities for responsiveness across the human-ani- acquisition, animal behaviour and child developmen- mal divide. The narrative raises many questions about tal psychology. Rosemary and Fern spent their insepa- the difficulty of companionship and the dangers atten- rable young lives as subjects involved in a multiplicity dant on attempts to erase or ignore difference. Yet it is of assessments with her father and his graduate stu- quite clear that Rosemary and Fern are able to respond dents. Her mother, too, was equally involved in this pro- to each other, if not always in the ways that Rosemary gramme and recorded the experiments in her journals, believes she was able to as a child. Lowell is essential which she passes to Rosemary when she is in college. It to this aspect of the story as it is through his work as is from her depth plunge into her memory, her strained a member of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) that conversations with her parents, and the evidence of her we are able to see what lies beneath the use of animals mother’s journals that the narrative is stitched together. for scientific research. Lowell is able to track Fern down Epigraphs from Franz Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” after she has been sent away, and this discovery propels align Rosemary’s narrative with Red Peter’s, the ape that him into a career of animal welfare activism. He is thus learns human language and manners in Kafka’s short an eye into the unacknowledged and unrepresented story, but raises several questions that remain tantaliz- foundations of much science, industry and commerce ing and unresolved. In Kafka’s narrative, Red Peter leaves – of society’s quiet assumptions with regard to the place behind his ape existence and can no longer remember of animals in a schema that identifies humankind as ex- what it was like as he had experienced it. Obvious paral- ceptional. Lowell’s membership at the ALF is not pre- lels with Fern highlight how, brought up with a human sented as some route to salvation or as a noble quest, family and identifying herself as human in distinction however, and it falls to Rosemary to tell the whole story. to other chimpanzees, she is unable to fully enmesh her- This is another reason for why it becomes so important self in ape society. Yet Rosemary, too, is not quite able for Rosemary to tell her story. It is Lowell’s story, too, to develop the sometimes awkward yet entirely familiar as much as it is her parents and Fern’s – and because relationships that people form with their peers. She has Fern cannot speak, Rosemary must find the voice that acquired mannerisms that mark her as different, plac- she once had and pass the story on. ing her as the object of the uncanny-valley response, ‘the We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is an extreme- 30 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 31 ly successful exploration of memory and narrative, of Media Reviews what it means to be human and part of a human soci- ety, and what it means to relate to animals. It is a story about growing up in extremely unusual circumstances, witzend [comic] but more than that it is about exploring the significance of the past on present action. It is poignant, touching Dominick Grace in its portrayal of the ruptured Cooke family and Rose- mary’s estrangement; it is distressing, especially so in Wallace Wood. witzend. Seattle: Fantagraphics, the revelations surrounding Fern and her life after she 2014. Print. 608 pages, paper, $85.82. ISBN 978- is sent away; it is also funny and lighthearted, as Rose- 1606997444. mary’s stories about her college friend Harlow and their shenanigans attest to. Fowler brilliantly weaves the as- Order option(s): Hard sumptions underlying behavioural psychology and its opposing voices into the texture of Rosemary’s mem- WALLACE (WALLY) WOOD should be a familiar name oir, allowing her to explore the social impact of science to anyone interested in comic book Science Fiction (or through their psychological ramifications on an indi- comic books in general, for that matter), as his art grac- vidual and her family. I would highly recommend this es some of EC Comics’s best SF stories and therefore novel to anyone interested in the push and pull between some of the best comics SF of the last century. By the memory and narrative, primate studies, and reflections mid-1960s with EC long gone (except for Mad), and the on the self and other. repressive Comics Code thoroughly entrenched, there were few venues for comics artists wishing to do more Works Cited personal or adult work than was permitted at the ma- jor comics companies. The Underground scene was in Ellis, Jason. “SFRA Members Thank Donna Haraway development but had not yet become the cultural phe- During Pilgrim Award Ceremony.” Youtube. 24 Apr. nomenon into which it blossomed (if one can describe 2012. Web. 10 Apr. 2015. https://www.youtube.com/ underground comics with such a term). Wally Wood de- watch?v=42HisZwKAqQ. cided to create such a forum: an alternative to the main- Fowler, Karen Joy. “What I Didn’t See.” in What I Didn’t stream comics market, where artists could do what they See and Other Stories. Massachusetts: Small Beer wanted without editorial interference. The result was the Press, 2010. magazine witzend, an idealistic forum for artists to pub- Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Na- lish whatever they wanted and retain the copyright in ture in the World of Modern Science. London: Verson, their work (almost unheard of in comics at the time). 1992. The first issue, published in 1966, had a “Statment [sic] Kaftka, Franz. “A Report to an Academy.” The Kaftka of NO Policy” on the inside front cover, announcing the Project. Mauro Nervi. 8 Jan. 2011. Web. 10 Apr. 2015. magazine’s artist-centric plan to present work without http://www.kafka.org/index.php?aid=161. editorial interference. Wood put together the magazine Tiptree Jr., James. “The Women Men Don’t See.” in Her for its first few issues before ceding control (though he Smoke Rose Up Forever: The Great Years of James Tip- remained a contributor) to Bill Pearson, who helmed tree, Jr. Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1990. the magazine through the remainder of its 13 issue run, before folding the magazine in 1985. Fantagraphics, one of the leading publishers of classic and contemporary comics material, has brought the entire run back into print in a lovely oversized (9 x 12.5), hardcover two- volume boxed set, excellently and lovingly printed and including an essay by Pearson as well as reminiscences from many of the artists involved. This is an invaluable resource for anyone seriously interested in the genesis of alternative comics, especially comics with a SF/Fantasy orientation, as Wood himself and many major contribu- tors are primarily associated with such genre work. 32 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 33 The list of artists whose work appears is a virtual who’s- ence alongside the more classic SF stylings of figures like who of major SF and Fantasy-oriented comics artists. Williamson and Frazetta allows for some fruitful con- In addition to Wood, there is also work from Vaughn sideration of the underlying assumptions we have about Bodé, Howard Chaykin, Reed Crandall, Steve Ditko, how SF should look; Bodé is rather an innovator in his Frank Frazetta, Jeff Jones, Jack Kirby (only one pin-up, creation of a messier, more baroque SF landscape than sadly), Gray Morrow, Ralph Reese, Al Williamson, and was typical of comics in the 1950s and 1960s, with their Berni Wrightson, and numerous other well-known and clean lines and clean-cut heroes. To be fair, even the not so well-known comics artists. (There is even some more classically-oriented artists here begin to challenge early, undistinguished work by Art Spiegelman, though the expectations of SF-oriented comics, notably Wood generally figures associated with the Underground are and Williamson in “Savage World” in the first issue, an glaringly absent from witzend—Spiegelman and Bodé unpublished and reworked Buster Crabbe comic that being among the few exceptions). Despite the talent looks like a typical 1950s/60s SF story in some respects involved, though, the result is very much a mixed bag. but offers a slightly more nuanced and disturbing view There are two probable reasons for this. of human/alien interaction. Frazetta’s “Last Chance” (is- First, an editorial policy of no policy is great in theory, sue 3) offers a similarly revisionist post-apocalyptic sce- but theory is almost always better in theory than in prac- nario, albeit with a disturbing casualness about rape. tice. The openness to diverse material in some ways is a Most interesting, though probably of least direct rel- strength for witzend, in that it allowed for an eclecticism evance to SF, are the major Ditko stories here: the first rare in comics publications at the time, and it is certainly Mister A stories, in which Ditko’s Randian revisioning interesting to see the range of materials here—from the of the crime-busting masked hero first appeared; and almost photorealistic styles of figures such as Frazetta or his two “Avenging World” stories, dizzying Randian al- Reed Crandall (several issues run some stunning illus- legories in which a personified planet Earth pontificates trations he did for the works of Edgar rice Burroughs) politically. through the more stylized work of figures such as Dit- In short, this is probably not a book anyone would ko to the cartoony work of, say, Don Martin—rubbing want to assign for a SF course—especially not at its high metaphorical shoulders with each other. On the other ticket price—but it is definitely of value to anyone in- hand, the absence of editorial policy or direction means terested in researching the genesis of alternative com- that the magazine really has no voice, vision, or direc- ics and/or the broadening of the parameters of SF and tion. Material advertised as forthcoming in subsequent Fantasy in comics, and there are certainly several stories issues never materializes; stories begun are not contin- that one could profitably assign to students for analysis, ued; and some bizarre shifts and turns occur (notably should one’s library happen to have the book. the fascinating but anomalous issue devoted entirely to the film work of W. C. Fields). Second, while witzend offered its artists the copyright in their own work, it offered no other compensation, SF-Worlds and the First-Person and when it began, there were few other venues for au- thor-owned material to be published. It is probably no Perspective coincidence, therefore, that the number of well-known and highly-visible comics creators decreased drastically Lars Schmeink by the end of the run. None of the 1980s creators one would see as on a par with Williamson, Ditko, Wood NaissanceE. Entwickler: Limasse Five. Publisher: Steam. himself, and so on turn up in the later issues. 2014.
The Talos Principle
34 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 35 to pursue or even a satisfying moment of closure (where The Signal [film] the game reminds us of Vincenzo Natali’s film Cube [1997]). All of this is an intentional negation of player Artem Zubov expectations and a feature of the game, which highlights the geographical exploration of the game space as moti- The Signal. Dir. William Eubank. Perf. Brenton Thwaites, vator for play. In terms of sf then, the game needs be un- Olivia Cooke, Beau Knapp. Automatik Entertainment. derstood, as Frelik argues, as an “iconographic archive 2014. of science fiction in which signature images […] are not only deployed in various permutations but also literally Order option(s): DVD | Blu-Ray | Amazon mobilized and made available to the players” (233) – the game provides a living canvas of sf imagery. YOUNG DIRECTOR William Eubank’s The Signal, the The variability with which sf video games such as The second title in his filmography (following Love, 2011), Talos Principle and NaissanceE appropriate entrenched premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in early 2014. game mechanics such as the first person perspective and Both films present the director’s reflections on human redesign its use, makes clear the expressive potential of nature and how far a human will go in order to survive the cultural form of the video game. The “productive in- or save a loved one. While both films may seem to be tersections” of genre and medium are important start- categorized easily as science fiction, the director only ing points for academic inquiry into our understanding uses conventions of the genre to create impossible situ- of the function of video games beyond a pleasurable re- ations to play out how characters react, elucidating the prieve. Similarly, they provide evidence that games are extremes of human nature. Responding to questions as able to blend artistry and message with game mechanic to what The Signal is about, the director himself notes and thus allow for a deeper and more meaningful game that it is “a personal story about a kid trying to examine experience, as well as pushing the envelope on what en- his emotional and logical self,” (Zimmerman 2014) and compasses science fiction in the 21st century. “is kind of about choices and sort of what drives some- body – the decisions we make, whether we make them Works Cited based off of thinking logically or thinking emotionally” (Thompson 2014) Frelik, Pawel. “Video Games”. The Oxford Handbook of From beginning to end, The Signal addresses a variety Science Fiction. Ed. Rob Latham. Oxford: Oxford UP, of ‘horizons of generic expectations.’ It starts as a road 2014. 226-38. movie —fellow hackers Nic (Brenton Thwaites) and Jo- Schmeink, Lars. “Wolfenstein: The New Order.”SFRA nah (Beau Knapp) and Nic’s love interest Haley (Olivia Review 310 (2014): 57-60. Cooke)—are going on a road trip. Nic (a former run- Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the ner who had to quit because of a leg injury) gradually Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: becomes distant from Haley in order not to be a burden Yale UP, 1979. for her. Since Haley is headed for a year-long study pro- gram, this road trip is their last chance to be together. Simultaneously, the movie promises a solid cyberpunk sub-plot with Nic and Jonah trying to locate a hacker (we only know his nickname—NOMAD) who almost got them expelled from MIT and is now sending them enigmatic e-mails. Locating the hacker’s computer sig- nal, the trio is led to an abandoned house somewhere in Nevada, where they get attacked by an invisible foe. This completes the movie’s first, ‘realistic’ part and takes us to the second, ‘science-fictional’ part. NaissanceE Transported to a laboratory, Nic meets Dr. Damon (Laurence Fishburne), who tells him that the three friends experienced ‘contact’ with EBE (‘an extra-terres- trial biological entity’) and are now dangerously conta- gious. While Damon says that Nic and his friends are 36 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 37 the ones who were contaminated by the aliens, viewers Signal is composed like a Russian ‘nesting-doll’ toy, suspect strongly that Damon himself is the alien, owing placing the film in the same context as the Wachowskis’ primarily to Fishburne’s ‘Morpheus’ charisma, which The Matrix(1999), Josef Rusnak’s The Thirteenth Floor makes us feel like he knows more than a regular human (1999), and Alex Proyas’ Dark City (1998), (the final being could or should. shot is reminiscent of the latter). Following the same Attempting to ascertain what is happening, Nic learns formula, Eubank starts The Signalwith easily the iden- that Jonah and Haley are also being kept at the laborato- tifiable and recognizable ‘real’ world of the road movie ry. At that moment, he decides to follow the path of his genre. But the world we see in the finale is openly fan- emotions and to save Haley, who is in coma. According tastic – it is either an alien planet-size spacecraft, or a to Eubank, this is the climax and the apogee of the plot— cybernetic network of virtual dimensions, or possibly Nic faces a choice between logic and emotions, and he both. Although this image strikes us with its aggressive chooses emotions. At the same time, the rest of the film science-fictional nature, it is presented as the only ‘real’ offers a number of science fiction elements that make it world. While the similarities with the Wachowskis’ and hard to believe that the entire plot can be reduced to an others’ approach are strong, Eubank explores the trans- easily decipherable ‘Bildungsroman,’ or ‘coming-of-age’ gression from the fantastic ‘real’ world to the real ‘fan- story. The filmmakers’ inventiveness and the abundant tastic’ more thoroughly by using our familiarity with imagery of The Signal promise too much to write them different genres of popular culture and by playing with off that easily. our expectations. The Signal does not reveal its generic affiliation till Since The Signal embodies multiple generic formu- the very end, preventing discovery by setting up ‘false’ las, it is a perfect demonstration of how we ‘communi- generic expectations. A scene in the abandoned house cate’ with works of fiction via genres. The film would be where the friends were supposed to find the hacker re- of great value for theorists of genre studies, especially calls the hand-held-camera horror genre; talks of conta- the disciples of reader-response criticism. In academic gious diseases invoke the zombie film orThe Andromeda courses, this film would be a valuable example of con- Strain by Robert Wise (1971). The Signal even makes a temporary low-budget science fiction films demonstrat- nod to the ‘superheroes’ genre. Nic’s injured legs, Jonah’s ing that inventiveness and creativity often hide in-be- arms, and Haley’s spine were replaced with prosthet- tween different genres and contexts. ics that—as Damon explains—were created using alien technologies. Those prosthetics lend Nic and Jonah su- perhuman abilities: Nic can run faster than the speed Works Cited of sound and break walls with a single kick; and at one point we see Jonah hitting the ground with his prosthet- Thompson, Luke Y. “TR Interview: The Signal’s Writ- ics and creating a pulse wave that crushes his pursuers. er-Director William Eubank”. Topless Robot. 2014. The underlying plot strategy that informs the entire
• Given the proximity to Halloween, we are especially Welcome. interested in proposals related to monsters and the 2016 marks the 50th anniversary from the launch of monstrous. Star Trek: The Original Series. To commemorate such an event, plans for the second Star Trek Symposium Please see our website NEPCA Fantastic (http://nepca- are under way. This will differ from the traditional Fan- fantastic.blogspot.com) for further details and ideas. Based Convention in that it is a platform for academ- 38 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 39 ics from across many disciplines to meet and explore ble) published in the original language within the the intersection of humanities and sciences. It will be last three years prior to submission. an academic meeting, with the presentation of scholarly • An abstract in English must accompany all submis- papers that will explore the intersection of the humani- sions; an English translation of the title of the essay ties and the sciences. should also be included. The first Star Trek Symposium held earlier this year • Only one essay per person may be submitted each was well received, thus motivating the organizers to year. plan and thus promote another symposium to celebrate • Submissions must be made electronically in Word Star Trek’s Golden Anniversary. The organizers are also format. in the in the process of compiling and publishing all pre- sented papers of the said symposium in a book. Hope- Prize: $250 U.S. and one year’s free membership in the fully it will be out for the public later on this year or the IAFA to be awarded at the annual International Con- beginning of next year. ference on the Fantastic in the Arts held each March. The event will be held under the auspices of HUMS, Winning essays may be posted on the IAFA website in a programme at the University of Malta that has been the original language and/or considered for publication set up to explore and encourage the interfaces between in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (http://www. the humanities, medicine and the sciences, and aims to fantastic-arts.org/jfa/) should they be translated into facilitate and disseminate cross-disciplinary research. English. The Star Trek Symposium is an event that will appeal to scientists and fans of science fiction alike. Submission: Amy J. Ransom, Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures & Cultures, 305 Pearce Hall, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, MI 48859 USA, [email protected]. Call for Papers—Articles
Title: Jamie Bishop Memorial Award Title: SFFTV Special Issue CFP: “Star Trek at 50” Manuscript Deadline: 1 September 2015 Manuscript Deadline: 1 September 2015 Contact: Amy J. Ransom
40 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 41 Science Fiction Research Association www.sfra.org The Science Fiction Research Association is the oldest professional organization for the study of science fiction and fantasy literature and film. Founded in 1970, the SFRA was organized to improve classroom teaching; to encourage and assist scholarship; and to evalu- ate and publicize new books and magazines dealing with fantastic literature and film, teaching methods and materials, and allied media performances. Among the membership are people from many countries—students, teachers, professors, librarians, futurologists, readers, authors, booksellers, editors, publishers, archivists, and scholars in many disciplines. Academic affiliation is not a requirement for mem- bership. Visit the SFRA Website at www.sfra.org. For a membership application, contact the SFRA Treasurer or see the Website. SFRA EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE President Immediate Past President Vice President Craig B. Jacobsen Pawel Frelik Keren Omry Composition, Literature and Film Dept. of American Literature and Culture Dept. of English Language & Literature Mesa Community College Maria Curie-Sklodowska University Room 1607, Eshkol Tower 1833 West Southern Ave. Pl. Marii Curie-Sklodowskiej 4 University of Haifa, Mesa, AZ 85202 Lublin 20-031, Poland Mount Carmel, Haifa 3190501 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Secretary Treasurer Susan A. George Steve Berman University of California Auburn Hills English Department Davis One, Shields Avenue Davis Oakland Community College CA 95616 Auburn Hills, MI 48326 [email protected] [email protected] SFRA Standard Membership Benefits SFRA Optional Membership Benefits SFRA Review Foundation Four issues per year. This newsletter/journal surveys the field (Discounted subscription rates for members) of science fiction scholarship, including extensive reviews of Three issues per year. British scholarly journal, with critical, fiction and nonfiction books and media, review articles, and historical, and bibliographical articles, reviews, and letters. listings of new and forthcoming books. TheReview also posts Add to dues: $36 (seamail); $43 (airmail). news about SFRA internal affairs, calls for papers, and up- dates on works in progress. Science Fiction Film and Television Three issues per year. Critial works and reviews. Add to dues: SFRA Annual Directory $59 (e-issue only); $73 (airmail). One issue per year. Members’ names, contact information, and areas of interest. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts Four issues per year. Scholarly journal, with critical and bibli- SFRA Listserv ographical articles and reviews. Add to dues: $40/1 year (US); Ongoing. The SFRA listserv allows members to discuss $50/1 year (international); $100/3 years. topics and news of interest to the SF community, and to query the collective knowledge of the membership. Femspec To join the listserv or obtain further information, visit Critical and creative works. Add to dues: $50 (US); $95 (US wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sfra-l. institutional); $60 (international); $105 (international insti- tutional). Extrapolation Three issues per year. The oldest scholarly journal in the field, with critical, historical, and bibliographical articles, book re- views, letters, occasional special topic issues, and annual in- dex.
Science Fiction Studies Three issues per year. This scholarly journal includes criti- cal, historical, and bibliographical articles, review articles, reviews, notes, letters, international coverage, and annual index.
40 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 SFRA Review 312 Spring 2015 41