Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  49. See Richard J. Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading (New Have, CT: Westview, 1998), pp. 10–17.

  50. This latter problem is Gerard Genette’s chief focus in Narrative Discourse.

  51. During this first period of time travel literature, the single work most often identified as an origin is also written: H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). For a number of reasons, which I discuss in the opening chapters, I decline to grant such credit to Wells’s book. However, I discuss The Time Machine at greater length in my “Historical Interval II.”

  Recommended further reading

  Broderick, Damien. Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1995.

  Develops a model for reading SF that draws on Delany’s theory of “subjunctivity,” arguing that the best SF uses the genre’s linguistic resources to fundamentally unsettle ontological categories, in ways that converge with the insights of postmodern theory.

  Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2008.

  A major study that anatomizes the genre into seven distinct “beauties,” each with its own aesthetic logic and history: “Fictive Neology,” “Fictive Novums,” “Future History,” “Imaginary Science,” “The Sublime,” “The Grotesque,” and “The Technologiade” (i.e., the epic construction of the cosmos as a “technological regime”).

  Delany, Samuel R. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. 1977. Rev. ed. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2009.

  Collection of ten essays on the function of language in SF, which contrasts the genre’s estranging techniques with the naturalizing rhetoric of realist fiction; includes powerful analyses of works by Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K, Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and Roger Zelazny.

  Ferns, Chris. Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1999.

  One of the most insightful studies of the narrative dynamics of utopian writing, anatomizing the tensions between conservative form and radical content in ways that have significance for the SF genre as well.

  Gomel, Elana. Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination. London: Continuum, 2010.

  A study of postmodern SF in terms of its engagement with the narrative logics of temporality, especially the movement beyond linear schemes and mechanistic causality; see also the author’s Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature (Routledge, 2014).

  Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005.

  Dense study of the relationship between SF and utopian writing, analyzing the poetic ideologies that structure these genres, both enabling and constraining their powers of social critique.

  Malmgren, Carl. Worlds Apart: Narratology of Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.

  A structuralist anatomy of the genre that divides work into extrapolative and speculative modes, with the former driven by prediction and the latter by visionary projection; offers one of the best analyses of the operations of “science fantasy” available.

  Meyers, Walter E. Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction. Athens: Georgia UP, 1980.

  A study of SF in relation to problems of communication, especially with aliens; offers trenchant analyses of how SF texts both thematize and structurally address these linguistic difficulties.

  Scholes, Robert. Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame UP, 1975.

  Argues for SF as a genre of speculative fabulation, which combines the forms of satire and romance, and which (following Darko Suvin) engages readers conceptually through a strategy of defamiliarization.

  Stockwell, Peter. The Poetics of Science Fiction. Harlow, UK: Longman, 2000.

  Examines how readers decode SF texts, drawing on the discourse of cognitive linguistics to show the ways that connections are made between imaginary worlds and real-world experience.

  Part 3

  Ideology and world view

  This section opens with a polemical defense of the genre as a potentially radical form of literature, originally delivered as a speech at the 1937 Third Eastern Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia by John B. Michel on behalf of the Committee for the Political Advancement of Science Fiction. Strongly influenced by Marxist theory and activism, Michel—a member of the left-leaning fan group The Futurians—denounced the political complacency of most of his fellow fans, as well as the “gigantic junk pile of stinking literature and less than puerile achievement” that, he alleged, constituted the bulk of pulp SF. The genre was in danger, Michel argued, of squandering its great potential as a vehicle for evoking utopian futures and thus combatting the forces of “barbarism.” His argument for a political awakening of SF can be seen as being aligned with what Michael Denning has called the “Cultural Front” against fascism during the 1930s.1 Michel’s essay ends with a stirring call to arms, urging fans, authors, and fellow travelers to embrace a mission to “lead humanity out of the Valley of the Shadow into the dazzling light of a triumphant future.”

  Writing almost three decades later, Susan Sontag’s arraignment of SF’s complicity with facile and reactionary apocalyptic fantasies does not suggest that the genre had taken up Michel’s militant leftism. Sontag is addressing SF film rather than literature, a form that, she argues, is in many ways superior because, unlike print SF, it has the “unique strength” of immediacy and representational power. The core theme of SF cinema, according to Sontag, is disaster, featuring multifarious scenarios of catastrophe up to and including “the destruction of humanity itself.” In its treatment of this theme, SF cinema is often deeply contradictory, on the one hand longing for peaceful resolutions, while on the other reveling in bellicose paranoia about alien enemies. Like Michel, Sontag argues that most SF constitutes an “inadequate response” to contemporary geopolitical threats, its undeniable charms insufficient to counteract the “primitive gratifications” offered by its powerful visions of armageddon.

  Like Sontag, SF author Joanna Russ offers a harsh indictment of the political ideologies of science fiction, while still holding out hope, like Michel, that the genre can be redeemed from its worst impulses. While SF, which ostensibly has the whole universe and all of the future in which to operate, ought to be able to summon imagery and ideas far exceeding the status quo, the sad fact, according to Russ, is that the vast majority of work published in the genre regurgitates stereotypes about women without interrogating them. One of the earliest works of feminist SF criticism, Russ’s essay attacks SF for constructing a kind of “intergalactic suburbia” in which gender roles and values conform with those prevailing in the present day, rather than critiquing or transcending them. Invidiously misogynistic assumptions about women—for example, that they lack intelligence or should be viewed solely in terms of appearance—are embedded in the fabric of much SF, while some stories—such as works that satirize imagined matriarchal dystopias—are actively anti-feminist, lampooning women’s pretensions to social power and autonomy. Russ’s essay was hugely influential in impelling the genre to confront its ideological limitations, paving the way for an overtly feminist SF writing in the coming decades.2

  While Michel and Russ believe that SF has the resources to project alternative realities, resources that have simply not been activated by most authors, Fredric Jameson provides a more sobering perspective, suggesting that the genre can be defined precisely by its inability to truly imagine the future. The anticipatory promise of SF can always be shown, in retrospect, to be a failure, with the genre historically mounting a series of fictive projections that never escape the orbit of the prevailing “political unconscious,” which both enables and constrains the prophetic imagination. Yet that does not mean the enterprise is pointless or quixotic since the mere fact that SF defamiliarizes present-day reality is a serious political function, potentially reorienting
a reader’s experience of that reality in important ways. The future, for Jameson, can never be represented in an SF text, because writers are obviously limited to the worlds they know, but the possibility of simply grasping the nature of these limitations, however obliquely, is itself a significant political accomplishment of the genre. Since Jameson is a Marxist critic, his goal is the imagination of a world after capitalism, but even if SF fails in its attempts to project such a world, the failure itself can be powerfully instructive. At the very least, by purporting to gaze forward in time, SF can restore to readers a sense of their own historicity and of the evanescence and mutability of all “presents,” including their own.

  An even more optimistic argument for the political potential of SF, in terms of its capacity for critiquing capitalism, is offered by Carl Freedman. Freedman’s thesis is at once simple yet sweeping in its theoretical implications: SF as a genre has deep affinities with the tradition of Marxist critical theory. In particular, its mode of representing the future is “profoundly dialectical,” showing the historically constructed nature of the most taken-for-granted institutions and values. Building on Jameson, as well as on Darko Suvin’s definition of SF as a literature of cognitive estrangement, Freedman argues that SF tends, in its defamiliarization of the actual, to offer, “at least implicitly,” a sense of “utopian possibility”; however, like Suvin, Freedman is compelled to admit that the vast bulk of SF fails to live up to this heady promise, acknowledging that “many texts classified as SF make major retreats from the conceptual radicalism of the SF tendency.” Nonetheless, SF’s capacity to project alternative realities makes it one of the most powerful agencies for the critical demystification of social ideologies in modern popular culture.3

  Wendy Pearson’s essay converges in some ways with Freedman’s concerns, arguing that SF can function to denaturalize sexual ideologies in provocative and productive ways. The genre does this not simply by representing alternatives to heteronormative identities, though this strategy itself might be a useful tool for unsettling homophobic assumptions. Rather, its most powerful texts work to “queer” identity as such, “resisting attempts to make sexuality signify in monolithic ways” (e.g., in terms of the binary of gay vs. straight) and moving toward a completely “different understanding of subjectivity and agency.” Pearson distinguishes between “queer texts”—that is, stories that either explicitly or covertly challenge naturalized assumptions about sexual identity and desire—and “queer readings,” which involve deconstructive reevaluations of tales that, on the surface, may seem deeply heteronormative. Just as Freedman argues for a homology between SF and critical theory, so Pearson suggests that SF shares significant epistemological terrain with contemporary queer theory; in short, both scholars locate, within the genre’s representational strategies, a compelling and incisive critical problematic.

  The final essay in this section by Lisa Yaszek moves in a different direction, away from large-scale theoretical claims toward a careful historical reconstruction of the sociopolitical valences of science fiction. While Russ dismissed the vast bulk of pulp-era SF as a wasteland of misogyny, Yaszek shows instead that a serious discourse on gender conflict and relationships—spurred by a diverse array of female authors, editors, and fans—had evolved within the genre well before the advent of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and the emergence of overtly feminist SF in the 1970s. Examining the work of a number of authors who have seldom been seen as part of SF’s literary canon, Yaszek shows that the immediate postwar decades, assumed to be a period when women were consigned to domestic roles, featured proto-feminist SF writers who at once challenged this social orthodoxy and pointed toward futures of increasing female empowerment.4 Yaszek also demonstrates that this sort of subversively critical writing was aligned with nascent forms of women’s activism—around issues of civil rights and nuclear disarmament, for example—that potently interrogated and rejected Cold War era ideologies. While several of the critics in this section see political value in only a small subset of genre production, Yaszek’s approach is instructive in showing that much SF that is now largely forgotten was, in its time, significantly effective in critiquing prevailing social norms and values.

  Notes

  1. See Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the 1930s (New York: Verso, 2011). For background on the political activities of SF fans during the period, see Damon Knight, The Futurians (New York: John Day, 1977) and Frederik Pohl, The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (New York: Ballantine, 1978).

  2. For discussions of Russ’s central role in establishing a feminist critical discourse within the genre, see the essays gathered in Farah Mendlesohn’s On Joanna Russ (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2009).

  3. Freedman expanded the argument in this article into a book length treatise, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2000).

  4. Yaszek’s essay formed the seed for her book, Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2002).

  15

  Mutation or death!

  John B. Michel

  “Mutation or Death” is a transcript of the speech delivered by Donald A. Wollheim for John B. Michel at the Third Eastern Science Fiction Convention, Philadelphia, October 1937.

  Mr. Chairman, Members of the Convention Committee, visitors, and friends:

  What I am about to say is the result of much thinking and introspection on my part and on the part of the several of my friends here today who support a new program for the future of science fiction—which shall be the main topic of my talk this afternoon.

  To open this discussion it would be well to put forward a statement pregnant with meaning, a statement above all appropriate to the speech, a statement heavily loaded with dynamite and fraught with shaking possibilities.

  I hereby make that statement.

  The Science Fiction Age, as we have known it during the past few years, is over. Definitely over and done with. Dead, gentlemen, of intellectual bankruptcy.

  Unfortunately, for any persons who might still be harboring any thoughts of optimism while moping over the moldering corpse, the decision is entirely final. I am not fooling when I say this. You can take it or leave it. But I believe, in the light of what I shall say further on in this talk, you’ll take it.

  Naturally such a statement calls for proof, strong, unbending proof guaranteed to stand up under criticism of the most searching nature.

  Need I offer any more positive a proof than the conduct of this convention itself?

  Gentlemen, we are gathered here this afternoon in solemn conclave—to do what? To do precisely what?

  In a few words let me put forth my opinion on what we are doing. My opinion is that we are baloney bending, throwing the bull, indulging in dull flights of fancy, tossing barrels of rhodomontade all over the place.

  I see before me fans, writers, editors, and publishers, stf fans all and but a handful really awake to the enormous possibilities inherent in that fragile little thing called science fiction, that potentially mighty force which is rapidly being buried in a deluge of obscure issues, meaningless phrases, stupid interpretations, and aimless goals.

  When the first science fiction fan organizations came into existence several years ago, they did so because of a need—a need, however obscure, which nevertheless existed. That need was expression. We all know the various organizations that were formed. Why recall their history, their mistakes, their stupid, colossal, blundering mistakes of bickering and internal strife and more and still more baloney bending? In reviewing the field in its entirety we would be doing nothing more than adding to the dull, dreary reams upon reams of historical fact, consigned already to the limbo of forgotten things.