Author: sfrarev

Review of Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination: A Critical Companion

Michael Pitts

D. Harlan Wilson. Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination: A Critical Companion. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A NewCanon. Hardcover. 135 pg. $49.99. ISBN 978-3030969455.

The Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon series sets out, as described by its editors, to rethink science fiction and challenge traditional “notions of the canon, so long associated with privilege, power, class, and hegemony” (v). In pursuit of these goals, the series posits two key questions in relation to the specific texts under consideration: “Why does this text matter to SFF? and “Why does (or should) this text matter to SFF readers, scholars, and fans” (v-vi). D. Harlan Wilson’s contribution to the series, a critical companion to Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956), skillfully answers these guiding questions through its focus upon Bester as a pivotal figure in the development of the New Wave and cyberpunk movements. As Wilson argues, Bester’s commitment to pushing science fiction beyond its pulp roots was fundamental to the development of the former subgenre while the particular novel in question acts as an early landmark of proto-cyberpunk fiction. In this way, Wilson’s critical companion emphasizes the radical impact of The Stars My Destination, which propelled the canon past the frequently childish inclinations of its earliest works and towards new terrain, including complex analyses of privilege, power, class, and hegemony.

Wilson’s critical companion centers upon the thesis that Bester’s novel “mapped new terrain in postwar SF” and that it “accomplishes what pre-1950s SF novels failed to do in terms of style, structure, and attitude” (17). It is divided into sections covering the author’s career and the novel’s historical context, intertextual relationships with earlier and later science fiction works, and the text’s coded commentary on class, gender, race, and religion. The first chapter focuses upon the inspiration and resulting legacy of Stars, provides a biography of Bester, illuminates his role as both a critical writer of SF and a harsh critic of its contributors, and underscores the recurring tropes of Bester’s fiction. After a synopsis of the novel in Wilson’s second chapter, chapter three explores the literary influences that shaped Bester’s writing style, which Wilson characterizes as dominated by literary tropes and allusions. It additionally considers how Bester’s fiction hints at the future of the genre. Focusing narrowly upon the intertextual parallels existing between the novel and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), chapter four considers these novels’ mutual interest in “charismatic monsters and meta-referentially point to the inherent mad scientism of Shelley’s and Bester’s authorship as well as narrative itself” (17). The most pivotal of Wilson’s contributions in this chapter is his analysis of Stars as a palimpsest under which lie multiple undertexts whose relationships to Bester’s novel are worthy of consideration, including, in addition to Shelley’s novel, the archetypal monomyth and H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) (70).

Moving past these intertextual considerations, Wilson focuses his fifth and sixth chapters upon the commentary Bester includes in the subtext of his novel upon identity markers and religious belief. “Architectures of Psyche, Power, and Patriarchy” considers Bester’s social views and his encoding of them in Stars. Analyzing specifically the novel’s treatments of gender, race, and class, Wilson complicates readings of the text as simply conservative or, on the other hand, radically progressive. Through a careful analysis of the future Bester imagines and the ways the novel’s protagonist, Gully Foyle, embodies both this society’s values and capability of evolving, Wilson introduces welcomed nuance to his analysis of the novel’s subtext. As Wilson outlines, his key argument in this chapter is that Bester “was more evolved than his contemporaries and made strides toward greater equality despite his own construction and entitlement as a white male author” (75). In this way, he presents a balanced critique of Bester as a patriarchal reflection of the culture within which he wrote and as a writer who at times radically subverted widely accepted, conservative perspectives on race, class, and gender.

In the final chapter of Wilson’s text, he considers the pervasive nature of religion within the encoded message of Bester’s novel. In one particularly insightful segment of this analysis, Wilson outlines the textual and extratextual implications of Bester’s encoded critiques of religion as they relate to language. As the title of the chapter, “Speaking in Gutter Tongues,” signals, Wilson illuminates an important connection binding language and religion in Stars. More specifically, he illuminates how dialect and other linguistic elements signal religious affiliation in this imagined society. The protagonist’s “lower-class gutter tongue,” for example, underscores his lack of anti-religious identity (101). But, as Wilson keenly observes, this connection between religion and language works simultaneously as a reflection of Bester’s extratextual desires and intentions as a science fiction writer. Specifically, Bester, Wilson contends, takes on the religious mantle of an exorcist, a mantle similarly taken on by Foyle in the novel. Both Bester and his protagonist aspire to positively reshape “their respective worlds—one from the violence of upper-class tyranny and prejudice, the other from the limitations of SF writers who fail to live up to the genre’s great potential” (101). According to Wilson, language and religion remain, therefore, entwined both within and immediately outside of the novel. This underscoring of Bester’s commentary connecting language and religion within the novel’s plot and Bester’s perceived role as a linguistic exorcist of sorts makes up a pivotal strength of Wilson’s critical companion.

Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination: A Critical Companion is overall a valuable critical tool for a wide audience. It is well-suited both for students seeking a broad guide to Bester’s novel and scholars in search of an in-depth introductory analysis of its key themes, tropes, and encoded messages. Moving beyond a simple overview of Stars, Wilson utilizes theoretically sound and sophisticated critical approaches to interrogate the novel’s significance and impact upon the science fiction genre. With its emphasis upon the ways Stars challenged science fiction’s trajectory and conservative political messaging, Wilson’s critical companion is a strong addition to Palgrave’s New Canon series.

Michael Pitts is lecturer at the University of New York in Prague. His first monograph, Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man, was published by Lexington Books in 2021. His research interests are positioned at the intersection of gender theory, speculative fiction, and utopian studies.

Review of Gendered Defenders: Marvel’s Heroines in Transmedia Spaces

Jeremy Brett

Bryan J. Carr & Meta G. Carstarphen, eds. Gendered Defenders: Marvel’s Heroines in Transmedia Spaces. New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality. Columbus, OH: The Ohio University Press, 2022. Paperback. 216 pg. $36.95. ISBN 9780814258521.

Scholarly, analytical works such as Gendered Defenders demonstrate that, despite opinions in some quarters (including the already tiresome Internet hot takes about being “so exhausted by all the comic book movies”), superheroes have significant cultural value. They produce emotional attachments among their readers and viewers, and they truly do mean something to people. For generations, media consumers have seen their own desires for heroism and goodness reflected in Superman, their own psychological darknesses and conflicts in Batman, their identities as social outcasts and misfits in the X-Men, their belief in love and justice triumphant and the power of a female warrior in Wonder Woman, their frustration with the foibles and troubles of everyday living in Spider-Man, their joy and pride in the heroic Black experience in Black Panther. Whatever their origins, Earthly or cosmic, superheroes are part of our shared human identity. Carr and Carstarphen quote comic writer Grant Morrison in their book’s introduction, noting that Morrison speculates “that the superhero (regardless of gender) holds significant psychic resonance in a world without an optimistic view of the future, providing the reader a surrogate ‘spiritual leadership’; the best superheroines, for all their supernatural exploits, are connected to universal human experiences” (4). One of those experiences is that of gender, and thus Gendered Defenders was brought into being to examine how the Marvel Cinematic Universe has dealt with this most fundamental of human conditions and identities. The fact that the MCU does so, and that its varying treatment of superheroines has produced high levels of both dizzying excitement and high dudgeon (much of the latter inspired by Internet trolls), suggests the ongoing relevance of superhero media to the lived experiences of people. As the editors note, “[p]opular culture has value and power because it can be a conduit through which an individual adapts and forms their own identity…as well as a means of finding commonality and relationships with others and metaphors that provide strength and catharsis in one’s own life” (5).

The MCU looms particularly large in this ongoing phenomenon because of its highly visible and entrenched cultural presence. The MCU is one of the grandest examples of what Henry Jenkins calls ‘transmedia storytelling,’ a form of media production that involves using multiple channels of adaptation (films, comic books, novels, cartoons, games, and other tie-in products) to tell the integrated story of an integrated fictional world across both overlapping and separate narratives. (The editors note that the MCU, of course, is more problematic than traditionally reinvented and reimagined worlds such as the Arthurian cycle, because it is a wholly corporate owned- and directed product geared towards market share and profits at least as much as towards telling new or reinterpreted stories.) How the MCU portrays female characters has significant cultural impact, and—in the book’s core conceit—the evolution of Marvel superheroines over time “mirrors the development, struggles, and triumphs of women in the real world” (7). The MCU does not stand apart from the greater movements of human society, but gives us a reimagined mythology through which to view their evolution. There is great importance in that, and Carr and Carstarphen, in bringing together scholarly essays of thoughtfulness and deep social consideration, demonstrate that superheroines are not mere cultural confections or vehicles for selling toys, but are windows through which we might view ourselves and our treatment of gender.

The book’s opening section, with three essays by the editors, sets the stage, presenting the overall thesis as well as necessary context for understanding how Marvel has portrayed women in its past, and a call to examine Marvel heroines through the lens of a trans/linear feminism (a conceptual model coined by Carstarphen that allows for female agency to pass beyond traditional constraints in progressive personal journeys, obviating the old style master linear narrative). With all these considerations in mind, the majority of the essays in the book involve examinations and critiques of specific Marvel heroines and their relationships to expressions and emanations of power. J. Richard Stevens and Anna C. Turner analyze Carol Danvers (Captain Marvel), the first MCU heroine to be the center of her own film; the essay notes Carol’s evolving image (and problematic portrayals at times) over the decades in comics and her reworking into a figure of positive feminism in the 2019 film (and the comic books beyond, as part of the MCU transmedia experience) in which Carol takes control of her own past and her own identity. The book’s final essay also concerns Carol, examining her character via feminist trauma theory and characterizing her film as a trauma narrative that carries her from trauma to recovery to empowerment. Kathleen M. Turner Ledgerwood looks at the character of Agent Peggy Carter (the first MCU heroine to lead a television show) through the analytical lens of ‘standpoint feminist theory,’ that is, the framework that examines society from the points of view of women (as a marginalized group) in their everyday worlds and the ways in which women socially construct those worlds – it’s a particularly relevant frame for looking at Peggy, a character we see navigating her way through the white male-dominated and intensely gender-divided workplaces of the 1940s and evolving to connect viewers to subsequent waves of feminist thought and action. Amanda K. Kehrberg studies the complicated figure of Jessica Jones and the ways in which Jessica visually and vocally subverts and refuses not only the traditional hero role but the traditional binary concept of gender, particularly through her use (or NON-use) of the superhero costume.

In her essay, Rachel Grant examines the character of Shuri, T’Challa’s sister and the leader of her native Wakanda’s scientific endeavors. Shuri is an active example of an Afrofuturist counternarrative that prioritizes the heroism of intelligence and future thinking and promotes anti-colonialist (very explicitly, in Shuri’s case—viewers of Black Panther in the theater will well recall the many excited responses by audience members to her use of the term “colonizer” when speaking to white CIA agent Ross) structures and viewpoints. Grant notes that Shuri “defies gender stereotypes of Black women” and is “a role model that empowers women to be smart and innovative in fields dominated by the patriarchy” (102). Maryanne A. Rhett deftly analyzes Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel) as a new type of cosmopolitan, even global, heroine, who embodies multiple and overlapping identities (woman, Muslim, teenager, feminist, daughter), none of which dominate her character but all of which define her in different ways. In an unusually constructed piece, Stephanie L. Sanders uses the character of police officer and cyborg Misty Knight to represent the possibilities for Black women to be change agents in dismantling unjust systems and presents Misty herself as a source of intersectionality “where gender, race, and power relations are hypervisible” (132).

Julia A. Davis and Robert Westerfelhaus look at the character of Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow), the first MCU heroine, her status as an “outsider” hero (as a Slav on a primarily American team of heroes and as a hero operating within a secret world of espionage) and her sometimes problematic depiction as a physically objectified figure. Mildred F. Perrault and Gregory P. Perrault examine Pepper Potts, her evolving role/increased presence in the MCU across a close reading of multiple examples of Marvel transmedia (films, animated TV, comics, video games), and how her gender and gender roles have been performed in these various media. And Carrielynn D. Reinhard presents a careful and complex analysis of the character Squirrel Girl (who has not yet appeared in an MCU film, though I remain hopeful) that centers on the various ways in which transmedia storytelling can affect and complicate the development and portrayal of a character. Squirrel Girl is a positive character, promoting dialogue over confrontation and friendly diplomacy over fighting, and who focuses on intelligence, friendship, and female empowerment. In doing so she embodies multiple iterations of feminism and the contradictions therein, but Reinhard suggests that the nature of her corporate transmedia existence allows her to reflect and express feminist values but never truly seek to subvert systems of power.

Gendered Defenders is a wonderfully varied collection of thought on a wonderfully varied collection of heroines, and it is a welcome addition to the body of scholarly study of superhero media. [I do admit that I was surprised not to see an essay on Wanda Maximoff, whose journey from Avengers: Age of Ultron through WandaVision, I think, would make for a fascinating examination of female trauma and power.] If it suffers at all, it is only because, of course, it must inevitably fall behind as the MCU marches on and characters continue to grow and change, and new ones to be introduced. It would be interesting to see how some of the writers might change their conclusions in light of new MCU developments: for example, Peggy Carter becoming an alternate Captain America, or Shuri becoming the new Black Panther. New series like Hawkeye (featuring Kate Bishop) or She-Hulk (with Jennifer Walters) have brought new iterations of superheroines to our attention and express new directions that Marvel is moving in with respect to its female heroes. A sequel to this volume—a Gendered Defenders 2­—would not only be thematically appropriate to studying a transmedia universe fueled by sequels but would provide new and welcome insights into the continuing evolution of the vitally significant cultural figure of the superheroine.

Jeremy Brett is an Associate Librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, where he is both Processing Archivist and the Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection. He has also worked at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region, and the Wisconsin Historical Society. He received his MLS and his MA in History from the University of Maryland – College Park in 1999. His professional interests include science fiction, fan studies, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.

Review of Science Fiction: Toward a World Literature

Michael Larson

George Slusser. Science Fiction: Toward a World Literature. Edited by Gary Westfahl. Lexington Books, 2022. Hardcover. 350 pg. $120.00 ISBN 9781666905359.

            The eminent science fiction critic and long-time curator of the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy George Slusser died in 2014, leaving behind multiple versions of a manuscript about the history and development of science fiction. Gary Westfahl, Slusser’s former colleague at the University of California, Riverside, compiled and revised these materials into this posthumous volume, which, barring any major archival discoveries, marks Slusser’s final contribution to the field he dedicated his career to.

Like Adam Roberts’s The History of Science Fiction (2006) and Brian W. Aldiss and David Wingrove’s Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1973), this project aims not merely to define science fiction in a new way, but to locate the historical origins of the genre. After a brief introduction, the first chapter traces the emergence of science fiction, and, although Slusser does not go back as far as Roberts, who sees even Greek epics as a kind of proto-science fiction, both critics understand the Reformation as a key moment in the development of the genre.

Employing Isaac Asimov’s definition of science fiction as a “branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings” (“Social Science Fiction”), Slusser identifies a series of scientific revolutions that swept across Europe and the United States beginning in the 17th century, which would go on to shape key proto-science fiction texts. For Slusser, the story begins in France, where the anti-clerical rationalism of François Rabelais passes through Michel de Montaigne to René Descartes, whose Discourse on the Method (1637) represents the first of a series of scientific paradigm shifts. Slusser argues that this advancement had an impact on French writing, producing a unique form of fiction, first visible in Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (1670), with its fictional concepts of the “human condition” and the “thinking reed,” which Slusser identifies as “the first genuine works of science fiction” (25). From there, we move to Germany, where the paradigm shift brought about by Immanuel Kant’s influence, especially his “synthetic a priori,” influenced E.T.A. Hoffman’s “Der Sandmann” (1815). Interestingly, it is only after identifying these Continental origins that Slusser turns to British literature.

Unlike many English-language critics, Slusser sees British literature as reflecting the impact of Francis Bacon’s “new science” at a relatively late moment. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818), which is often cited as the first work of science fiction, is brushed aside for taking a posture that is “quite traditional in stigmatizing science” (39). Instead, Slusser identifies H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) as the first British work of fiction that shows science—in this case, the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859)—impacting human activity. The final paradigm shift occurs in the United States, stemming from the philosophical innovations of Ralph Waldo Emerson, although this is only arrived at toward the end of the text, after the key characteristics of science fiction have been investigated.

The middle chapters take up particular themes and markers of the genre. For Slusser, key attributes include the scientist as protagonist, a quest for intellectual liberty, seminal objects or inventions that play a key role in the narrative, and a story in some way concerned with humanity’s advancement towards a transcendent transhumanism, best exemplified by J.D. Bernal’s The World, the Flesh, the Devil: An Enquiry into the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929). As with Roberts, Slusser sees space travel as a key setting for science fictional narrative, although his treatment of this subject primarily serves to underline the difference between the Anglo and French science fiction traditions, the latter of which he sees as bound up with the Cartesian conception of the cogito; although French travelers board rocketships and submersibles, just like their British counterparts, more often than not their journeys are actually explorations of a mental space that is simply reflected in the res extensa.

Throughout these investigations, Slusser does not shy away from controversy, and a number of established theorists and traditions come in for a heaping of criticism. Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) can only “conjure the old specter of the human form grotesquely distorted, stillborn” (211), while China Miéville’s work is “a personal form of urban fantasy whose purpose, it seems, is to confound genre readers while delighting critics” (288). Marxism and Marxist theory are viewed in a skeptical light, and deconstructionism is frowned upon.

Of course, a critical lens can be also applied to Slusser’s text, and when it is, one begins to wonder about the meaning of “world literature,” a term that seems to define the manuscript even as it is never itself defined. A reader might be forgiven for observing that a series of national, European, science fiction traditions are interrogated, with minimal description of the significant interactions between them until the final chapters. In addition, some readers might echo the criticism of the original reviews of the manuscript, which Westfahl reports requested extensive revisions because the book “was devoting too much attention to authors and texts that were not really part of the genre of science fiction” (xi). Although Westfahl sees exactly this as Slusser’s innovation, some scholars may question the usefulness of giving so much attention to certain classics of European literature and philosophy—Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Aristotle, Balzac—in a study of science fiction.

However, on balance, even scholars who are not prepared to sign onto Slusser’s account of the history of science fiction are likely to find his efforts to understand the genre from a more international perspective to be worthwhile. Slusser’s thorough examination of non-Anglo traditions, especially French science fiction, will be edifying for those who are accustomed to thinking of science fiction as an exercise primarily conducted in English. Crucially, in the book’s conclusion, Slusser engages fruitfully with writing from India, China, Israel, East Germany, Romania, and other terrains of “Global SF” (286). Along with the aforementioned volumes by Roberts and Aldiss and Wingrove, Science Fiction: Toward a World Literature makes a valuable contribution to the critical understanding of science fiction’s origins and is a worthy capstone to a vaunted career.

Michael Larson is a visiting assistant professor at Keio University. He completed his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and received a Fulbright Grant to research the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan, later writing a nonfiction account of the disaster When the Waves Came: Loss, Recovery, and the Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami (Chin Music Press 2020). His current research focuses on science fiction and utopian studies and has been published in Poetics Today and Utopian Studies. In 2020, he received a three-year Young Researcher Grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Review of Equipping Space Cadets: Primary Science Fiction for Young Children

Bruce Lindsley Rockwood

Emily Midkiff. Equipping Space Cadets: Primary Science Fiction for Young Children.  UP of Mississippi, 2022. Childrens Literature Association Series. Hardcover. 218 pg. $99.00, ISBN 9781496839022. Paperback. 218 pg. $30.00, ISBN‎ 9781496839015. Kindle E-Book. 211 pg. $30.00. ISBN 1496839013.

        At a time when disputes—whether political, cultural, or merely pedagogical—are growing over what literature should be available to children in pre-K through primary school, and the very idea of encouraging librarians, teachers (and parents) to read aloud from, teach with, or make available to children picture books and early readers that challenge or encourage interest in science (much less science fiction!), especially for girls and diverse readers, Emily Midkiff has undertaken an arduous effort to address this challenge. Her goals are straightforward: to identify categories of picture books and early readers that exemplify ‘quality’ sf; assess how widely sf is available and read by or to children in our schools; to show how young readers are ready for, and appreciate, what she seeks to identify as “quality primary” age sf; and to encourage writers, publishers, and acquisitions professionals in the value of the production and promotion of quality primary sf. (5-8) Wider availability of such texts will better prepare younger readers to transition to more complex sf texts when they reach and exceed the storied “golden age” of 12 so often referred to in superficial discussions of who is “ready for” the genre. (18)

In her introduction, Midkiff discusses the example of a publisher’s initial reluctance to have Jon Scieszka include “too much science” in his sf series that starts with book 1, Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Robot (2014). (3-4) She points out that the book’s text and detailed illustrations include “the sort of plausible explanations found in sf for adults.” (3) Usefully, her close reading of this text includes excerpts from the illustrations in this book (6) and examples of intertext references contained in the story that will ring true to adult readers and primary age children who are exposed to movies, television, and other cultural markers of sf themes. For example Frank is shown “reading a copy of Asimov’s I, Robot when Grampa Al asks to know what he is working on” (4).

Midkiff argues that “sf for preadolescent children… is often approached with the belief… that scientific extrapolation and speculation in fiction are beyond most children’s abilities or interests” (5). Her book argues in essence that this is not true, and she supports this assertion with three interdisciplinary case studies (Chapter 4) to show that primary sf does exist, much of it fits her definition of quality, is appreciated when available, can provoke lively reactions and discussions when presented to small groups of children, and deserves wider acceptance and promotion. Her argument is that the “dismissal of primary sf is fueled by largely ungrounded beliefs about children, science, and genre.” (5)  The case studies are a School Library circulation survey of books checked out in all fields, as coded by Midkiff from records submitted (105-117), which tends to show that primary sf while underrepresented in collections, is more likely to be checked out multiple times than other fiction; a survey of librarians and teachers, 59 of whom responded to the survey request concerning whether they recommended or made us of primary sf in class; (117-129) and a small group read-aloud exercise of several stories where she read to children with parental consent, recorded the event and analyzed the responses of the children to the texts and each other’s comments (130-151).

Chapter 1 of the book commences with a review of two related questions: “What is Children’s Literature?” (9-12) and “What is Science Fiction?”(12-16), followed by an integration of the two: “What is Primary Science Fiction?” (17-27), and a “Guide” to identifying primary sf (27-30). This is applied to “The Case of Robots” (30-35), with a close textual analysis of Rian Sias’s Zoe and Robot: Let’s Pretend (2011). Midkiff usefully compares claims, arguments and examples from Brian Aldiss,  John Clute, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Grace Dillon, A. Waller Hastings, and in particular Farah Mendlesohn’s The Intergalactic Playground (2009) to lay out the scholarly critical background for her investigation of her theme, the value of primary sf.

She condenses this chapter into a three-part test to determine whether primary sf can be said to be ‘quality’: “1. Is there a speculative ‘what if’ question or extrapolative ‘if this, then what?’ question to the story?  2. Does the ending imply that something has changed in the world or that new possibilities have opened due to the events of the story, however small? 3. Would the story’s plot, themes or lesson be different if you replaced the sf components of the story with something realistic or magical?” (30)

Chapter 2 addresses the  general question of how readers read and interpret science fiction generally, discusses the “processes and protocols of reading sf” (37-42), and applies them to the forms of early childhood literature such as board books, popup books, picturebooks, early readers and so forth. She applies the “reader response theory of reading first described by Louise Rosenblatt” to how children read sf  (37), and cites the work of Darko Suvin, Orson Scott Card, and David Hartwell to discuss how the “sf intertext includes far more than just books” and provides a cultural foundation to facilitate children understanding and appreciating the themes and stories of sf texts (38-39). Her investigations show that “widely consumed reboots of Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who” and more prepare young children to successfully read and relate to sf (39) As for all reading instruction, Midkiff notes that “high-quality primary sf offers support—-or ‘scaffolding’—for young readers, ensuring that sf is accessible to children of various skill levels and backgrounds,” citing the work of Jerome Bruner and Lev Vygotsky (42). She applies a close reading of Chris Gall’s There’s Nothing to Do on Mars (2008), showing how the pictures provide context and meaning that challenges the text, and how the book “pushes back against the idea that sf and children’s fiction have conflicting patterns, and the text/picture tension is critical to that message.” (50-51) As another example she cites David Wiesner’s picturebooks Flotsam (2006) and June 29, 1999 (1992) (51-53), the latter one of the books she used in her read-aloud case study to assess how children react to a text in real time (132-145).

Chapter 3 focuses on “Reading Representation,” addressing the various ways in which primary sf, and particularly early childhood sf, tends in recent decades to provide more representation of, and opportunity for self-recognition of themselves, in girls and diverse communities than in children’s literature generally. She cites Lisa Yaszek’s observation that sf has always been “naturally compatible with the project of Feminism” (70).  Midkiff notes the conservative complaints about the Hugo awards to N.K. Jemesin for her Broken Earth trilogy, which was perceived as somehow a threat to genre sf  (70), but argues that primary sf is “in the direst need of attention to diversity” (71). Using the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC), https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/ , as a resource, she shows the low percent of the 4035 children’s books of all sorts published in 2019 that feature Black/African, Asian, Latinx, Pacific Islanders, Arab, or Indigenous  characters. Female characters are also underrepresented. Her own research shows that “High-quality, diverse primary sf books already exist, but they are not getting nearly enough critical attention or support” (72), citing the 357 primary sf books she identified in her study (87). Appendix A identifies the 357 primary sf books from the 1920s to the 2010s to support her analysis (157-178). Pros and cons of several representative stories are discussed, including Deborah Underwood and Meg Hunt’s Interstellar Cinderella (2015) : “The mechanical engineering  aspect of the story is sidelined in favor of the fractured fairy tale” (74). In contrast, Ben Hatke’s Zita the Spacegirl (2010) is seen to “satisfy several girl-friendly aspects in conjunction with speculation” (75). She reprints several pages of illustrations from the book to illustrate her explanation (76-77). Other examples include A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel (2015), and Ryan Sias’s Zoe and Robot: Let’s Pretend! (2011)

Midkiff then discusses “Alternative Futurisms and Primary Science Fiction” (83-91), exploring the potential for more diverse primary sf, acknowledging a few positive representative examples, while acknowledging their limitations. She explains: “To examine the extent of diversity in these books, I coded them into two categories proposed by Lee Galda et.al. in Literature and the Child: painted faces and culturally rich.” The former refers to a story that offers “visual cues of diversity” which may not otherwise impact the story line, while culturally rich stories have “a nonmainstream culture or identity… integral to the story.” (87)  She argues it is not enough to have “painted faces” representing diverse characters in illustrations, the stories themselves should be culturally rich to enhance young readers of all backgrounds engagement with the text (87-88).  One positive if rare example given is Cathy Camper and Raul the Third’s graphic novel Lowriders in Space (2014), discussed in detail with reprinted illustrations. (89-93)  The only primary sf discussed in her data set that features a Native American character is Adam Rex’s hybrid novel The True Meaning of Smekday (2007) (97-100). There is a Pearson statistical analysis of the correlation of gender, diversity and sf quality in the books in Midkiff’s data set (91 and Appendix A) which shows “quality is slightly correlated with female characters and not reliably correlated with diversity” (91).  I appreciate the attempt here to provide statistical rigor to what is essentially an impossible task, and the effort here provides  a template for future scholarship in the field.

The book concludes with two Appendices providing documentation of her sources and evaluations. Appendix A describes and lists the 357 texts she “read and analyzed for this study” covering works from the 1920s to the present (157-178). Books included were limited in three ways: they had to meet the definition of sf she provides in Chapter 1; be significantly illustrated to meet her emphasis on early primary readers as the target of her research; and her decision that there could be no more than 3 books in the same series (157). Books were grouped as Picturebooks, Early Readers, Comic Books, Graphic Novels, or Hybrid Novels. Each was evaluated for quality (Yes/No: was  Speculation and/or Extrapolation encouraged by the text?); whether they had female primary characters; and whether they promoted diversity by either of the broad categories discussed in Chapter 3: “painted face,” “culturally rich,” or none (161). Appendix B (179-186) contains a list of suggested recommended quality sf texts in the age appropriate categories she identifies. The book concludes with end notes (187-190), works cited (191-199) and an index (201-206).

Having read aloud a great many board and picture books over 50 years, many of them fantasy or sf, to our four children and our grandchildren, and as the son of one librarian and being married to a children’s librarian/early childhood educator, I was initially inclined to doubt her hypothesis that primary sf is not widely available or promoted. I thought of earlier Jon Scieszka books such as The Time Warp Trio series, with its own t.v.series spin-off,  https://www.timewarptrio.com/, The Enormous Egg by Oliver Butterworth (1956), The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet (1954) by Eleanor Cameron, and the Danny Dunn series of adventures by Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams, all of which have useful illustrations, are aimed at younger readers, and address science fiction tropes, as a few examples not mentioned in her book. And then there are, in addition to school libraries, other means of exposing children to sf she might explore to expand her sense of the contemporary reach of primary sf, such as the Bruce Coville and other books many children are offered in Scholastic Books Club newsletters and school book fairs over many years. See: https://clubs.scholastic.com/home [Although censorship of their offerings is creeping into what schools in some states can now offer; see: https://www.npr.org/2023/10/17/1206219484/scholastic-book-fair-diversity-book-bans and https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/us/scholastic-book-fair-race-gender.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare ] The omission of some of these authors and potential resources suggests that there is more sf (quality or otherwise) available to younger children than Midkiff may realize. On the other hand, school and town libraries have limited space and budgets, and books get worn out and deaccessioned, so some of the books I’m familiar with, as well as those discussed by Midkiff, may not be readily available. We are agreed that there is a need for more willing and eager young readers, and that this can be supported by more quality primary sf being written and published. Midkiff’s book should be included in the libraries of schools of education, and considered by public and school librarians as they review their acquisition policies and make more invitations to authors to visit for book talks in the children’s room. It matters.

Bruce Lindsley Rockwood, Emeritus Professor of Legal Studies at Bloomsburg University, Pennsylvania, is a long-time member of SFRA, having served as Vice President (2005-2006), and regularly writes reviews for SFRA Review from his retirement home in Midcoast Maine. He has taught and published on law, literature, climate change and science fiction, and attends SFRA and WorldCon with his wife Susan when possible (most recently in Montreal, Spokane, and the June 2021 virtual SFRA).

Review of Rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke: Centenary Essays

Jerome Winter

Andrew M. Butler and Paul March-Russell, eds. Rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke: Centenary Essays. Gylphi Limited, 2022. SF Storyworlds: Critical Studies in Science Fiction Series. Paperback. 306 pg. $40.00. ISBN  9781780241081.

Andrew M. Butler and Paul March-Russell, the editors of this new collection by leading scholars of Arthur C. Clarke, begin with a riposte to the still pervasive marginalization of genre work in literary studies and culture at large. In a 1998 article for The Village Voice, Jonathan Lethem, a supremely genre-savvy writer, famously offered a broadside in which he characterized Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama as “reactionary SF as artistically dire as it was comfortingly familiar” (qtd. in Butler and Russell 1). If Rendezvous with Rama had lost its Nebula Award to Thomas Pynchon’s also-nominated Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973,Lethem facetiously conjectures that, then, the New Wave experiments of the SF genre would have at last escaped their commercial straitjackets, and the SF genre as a basic category of fiction would have evaporated with a collective sigh of “good riddance.”

Butler and March-Russell bristle at Lethem’s tendentious dismissal of Clarke’s brand of hard-SF fiction, but, more substantively, they challenge the equally unquestioned conventional binary that seeks to oppose a virtuosic genre-hybridizing and postmodern writer such as Thomas Pynchon to a less flamboyant innovator like Arthur C. Clarke who wrote, at least superficially, from within genre constraints. Indeed, with this impressively informed and diverse collection of essays that began at a 2017 centenary conference memorializing Clarke’s birth in 1917, Butler and March-Russell make a convincing case that the broad range and intricate subtlety of Clarke’s deep veins of literary-SF ore have yet to be critically assayed, let alone sufficiently mined. In their introduction, Butler and March-Russell argue that it is impossible not to read Clarke as a “homo duplex, a perpetually two-sided and enigmatic figure” (7). Indeed, the deeper and more carefully a reader looks, the more the lucid simplicity of Clarke’s career concerns seems to be, on closer reflection, a mysterious bundle of contradictions.

One of the overlooked ways in which Pynchon and Clarke are surprisingly likeminded is their obsession with fictively overcoming the inexorable laws of physics, such as gravity or entropy. Noting that the Overlords in Childhood’s End (1953) both fly and manipulate gravity, Thore Bjørnvig traces Clarke’s literary pedigree to the long tradition of eschatological and apocalyptic writing that levitates the future of humanity upward to disruptive visions of radical progress. Jim Clarke then picks up this fundamental paradox of Clarke’s rational-fantastic fiction to explore Clarke’s debt to what Clarke himself called his own unique blend of “crypto-Buddhist” metaphysics. Likewise, in “Clarkaeology,” Patrick Parrinder argues that even though Clarke’s fiction seems to be “strikingly forward-looking” (35), it also evinces a powerful sense of “belatedness,” betraying a keen interest in archeological theories about the diffusion of cultures, especially in the fascination with megaliths and obelisks.

Developing this critical analysis of Clarke’s unique twists on future histories, co-editor Paul March-Russell, in his own contribution to the collection, performs a close reading of The City and the Stars (1956) to argue that Lee Edelman’s notion of queer futurity can help readers understand how Clarke subtly subverts the common assumption that this prototypically hard-SF writer implicitly champions technological and imperial (galactic) progress. Similarly, connecting Clarke to Robert Heinlein’s movie tie-in Destination Moon (1950), the Russian SF writer Pavel Klushantsev, and the British SF writer E.C. Tubb, Andy Sawyer’s chapter argues that Clarke avoids straightforward propagandizing for Cold War ideology. Sawyer, though, cautions that Clarke wrote for an audience composed largely of technocrats and fans, and Clarke therefore soberly appeals to the power of scientific explanations and regularly evokes the sublimity of the cosmos, even if he also undercuts these semi-heroic gestures.       

   Another chapter that concerns itself with excavating the queerness in Clarke’s oeuvre would be Mike Stack’s “Clarke Dare Speak Not Its Name,” which explores the futuristic normative bisexuality of Imperial Earth (1975) against the illuminating historical backdrop of the partial decriminalization of homosexuality in the UK. In an essay that is equally attentive to textual details, co-editor Andrew Butler, drawing on theories of Freud, Heidegger, Haraway, and Derrida, explicates Clarke’s representations of tools in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and 2010: Odyssey Two (1982)as not only empowering prosthetic enhancements but also as unsettling posthuman transformations. With an emphasis on Clarke’s uncertain mixture of skeptical deflation and heady enthusiasm entirely in keeping with this nuanced volume, Helen M. Rozwadowski discusses Clarke’s writings and life of active undersea diving to show how Clarke probes the limits the frontier analogy for both sea and space.

This collection also incisively focuses on Clarke’s legacy with one chapter by Lyu Guangzhao on Clarke’s influence on Liu Cixin and contemporary Chinese SF, and one chapter by Joseph S. Norman on Clarke’s influence on Iain M. Banks and New Space Opera. Nick Hubble’s final chapter on the history of the Clarke Award and how the award has become more controversially unpredictable and less narrowly restrictive in its selective criteria over the years suggests the more or less consensus view today, in China Mieville’s clever pronouncement, that “any sufficiently advanced science fiction is indistinguishable from literature” (qtd. in Hubble 236). This chapter is a fitting conclusion to the volume as it revisits the dismantling of the problematic binary between SF and mimetic literature that the other important contributions to Clarke scholarship contained in this collection also consistently upend. This wide-ranging, insightful, and often scrupulously evenhanded collection would serve equally well SF novitiates, veteran Clarke scholars, and those interested more broadly in the contested boundaries between genre and mainstream fiction.            

Jerome Winter is an SF scholar who studies literary space opera, citizen science, and pedagogy. His most recent published book is a critical introduction to the Mass Effect videogame series as an innovative iteration of space-opera narrative.