Author: sfrarev

Review of Science Fiction in Translation

Alice G. Fulmer

Ian Campbell, ed. Science Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Studies in Global Science Fiction. eBook. 359 pages. $109.00. ISBN 9783030842086. Hardcover ISBN 9783030842079. Softcover ISBN 9783030842109.

Science fiction (often abbreviated throughout this volume as SF), as a genre, has far more potential than just to provide scaffolding for media franchises that have dominated Anglophone ‘fandom’ spheres, such as Doctor Who or Star Wars. Modern translation studies and its dissemination into other fields, such as SF, carries the tools to decenter and destabilize the Anglocentrism of these media ventures. And it is precisely at these intersections that Georgia State University’s Ian Campbell makes a powerful case for inclusivity in SF. A scholar of Arabic science fiction and its translation into English, he binds together articles incredibly diverse not only in language and/or place of origin, but in genre and across  time. Campbell dispenses this attitude readily to the intersection of SF and translations studies—a mission statement from the volume’s beginning:

SF as a genre evolved largely—though by no means exclusively—in English and in Anglophone cultures. In these cultures, even readers who don’t care for SF will likely have a clear understanding of the characteristics of the genre; they will be accustomed to the tropes and discourse of SF to an extent that readers in other cultures may not. There are many languages and cultures where SF has a firm presence: Russian and French at first, then Japanese, Spanish and Korean, and Chinese and some of the languages of the Indian subcontinent. There are still other cultures (notably, in sub-Saharan Africa) where literature is often written and read in English but where SF is a comparatively new phenomenon. This is in no way to say that people from such cultures cannot or do not understand SF: of course they can, and among other things, the expansion and distribution of SF film and television have gone a long way toward bridging that gap. (Campbell 7)

This volume does not show up empty handed or without evidence for Campbell’s vision for international science fiction. It does, though, fight for inclusion in a field dominated by ‘angloisms’ and by extension, one that has historically been white, misogynist, and queerphobic. Painfully so. An antidote is to bring attention to other canons, authors, ideas, and corpuses, moreso by introducing the Anglo world to non-Anglo SF instead of the other way around. Walt Disney Studios and its affiliates have that market cornered.

So in conducting a review for an essay anthology on translation, naturally I find myself trying to bring my own parable to the rather long and oblong table of discourse Campbell puts together neatly in Science Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation. To start, looking from my primary field of English medieval literature(s), I see the work of science fiction and translation both together and separately in this anthology as a reckoning of an irresistible force and immovable object, not unlike the most memorable section of Venerable Bede’s (c. 673-735) Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Therein, he sought to translate “Caedmon’s Hymn” (aka, the first ‘poem’ in English) from the Old English to Latin and subjects the reader to the force and object which complicate translation (signaled in bold, emphasis and translation mine):

Hic est sensus, non autem ordo ipse verborum quae dormiens ille canebat; neque enim possunt carmina, quamvis optime composita, ex alia in aliam linguam ad verbum sine detrimento sui decoris ac dignitatis transferri.

(This here is the sense, though not the order of the words themselves, of which he was singing while sleeping. Although they are not able to be “sung”, however excellently composed, out of one language to another, it is not possible to translate without hurting the charm and merit of them.)

In translation studies, then, from Bede to Campbell, there is the teleological battle between conveying the sensus verborum (sense of the words) and the methods transferri (to carry over, to translate). The tension between this ‘force(s)’ and ‘object(s)’, and the subsequent consequences of prioritizing one over the other, is the joy and angst inherent in works of translation. Now, applying the metaphor to science fiction and its speculative relatives, we, the initiates of this field, see a similar tension between the conventions of what is ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ SF, hard SF being speculative literature whose diegesis explicates the fiction in terms of mathematics, physics, engineering, or otherwise what may be construed as ‘STEM,’ while ‘soft SF’ may focus instead on the framings of psychology, sociology, history, or the legacy of literary lineages that converge onto the text.

On the whole, the wide array of science fiction materials may necessarily use both hard and soft SF in the development of worldbuilding, narrative scaffolding, and aesthetics, just as the translator carefully balances the sense of the words against how to translatus them—that is: “trans” (across) and “latus” (been carried). So then, the exegesistic direction across the essays—crafting theses on corpuses ranging from Swedish sci-fi epics to Cuban enslavement narratives in verse, feminist utopias found from Spain to Quebec, international translations of subversive Anglo SF tomes from Phillip K. Dick to A Clockwork Orange—runs along and around the political ramifications, consequences, and contexts surrounding the works of translation and precisely how they came to be.

Science fiction, famous for encompassing rich and original (and English-language-based) worlds such as those found inButler’s Dawn Trilogy and even the ill-fated Cyberpunk 2077, is shown in Campbell’s anthology to be more composite and diverse than the dichotomy of hard and soft SF. The breadth of geography and genres themselves expand in SF, together and separately, when ‘anglophonics’—that is the collocation of both Anglo and Americans literatures, media and mores – is no longer the dominant corpus that is expanded upon and invested into. Touching on the Swedish sci fi epic Aniara and its subsequent translations, Dr. Daniel Helsing, Linnaeus University, writes that:

[t]raditional poetic metaphors evoke images that are unspeakably insufficient to capture the universe, yet they may lead to a sense of comprehension. They are thus not only ineffective when trying to grasp the universe; they may also be misleading. In this sense, traditional metaphors can be said to use domesticizing strategies when translating the findings of science into any natural human language. (Helsing 86)

Traditional literary devices, systems, and ambitions, no less traditional audiences, is where SF and its international author base meets the hard work to convey the majestic sublime of space and all the hopes it can contain for the reader and author alike. However, staples of ‘the classics’ definitely do contain speculative and SF imaginings. I would, though, as a premodern scholar, further emphasize that speculative and science fiction has its origins long before Jules Verne. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale (c. 1390s)  or Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)are both powerful exempla of premodern speculative fiction—one in verse and one in prose. An understated job of translation is not only carrying over the sense of the words, but also being able to translate time: looking to the past and looking for the future within it. That is, traditional devices of literature do not have to exclude science fiction or international visions of it. In fact, they can help and historically have shaped speculation in literature. However, we are as critics also able to separate and diminish the mores of exclusion that movements of literature historically have. Science fiction has us looking to the stars—and they should be shining as brightly as possible.

Campbell’s volume is an indispensable collection of new voices and media spanning from at least the 1830s to the close of the 2010s, which not only makes the case for inclusion within the field but provides a tangible, though far reaching, web from which to choose a new vision for SF. This involves, for the casual reader or the adherent, letting go of certain attachments to what SF can and cannot be. It may involve breaking through at least two well-established binaries: the dichotomy of hard and soft SF, and from translation studies down from Bede’s time: the angst between sensus verborum (the sense of the words) and transferri (what is actually carried across from translations). In a world where the lenses of SF and conscious reality seem to blur more and more, Campbell’s volume and the authors included are a beacon of hope.

Alice Fulmer (she/her) is an MA/PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, ESL teacher, and poet. She is pursuing a Medieval Studies emphasis, and planning a prospectus on digital cultures and late medieval British manuscript culture. Her debut collection Faunalia (2023), on Gods and Radicals/Ritona Press, is a love letter to the great god Pan.

Review of The Recognition of H. P. Lovecraft: His Rise from Obscurity to World Renown

Beatrice Steele

S.T. Joshi. The Recognition of H. P. Lovecraft: His Rise from Obscurity to World Renown. Hippocampus Press, 2021. Paperback. 340 pg. $25.00. ISBN 9781614983453.

When H. P. Lovecraft died in 1937, not a single book of his stories had been published. This is a fact we are frequently reminded of in S. T. Joshi’s The Recognition of H. P. Lovecraft: His Rise from Obscurity to World Renown. This thorough study attempts to explain at least part of Lovecraft’s meteoric rise to worldwide fame by charting public discussions of his life and work. I use the slightly vague term “discussions” to describe the materials Joshi draws upon in this study because they are incredibly wide-ranging. He assesses all kinds of engagement with the Lovecraftian paper trail, from critical notices, scholarly tomes, and translations to rock music and pulp films. Despite some diffidence in the preface about whether he is the correct choice to author a book such as this, perhaps because of his own considerable stake in the recognition of Lovecraft, it soon becomes clear that nobody is better placed than Joshi to track and evaluate these developments. The reader gains useful insight into the circumstances that led to Lovecraft gaining popularity in a society that is arguably even weirder than the early twentieth-century one he inhabited. Joshi does not confine his study to Lovecraft’s fictional works, but also examines the legacy of his essays, poems, and philosophical thought.

One imagines that this body of research could have been rendered as a vast bibliographic list of items that make mention of Lovecraft. This might have proved useful for academics searching for a database comprising every important piece of public recognition. Indeed, Joshi acknowledges such previous projects, particularly where they do manage a significant act of textual excavation, but this book could appeal to an audience of casual Lovecraft enthusiasts as well as academics. It acknowledges that the story of his ascent is a fascinating one in itself. Yet, Joshi is careful to prioritise the impact of the fiction and not let the substance of his discussion become trapped in tangents about the author’s personal life.

The Recognition of H. P. Lovecraft begins with a newspaper column on the meteorological station Lovecraft built and ran as a teenager. His fascination with astronomy was what first encouraged him to write a letter to Scientific American. Lovecraft’s membership in the United Amateur Press Association opened up a new world of colleagues, friends, and rivals. Joshi briefly covers this amateur press career, but the book is primarily invested in responses to Lovecraft’s imaginative work. Indeed, members of the UAPA were generally not receptive to the fiction, but by the time Joshi moves on to examine Lovecraft’s pulp career, the engine of approbation is beginning to get started. Fictional outings in Weird Tales and Amazing Stories were met with acclaim, although Joshi is careful to point out that the editor of Weird Tales did not choose to publish letters critical of Lovecraft’s work.

Despite the famous caricature of Lovecraft as a reclusive genius, Joshi makes it clear that his friends and associates were the ones who kept his memory alive long enough for the popular paperbacks and movie adaptations of the 1960s to filter into serious scholarship in the late 1970s. The remarkable aspect of this trajectory is just how many setbacks Lovecraft’s reputation suffered and overcame. An interesting case study is that of 1945, a watershed year which soured into an annus horribilis. During this year there were many publications concerning Lovecraft, including an Armed Services Edition of The Dunwich Horror, illustrating the traction Lovecraft was gaining in the English-speaking imagination. In Joshi’s opinion, the tide was turned by an extremely negative review by Edmund Wilson, an eminent American critic. In him, Joshi appears to have located the quintessential case of the literary snobbery that would dog anyone who wanted to take Lovecraft seriously as an artist for years to come. In particular, Joshi highlights Wilson’s comment about Lovecraft being more “interesting” than his work (113). It becomes clear in the last part of the book as to why Joshi thinks that these probings into the author’s personal life are something to be regarded with suspicion.

The latter chapters are nothing short of gold dust for any scholar seeking a comprehensive and informative history of monographs and articles on Lovecraft. The canonisation of Lovecraft as a literary titan, in addition to the seismic effect of his work in science fiction internationally, makes the general recognition of his talent seem a foregone conclusion by the time we reach the ninth chapter of the book. Joshi admits that a total audit of Lovecraft-related media by this point in time is basically impossible. Nevertheless, readers of SFRA Review will no doubt already be familiar with much of what Joshi covers in terms of the growth of Lovecraft in popular culture.

The most polarising aspect of this book is undoubtedly how it approaches the recent controversies surrounding Lovecraft’s prejudices. Joshi makes no bones about his negative opinion of “virtue signalling” (305). His main objection to the attacks on Lovecraft is essentially what many of Lovecraft’s defenders have said in the past, namely, that his views were conceived in a historical context that deserves to be considered. He also argues that the criticism of Lovecraft’s worst lines often devolves into slander and has achieved little more than the defacement of every other facet of the man’s personality. The end result has been the condemnation of the entire person rather than his views, many of which Lovecraft regretted later in life. Joshi does not hesitate in calling out cynical personalities who profited from Lovecraft’s legacy only to trample on his reputation later.

Joshi ends by reminding us of the most important point. Whatever we may think of Lovecraft the man, this controversy has had little effect on the sales of his fiction around the world. The Recognition of H. P. Lovecraft is ultimately a testament to the power of the stories, which have proved resistant to many different crises, and will certainly survive many more.

Beatrice Steele is a PhD researcher and freelance writer from Guildford, England. She gained a Master’s in eighteenth-century literature from the University of Oxford in 2022 and is now undertaking an AHRC-funded PhD based at the University of Exeter. Her research interests include Victorian science, visual culture, and astronomy. She is also a regular contributor to the Dotun Adebayo Show on BBC Radio 5 Live. In her spare time, she likes to read and write poetry. She recently won second place in the Jane Martin Poetry Prize, a national competition run by Girton College, Cambridge.

Review of Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects

Sabina Fazli

Marc Olivier. Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects. Indiana UP, 2020. Ebook. 350 pg. 44 b&w illus. $18.99. ISBN 9780253046598.

The underlying idea of Olivier’s study, namely that objects in horror films are more than they seem, is probably intuitively evident to anyone who has ever watched a horror movie. But rather than focus on the props that come to mind—the haunted houses and cursed objects—Olivier attends to objects that sit on the margins of the plot and seem to be benign, familiar, and even mundane.

Olivier’s object-oriented readings of horror films offer detailed analyses which illuminate the ‘secret lives’ of these domestic objects on screen. This object-led approach is also reflected in the book’s structure and its visualization: Household Horror takes the reader on a tour of an apartment and guides them through four sections titled “Kitchen/Dining Room,” “Living Room,” “Bedroom,” and “Bathroom,” each containing chapters on objects which we would expect to find in these rooms (for example, the “Bathroom” contains chapters on the “Radiator,” discussing Lynch’s Eraserhead [1977], on “Pills” which probes the medicated female body in The Bad Seed [1956], Rosemary’s Baby [1968], and The Exorcism of Emily Rose [2005], and lastly the famous “Shower Curtain” from Psycho [1960]). The floor plan of a one-bedroom apartment preceding the first chapter functions as an additional flat, visual table of contents mapping all of the objects discussed in the book. This structure already illustrates Olivier’s approach. Rather than ordering his analyses according to “traditional strategies of coherence such as chronology, country, director, and subgenre,” readers are free to “roam” among the object-themed chapters (2), which can be read in any order.

In the short introductory chapter, Olivier establishes the theoretical orientation of the following analyses. Setting out to follow objects’ ‘secret lives,’ the book announces its inspiration by reference to work within the material turn that seeks to decenter the hierarchical organization of humans and objects. Olivier cites Ian Bogost and his elaboration of object-oriented ontology (OOO) as the basis for “treat[ing] objects as beings that surpass the roles given to them as props or decor” (3). This re-perspectivization recovers the various pieces of furniture, tools, and devices that form the unremarkable tapestry of everyday life from the background and grants them center stage. Viewed through the lens of OOO, horror films, Olivier argues, turn this domestic landscape inside out and foreground humble objects as central participants on a par with humans.

Methodologically, Olivier combines a range of approaches, two of which seem to be particularly characteristic of his project: He takes the reader on contextual excursions into the histories, inner workings, and material make-up of objects, detailing their usually obscured or forgotten ‘lives’ on their own terms and then tying them back into the films. For example, one of the objects in the first section, “Kitchen/Dining Room,” is the microwave which Olivier reads as a pivotal element in Gremlins (1984): “The microwave is a gremlin-sized chamber of atmospheric terror rooted in wartime research, embroiled in spy scandals and health scares—it is an inspirer of tabloid stories and urban legends and possibly the least understood device in the kitchen” (30). It is, Olivier suggests, much more than a convenient appliance as its public and imaginary lives complicate its status as a mundane domestic appliance, not the least, because microwave ovens are a relatively recent addition to kitchens. Their new owners in the 1980s were particularly fascinated by rumors and sensationalized stories about the dangers of microwaves, because the technology evokes the threat of nuclear radiation (35). This residual uncanniness of objects seems to emerge from their incomplete domestication due to their relatively recent adoption in homes. Mining the history of the refrigerator, sewing machine, and typewriter, Olivier provides compelling interpretations of their roles in Possession (1981), Silence of the Lambs (1991), Carrie (1976), and The Shining (1980) and includes readings that draw out the complicated processes of domestication that these technologies underwent. Their horror, Olivier’s readings also suggest, lies in their continued, but obscured, connections with histories and networks outside the home. Other object-led excursions consist in attending to the inner workings of devices, offering physical routes into black-boxed objects, as Olivier demonstrates with regard to call tracing in Black Christmas (1974), where “The call is taking place not only at two ends of a phone line but also at a police station and in a switching station” (60). Olivier then dwells on the latter as much as on the former two locations and opens up a constitutive but hidden space within the network. In this way, histories and technologies that lead outside the films (and outside the home) are reinserted into the analyses in a movement reminiscent of Elaine Freedgood’s ‘old’ materialist “strong metonymic reading” (see her The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel of 2006) which recovers the cultural and historical meanings of objects outside the literary text and then weaves them back into the narratives.

Olivier further centers objects through the straightforward but effective strategy of translating plots into lists (4). This re-segmentation based on the object rather than subject, assisted by phrases that highlight the non-human agent, as in “table events” (80, Noriko’s Dinner Table [2005]), “remote-control phenomena” (123, Poltergeist [1982]), “bed scenes” (184, The Exorcist [1973]), or “typographic events” (212, The Shining), subtracts human agents and provides inventories instead (also the diagram of phone calls in Black Christmas, 56). The ‘inventory’ is a key figure and programmatic device in Olivier’s study to which he returns in the brief conclusion: “Household Horror takes a simple inventory of household objects, explores the deformations caused by their presence in cinematic horror, and produces new objects as readings” (312), relying on the “gentle knot of the comma” (312, quoting Bogost).

Household Horror is a readable and jargon-free study that demonstrates the benefits of object-led analyses through the sheer range of illuminating case studies rather than abstract theory. Reading it from cover to cover, as I have done following the protocols for reviewing academic monographs, is probably less effective than picking and choosing chapters that are of interest either because of the films they analyze or the objects featuring in them. The book, or rather its individual chapters, would thus be of interest not only to students and researchers of horror but also to anyone wondering how film (and, indeed, literary studies) can put OOO into interpretative practice.

Sabina Fazli is a postdoc in the collaborative research center ‘Studies in Human Categorization’ at Mainz University, Germany. Her PhD thesis was in English literature and has been published as Sensational Things: Souvenirs, Keepsakes, and Mementoes in Wilkie Collins’s Fiction (2019). The book explores the significance of sentimental objects in sensation fiction. Her research interests are now in magazine studies, and the material and affective side of periodical reading, independent, experimental, and zine publishing, as well as Neo-Victorian and steampunk fiction.

Review of Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21^st Century Dystopian Fiction

Ben Eldridge

Annika Gonnermann. Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21^st Century Dystopian Fiction. Narr Francke Attempto, 2021. Print. 352 pg. €68.00. ISBN 9783823384595.

We live in dystopian times, at this early stage of the twenty-first century. Against a backdrop of environmental disaster and increasingly violent geopolitical manoeuvrings, a raging viral pandemic continues to exacerbate long-developing global inequalities. Meanwhile, dystopian fiction has also become inescapable. Novels such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) are once again topping global bestseller charts, television series including 오징어 게임 (Squid Game) (2021-) have come to dominate on-demand streaming services, and film adaptations like The Hunger Games franchise (2012-2023) continue to break various box-office attendance records. Annika Gonnermann’s Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21^st Century Dystopian Fiction (henceforth Absent Rebels) responds directly to this booming popular cultural embrace of dystopia, but makes a further seemingly provocative claim: such “classical” (12) fictional dystopias are effectively meaningless for the current age. Gonnermann argues that this type of dystopian fiction (which she identifies as material containing a “focus on political entities” [17], primarily totalitarian regimes) – particularly as such works increasingly infiltrate mainstream channels – cannot act as a subversive critique of its cultural status quo, but can exist only as a commodity that offers light, somewhat anachronistic, entertainment. While Big Brother is certainly still watching, Big Brother is also being watched, in record numbers.

Absent Rebels posits that the commodification of dystopia is a direct result of the economic milieu that engulfs contemporary Western culture: neoliberalism—that most highly aggressive and unchecked form of capitalism—functions by flattening, incorporating, and ultimately commodifying everything, even its own potential critique. According to Gonnermann, this leaves classical dystopias neither adequate nor appropriate for representing—much less challenging—contemporary forms of political organisation, because “the state’s monopoly of power” (18) is now subsidiary to the logistical and financial networks that underpin globalized capital. Gonnermann proceeds to claim that a “new relentless bleakness” (304) is evident in certain exemplary contemporary dystopian texts – her selection consists of David Eggers’s The Circle (2013), Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last (2015), M.T. Anderson’s Feed (2002), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005)—and is beginning to “rejuvenate” ( 19) the genre in order to “spell out the inevitability of free-market capitalism” (304) and its attendant violent social impacts. Presented by Gonnermann as “especially progressive and subversive” (18), she argues that her chosen texts are identifiable by their lack of “rebels and dissidents,” (19) which means that they “urge readers to explore the possible alternatives to the dystopian world presented to them on their own” (19, emphasis in original). For Gonnermann, the lack of protagonists who can challenge the economic system that they are depicted as existing within reflects the truncated possibility of meaningful resistance in a more broadly networked society that features no clearly identifiable antagonists. The texts thus act as “phenotypes of a neoliberal economic system” (241), and function to “map out the contradictions of contemporary neoliberal capitalism” (19). Absent Rebels, then, is a timely and sometimes innovative contribution to the field of dystopian studies and is impressive for its ambition, even if it is rather frustrating to witness this ambition only inconsistently realised across the text.

The limitations are unfortunately apparent from the opening of Absent Rebels, which does read rather like a postgraduate dissertation, desperate to prove its bona fides in an overdetermined manner: the early definitional sections are laboured, and the literature review of canonical dystopian literature and literary history that comprises the first major chapter of the book is rather cumbersome, as are the frequent and extended footnotes that addend the text.[1] More problematically, however, Absent Rebels is underlain by a number of somewhat problematic assumptions that remain completely unchallenged. Take Gonnermann’s starting point, for instance:

What makes dystopia so fascinating is its ability to capture cultural anxieties and voice them in literary terms, so that it acts as a mouthpiece and tool of diagnosis and critique for social, political and economic developments… dystopian fiction is always meant as a normative criticism of the socio-historical and historical characteristics of its own origins. (38; 40 emphasis in original)

Claiming an invariable one-to-one correspondence between textual representation and societal critique is a basic misjudgement, because it presumes, amongst other things, that critique is in fact the raison d’etre of all dystopian texts: a highly dubious presumption given the cynically populist manner in which many such texts are written, produced and marketed.[2] But there is an even more fundamental supposition that informs Gonnermann’s claim: in positioning dystopia as a literary expression of extratextual criticism, and claiming that “the aim of any criticism is a transformation of the status quo” (45), she explicitly aligns dystopian texts with their authors’ attempts to engage in real-world revolutionary change. At its most fundamental, then, the premise about the essential function of dystopian literature is naïve in Absent Rebels: there is simply no necessary relationship between any specific piece of cultural production and extraliterary political effect or social reform. In this and other areas, and to its detriment, Absent Rebels repeatedly fails to distinguish between the fictional representations found within the pages of its selected texts and the external reality in which readers and writers live.

Relatedly, much of Absent Rebels understands its primary texts as predominantly, and oftentimes solely, didactic and veers, sometimes headfirst, into intentional fallacy. Take, for example, Gonnermann’s following rumination:

The challenge authors are faced with is to develop an appropriate imagery or language to capture neoliberal thought in its essence while avoiding the fallacies of methodological individualism, i.e. blaming individuals for systemic problems. (175)

What remains unclear is why—or even if—such innovations in form, theme or style are intended in the first instance, and, more crucially, why authorial intention matters in any case. The above quotation is indicative of a general trend by which Absent Rebels simply presumes the accuracy of each of its theoretical speculations, and frequently does not bother offering simple things like evidential substantiation. Indeed, the repeated blind profession of opinions on behalf of a hypothetical reader and the constant moralising throughout Absent Rebels can become fairly overbearing, even to a reader that is already sympathetic to its ideological starting point.

Credibility is further strained in Absent Rebels by the indiscriminate application of its central thesis to its primary texts. By reducing each of its focal texts simply to their relationship with “globalised predatory neoliberal mechanisms” (206), Gonnerman leaves any other themes that arise in the respective novels almost entirely adrift.

For all these problems, however, Absent Rebels does make some insightful observations on both a large and small scale. The foregrounding of theory – particularly in positioning capitalism as a kind of “hyperobject” (Morton 2013, 1) that is “almost impossible to criticise directly” (Gonnermann 66) – is highly productive, and some of the close readings of the primary texts are relatively compelling, particularly in the later chapters.[3] Indeed, Absent Rebels should be applauded for its serious exploration of contemporary texts and social systems. All in all, Absent Rebels is a book that demonstrates a lot of promise, but is heavily flawed on both a theoretical and a formal level. The fairly frequent errors with grammar and spelling are frustrating, and combine to undermine the text’s clarity and coherence in their own right, but also cause further issues with phrasing and stridency (for example, a claim that a text “obviously references” a specific event shifts to merely “hinting at” that event later in the same paragraph [152]). The latter issue is also likely responsible for some arguments being at odds with the evidence provided, instances of further dubious foundational bases provided for the claims being made, and occasional outright misrepresentation of some secondary source content.

NOTES

[1] The copyright page reads “Zugleich Dissertation an der Universität Mannheim,” (translation: “At the same time dissertation at the University of Mannheim”) so this may be an unrevised thesis. I do hasten to note that this is a good, interesting and somewhat innovative dissertation, but that fact alone does not necessarily translate directly into a wholly convincing academic publication.

[2] Gonnermann herself makes precisely this point, in fact: “novels in general, and dystopias, struggle to maintain their integrity as channels of criticism [because t]hey are always products of a neoliberal market policy and are produced as commodities by publishing houses and marketing departments to satisfy consumer demand for the highly popular dystopian genre” (2021, 67). Accordingly, it is one of the constant frustrations of Absent Rebels that Gonnermann seems unable to consistently maintain her own argumentative line(s).

[3] Morton describes hyperobjects as “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (2013, 1).

WORKS CITED

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Petrozza, Mille (Kreator). “Terrible Certainty.” Terrible Certainty. Berlin: Noise Records N 0342-2, compact disc. 1987.

Ben Eldridge an early career researcher of Literatures in Englishes & the current Vice-President of the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand (ACSANZ), who lives and works primarily on unceded Darug and Gadigal land. If not performing the exploitative, unpaid labour that is intrinsic to the functioning of the modern neoliberal ‘academic’ sector, Eldridge can be found either denouncing technocratic management or—like his personal avatar, the Canada goose (Branta canadensis)—honking eternally into the void of existential despair. This, he realises, may be a tautological claim.

Review of Middle-earth, or There and Back Again

James Hamby

Łukasz Neubauer, ed. Middle-earth, or There and Back Again. Walking Tree, 2020. Paperback. 156 pg. $19.45. Cormarë Series. ISBN 9783905703443.

Łukasz Neubauer’s edited collection Middle-earth, or There and Back Again covers an eclectic array of works from J. R. R. Tolkien’s oeuvre. Four of the six essays focus on Tolkien’s Middle-earth legendarium while the other two discuss The Fall of Arthur and The Story of Kullervo. Each essay focuses on the texts that influenced Tolkien’s world-building, examining the ways in which Tolkien took themes, characters, and even worldviews from earlier mythologies and changed, elaborated, or otherwise recapitulated them in order to create his own mythopoeic texts. In all, this collection leaves the reader with a deeper understanding of just how fertile Tolkien’s familiarity with ancient and medieval literature was for his writing.

Neubauer’s own contribution to the volume, “‘You cannot pass’: Tolkien’s Christian Reinterpretation of the Traditional Germanic Ideals of Heroism and Loyalty in The Lord of the Rings”, is the most notable essay in the collection. Neubauer argues that the scene in The Lord of the Rings in which Gandalf battles the Balrog in the depths of Moria was inspired by Beorhtnoth’s actions in The Battle of Maldon. Both texts envision a battle against formidable foes where a leader’s followers come to his aid, as well as a setting where the enemies must cross a bridge in order to engage in battle. The major difference between the two texts, Neubauer argues, is that while Beorhtnoth allows the Vikings to cross in a hubristic desire to increase the glory of a supposed victory, thus allowing his followers to die needlessly, Gandalf positions himself on the bridge to prevent the Balrog’s passing and refuses help from his company, thus sacrificing himself for the greater good. As Neubauer comments, Tolkien’s “understanding of what truly defines heroism goes well beyond the somewhat narrow and oversimplified framework of the oft-examined Germanic ‘heroic ideal’” (34). In this way, Tolkien takes an older story and reimagines it to adhere to his Catholic worldview, transforming what had been a story of warrior heroism into a parable of heroic sacrifice.

In the same vein, Michał Leśniewski in “Tolkien and the Myth of Atlantis, or the Usefulness of Dreams and the Methodology of Mythmaking” examines the influence of Plato’s tale of Atlantis on Tolkien’s creation of Númenor. While scholars elsewhere have made this connection between these two doomed societies before, Leśniewski emphasizes how the fallen nature of the Edain constitutes a significant theme throughout the Middle-earth mythos. As Leśniewski observes, “the Edain are … inclined to make the same mistakes, over and over again” (17). This, Leśniewski argues, also falls in line with Plato’s thinking, as “Tolkien appears to share Plato’s pessimistic view concerning the fallible character of human nature” (17). Plato’s influence on Tolkien’s legendarium therefore extends beyond just the tale of a civilization doomed by punishment for its wickedness, it also inspires a paradigm for all human actions on Middle-earth and the way in which its history unfolds.

Barbara Kowalik’s essay, “Tolkien’s Use of the Motif of Goldsmith-craft and the Middle English Pearl: Ring or Hand?,” offers a fascinating look at how one of Tolkien’s favorite medieval poems influenced his creation of the Ring of Power. While previous scholarship has largely focused on how Tolkien was inspired by the rings from Niebelungenlied and Plato’s “Ring of Gyges,” Kowalik instead convincingly argues that Pearl provides the model for the One Ring. Yet, as in the essays discussed above, it was not inspiration merely for one object; rather, it offered an entire framework of beliefs around rings that Tolkien used throughout his Middle-earth Legendarium. Kowalik notes how the symbolism of precious metals and gems found in Pearl are recapitulated in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. Kowalki points out that both works contain “a story of attachment and loss, and of regret, pain, and quest for a jewel” (48). In addition to similarities in plot, Kowalki demonstrates that these works both contain similar themes, such as how the jewels “must not be isolated to please a single individual” (53) because “isolation is shown to be at the root of … evil-doing” (54), that “personal dignity and goodness is preserved through acknowledging authority” (53), and that the circular shape of the rings “suggest both perfection and entrapment” (59), amongst others. Tolkien scholars have long noted how Tolkien’s interest in medieval literature affected his creation of Middle-earth, and Kowalki’s essay should bring more critical attention to Pearl as source material for Tolkien’s mythos.

The final essay that focuses on Middle-earth, “The Wisdom of Galadriel: A Study in the Theology of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” by Andrzej Wicher, looks at the many influences that Tolkien drew upon to construct Galadriel, from Saint Paul’s Epistles to John Ruskin’s ideals of womanhood.Wicher’s interpretation of Galadriel focuses on how she is “an unlikely heroine of the struggle with Sauron” (128) because she herself took part in Fëanor’s rebellion against the Valar. This, however, gives her wisdom and helps her understand humanity’s sinful nature, making her, as Wicher says, into a character “through whom many Biblical echoes reverberate” (128).

The two essays that focus on Tolkien’s works outside of his Middle-earth legendarium, “The Mythical Model of the World in The Story of Kullervo” by Andrzej Szyjewski and “J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur in the Context of the Medieval Tradition of Romance” by Bartłomiej Błaszkiewicz, both look at Tolkien’s direct adaptations of older mythic cycles. Szyjewski’s assessment of The Story of Kullervo is that while composing this work Tolkien honed his skills in creating new languages and pantheons, thus teaching him the principles of mythopoeic creation that would ultimately result in his tales of Middle-earth (110). Błaszkiewicz explicates Tolkien’s adaptation of the Arthurian language and likewise argues that Tolkien’s experiences in writing this poem contributed to his creation of Middle-earth (81).

This volume provides a valuable overview of some of the sources Tolkien was familiar with as a medievalist and that he used to create his own literary works. While readers of the Cormarë series may expect a more focused theme for an edited collection, these essays are connected (even if somewhat loosely) by their explorations of how Tolkien reworked medieval and ancient literature into his own writings. These essays provide important studies of Tolkien’s sources and, as with all the other volumes put forth in the Cormarë series, this collection makes a valuable contribution to Tolkienian scholarship.

James Hamby is the Associate Director of the Writing Center at Middle Tennessee State University, where he also teaches courses in composition and literature. He currently serves as the editor for The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale, and he previously held the position of Associate Book Reviews Editor for Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. He has written book reviews for many different journals, and recently published an article on Dickens’s Holiday Romance with Dickens Studies Annual.

Review of According to Jack Kirby

Dominick Grace

Michael Hill. According to Jack Kirby: Insights Drawn from Interviews with Comics’ Greatest Creator. Lulu Publishing, 2021. Paperback. 348 pg. $19.95. ISBN 9781667133072.

Michael Hill’s title here—the subtitle especially—tells you much of what you need to know about this book. This self-published study is evidently a labor of love by a self-identified Kirby fan, and it wears its admiration of Kirby on its sleeve. Hill’s contention is straightforward and clear: the history of Marvel Comics, certainly the official Marvel history, exaggerates Stan Lee’s role and criminally downplays Kirby’s in the creative explosion of the early 1960s from which most of Marvel’s major characters emerged. I think it is fair to say that Hill’s is an uncontroversial position; certainly, I have believed Kirby was the primary architect of Marvel’s early superhero line for decades—and indeed, Hill relies on interviews that are decades old as the basis of much of his argument. Two features make this book stand out. First, it takes a fairly absolutist view of the question, essentially accepting both Kirby’s claims to have created almost everything and Kirby’s dismissals of Stan Lee. Second, it offers a comprehensive tour through an enormous number of interviews with Kirby and others to make its case. One key point Hill makes, and demonstrates, is that Kirby’s story remained consistent across decades, whereas Stan Lee’s did not, which one can easily see as damaging Lee’s credibility. Hill also lands hard on two financial arguments. First, he argues, persuasively, that the so-called “Marvel Method,” whereby artists produced pages from plot summaries rather than from full scripts, really meant that the artists actually did most of the heavy lifting on the books. Hill cites artists other than Kirby who assert that Lee often provided no actual plot at all, leaving the artist to create the story; Lee then took the writing credit, leaving the art credit only for the artist. Hill’s argument is that this practice allowed Lee to exploit the artists by claiming not only the writing credit but also the payment for writing. Second, he argues, perhaps somewhat less persuasively, that Lee’s shift to asserting that he was the creator of all the early Marvel superheroes coincided with the takeover of the company so was part of a scheme to confirm company ownership of all of its lucrative characters. These are arguably the book’s core points, and they are good and important ones. They are not, however, news to those already well-versed in this long-standing controversy. Many other commentators have largely accepted Kirby’s claims, though not as thoroughly as Hill does, as is evident from Hill’s critiques of earlier researchers in this area.

Furthermore, the book suffers from limitations. First of all, Hill’s criticisms of the hagiographic way Lee has been viewed may sound valid given that Kirby has been so overlooked, but they also seem ironic, as Hill is engaged in his own hagiographic depiction of Kirby. This is not an academic study, so its fannish style is to be expected, but Hill’s strongly anti-Lee perspective, understandable (and valid, in my opinion) as it may be, means that he is unlikely to win over anyone not already on his side of the debate. His decision to give Kirby the same benefit of the doubt that he argues has always been given to Lee’s claims leads him not to question Kirby’s own claims, thereby correcting (from his point of view) the different standards of credibility Lee and Kirby have received in the past, but also thereby letting all of Kirby’s claims go essentially unchallenged. The critical consensus is that Kirby did indeed play a far greater role than the partisan official history grants him, but it also and legitimately recognizes that Kirby’s own claims need to be evaluated rather than simply accepted. Interestingly, Abraham Josephine Reisman’s biography of Stan Lee, True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, also published in 2021, essentially supports Kirby’s claims over Lee’s, without Hill’s propensity for partisanship in Kirby’s favor.

Second, and more problematically, the book’s structure is confused and repetitive. The book consists of two sections. Part one is derived from Hill’s chronological examination of the Lee-Kirby controversy for the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center’s web page in 2015, produced because a promised treatment of the same subject in the magazine The Jack Kirby Collector had been cancelled. As Hill reports, that special issue “was quietly added back to the schedule” (x) for the magazine after his piece appeared. Part two of this book comprises Hill’s point by point and exhaustive response to that special issue. Consequently, part one and part two cover much of the same territory, and in a great many instances say essentially the same thing, even using the same quotations. Multiple quotations appear twice (or more) in the book, and many repeat the same information. While documenting different occasions on which Kirby said essentially the same thing does support Hill’s argument that Kirby’s story stayed consistent, the extensive repetition of information, whether verbatim or in multiple similar quotations, unnecessarily pads the book and weakens its coherence. Hill could have combined his two separate accounts into one linear narrative, though doing so would have required considerably more reshaping of the material than has evidently been done.

Those unfamiliar with the Kirby side of the story, and even Kirby enthusiasts, might find value here, the uninitiated simply because the book provides a corrective to the Marvel version, and enthusiasts because Hill’s thoroughness means that many difficult-to-find interviews are referenced and cited, and because other rare documents are also reproduced. However, this book does need to be read with a critical lens, and those interested in the long history of the Lee vs Kirby argument would do well to consult other sources, perhaps especially those Hill cites and criticizes. Unfortunately, though, Hill does not provide a bibliography of works consulted, only an index of the interviews referenced. Comprehensive comics libraries might want to add this book, but more selective collections can pass it by.

Dominick Grace is the author of The Science Fiction of Phyllis Gotlieb: A Critical Reading and of numerous articles. He has co-edited several books covering topics such as comics, television, and Canadian speculative fiction.