Author: sfrarev

Review of Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century

Stephen Mollmann

Sarah Cole. Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century. Columbia UP, 2020. Hardcover. 392 pg. $35.00. ISBN 9780231193122.

In her article “Rereading H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine: Empiricism, Aestheticism, Modernism” (English Literature in Transition, vol. 58, no. 4), Caroline Hovanec calls for an alternative history of modernism that places H. G. Wells at its vanguard, rather than Joseph Conrad: “it [would] challenge[ ] us to think beyond the heroic narrative of modernism rising up against a complacent positivism, and to imagine a literary history in which modernist epistemology is seen not as a radical break from Victorian positivism and realism, but instead as an evolution of a particular species of Victorian thought” (480). Hovanec argues that critics have been too accepting of Wells’s own claims about his distance from modernism.

Sarah Cole’s monograph proposes a different alternate history of twentieth-century literature, one where Wells’s ideals for “how literature would engage the public world” won out over the modernists’ (4). Cole argues that Wells’s writing—with its strong didactic bent, its grand projects, its lack of focus on interior life—seems strange from our current vantage point because the modernists won. She argues Wells benefits from being read outside the context that modernism created in literary analysis, which “uncover[s] a thriving form of literary accomplishment, germinating alongside the more familiar works from this period […] producing, perhaps, a broader and more capacious modernism” (4). The introduction to Inventing Tomorrow explicates the differences between Wells’s approach to literature and that of the modernists, exemplified by Virginia Woolf, but also shows how Wells and the modernists were allied in their reactions to the new century.

Cole argues that her analysis of Wells is distinct because of its capaciousness; Wells wrote voluminously in many genres across a long career, but most contemporary studies focus on his science fiction or a couple of well-regarded literary texts. Cole covers it all, from textbooks to autobiography to novels to pamphlets to short fiction to film scripts. The first chapter tries to lay out an overall sense of Wells’s attitudes, techniques, style, and tone across the totality of his writing. The other three chapters each focus on a key theme of his work: “Civilian” on his explorations of wartime and calls for peace, “Time” on his attempts to communicate new understandings of history and futurity, and “Life” on the role of biology and evolution in his thought.

I found the first chapter the least successful because of its amorphousness. It has some keen insights, such as Cole’s discussion of Wells’s propensity for self-insertion (61-3), and how his novels tell the reader how to read them, but not heavy-handedly (72). Wells had many novels with protagonists that were essentially him (e.g., The History of Mr Polly [1910], Love and Mr Lewisham [1900], In the Days of the Comet [1906], Tono-Bungay [1909], Ann Veronica [1909], The New Machiavelli [1911]), and one could see this as egoistic, but Cole argues that the primary feature of his self-writing is argument: his “voice discussing the problems of our world and offering solutions” (67). Even Wells’s autobiography, she claims, is more about his ideas than his actual life (66). There are other good insights, but limiting a discussion of darkness and light in Wells to just over four pages suggests more than it compels. (It was unclear to me, too, why and how these topics all fit into the theme of “voice.”)

The other chapters, though, are compelling, specifically for the breadth of Wells’s writing that they cover. The chapter on “Life,” for example, takes in SF such as The Food of the Gods (1904), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and The Time Machine (1895), book-essays such as The Conquest of Time (1942), The Future in America (1906), and Mankind in the Making (1903), the popular science book The Science of Life (1929-30), the religious parable The Undying Fire (1919), and literary novels including Ann Veronica and Tono-Bungay. Cole doesn’t force all this into a single trajectory, however, as Wells is too diverse and self-scrutinizing a writer for that. Rather she explores how for Wells, life is all about energy (often unfulfilled) and waste (often necessary) in a variety of different contexts, from Doctor Moreau’s attempts to reshape evolution to Ann Veronica’s inability to achieve a political awakening. For the SF scholar, the real benefit is in seeing how the familiar SF texts interact with the less familiar literary and nonfiction ones. Most of Wells’s scientific romances are clustered at the beginning of his career, but Wells continued to explore the ideas in them throughout his life.

After the introduction, Cole’s placing of Wells in the context of modernism is usually implicit more than explicit, but one of the book’s strengths is in showing how Wells was influenced by his world and how he then made the world others reacted to. Many scholars note Wells’s claim about what such an influence Thomas Henry Huxley was on his thought; Cole actually incorporates discussion of a couple of Huxley essays into the chapter on “Life.” She also analyzes the scenes in Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) in which a character is reading Wells’s The Outline of History (1919-20). Cole shows how Wells was reacting to his era—but also creating it.

The scale of Cole’s analysis is impressive, but in a sense, it just reflects the scale of Wells. He had a plan for the entire world, and that is what let him essentially invent the genre of SF, and what set him apart from his modernist contemporaries. Cole’s conclusion emphasizes this point: “Wells […] set literature on a path to social amelioration, seeing its forms as mutable and impermanent but its power and purpose as firm.[…] [W]riting need not be diffident […] change need not seem impossible” (319). It’s an almost inspirational conclusion: “I hope that, in considering Wells’s lifetime of writing, that reader—you—will feel motivated to ask of literature, what can and should it do for the world, for tomorrow?” (320).

It’s a big ask. And so too are the alternate histories that Cole and Hovanec propose. Wells is so big a writer that an alternate literature with Wells at its center is almost impossible to contemplate. For what Cole shows is that, like the sun of the dying Earth at the end of The Time Machine, Wells absorbed everything before the end.

Steven Mollmann is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of English and Writing at the University of Tampa, as well as associate editor of Studies in the Fantastic. He is currently at work on a book about the scientist in the nineteenth-century British novel, from Mary Shelley and Charles Dickens to Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells, and he is also the author of several works of Star Trek fiction. He can be found on the web at lessaccurategrandmother.blogspot.com.

Review of Climate Fictions

Bruce Lindsley Rockwood

Alison Sperling, ed. Climate Fictions: Paradoxa #31. Paradoxa, 2019-20. Print, 451 pg. $48.00, ISBN: 9781929512416. PDF $42.00. Available for order at https://paradoxa.com/no-30-climate-fictions-2020/.

Climate Fictions is an interdisciplinary collection of 30 short essays, offering critical interpretation and exploration of the role of art, performance, music, digital games, and stories in understanding the climate challenge and possible responses from diverse perspectives. In an introductory essay, editor Alison Sperling reviews the various terms for the genre, whether “Climate-change fiction, climate fiction, cli-fi, or in this introduction also denoted as CF” that she notes “was coined (and since championed, now policed) by blogger Dan Bloom in 2007, and popularized by a retweet from speculative fiction author Margaret Atwood in 2012” (9). The volume is divided into three parts: Part I: Simulation, Part II: Narration, and Part III: Speculation. Each part is further divided into Dialogues and Essays. Each contribution is documented by footnotes or lists of sources, and many include photographs or other illustrations of the work discussed.

The collection offers contributions that reflect “crucial insights that reveal the many ways in which climate change is bound to innumerable forms of oppression due to colonialism and extractivism, environmental racism, homophobia, and ableism” (17).

Sperling notes at the conclusion of her introduction, “Schneider-Mayerson has recently written that ‘in the very near future, almost all literature will become a form of what we now think of as climate change fiction, defined broadly’ (Schneider-Mayerson, “Climate Change Fiction” 318). It is possible that the more climate change comes to dominate the fictions and imaginative realms in the future, the already unstable category of cli-fi may prove to be overly capacious. [. . .] But the issue as a whole worries less about cli-fi as a category and more about the ways that climate fictional works interrogate inter-related histories and systems at work in a changing climate, as well as about how the fictions we tell ourselves also shape the climate” (18-19).

Cli-Fi’s importance is illustrated by a link showing 291 books under the term: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/36205.Cli_Fi_Climate_Change_Fiction, and numerous reviews on the subject, e.g., “Cli-Fi: Birth of a Genre,” by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, Dissent (Summer, 2013), and resources at  http://www.asjournal.org/62-2017/cli-fi-american-studies-research-bibliography/. This volume recognizes and responds to that reality while opening it up to new and wider perspectives.

The visual and performance arts center the first four dialogues in the collection. In “Tomorrow You Are a Cactus,” Simon(e) van Saarloos and Paula Chaves Bonilla discuss the role of performance in presenting their reality “[a]s queer people, as racialized artists,” (28) and explain “Omni Toxica [2019] is inspired by a myth about the message of the coca plant” (27). Chaves Bonilla affirms, “Speaking about climate change, marica, it’s important to say: the end of the world already happened a thousand times for marginalised communities, habibi. It’s been more than five hundred years of ongoing fight against the complete erasure of our peoples. More than five hundred years since the white Europeans came and the fight against the extraction and colonisation of our lands started. The end of the world already happened” (24).

In “Balance is Possible,” Stina Attebery carries on a conversation with Elizabeth LaPensée, “an award-winning artist who both creates and researches Indigenous Futurisms in media. She is Anishinaabe with family from Bay Mills, Métis, and Irish” (31). LaPensée’s work includes computer games Coyote Quest (2017) and Thunderbird Strike (2017), and the comic Deer Woman: A Vignette (2017) (32-33). They explore the role these pieces play in reaching young people. LaPensée notes, “My greatest hope is to reflect the importance of the land and waters as they are, to facilitate reciprocity, and to give space for people to make their own meaning” (36).

In “The Future was Yesterday,” Dehlia Hannah interviews Charles Stankievech to discuss his installations and video work projects, including “The Drowned World” (2019)  (based on J. G. Ballard’s novel) for the Toronto Biennial (38), and the video installation LOVELAND (2009-2011) and its relationship to M. P. Shiel’s 1901 novel The Purple Cloud (40-41). Stankievech asserts that “Good science fiction at its core is always conceptual, and some of the earliest pieces were more impressive as conceptual ponderings than written craft” (42).

In “Sun & Sea (Marina) Performing Climate Change,” Alison Sperling explores with creators Lina Lapelytė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Rugilé Barzdžiukaitė their work which “took place as an opera-performance in the Lithuanian Pavilion [. . .] as an adapted durational work in English at the 2019 La Biennale di Venezia.” It “took place on a constructed beach inside of a warehouse off-site from the main grounds of the Venice Biennale, where performers in beachwear and reclining on beach towels sang their respective parts of an ecological-libretto lasting about one hour” (47). The performers are largely white, “vacationers sipping planetary resources as a Pina Colada” (50).   

Part I’s essay section begins with Bogna Konior’s “Modeling Realism: Digital Media, Climate Simulations and Climate Fictions,” which argues that climate change is “a phenomenon that we know only through computerized simulation and statistical probability” (57). We can’t observe it except through elaborate computer models, which help us talk about the future in ways we can use to address the present. “Climate models are like petri dishes for growing fictional Earths so that we can learn about our real Earth” (66). Given the heat dome in the North American west in 2021, which is highly visible to all, this claim that climate change can only be observed through models is open to question. See, for example: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/28/portland-seattle-heatwave-heat-dome-temperatures.

Péter Kristóf Makai then addresses the role of board games in talking about climate change, in “Climate Change on Cardboard: Ecological Eurogames,” to clarify the abstract nature of climate change to lay audiences (77). “The four board games presented here—20th Century, Rescue Polar Bears, Keep Cool and CO₂—all work based on the assumption that humans make a difference; it’s also what makes the process adaptable to the board game medium” (82). He discusses the difference in American and European board game design traditions, and notes the emergence of cooperative games which play a role in some of those he reviews (84-89). He concludes that games “may also provide our best method for consciousness-raising, because they place human agency at the center of their rule-defined mechanics” (97).

In contrast, Cameron Kunzelman brings a skeptical eye (105) to “Video Games as Interventions in the Climate Disaster,” proposing that “modeling, affect, and direct intervention are modes of innervation that tie into distinct ways of politicizing play and generating some kind of player response around questions of climate” (107). Games reviewed to illustrate modeling and affect include Civilization IV (2005) and VI (2016), Frostpunk (2018), Fate of the World (2011), Subnautica (2018), and Gathering Storm (2019) (107-115). Kunzelman concludes by arguing that the third approach, direct intervention, by combining elements of modeling and the affective relationship with climate, is the best way for games to make a significant “ideological impact on players who might be either neutral or hostile to arguments about the necessity of addressing climate change. I see both Eco (Strange Loop Games, 2018) and the Minecraft (Mojang, 2011) mod GlobalWarming (Porillo, 2018) as emblematic of this synthetic mode that place [sic] players within a subject position within a broader system that models climate change” (116).

In “Nodding Off from the Anthropocene: Picnolepsy and Rehearsing Disappearance in Space Exotic,” Andrew Wenaus reviews a post-World War II musical subgenre, space exotica, “an eccentric take on popular mood music” that “at once prioritizes an optimistic escape from Earth while intimating a need to leave the planet” (123). The world may end but we can ignore this as the music “offers at once picnoleptic blips of escape from the anxieties of global catastrophe” (125).   

The concluding essay in Part I is “The Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene,” by Gerry Canavan (143-167), which contains a detailed and thoughtful examination of the entire Zelda/Link/Ganon franchise story line framed as an examination as well of the deeply pessimistic Anthropocene worldview that the current generation of game players  face. ”The game’s breathtaking visuals and acclaimed open-world gameplay are thus part and parcel of what I will argue here is its sourly dyspeptic vision of climate crisis in the  Anthropocene  [. . .]; Wild’s Hyrule is no longer a site for wish-fulfillment and juvenile power fantasies but a grim premediation of a depopulated and (multiply) destroyed civilization, whose inevitable, always-already ruined future can only be partially and provisionally mitigated, not prevented or saved. In a twisted version of Jameson’s famous ‘nostalgia for the present’ (279 and passim), then, we therefore see registered within Hyrule’s collapse our culture’s anticipation of its own coming disruption by the climate crisis” (145-146).

Parts II and III similarly address important themes in climate fiction’s place in the diverse and cross-cultural world of the 21^st century. The dialogs in Part II include “Stories of Where We Come From” by Viola Lasmana  and Khairani Barokka, a conversation “where we spoke about the possibilities of language and imagination (what Okka expresses as ‘cosmologies within languages’), the fictions already embedded in what one might think of as facts, and the inextricable links between capitalism, the environment, climate change, colonial violence, disability justice, and indigenous cultures” (169-174). Stef Craps follows with “Last Aboriginal Person Standing in a Climate-Changed Australia: A Conversation with Alexis Wright” (175-181).  Jim Clarke converses with SF scholar and author Adam Roberts in “The Malign Flipside of Fluke,” including a discussion of Roberts’s novel The Black Prince (2018) (183-187). In “Dear Environment: Dialog with Anna Zett,” we explore Zett’s on-going “project Deponie (Dump), which includes video works as well as sculptural installations deploying piles of gravel and remnant ashes from industrially incinerated household waste” (190-195). Callum Copley concludes with “Documenting Fictions” in conversation with Federico Barni, discussing his work on “how climate operates at the intersection of fiction and fact in literature and filmmaking” (196-202).

The essays in Part II explore the “Stories We Tell About the End of the World: (Post)Apocalyptic Climate Fiction Working Towards Climate Justice” by Julia D. Gibson (204-228), “Tracking Climate Change from Ancient Times” (230-245 ), an essay on J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (246-266), and an examination of the Australian author James Edmond’s 1911 short story, “The Fool and His Inheritance” (267-288). The concluding essay explores climate change and “Cosmic Horror in John Langan’s The Fisherman” (289-304).

Part III’s Speculations include the dialogues “Ruins and Erosion: Reflections on the CaseDuna Project” in Brazil (305-313); an exploration of the art of Janet Laurence in “Through the Portal” (315-323); “Architectures of Seed Banking” (323-331); a conversation with the educator, author, editor, and public speaker Walidah Imarisha, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (2015), in “There Are No Givens” (333-339); and M. Ty’s interview with artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang in “Uncertain Harvest” (341-351), including a discussion of Cheang’s 1994 film Fresh Kill, about an “outbreak of radioactive fish lips” in a New York restaurant (341). Cheang discusses her 2017 film Fluidø, and concludes by commenting, “To invite people for a dinner these days involves a survey of dietary situations, and certainly this takes us back to environmental and health issues, to ethical beliefs, body natures, and the demise of immune systems. Food is political. Sex is political. Being is political” (351).

In the concluding essays in Part III, Suzanne F. Boswell in “The Four Tourists of the Apocalypse” addresses “Figures of the Anthropocene in Caribbean Climate Fiction” (353-371). Alexander Popov and Konstantin Georgiev explore Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017) in “Crises  of Water and the New Maps to Utopia” (373-395), while Conrad Scott examines “Ecocritical Dystopianism and Climate Fiction,” including the works of Atwood, Butler, Erdrich, Jemisin, Kingsolver, and others, and the criticism of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. Tyler Austin Harper examines the “Climate Fiction, Paranoid Anthropocentrism, and the Politics of Existential Risk,” discussing Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men, and a  British tradition of “paranoid anthropocentrism” (420) seen in such works as J.B.S. Haldane’s The Last Judgment (1927) and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007). Harper argues ”that paranoid anthropocentrism is intimately bound up with a disavowal, not of the possibility of utopia—paranoid anthropocentric depictions of the struggle for human survival are often deeply (and perversely) utopian—but of specifically emancipatory utopias in which responsibility for the survival of the human race would be democratically distributed” (427). Harper cites Kathryn Yusoff in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018), who he says “argues that whiteness functions as a place of power from which to organize and administer the dispensation of environmental risk in an age of climatic crisis” (428). Glyn Morgan concludes the volume with “Economies of Scale: Environmental Plastics, SF and Graphic Narratives.”  He cites Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016) for the claim that climate change “defies both literary fiction and contemporary common sense” (436) and offers to “examine comic book forms of SF to reinsert them into our discourse around climate change and genre fiction” (437), including a discussion of the Great Pacific (2013-2015) comic book series, William Gibson’s The Peripheral (2014), and Richard McGuire’s Here (2014). No review can do justice to every contribution to this fascinating and stimulating volume. It introduces the reader to specialist texts and insights that one would not otherwise encounter, while providing comprehensive critical essays on a range of SF texts that fall within the broad scope of Cli-Fi or Climate Fiction. It is a useful reference tool for researchers in the field and should be in any academic library collection.

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 edited a symposium “Law, Literature and Science Fiction” for the Legal Studies Forum (XXIII #3, 1999), has taught and published on law, literature and science fiction, and attends SFRA and WorldCon with his wife Susan when possible (most recently in Montreal and Spokane, and the June, 2021 virtual SFRA). A fan of all things Terry Pratchett. Since retirement he has taught Environmental Law and Ethics for Coastal Senior College, https://coastalseniorcollege.org/ and serves on the land use advisory committee for the town of Damariscotta.

Review of Children of Men

Zachary Ingle

Dan Dinello. Children of Men. Constellations. Auteur, 2019. Paperback. 133 pg. $24.95. ISBN 9781999334024.

Constellations is a series of small volumes (in the vein of the long running BFI Film Classics series) published by Auteur that focuses on individual science-fiction films and television series. By mid-2021, there had already been sixteen volumes published in the series, with several more on the horizon. Dan Dinello surely had a tough task in writing the entry on Alfonso Cuarón’s apocalyptic/dystopian Children of Men (2006), lauded as one of most enduring science-fiction films of this century, a rich text worthy of intense scrutiny that has only become more timely since its release with its “salient critique of anti-immigrant xenophobia and ultranationalism” (12). The film is set in 2027 at a time when there has not been a new human birth in over eighteen years. Britain has “soldiered on” even though most of the rest of the nations of the world have crumbled under environmental, nuclear, viral, or another form of destruction. Just as we inch closer to the film’s temporal setting, Children of Men has renewed relevance in light of Brexit and Trump, the Syrian refugee crisis, and the caging of immigrants—not to mention Covid-19.

Cuarón’s film is an adaptation of P. D. James’s acclaimed 1992 novel, and Dinello does devote a few pages to the differences between it and the film adaptation before rightly focusing on the film, not overly concerned with issues of fidelity. For instance, while the novel was more overtly Christian, the film still retains numerous parallels to the Gospels—from the obvious to the much less so—as Dinello scrutinizes in Chapter 6. However, the film focuses more on fascism, xenophobia, racism, and inequality—i.e. “tyrannical apartheid politics” (69)—that  Cuarón enhanced for the film, inspired by his post-9/11 milieu. But as Dinello notes, the anti-immigration rhetoric promoted by the media in Children of Men seems less concerned with terrorism (as it would have been at the time of the film’s release), but more about “medical nativism” as immigrants are constantly shown in locked cages in several key moments of the film for fear of microbial invasions from the Other. Though his book was published in 2019, Dinello now seems quite prescient of the xenophobic rhetoric surrounding Covid-19 (e.g., Trump’s “Chinese Virus” moniker).

The author invokes Camus more than anyone else, fittingly due to Camus’s “conception of fascism as a contagious plague against we must happily and relentlessly rebel” (123). Dinello delineates frequent connections to Camus in the latter half of the volume, from characters who exhibit his existentialist philosophy to the main protagonist Theo (Clive Owen) as quite similar to Camus’s protagonist in The Stranger (1942). Throughout, Dinello writes in a clear style that is accessible even for those with little background in existential philosophy.

Yet there are numerous reasons why Children of Men has become so acclaimed; certainly some are grounded in Cuarón’s use of long takes, moving cameras, and a cinema-verité approach, atypical at the time for the science-fiction genre. Dinello does not ignore an aesthetic analysis, offering a concise summation of André Bazin’s theory of realism (for those less familiar with film theory), a formal style that fits the content. Dinello considers Children of Men the most realistic science-fiction film ever. Indeed, Dinello devotes an entire chapter to the film’s visual design and how it enhances the film’s key political concerns (e. g. via the backgrounds which offer an “ambient apocalyptic” look) (61).

One potential negative, at least for readers of SFRA Review, is the lack of contextualization within the genre. Those readers looking for comparisons of Children of Men to other SF film and literature (and there are certainly interesting parallels that could be made to other dystopian texts on British fascism such as V for Vendetta—graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, 1989; film adaptation directed by James McTeigue, 2005) will need to look elsewhere, as Dinello proves to be more deeply fascinated with philosophical and political connections. 

Overall, this Constellations entry is highly recommended, illustrated with 42 black-and-white stills and enhanced by Dinello’s impeccably well-written prose that offers an intense textual analysis that never resorts to tedium. The brevity and affordable nature of books like those in the Constellations series make them excellent for the classroom setting and particularly recommended for a week-long focus on a film. Whether for classroom use or personal research, this volume is certainly endorsed as a study of a film worthy of further exploration (as those of us who have shown it recently in classes can attest). Despite the dystopian nature of Children of Men—and the depressing realization of its growing applicability—the film does end on a hopeful note, presenting the possibility of “an egalitarian, altruistic and non-authoritarian society that pursues the common good, accommodates plurality, and amplifies the sense of human and social possibility” (126).

Zachary Ingle is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film at Hollins University in Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies at the University of Kansas. Ingle has edited four volumes: Robert Rodriguez: Interviews; Gender and Genre in Sports Documentaries; Identity in Myth in Sports Documentaries; and Fan Phenomena: The Big Lebowski. His articles have appeared in Post Script, Literature/Film Quarterly, and Journal of Sport History.

Review of Yet Another Heart of Darkness: American Colonial Films

Frances Auld

Noah Berlatsky. Yet Another Heart of Darkness: American Colonial Films. Self-published, 2018. $5.14. ASINB07GYBHQ1G.

Yet Another Heart of Darkness: American Colonial Films by Noah Berlatsky is a digital collection of essays previously published in magazines such as Playboy, SpliceToday, Pacific Standard, the subscription service Patreon, or the author’s blog, the Hooded Utilitarian. Berlatsky’s essays cover film, fiction, non-fiction, and 21^st Century U.S. Politics. If that sounds eclectic, it is an eclectic book. However, the collection is united by certain touchstone fictional texts such as H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1897)and The Time Machine (1895), as well as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912). Berlatsky also references the critical work of John Reider, Colonialism and Science Fiction (2008) throughout many of his essays, demanding the reader see the underlying colonial and imperial motifs in popular film, television shows, and fiction.

The text is organized by sections: The Lost World of Colonialism (an introduction to his thesis on colonialism and his touchstone texts, including Heart of Darkness [1899]); American Colonial Films (16 essays on war films that include Aliens [1986] and Predator [1987]); Invasion of the Mummies (four essays on Mummy films from 1932-2017); Invasion of the Superheroes (three essays on superhero films primarily from the Marvel Comic Universe); Invasion of the Science Fiction (six essays primarily about science fiction novels, although some films are mentioned for context of tropes); Off-Screen Imperialism (four essays concerning non-fiction texts and 21^st century political narratives); Coda: Full Metal Bunny (a single essay that returns the reader to Berlatsky’s touchstone texts).

Berlatsky’s organization is hyperpermeable because as a digital text it allows for links within the essays. Thus, a reader might be reading the Coda, find a reference and a link to an essay on Rambo [1985] and be offered the jump to an earlier essay in a different section. This flexibility makes up for categorization which at times feels awkward or oddly drawn. Aliens seems to be excluded from the section on Science Fiction based on its genre (film), yet Berlatsky intentionally moves between film and text in his discussion of other Science Fiction novels and films or television shows. In addition, not all of his touchstone texts appear in all the essays. Seen as a collection of individual expositions written for different venues over time, this makes sense, as does the occasional repetition of a point made in an earlier essay. What makes the collection work is his scrupulous cinematic analysis, the depth of his comprehension and range of familiarity with films across genres (War Films, Horror Films, Science Fiction Films), and his consistent commitment to reading visual and written texts for their colonialist text and subtexts, as well as the occasional subversion of imperialism.

While this last comment may suggest a theory-heavy read, this book eschews deep theory or even a genuine literature review. Instead, the essays function as a series (not a sequence) of examples of colonialism in popular culture spread over more than a century. Berlatsky adds links to Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies (2017), as well as links to sources such as Slate and The Guardian, rather than offer a bibliography, reference pages, or pages of footnotes. Like the organizational structure, the selection and use of references is not slapdash, it is simply designed for a more popular audience, and a comparatively relaxed reading.

Yet Another Heart of Darkness: American Colonial Films belies its title. Rather than a text purely focused on “American colonial film” itis an application of select components of theory (America’s colonial past reappears in 20^th century films; contemporary films are still busy domesticating America’s past; viewers pleasurably participate as colonizers in these films and other texts) applied to various genres, mediums, and time periods. The language and tone befit the essays’ previous publication in magazine and blog formats. There are some spelling/format errors which may be attributed to self-publishing, and they occasionally distract from the text.

Overall, this is an enjoyable and fascinating read. Select essays would be particularly effective for undergraduates being introduced to colonial theory, feminist theory, and popular culture. Some essays may lack the critical foundation for more advanced academic researchers, but they offer detailed readings in historical context. Berlatsky’s essays cover both British and U.S. historical imperialist actions and their sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle, inscriptions in fiction and film. However, despite the historical underpinnings, the book does speak to fantasy. Even when he is writing about a non-fantastic visual text (Rambo, Full Metal Jacket [1987]), Berlatsky identifies the colonialist, time-travel fantasy that allows film makers and audiences to replay, recast, and rewrite historical events. The science fiction and horror texts he discusses exemplify the public’s desire and the authors’ impulse to continue colonizing (even if they have to do it in the center of the earth or outside the galaxy).

Berlatsky’s rendering of American War film as an expression of a science-fictional attitude toward history is perhaps the most fascinating focus of his essays. His critique of whitewashing in Marvel Comic Universe’s Superhero films is clear and solid, but rethinking the fantastic cultural displacement underlying Rambo or Apocalypse Now (1979) and seeing it as kind of time travel narrative is especially thought provoking, as is his recognition of viewers’ ongoing attraction to the fantasy of colonization from the viewpoint of the good guy/superhero/colonizer.   

Frances Auld, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Language and Literature at State College of Florida where she teaches coursework in Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy; Fairy Tales; Medieval Literature. She watches way too many horror movies, occasionally writes horror and dark fantasy, and loves to introduce students to creepy literature.

Review of An Ecotopian Lexicon

Ray Davenport

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy, eds. An Ecotopian Lexicon. Minnesota UP, 2019. Paperback. 344 pg. $24.95. ISBN 9781517905903.

Many scholars have acknowledged the need to expand our current conceptualizations of the complexity and scale of climate change, and of the Anthropocene more widely. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy’s An Ecotopian Lexicon takes an unusually direct approach to this task by offering a collection of essays, each of which makes a case for adding a specific new loanword to English from another language. In the foreword, Kim Stanley Robinson suggests that this text can function as “sourcebook, clarification, diagnostic, and stimulus” (xiv) for conceptualizing contemporary climate issues. Each of the thirty essays and fourteen pieces of art in An Ecotopian Lexicon draws attention to crucial issues through examining a specific loanword. Most helpfully, each essay begins with a pronunciation guide and an example for its respective loanword. These loanwords aim to broaden the imagination and are highly diverse in origin; some, such as “heyiya” and “terragouge” are derived from speculative novels and science fiction. Others, such “Qi,” “nahual,” and “solastalgia” find their roots in Confucianism, Mesoamerican cultures, and ecopsychology, respectively. What they all appear to share, however, is the ability to address an existing gap in the English language. In other words, each loanword provides a concrete term for an existing concept, emotion, or movement that engages with environmental challenges but has yet to be articulated by the English-speaking world.

            An Ecotopian Lexicon offers two ways in which to navigate these loanwords. The first contents pages alphabetize the essays while the second groups them into the following themes: Greetings, Dispositions, Perception, Desires, Beyond the Human, and Beyond “the Environment.” Many may consider the latter option more helpful, given the unfamiliar nature of loanwords. However, if reading this text in alphabetical order, ~*~ is the first loanword presented. According to Melody Jue, in the “Apocalypto” entry, this loanword is pronounced by blowing softly on the back of your hand (15). In addition to its curious pronunciation, ~*~ is the most glyphically unusual loanword contained in An Ecotopian Lexicon. Inspired by Dolphinese, ~*~ can be described as the “vibratory jouissance” (17) felt when dolphins use soundwaves to tickle each other, often across considerable distances. In terms of its practical usage, Jue suggests that ~*~ can function as a metaphor for figurative language in relation to the aquatic within terrestrial and human contexts. Indeed, the example she provides at the beginning of her essay elucidates her suggested usage nicely: “That USB comedy sketch about a BP board meeting struggling to clean up all the coffee spilled at their table really ~*~ me when I watched it on YouTube” (15).

            Through drawing attention to a method of communication used by Dolphins and why we should also make use of ~*~ as a metaphor, Jue inadvertently subverts the Anthropocentric binary notion of “us” (humans) and “them” (animals). As noted by Matthew Calarco, this idea has continued to pervade Western philosophies since Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics suggested an innate separation between humans, animals, and other forms of nonhuman life alongside a corresponding hierarchy (8). While many may consider the subversion of this idea to be a worthy ambition, particularly as it has been used to justify countless ecological atrocities against nonhuman species, practical utilization of ~*~ is potentially problematic in many circumstances. This, unfortunately, undermines its presence within a text that seeks to embed the usage of useful loanwords into the English language. While it may be relatively easy to type ~*~, as demonstrated by the example that Jue provides, using it in lectures, presentations, and more casual conversation would be somewhat tricky, thus diminishing ~*~’s potential for widespread usage.  

            Carolyn Fornoff’s essay, “Nahual,” occurs approximately halfway through the text, finding itself placed before ~*~ within Beyond the Human. It is not entirely clear why this essay was placed first (the decision was evidently not based on alphabetical order) but Fornoff’s exploration of the loanword “nahual” is both interesting and engaging, nonetheless. Like Jue’s essay, Fornoff’s criticises the notion of humans as being separate from the animal kingdom and the suggestion that “humans and nonhumans occupy separate, discrete realms of activity and knowledge” (163). The term nahual, which can be pronounced as “na-wal,” represents a Mesoamerican concept that suggests every human is linked to an animal alter-ego. In this sense, the daemons featured in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995-2000)could be considered reminiscent of this idea. For example, in both, the form of each person’s nahual or daemon is determined according to key characteristics of their personality. Understood metaphorically, nahualism, Fornoff suggests, can offer a crucial counterpoint to current Western conceptualizations of humans as separate from animals and provide a way of conceiving our human selves as innately bound to non-human life. Furthermore, she suggests that a better understanding of the inseparability between humans and animals can shift our ethical relationship with nature from one that is generated by individual moral codes to a relationality-based code of ethics (169-170). Indeed, nahualism has the potential to provoke decisive action against ecological degradation and what scientists such as Samuel T. Turvey have described as the Holocene extinction. Although this research on nahualism provides an interesting insight into Mesoamerican worldviews and a symbolic method of visualising the interconnectedness between humans and non-human animals, it does little to help us conceptualise the complex relationships that exist within ecosystems.     

            Destabilising separatist views is clearly a recurring theme within An Ecotopian Lexicon; in some essays, it is a key motif while in many others it is a more peripheral motif. Janet Tamalik McGrath’s thought-provoking essay on the loanword “sila” critiques this view through her examination of the English language at a structural level. Given that An Ecotopian Lexicon aims to harness the power of language to expand our conceptualization of climate change, essays such as this one seem appropriate for inclusion. The term sila, which can be pronounced as “see-lah,” is a noun derived from Inuktut (one of several Inuit languages) and, unlike ~*~ and nahual, is placed in Beyond “the Environment.” Although McGrath acknowledges the difficultly of a direct translation of this loanword, sila can be thought of as a concept that suggests humanity is responsible for preserving nature due to our ability, as a species, to influence its progress. Of course, concepts that promote this sort of stewardship are not unfamiliar to the English-speaking world and can be found in Christian, Islamic, and Jewish doctrines alike. However, according to McGrath, sila differs from these ideas as it can be thought of as a “superconcept” that emphasizes the interconnectedness between abstract ideas such as intelligence, spirit, and the cosmos. In this essay, McGrath also highlights how the linguistic structure of Inuktut is used to convey the highly relational worldviews held by many Innuits. Unlike English, Inuktut utilizes transitive verb agreement endings (subject and object as a single unit), is ungendered, and does not distinguish between animate or inanimate objects. In addition to being a highly relational language, Inuktut places the subject at the end of the sentence rather than the beginning as English does. For example, in English we may say “I am going to the store.” In Inuktut, however, the morphology would be more akin to “the store-going to-will-I” (260). Through exploring sila in the context of the linguistic structure of Inuktut, McGrath raises intriguing questions about how the structure of language itself has the ability to shape our perception of and relationship to the world. In addition, McGrath raises intriguing questions as to what effect putting ourselves at the end of the sentence may have on how we react to climate change.             Overall, this text is highly thought provoking and has the potential to be widely influential. However, its level of influence is altogether dependent on how it is used. For example, if those who read it actively incorporate these loanwords into everyday conversation, presentations, academic work etc., it could significantly develop our conceptions of climate change. Therefore, perhaps this book can be used most effectively by educators, academics, and researchers. That being said, those with an avid interest in climate change and the Anthropocene would be likely to find its contents interesting and informative. The inclusion of artwork to represent selected loanwords is also a nice touch and acknowledges the role that art, as well as language, can have in allowing us to better visualise climate change. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone seeking to expand their understanding of climate change as well as to those seeking to educate others on this topic. However, a revised edition of An Ecotopian Lexicon with further loanwords that address its complex temporal aspects, and perhaps even climate change denial, would be a welcome addition to literature on climate change and the Anthropocene more widely.

WORKS CITED

Calarco, Matthew. Thinking Through Animals. Stanford University Press, 2015.

Ray Davenport is a PhD student at Plymouth University, England. Her current research involves examining pretrauma and anticipatory memory within contemporary environmental fiction.

Review of Twelve Monkeys

Dominick Grace

Susanne Kord. 12 Monkeys. Auteur, 2019. Constellations. Paperback. 102 pg. $24.99. ISBN 9781999334000.

Auteur’s Constellations series of short monographs on key SF films and TV shows is uneven. Susanne Kord’s 12 Monkeys, which focuses primarily on Terry Gilliam’s film but also devotes a short chapter to the TV show, is a strong addition to the growing series. Kord, a Professor at University College London and author of several books and articles on popular culture, especially film, demonstrates intimate knowledge not only of the film but also of the critical tradition surrounding it. While one might quarrel with the back cover copy’s claim that 12 Monkeys is Gilliam’s best film (a claim not made within the book itself), Kord argues persuasively that it is Gilliam’s “least understood film” (13) because audiences and scholars alike have failed to see past the ways the film “deliberately confounds viewer expectations” (13). Kord cites numerous reviews and studies that express bafflement about the film, noting that commentators can’t agree “even on plot fundamentals” to a “startling” degree (8). Kord sets out to untangle the film’s knots, and she does so by exploring carefully and thoroughly how it deals with the implications of time travel.

Key to Kord’s reading is an explication of how the film denies the idea that time is linear, choosing instead to follow Einstein’s ideas (Einstein is even referenced in the film) of spacetime. Though the film repeatedly has characters point out that time cannot be changed, Kord argues that the implications of this fact have been insufficiently recognized in studies of the film, which often want to read some sort of hope or optimism into it—to see 12 Monkeys as the kind of time travel story in which one can change the past (or the future)—despite the fact that the film itself forecloses on that possibility.  Kord’s chapter on the TV series notes that this is a key aspect of the film discarded by the television show, which is predicated on the notion that the past can indeed be changed, if only one finds the right antecedent event to undo. Following the first chapter, which offers Kord’s synopsis of the film, Kord provides two chapters, “Pushing the (Reset) Button: Why You Can’t Start Over” and “’Thank You, Einstein’: Why You Can’t Turn Back Time,” in which she offers a detailed reading of the film’s time travel theory and some of the implications of that theory for concepts such as free will and determinism, a subject to which she returns in chapter 6, “Free Will, Determinism and Doing What You’re Told.” These aspects of Kord’s study constitute her most significant contribution to 12 Monkeys scholarship and should be illuminating to anyone interested in the film, whether as a fan or as a scholar.

            Kord is interested in other questions raised by the film, notably about the implications of point of view and perception. The film itself provides a meta commentary on this topic when Cole, while in a movie theatre watching Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), comments on how the movie itself can’t change but that one sees something different every time one watches it. Kord reads this not only as a commentary on the nature of the relationship between films and audiences (a relationship endorsed by Gilliam himself, who Kord quotes in the book’s coda as believing that there are multiple equally valid interpretations of his films, regardless of his intent) but also as a commentary on the nature of time in the film: time itself is fixed and immutable, but how one perceives it varies. This is of course very much in keeping with Einstein’s relativity. Kord makes much of the fact that a key problem in the film is that what is true is very much a matter of perspective; what seems like Cole’s insane babbling from the perspective of Railly in 1996 is, from Cole’s perspective, literally the truth.

            Kord also looks carefully at Gilliam’s filmic technique. She devotes considerable attention to the ways Gilliam fills the screen with significant information. This ranges from visual elements such as set dressings and objects shown on screen through camera point of view (e.g. the frequency with which characters are shown contained or enclosed, or even viewed through obstacles such as fences), the color palettes (e.g. how Cole frequently blends into the drab surroundings in which he is placed, or how the absence of color differentiation creates confusion even about which time frame we are in), camera angles, etc. Gilliam is a master of cinematic form, so it is unsurprising that so much of the film’s meaning is communicated not by dialogue and acting but by the visuals, but Kord expertly demonstrates how this is the case in clear prose that makes Gilliam’s technique evident even to those who are not film scholars.

            Indeed, one of the most admirable aspects of this book is Kord’s clear, engaging writing. This book is not only insightful but also a pleasure simply to read for the vividness and elegance of its prose. Kord is adept at communicating complex scholarly ideas in understandable language. That she can say so much of value in a mere hundred pages is impressive. This book makes an important contribution to Gilliam scholarship and should be read by anyone interested in the study of his films, but it is also eminently readable by a general audience. Given its relatively low cost, it would make a useful resource for students covering the film in a course, but it would be a worthwhile addition to any library’s Film and/or SF studies holdings.

Dominick Grace is Professor of English at Brescia University College in London, Ontario. His main area of research interest is popular culture, especially comics and Science Fiction.