Author: sfrarev

Review of The Triumph of Babylon 5: The Science Fiction Classic and Its Long Twilight Struggles

Bruce Lindsley Rockwood

Baz Greenland. The Triumph of Babylon 5: The Science Fiction Classic and Its Long Twilight Struggles. McFarland, 2024. Softcover. 250 pg. $49.95. ISBN 9781476692401; Ebook. $29.99. ISBN 9781476651446.

Baz Greenland is a podcaster and long-time fan of the television series Babylon 5, whose deep understanding of the show and its aborted spin-offs comes from the standpoint of a British viewer who heard of the show in his youth after its initial broadcast in the United States and who has watched and rewatched it ever since for over thirty years. He comments in his book, “The show’s inception, the struggles during production, and the attempts to continue the Babylon 5 story are almost as epic a tale as the fight against the Shadows and the battle to save Earth” (4). He has written widely and on-line about the series, https://www.threads.net/@greenlandbaz, interviewed surviving cast members, and has a podcast about it: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-dream-given-form-a-babylon-5-podcast/id1611981020. Now he has produced a book aimed at exploring the parallel stories of the show’s narrative plot, and the attempts to revive and extend it.

He notes his early enthusiasm for the show:

Babylon 5 stayed with me. I caught late night reruns on Channel 4, finally seeing what life was like under Commander Sinclair in season one. I bought all the seasons on VHS. On my A-Levels results day, I treated myself  by popping into the video store and spending a whole $100.00 on the complete season three box set. . . . I introduced new friends to Babylon 5. I got the TV movies. I stuck through Crusade. (2)

His reaction was much like my son’s, who bought an extra DVD set of the first season when it came out to share with friends at school, something I have seen duplicated since only with the single season of Firefly! (2002-2003)

The book has 26 chapters, starting with a discussion of “The Legacy of Babylon 5” in Chapter 1, followed by an overview of SF “Story Arcs” in Chapter 2. Greenland notes:

The Oxford English Dictionary defines legacy as ‘a situation that exists now because of events, actions, etc. that took place in the past.’ The story of Babylon 5 as a TV show can certainly be viewed through the prism of that definition. The narrative structure of the show is built on the events of the past. The horrors of the last great Shadow War left scars on the Minbari and the Narn. The rise of Valen a thousand years ago shaped Minbari culture, most significantly the character of Delenn. The Vorlon manipulation of other races and the creation of telepaths saw the show revisiting the trauma of the past, most fundamentally in the show’s final season. (6)

He argues that J. Michael Straczynski’s creation of Babylon 5 opened the door and set the standard for long-form story telling and multi-season story arcs that enabled subsequent television shows, from the reboot of Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009), to more recent iterations of Star Trek, such as Discovery (2017-2024) and Picard (2020-2023) (7-18).

Chapter 3 focuses on how Straczynski came to develop Babylon 5, making use of his comments on the rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated message board back in 1995, when he emphasized the need to have a reasonable budget, treat SF seriously in story-telling, and make use of the kind of sagas he admired in the genre. “As a lifelong fan of grand science fiction sagas like Foundation, Childhood’s End, The Lord of the Rings and Dune, he kept wondering: why hadn’t someone done this for TV?” (19-20). Chapter 4 explores how cast changes and the collapse of the Prime Time Entertainment Network (PTEN) lead to revisions of the original five year story plan and his proposed follow-up series Babylon Prime. (26) See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Time_Entertainment_Network and https://www.themoviedb.org/network/211. The original combined ten year story arc would have been very different from the show as it was produced, perhaps more dark and less exciting: “The final version of the TV show certainly appears to be the more thrilling option of the two” (29).

Further chapters discuss the development of the series, the back and forth debate about the relationship between Star Trek Deep Space Nine (1993-1999) and Babylon 5 (Chapter 6), and interesting interviews with cast members Peter Jurasik, Marshall Teague, and Patricia Tallman. Chapter 7, “Making ‘The Lord of the Rings in Space’ a Reality,” discusses the financial and technological obstacles to making grand SF films, and the literary influences on Straczynski’s story arc, including the poem “Ulysses” (1833; 1842) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as well as Childhood’s End (1953), Dune (1965), and The Lord of the Rings (1954) (50-53).  Chapter 9, “JMS’s Character Trapdoors,” shows how Straczynski planned character switches and exits to allow continuity despite unexpected challenges, while Chapter 10 explores his efforts at introducing diversity in race, religion, gender, and sexual relationships that were not always fully realized but significant for the era (74-76). Chapters 12 through 16 deal with each of the five seasons of Babylon 5, including comparisons of alternate viewing orders of Season 1 (97-98), Season 2 (109-110), and in subsequent seasons, as they relate to building the mythos of the show. Subsequent chapters explore the TNT Movies, the single season of Crusade (1999), and other attempts to extend the detailed universe created by JMS.

The book includes Chapter Notes, a Bibliography, and an Index. It makes extensive use of The Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5, available at http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/. Anyone familiar with (or new to) the series will value the detailed discussion of the making (and unmaking) of the original five-year story arc, Greenland’s commentary on each of the five seasons, and discussion of the innovations made by Straczynski that set the template for much of 21^st century SF production. Greenland explores attempts to extend or reboot the series, and his enthusiasm, commentary, and interviews with the cast make this a valuable resource for conducting further research on the series, which remains one of my favorites.

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

Review of The Kaiju Connection: Giant Monsters and Ourselves

Amber A. Logan

Jason Barr. The Kaiju Connection: Giant Monsters and Ourselves. McFarland, 2023. Paperback. 210 pg. $39.95. ISBN 9781476693514.

The Kaiju Connection is a short work focusing on the questions: what makes a kaiju a kaiju, and why are we, as humans, so intrigued by them? This isn’t Barr’s first foray into kaiju discourse, but this volume focuses more on recent kaiju films and the existential questions associated with the genre. With a refreshingly conversational (and sometimes humorous) tone, Barr isn’t afraid to pull metaphorical punches, curse, or paraphrase Homer Simpson in his evaluation of kaiju films, ranging from the serious and philosophical to the campy. Barr even states that this book isn’t an academic text in the strictest sense, but perhaps “more of an apologia for the continued study of the kaiju film” (3).

Barr suggests that society continues to be intrigued by kaiju films because the fascination with kaiju is an (at least tacitly) acceptable extension of a childhood fascination with dinosaurs. While not being particularly female-forward (few kaiju films, with the exception of Colossal [2016], have strong female protagonists—or, even, side characters), kaiju films do have strong masculine vibes and odd tie-ins with professional wrestling—which, admittedly, goes a long way to explaining the suspension of disbelief afforded some of the more comical and unconvincing rubber suits found in lower-budget kaiju films. Beyond gender dynamics, Barr argues that kaiju films can be legitimately studied in terms of political commentary (from the original 1954 Godzilla’s clear connections to post-war nuclear trauma to the 2016 Shin Godzilla, which can be read as a critique of the Japanese government’s response to the Daichii Fukushima disaster) and social commentary (evidenced in the evolving sense of “the Other” found across kaiju film franchises). Barr also argues that the more recent trend for American film makers to downplay Godzilla’s original nuclear origins has strong implications, arguing that they manipulate the story to give Americans a “pass” for the nuclear bombs dropped on Japanese soil during WW2 in order to make the story more palatable to their targeted American audience, thereby co-opting a character originally about a collective national trauma by the nation who caused the trauma. Recasting Godzilla as a ‘force of nature’ rather than a product of human violence and cruelty certainly reframes the narrative. However, Japanese filmmakers are not immune to the concept of spinning the popularity of Godzilla in order simply to make a quick buck; Barr also delves into the trend of some Japanese film companies to turn Godzilla from a serious message about humanity’s hubris into a kid-friendly “big monsters fighting” type of Saturday morning entertainment—the type of low-budget films that Barr bemoans as having watered down the reputability of the genre as a whole in the eyes of the general public.

Beyond Barr’s arguments for why kaiju and the genre of kaiju films are worthy of study, one of the most interesting parts of this book is its continual probing of the boundaries of the kaiju film genre. Barr convincingly argues that determining what ISN’T a kaiju film can be just as enlightening as determining what IS. Can a giant ape be a kaiju? What about a giant human? When does a creature change from being merely an oversized animal, to being a monster, to being a full-blown kaiju? Where those lines are drawn can arguably say a great deal about our perceptions of what constitutes humanity, and what we can sympathize with and relate to. Barr argues that the most solidly-kaiju kaiju are ultimately giant monsters (usually with Japanese origins, or at least nods toward a Japanese origin) who hold up a mirror to humanity and teach us something about ourselves. Barr proposes four “types” of kaiju or kaiju-adjacent films (authentic kaiju films; knockoff kaiju films; big, familiar creature films; and human kaiju), but perhaps the use of “fuzzy logic” is best applied when determining whether a film is a “kaiju film” or not, allowing the judger to decide how close the film in question approaches the beating heart of the kaiju film exemplars.

As Barr readily admits, it would be difficult to call The Kaiju Connection an academic tome, but it arguably has merit for scholarly research, particularly for those interested in the more philosophical, ethical (the costs of human life are often skimmed over in favor of watching two kaiju battle it out on the streets of major cities), and existential questions raised by the more ‘serious’  kaiju films. Casual fans of the kaiju film genre will find enlightening topics and much to enjoy (as well as much to skim over), but hardcore kaiju film junkies will delight in the depth into which Barr delves regarding specific recent films, characters, and even associated merchandise. Overall, The Kaiju Connection is a valuable addition to the kaiju film discourse.

Dr. Amber A. Logan is a university professor, freelance editor, and author of speculative fiction. In addition to her degrees in Psychology, Liberal Arts, and International Relations, Amber holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. Her thesis “Men Who Lose Their Shadows: from Hans Christian Andersen to Haruki Murakami” examined the intersection of fairy tales and near-future speculative fiction, and her debut novel The Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn was published in November 2022

Review of Vision, Technology, and Subjectivity in Mexican Cyberpunk Literature

Josh Beckelhimer

Stephen C. Tobin. Vision, Technology, and Subjectivity in Mexican Cyberpunk Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Studies in Global Science Fiction. Hardcover. XI, 200 pg. $129.99. ISBN 978-3031311550.

Stephen C. Tobin’s Vision, Technology, and Subjectivity in Mexican Cyberpunk Literature is a valuable chronicle of Cyberpunk in Mexico, a country not generally associated with the subgenre. Indeed, U.S. readers familiar with the foundational Japanese-indebted gambits of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson will likely be unfamiliar with most of the work here–primarily due to the cultural hegemony of the English Language. This book provides a fascinating media history of recent visual technologies in Mexico, reminding us how media and genres spill over from one place to another. Tobin orchestrates a nuanced reflection on the complicated, pervading dispersal of globalized media. In an age where boundaries between science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, and other subcategories are contested, Tobin’s new book proposes “specular fiction” (2). This designation points us in the right direction if we want to begin progressing our understanding of speculative cultural production. Tobin suggests a slight turn away from such hegemonic labels to root his definition at the nexus of literary and visual media–two spaces that, he contends, have grown increasingly intimate. Cyberpunk provides a useful nexus because, though realist texts feature ocular themes, a subgenre that can draw connections between older technologies and newer variations of “the e-image component” (12) is necessary. Tobin analyzes works from 1993 to 2014 to highlight just how turbulent the media landscape has been in recent decades.

Tobin is a scholar of Mexican culture on a larger scale, and his intervention into genre studies is doubly justified by his analytical roots in Mexico. It is a country where genre labels are more fluid, contrasting the market-driven genre labels of U.S. cultural production. While Tobin’s case studies can mostly be identified as science fiction, his theorization opens up specular fictions–narrative forms that entwine language and screens–as works present across disciplines. Such theorization allows Tobin to dodge some prickly generic disputes about “science fiction” and the sweep of “speculative fiction.” Rather, he contextualizes his intervention for literary and media studies more broadly by following the well-known work of Walter Ong and W.J.T. Mitchell, who have “argued that all media are mixed media, meaning that no media [sic] is purely visual” (4). With this mixed approach, Tobin performs literary analysis that utilizes literature as case studies to theorize media. Tobin’s key interventions contribute to SF scholarship, Mexico Studies scholarship, and scholarship that explores the growing camaraderie between literary and visual media studies. His focus on “specular fictions” does well to offer useful critiques for theorists of science fiction and cyberpunk. By building his definitions on the importance of a given visual technology for a literary work, though, he also theorizes something that can be identified and analyzed across disciplinary and generic boundaries.

In Chapter 1, his introduction, Tobin provides a useful comparative reading of Mauricio-Jose Schwarz’s “La pequeña guerra” [“The Little War”] (1984) and Francisco Amparán’s “Ex machina” (1994). The former, an earlier text, figures television secondarily. The latter, a later text, is a narrative primarily driven by the presence of television. The latter is a specular fiction, while the former is not. Here we see a way in which specular fiction remains compatible with Science Fiction theory–Amparán’s story uses television as the “novum,” or the technological mechanism that shapes the narrative world (In his landmark essay “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” Darko Suvin adapted “novum” from Frankfurt School theorist Ernst Bloch). Tobin adapts the term “scopic regime” from Media Studies, but the scopic regimes in focus are usually generated by a novum. This categorization of specular fiction serves most usefully as a temporal map that places geographical pressure on Mexico and the landscape in which it is situated. The fiction that Tobin highlights contains myriad visual technologies, from the television to the more speculative reality-distorting glasses. While some are more rooted in fiction than others, Tobin can move from foundational observations on cinema and television to the numerous screens that have exploded in popularity in the public life of the 2020s. With this progression through time, it becomes increasingly clear that this book about Mexico is more broadly about how Mexico is connected to, and increasingly resembles other global scopic cultures.

Chapter 2 grounds the book on a safe but sharp analysis of gender in the work of Gerardo Porcayo. It is safe because Tobin leans on Laura Mulvey’s now-classic analysis of the male gaze in cinema, which argues that the history of cinema has been dominantly constructed through a male-centric gaze. It is also safe in that readers who come to this book will be familiar with the prevalence of masculinist SF and Cyberpunk. The analysis allows Tobin to perform two key moves. First, he roots Porcayo as a foundational figure for Mexican Cyberpunk, a figure representative of the indelible influences of the US and the dominant masculinist foundations of the subgenre. Second, he establishes that Porcayo’s book is not limited to how specific visual technologies represent/influence perception and subjectivity, but how the gaze, on a broader scale, is a visually encoded social phenomenon.

Chapter 3 transitions into work that zeroes in on specific scopic regimes. Its focus on television makes it generally the heart of the book. Despite the range of visual media at play here, television is the most longstanding form-giving technology. Porcayo writes towards the beginning of the growth of television as a scopic regime, while the book ends with reflections on the proliferation of smartphones and computers which in the 2010s “still had not eclipsed television presence” (27). Television history also helps Tobin bring to light the “restructuring of the media industries within Mexico,” a “higher proliferation of images,” and the growth of the television market itself (27). These three areas open up analyses of “political legislation and privatization,” the “expansion of foreign oligarchic media companies” and the evolutions of the Mexican economy (27). In one striking detail about the shift from public to private media, Tobin reflects on the “media imperialism” that took place as US-based programming took hold of the Mexican television-watching public (27). Focusing on Pepe Rojo’s work, Tobin centralizes a theoretically informed writer through his story “Ruido gris” [Gray Noise] (1996) and the novel Punto cero [Zero Point] (2000). Two key strains arise here as Tobin further expands the net of globalism by juxtaposing an analysis of NAFTA and an analysis of the influence of European postmodernists Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, and Slavoj Žižek on Rojo’s work. Tobin suggests that Jacques Lacan’s influence may be the most important to Rojo’s work. He offers a Lacanian analysis to tie the television to the home. Here, the spectacular violence that becomes regular viewing numbs individual viewers to bodily destruction. The critique illustrates how screens become a part of Rojo’s speculative literary form, as well as the political forms that emerge with the immediacy and pervasiveness of television news cycles.

Chapter 4, finally, is perhaps the most striking, at least insofar as the content of the case studies goes. It offers a comparative analysis of Eve Gil’s novel Virtus (2008), and Guillermo Lavín’s short story, “Él piensa que algo no encaja” [He thinks something doesn’t fit] (2014), using Debord’s Society as a Spectacle as a theoretical springboard. Debord’s theory leads to a theorization of the twentieth century as “one which involves a hypermediated realm of megaspectacles and interactive spectacle” (40). The analysis centers on Gil’s depiction of President Wagner, the center of a virtualized Mexican future. Wagner is a young, handsome politician who is carefully shaped and curated to appeal to the power of celebrity culture and telenovelas. Wagner is likened to the real-life President Enrique Peña Nieto, elected in 2012. Wagner’s fictional, highly publicized celebrity marriage mirrors that of Peña Nieto, whose marriage may have been a ruse to appeal to public cravings to blur the lines between the telenovela and reality. Wagner dies and becomes a hologram controlled by a mysterious group of powerful people. While Gil’s text relies on curated mass culture, Lavín’s uses VR glasses that render the world better than it is, suggesting that not only are individuals prone to ideological conditioning, but often they actively desire it. The analysis builds out Debord’s neo-Marxian critique to a critique of ideological conditioning as a spectrum. Subject formation proceeds under the pressure of dark media conglomerates, and through intimate individual engagement with the technology. This comparative analysis reflects on the relationships between mass culture and individual subjectivity. Perhaps most hauntingly, it meditates on Wizard of Oz-esque figures who work behind the veil to advertise, condition, and enforce power. Though the technologies of these stories are more speculative than those of the works discussed in the preceding chapters, they resonate with the familiarly fragmented and persuasive cultural dispersals of today’s smartphones, social media apparatuses, and corrupt powers that often work across national boundaries to maintain docile populations.

These works are predominantly dystopian, and Tobin carefully relies on theorizations of dystopias as critically reflecting on the times in which they are imagined. His engagements with these dystopias generate compelling arguments for the magnitude of power that visual technologies have to shape national cultures and individual subjects. Tobin’s scope is limited to a corpus that reflects on recent decades but leaves open the question of how specular fictions might be further explored. Following Nicholas Mirzoeff, he writes that specular fictions engage with visual technologies “defined as any form of apparatus designed either to be looked at or to enhance natural vision, from oil painting to television and the Internet” (6). Questions that might follow then: what happens when we stretch definitions of visual technology? Perhaps an apt question for cyberpunk specifically might be, can we identify specular fictions by the clothing worn in the texts? Can we identify specular fictions by how they represent plant and animal life? How do our formulations of specular fictions change when we bring more specifically semiotic theoretical lenses to them? If we are to bring specular fictions full circle by examining questions of genre, might we interrogate deeper history? Tobin carefully keeps the presents of the texts close to the chest to avoid vague proclamations about the future, which leaves these questions for other thinkers. Hopefully, they will be taken up by scholars working on SF, Mexico, and wider discourses of literary and media studies, all of whom should find useful insights in this book.

Josh Beckelhimer is a PhD Candidate in the English Department at the University of Southern California. He is a Visual Studies Images Out of Time Fellow and holds an MA from the University of Cincinnati. His work focuses on ecological cosmologies within speculative literary works by Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Rita Indiana. He focuses on the cosmological forms that literary writers use and interact with to reconceptualize colonial histories of the Americas, human relationships to the environment, and varying sciences and systems of ecological knowledge. He is particularly interested in writers who tap into expansive imaginative generic frames to go beyond basic understandings of material ecology.