Category: 53.2

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Roger Zelazny is a thorough and sympathetic review of the life, career, and work of one of the seminal creators in science fiction and fantasy of the last half of the 20^th century. It takes into account the prior work of reviewers, critics, and biographers as well as commentary by his peers and fans, from every period of his sadly shortened life and since. It includes an interview with Zelazny (152-161) conducted by Jeffrey D. Smith and Richard E. Geis reprinted from The Alien Critic: An Informal Science Fiction and Fantasy Journal, vol. 2, no. 4 (November, 1973). There is a comprehensive bibliography of all his fiction, selected poetry, non-fiction, and interviews. The list of secondary sources (193-198) notes that the author also made use of the archives of Zelazny’s papers at Syracuse University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in pursuit of completing this work.  

The only omission of note is any reference to the audio books that Zelazny recorded of his own work and that of others, including his performances of the Amber novels, Eye of the Cat, and A Night in the Lonesome October. These recordings provide a memorable sense of the vibrancy of these stories and the man who wrote them that merits further inquiry.

Cox divides his book into five chapters covering the early life, education, initial publications, and the arc of Zelazny’s career until his death (146), as well as posthumous publications and reprints of his works. Chapter 1, “Out of Nowhere Beginnings—1963,” focuses on Zelazny’s early life, initial interests, losses, and the creation of his first great short story, “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” which he wrote in 1961 at the age of 24, and sold to Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1962 (14-19). Cox comments, “This story… may have been fueled in part by a young man’s heartbreak, but it also emerged from the combination of artistic ambition and commercial goals that marked Zelazny’s entire career” (14).

Chapter 2, “Everybody Loves a Winner: 1964-1968,” Chapter 3, “Do Quit Your Day Job: 1969-1971,” and Chapter 4, “A Series of Different Endeavors: 1972-1979,” track the variety of short stories, novellas, and novels that Zelazny produced during these periods, their artistic and thematic differences, and the reaction of his peers, critics, and fans. Commenting on some of Zelazny’s early stories, Cox notes, “If ‘The Graveyard Heart’ stands as an early consideration of one of Zelazny’s main preoccupations—immortality—‘The Furies’ offers an early glimpse of two recurrent concerns of Zelazny’s later work: the outlaw-terrorist whose violence emerges from the collision of human and alien cultures, and classic mythology as a template for the science fiction story” (27).

Already there were differences of opinion concerning his work: Theodore Sturgeon “called ‘The Furies’ a ‘tour de force,’” while Frederik Pohl rejected the story for Galaxy “on the grounds that . . . it was simply confusing” (27-28). Cox cites this as emblematic of a “a long-term debate about Zelazny’s fiction. Was the author fully, and brilliantly, in control of his materials, or not?” (28). Cox explicates his next stories: “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth”(1965) (28-30), and “He Who Shapes” (1965) (32-33), commenting “The miraculous year of 1965 concluded with the serial publication of …And Call Me Conrad” (1965), his “first novel… a far-future tale of a ruined Earth, interplanetary politics, exotic aliens, and a hero who may or may not be immortal” (33).

In 1966 Ace Books published his first novels …And Call Me Conrad as This Immortal, and He Who Shapes as The Dream Master, followed by his first collection of short fiction in 1967 (38). …And Call Me Conrad tied with Dune for the Hugo as best novel at the 1966 World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland, greatly impressing Samuel R. Delany. Cox notes the enthusiasm Zelazny met when he was introduced at the Convention (38-39). He goes on to discuss the place of Delany and Zelazny as contributors to the 1960s New Wave in SF, citing their contributions to Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions in 1967 (38-39), and how Zelazny’s remarriage and full-time work at the Social Security Administration (SSA) provided him with the stability to write 19 new “well developed, fully resonant stories,” two of which contributed to his novels Lord of Light (1967) and Damnation Alley (1969) (40-41). Cox describes in detail the creation and complex plot of Lord of Light as a “science fantasy novel that blurs genre lines” (47-55), and the creation of the loner anti-hero Tanner in Damnation Alley (57-58). By May, 1969 Zelazny and his wife felt comfortable enough to quit their SSA jobs, and he devoted himself to full time writing (60).   

Each subsequent chapter in Roger Zelazny follows the same pattern of detailed and thoughtful assessment of the works produced in the period, their critical reception and often contrasting popular appreciation by his fans. Chapter 3, “Do Quit Your Day Job: 1969-1971,” examines Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969) and the first Amber novel, Nine Princes in Amber (1970), which Cox’s research indicates was written between April, 1966 and February, 1967 and reflects “a deliberate shift toward more commercial writing” (62). Zelazny’s next major novel in this period was Isle of the Dead (1969), a contribution to the “renowned series Ace Science Fiction Specials edited by Terry Carr” (63). The protagonist is Francis Sandow, who was born in 1965 but due to time dilation from space travel and medical advances is nearly a thousand years old, and a practitioner of an alien religion that allows him the telepathic “power to modify and create new worlds” (63). Cox finds the novel more “pared-down and under the author’s control,” and “Zelazny’s most nuanced treatment to date of the theme of immortality” (65) with suggestions of environmental concerns that emerged more clearly in his later work (67). Its critical reception was again mixed, with one review condemning its “mediocre plot” and another praising it as his “finest work to date” (68).

Cox then discusses the Egyptian-based mythology and the plot of Creatures of Light and Darkness (68-73), and its mixed reviews: James Blish disliked his “application of myth to science fiction,” while Algis Budrys’s review in Galaxy called it “full of adventure and poetry,” with “nearly a perfect clarity,” although Zelazny later suggested it was a parody of New Wave or even a “self-parody” (72-73).

Cox suggests that at this time Zelazny was trying to establish his identity as a writer, “whether he [was] fundamentally a wordsmith or a storyteller,” and that the 1970 publication of Nine Princes in Amber seemed to answer this question in favor of storytelling, even though it had been written earlier (73). Cox gives a detailed plot summary of the novel (73-78). Blish this time praised the novel “as an adventure story with real originality and zest” and observed that Zelazny’s “mixture of poetry and slang . . .is not jarring here” since it matches Corwin’s “double life” in the real and fantasy world (75). The last novel in this period, Jack of Shadows (1971), was less well received (78-83), featuring a self-interested loner comparable to Damnation Alley’s Hell Tanner. Cox cites Jane Lindskold’s discussion of these two as “More Villain than Hero” (81). Zelazny later commented in a 1989 introduction to a reprint of Jack that “This was not one of my experimental books… This was a more workmanlike job in that I knew exactly what I wanted to do and how to do it,” which Cox suggests could be an epigraph for the next phase of his career, “with an increasingly mixed critical response” (83).

Chapter 4, “A Series of Different Endeavors: 1972-79,” continues the close analysis of Zelazny’s career and creative choices, including his focus on novels over short fiction for commercial reasons, and his engagement with a Writer’s Workshop in Baltimore called the Guilford Gafia (84-85). His publications included the next four sequels in the Amber series, which Cox assesses in detail (92-101), My Name is Legion (1976), and a collaboration with Philip K. Dick, Deus Irae (1976). Zelazny and his family moved to New Mexico, and a film version of Damnation Alley was made, which, while not true to his story, helped pay for his house (86-87). To Die in Italbar (1973), a “straightforward adventure tale” (89), was followed by four more novels: Today We Chose Faces (1973), Doorways in the Sand and Bridge of Ashes (1976), and Roadmarks (1979). All were open to criticism for “incompleteness” while showing Zelazny’s continued interest in “experimenting with narrative structure” and “outbursts of lyricism” (101). His interest in science fiction continued despite his increased commitment to fantasy (101 & 108). Cox notes that Bridge of Ashes, one of the first novels written after the move to New Mexico, addresses environmental concerns while also returning to Zelazny’s theme of political violence to protect the earth (106-107). Concluding with an exegesis of Roadmarks, Cox asserts that Zelazny was still committed to pursuit of his “feelings… toward narrative” while “even eager, to write for the market,” which would reflect his priorities in the decade to come (121-122).

Cox then assesses Eye of the Cat (1982), concluding that “William Blackhorse Singer is Zelazny’s most emotionally mature protagonist, and Eye of the Cat may be his most emotionally mature novel” (132-136). It involved more research than his “straight adventure books” and permitted him to “use all the tricks” he had as an artist, despite being received to mixed reviews at the time (136-137). Critical reception of his next novella, “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai” (1985), was much more positive, and featured a female protagonist as “a direct response to criticism that the main characters of his longer works were always men,” as he wrote in a letter to Lindskold in 1989 (139). The story is informed by a knowledge of Japanese art and literature, while its use of computers, data nets, and “the projection of a human consciousness into virtual landscapes” reflects an awareness and appreciation of the cyberpunk movement of the era, coming out a year after the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (138). Cox points out that Zelazny was not just jumping on a bandwagon and had made use of computers, artificial intelligence, and virtual landscapes in many earlier stories, such as “He Who Shapes” and Lord of Light (139).  At the start of Chapter 5: “Nothing on Spec But Still Some Joy: 1980-1995,” Cox reports thaton July 31, 1980, Zelazny “incorporated himself as the Amber Corporation.” (123). Other SF writers have also incorporated (Asimov and Ellison, for example), and Cox notes this reflects Zelazny’s careful attention to his finances and recognition that the Amber novels were a significant source of his commercial success. He published 23 books between 1980 and his death, “only two” of which were adult stand-alone novels: Eye of the Cat (1982) and A Midnight in the Lonesome October (1993) (123). He wrote five more novels in the Amber series, and approximately 30 short stories (123-124). Zelazny collaborated with Fred Saberhagen on the novels Coils (1982) and The Black Throne (1990), and with Thomas T. Thomas on The Mask of Loki (1990) and Flare (1992) (124), and produced the Dilvish the Damned stories (1982), a sword-and-sorcery series that he said was “easy to write . . .when I might need a story in a hurry” (125). His most significant work in this period was the second Amber series, starting with The Trumps of Doom (1985). He had many fan requests to continue the series, had more Amber tales to tell, and was partially motivated by a substantial advance from Avon Books to continue the series (125). Cox explicates the plots of these stories and critical response in great detail (125-132), pointing out, as “Lindskold and Khanna have noted, that the women in the second series are more prominently featured and operate with significantly more agency” than in the first series (130). The series was and remains a popular success and subgenre of fandom that continues to this day.

Zelazny’s last stand-alone book, A Night in the Lonesome October (1993), made use of characters, stories and tropes associated with Hallowe’en, Jack the Ripper, H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, and more, presented in 32 chapters (an introduction and then one day for each day in October), and came with illustrations by Gahan Wilson (140-144). While the book was not widely reviewed at the time, George R. R. Martin saw it as Zelazny’s “last great novel,” and Cox suggests that it supports Neil Gaiman’s comment that in the “late eighties and early nineties he got his joy back” (144). Cox concludes by describing Zelazny’s support of the arts in Santa Fe, travel, personal life, and the shock felt in the writing and fan community at the news of his untimely death (146). An afterword summarizes his posthumous publications and reprints of his work, including The Great Book of Amber (1999) and the 2009 Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny in six volumes (147-152).

For a relatively short treatise, Roger Zelazny is a comprehensive and insightful presentation of his life and works, a resource for anyone interested in further research, and a reading list for those who came to him from Amber and now realize how much more there is to explore. Highly recommended for general readers and library collections alike.

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

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In his engaging, informative description of the birth and evolution of the utopian and dystopian genres, Emrah Atasoy explains why the dystopian genre overtook the utopian genre in the twentieth century due to international conflicts and the rise of totalitarian and fascist regimes. For those unfamiliar with utopian and dystopian literary theory, Atasoy provides a comprehensive overview of the most influential scholars and texts. In the introduction, Atasoy discusses recurring themes in utopian and dystopian fiction, such as power, surveillance, and social control. The journey of the protagonist and other key utopian and dystopian literary tropes are also explained. Undergraduate students and non-specialists will benefit greatly from reading Atasoy’s introduction to the field of utopian studies and his overview of the utopian and dystopian genres not only because of his extensive research, which is abundantly clear, but also because of Atasoy’s lucid writing style.

A wide range of theorists are drawn on throughout this monograph, but Atasoy’s engagement with Rafaella Baccolini, Tom Moylan, and Lyman Tower Sargent is particularly significant because of their scholarship on the critical dystopia. Sargent coined the term “critical dystopia” to refer to a fictional place that is worse than the reader’s world but which has some semblance of hope. Baccolini and Moylan similarly state that critical dystopias must maintain hope within the text, which is achieved through an open ending. The critical dystopia is often used to describe dystopias of the 1980s and 1990s but Atasoy, like Baccolini, claims that some earlier dystopian texts are critical dystopias. Through his analysis of Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937), Anthony Burgess’ The Wanting Seed (1962), and P.D. James’ The Children of Men (1992), Atasoy makes a convincing case for reading these novels as critical dystopias that maintain the utopian impulse, by examining these novels alongside their historical context.

Atasoy claims that the critical dystopia “does not only function as a warning, a cautionary tale, but it takes an active part in the possibility of radical transformation” (7). This is important as the possibilities of the dystopian genre to effect positive change are often overlooked by scholars, in favour of the utopian genre. This is because dystopian literary texts are seen by some theorists—most notably Ruth Levitas—as encouraging a sense of fatalism. Recently, scholars from the humanities and social sciences have begun to argue that, as a political genre, dystopian fiction inspires critical thinking and activism, and that it can be used for utopian thinking. Adam Stock’s Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought (2019), like Atasoy’s monograph, focuses on the significance of twentieth century dystopian fiction and social change. Meanwhile, Annika Gonnermann’s Absent Rebels (2021), Aaron Rosenfeld’s Character and Dystopia (2021), and Sean Seeger and Daniel Davison-Vecchione’s “Dystopian Literature and the Sociological Imagination” (2019) suggest that twenty-first century dystopian fiction has more potential to effect positive social change than twentieth century dystopian fiction. This is because twenty-first century dystopian fiction tends to be set either in the very near future or in the present, it is typically set in recognisable, real locations around the globe, it is explicit in terms of what is being critiqued, and many contemporary dystopias also depict collective rebellion, through the collaboration of multiple protagonists and/or characters. Atasoy demonstrates, however, that the texts he analyses are indeed political, hopeful, and extrapolative, and he illustrates the importance of revisiting twentieth century dystopias.

In the three literary chapters, Atasoy examines the primary texts—Swastika Night, The Wanting Seed,and Children of Men. Atasoy’s choice of novels provides an illuminating discussion of gender roles, reproduction, and population control in twentieth century dystopian fiction. It is also refreshing to see two twentieth century dystopias by female authors, which differ from the current trend of twenty-first century feminist dystopias—particularly in terms of their portrayal of male protagonists—put in dialogue with each other. The novels complement each other well and the analysis makes the connections between the novels clear. Although these texts are fairly well-known, they have often been overshadowed by canonical dystopias such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and they have been somewhat overlooked by scholars. By examining twentieth century dystopian fiction which is often given short shrift, Atasoy convincingly suggests that many twentieth century dystopias need further analysis.

Epistemological Warfare and Hope in Critical Dystopia is a key text for utopian and dystopian scholars. As Atasoy frames Swastika Night, The Wanting Seed,and Children of Men as critical dystopias, the connections and nuances between twentieth century and twenty-first century dystopias are drawn out further. As all three primary texts are by British authors, however, it would be interesting to see whether there are examples of critical dystopias before the 1980s beyond Britain. A comparative global approach to twentieth century critical dystopias could be an area for future research for Atasoy and other scholars to build on.

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Jade Hinchliffe is a PhD researcher at The University of Hull. Her interdisciplinary thesis examines the discriminatory impacts of surveillance in twenty-first century dystopian fiction from the global north and global south.

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John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film Seconds, starring Rock Hudson, was not marketed as a science fiction film, but its premise is sufficiently science fictional that it merits inclusion in the Constellations series of brief “studies in science fiction film and TV.” Although the book is outrageously overpriced for a text of about 35,000 words, Jez Conolly and Emma Westwood do a brilliant job of summarizing the film, exploring its implications, and finally giving it its proper place in the canon of science fiction cinema.

I cannot avoid a few spoilers here; the book assumes that the reader has already seen Frankenheimer’s movie. Seconds is about a mysterious corporation, known only as “the Company,” that offers affluent but dissatisfied men a supposed second chance to live their lives all over again. If you take them up on their services, and pay them well enough, the Company will fake your death, surgically reconstruct your body, and give you a new identity. The movie’s protagonist, initially played by John Randolph (one of four blacklisted actors for whom Seconds offered their first Hollywood roles after fifteen years without work), is a middle-aged New York banker, wealthy and powerful but living an empty life; he is trapped in a loveless marriage, and commutes daily into the city from his expensive home in the suburbs. He is both cajoled and blackmailed into signing up for the Company’s services. After a series of grueling operations, the protagonist emerges as a younger-looking and healthier man, now played by Rock Hudson. Thus rejuvenated, the protagonist moves to California and embarks upon a new life, filled with art, excitement, and even a bit of 1960s countercultural pizzazz. But this new life ultimately proves as sterile and unsatisfying as the old one. At the end of the movie, the protagonist returns to the Company; only this time, instead of surgically altering him yet again, they kill him and use his body as fodder for further operations with new subjects. It is implied that this is the ultimate fate of all the Company’s clients.

Conolly and Westwood begin the volume by reflecting upon their own different reasons for valuing the movie. They then proceed to a brief plot summary. After this, instead of proceeding sequentially, they give a series of overviews of the film from different perspectives and in accord with different interests. They analyze everything from the overall shape of Frankenheimer’s career as a director to small but telling details about the fonts used in the opening titles (designed by Saul and Elaine Bass, who had previously worked with Hitchcock). They spend a lot of time on set design, and on James Wong Howe’s innovative black and white cinematography. They are especially good in discussing how the disruptive and alienating style of the film—with its departure from Hollywood norms, and its nods to the French New Wave—works to express the negativity of the narrative, which refuses to accord us the happy ending that audiences of the time still craved. They also focus on the significance of the movie for Rock Hudson himself, a gay man who lived a closeted existence as a heterosexual-romantic screen idol. And they situate the film in the larger currents of American popular culture, which in 1966 was in the midst of its transition from a concern with suburban lifestyles and the gray, monotonous lives of middle-management businessmen (as reflected in movies like The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit [1956]) to mainstream adoption of the more free-wheeling 1960s counterculture (as reflected in the New Hollywood of the early 1970s).

In this way, Conolly and Westwood provide a close analysis of the movie, while at the same time showing its relevance for larger concerns about cultural transformations in the mid-twentieth-century. The authors are especially astute in the way that they relate emblematic details of the film to more pervasive issues. I am thinking here especially of the chapter in which they analyze one of the more memorably weird sequences in the film: that in which Hudson’s rejuvenated protagonist is induced to participate in a Dionysian grape-stomping ceremony. The participants are not quite hippies, but rather people more or less in Hudson’s own age-group (he was 41 when the film was shot). The protagonist hesitates to join in, but he is finally induced to, and he ultimately gives way to an almost orgasmic ecstasy. Nonetheless, we still see in Hudson’s performance vestiges of the uptightness that were most evident in Randolph’s previous incarnation of the character. In Conolly and Westwood’s analysis, the movie is skeptical both of our fictions of personal identity, and of our fantasies of being able to simply erase those fictions and substitute them with others. This double questioning of identity and of escape from identity is one of the important science fictional themes that the authors pull out from the movie, even though they do not write explicitly about science fiction as a genre or mode of discourse.

There are a few minor points in the book where I wished for a slightly different treatment. The authors spend more pages than necessary worrying about the believability, for the audience, of Randolph’s transformation into Hudson. This doesn’t seem to me to be much of a problem, since few subjective fantasies are more alluring than the prospect of being transformed into a gorgeous and sexy movie star. I was also disappointed that the authors didn’t give more attention to Will Geer’s role in the movie. Geer in real life was a radical political activist; he is one of the four formerly blacklisted actors who were given roles in Seconds. Here he plays the head of the Company, whose sinister aims are disguised behind a veneer of empathetic folksiness; it is almost as if Geer were giving us, in advance, a parody and deconstruction of the role for which he became famous in the following decade, as Grandpa in The Waltons.

Despite these reservations, I consider Seconds to be a deeply insightful and accomplished book, which does justice to an important movie that has long been overlooked. Although the book doesn’t explicitly address the issues most overtly articulated in science fiction scholarship and criticism (e. g. cognitive estrangement and the duality of utopianism and dystopianism), its actual concerns are deeply congruent with those issues. The goal behind the Constellations book series—that of giving succinct yet comprehensive readings of particular science fiction films and television series—is an important one, and this volume fulfills that goal admirably.

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Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University, where he teaches film studies. His books about science fiction include Connected, Or What It Means To Live in the Network Society (2003), Discognition (2016), and Extreme Fabulations; Science Fictions of Life (2021).

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When tracing the origins of Middle-earth, most scholars over the years have focused on Tolkien’s deep knowledge of German philology. While this is indeed a rich field for Tolkien’s mythopoeic vision, it is only a portion of the much larger well from which Tolkien drew his inspiration. The essays in Tolkien and The Classical World, edited by Hamish Williams, explore the ways classical influences shaped the stories, characters, and ideas found in Tolkien’s works. In a wide-ranging collection of essays that focus on everything from Tolkien’s early training as a classicist to Greco-Roman myth to ancient philosophy, this volume demonstrates how the oft-neglected classical influences on Tolkien’s writing truly are some of the most powerful forces in his creative imagination.

The volume is organized into five major sections of two to four essays each. The first of these sections, “Classical Lives and Histories,” serves as an excellent introduction to the topics of the volume. Wiliams’s essay, “Tolkien the Classicist: Scholar and Thinker,” traces the long period of Tolkien’s life in which he studied the Classics, from his home schooling through his undergraduate years at Oxford.. Williams’s detailing of the curriculum at King Edward’s particularly illustrates how well Tolkien was acquainted with the Classics and how they shaped his literary sensibilities. Williams notes how students at King Edward’s School were inculcated in the classical world through “various Anglified popularisations of the Classics” (9), including Lord Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, which inspired the young Tolkien to write his own mock epic in Macaulay’s style. Additionally, in his study of ancient Greece, Tolkien found models for social construction that would shape the peoples of Middle-earth. Williams observes how Tolkien saw in the ancient Greeks “an anarchic, diverse, inefficient, and quarrelsome form of human virtue which can resist power without succumbing to it” (27). Tolkien saw in these troublesome Greeks a society of independent, strong-minded people capable of resisting tyranny. Here may be seen the genesis of the free peoples of Middle Earth and their struggles against Sauron. The next essay in the opening section, “Greek and Roman Historiographies in Tolkien’s Númenor” by Ross Clare, ties in nicely to Williams’s opening piece. Clare compares the history of Númenor to that of the Delian League, pointing out how both grew into autocracies. These two essays combined make a compelling foundation for the volume’s argument that Tolkien’s created world has deep roots in the Classics.

The next section, “Ancient Epic and Myth,” delves deeply into the literature of the Classical world that influenced Tolkien. All four essays in this section are excellent works of scholarship, but two, “Middle-earth as Underworld: From Katabasis to Eucatastrophe” by Benjamin Eldon Stevens and “Pietas and the Fall of the City: A Neglected Virgilian Influence on Middle-earth’s Chief Virtue” by Austin M. Freeman, work particularly well together by showing how Tolkien transformed ancient concepts such as katabasis and pietas into ideas such as eucatastrophe and estel that underpin his own created world. Freeman, likewise, finds in the “leaf mold” of Classics the ideas that Tolkien developed into his own concepts. Freeman argues that Tolkien took the ideas of pietas (Virgilian notions of duty), Northern courage, and pistis (Christian faith) and combined them into estel—firmly believed hope that inspires action (153). Estel is the force that spurs Aragorn in his quest against Sauron, for instance. Freeman’s essay provides a particularly illustrative look at the way Tolkien combined Classics, Germanic philology, and Christianity into his own vision for human experience.

Section Three, “In Dialogue with the Greek Philosophers,” looks at Tolkien’s engagement with Plato and Aristotle, and many of these essays tie in with those from earlier in the volume. Michael Kleu, for instance, in his essay “Plato’s Atlantis and the Post-Platonic Tradition in Tolkien’s Downfall of Númenor,” again examines the Greek influence on Númenor but this time in its relationship to Plato’s Timaeus. Łukasz Neubauer’s contribution, “Less Consciously at First but More Consciously in the Revision: Plato’s Ring of Gyges as a Putative Source of Inspiration for Tolkien’s Ring of Power” ably demonstrates how the magic ring from Plato’s work provided inspiration, along with other literary rings (such as the one from The Niebelungenlied), for Tolkien’s One Ring. As in Freeman’s essay above, Neubauer also explores how Tolkien combines Classical and Germanic influences. Once again, all of the essays in this section look at Tolkien’s art not as one derivative of the Classics, but as one that transforms ancient ideas and narratives into something new.

Section Four, “Around the Borders of the Classical World,” further examines the connections between Tolkien’s interest in Germanic philology and the Classical civilizations of the Mediterranean. Juliette Harrisson’s “‘Escape and Consolation’: Gondor as the Ancient Mediterranean and Rohan as the Germanic World in The Lord of the Rings,” astutely examines how Tolkien recreated the relationship between these two cultures and instead envisioned a happier, symbiotic union instead of one fraught with conflict. This reworking of the history between Germany and Rome demonstrates the heavy influence both cultures had on Tolkien. The volume concludes with a miscellaneous section of two essays and an afterword by Graham Shipley. The final section is a bit disappointing; not because of the quality of the essays but rather because they seem like an afterthought by not being grouped into other sections. The afterword, however, does make a satisfying ending for the volume.

These essays should be of great interest to both Tolkien scholars and to Classicists. Tolkien scholars will appreciate the ways in which these essays expand the pool of Tolkien’s source material. While it is not new to find Classical influences on Tolkien’s work, they have been overshadowed by the study of his Northern influences, and as a result have been undervalued. Scholars of classical reception theory will find in this volume engaging works on how the ancient world continues to exert its influence over our literature and society. Indeed, Tolkien and the Classical World is one of the best volumes the Cormarë Series has produced, and it will no doubt prove to be a necessary text for anyone studying the connections between Tolkien and the Classics.

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James Hamby is the Associate Director of the Writing Center at Middle Tennessee State University, where he also teaches courses on composition and literature, including Victorian Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale. His dissertation, David Copperfield: Victorian Hero, explores how Charles Dickens created a new hero for the Victorian Age by reconceiving his own life through the prism of myths and fairy tales.

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Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life: The Culture of Astrobiology in the Muslim World (2021) follows Jörg Matthias Determann’s earlier books on the subjects of space science (2015) and evolutionary biology (2018) in the Arab world and the Gulf states respectively. However, in place of a specific regional focus, his latest book adopts a transnational and transregional approach as it explores a religio-cultural context of the works that he identifies and analyzes in the book. This work is a very welcome addition to the field of science fiction studies and, broadly speaking, speculative literature which, in recent years, has been looking further afield to afford critical attention to non-Anglo-European authors and texts and include them within its frameworks of analyses.

The book’s particular focus on Islam is significant for at least two reasons. First, it aims to bridge the chasm between fundamentally divergent realms of faith and science (in spite of what may be conveyed by the first part of the title, the book is not just about science fiction – it also includes science and to a large extent, the scientific imagination of individual scientists). Secondly, it also counters views such as the ”Muslim world is still not commonly associated with science fiction” as the book points out that “even authoritarian countries have produced highly imaginative accounts on one of the frontiers of knowledge: astrobiology, or the study of life in the universe” (x) and that “scientists in and from Muslim-majority countries have been at the forefront of the exciting search for extraterrestrial life, the ultimate Other” (xi). The perceived incompatibility between Islam and science fiction, and in fact, scientific imagination, certainly has a long political and cultural pre-history, its genesis being in orientalism, or the West’s perception of the orient as essentially “aberrant, undeveloped, inferior” which postcolonial critics such as Edward Said have pointed out, was most rigorously directed against the Islamic orient, since Islam, as “the very epitome of an outsider” of the West, was deliberately conceptualised and projected as “uncreative, unscientific, and authoritarian” (Said 296). Determann’s book triumphantly upends such orientalist and colonial notions. As he points out, not only is Islam not against science fiction or extra-terrestrial life and multiple worlds, the Qur’an itself refers to the God as the ‘lord of the world’ forty-two times, and as the Syrian artist Ayhem Jbr claims, one might even consider the Qur’an as “the first work of SF” (10).

What adds to the richness and variety of the material is the fact that the book moves beyond the literary corpus and includes films as well as scientific and journalistic research, and as the author states, the “protagonists of this book therefore comprise professional scientists and journalists alongside writers and visual artists” (30). Besides an Introduction (Chapter 1) and a Conclusion (Chapter 6), the book has four chapters which are broadly chronological with each focusing on a specific medium, beginning with scientific journals and popular magazines in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in Chapter 2. The third chapter, titled “Trips to the Moon,” focuses on the depiction of extraterrestrial lives in films from primarily Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan during the cold war period, while Chapter 4, “Islamic UFO Religions,” analyses a series of UFO-logical texts written in Urdu, Turkish, and Arabic from the 1960s onwards. Chapter 5, “Building Nations and Worlds,” studies science fiction novels and short stories by authors from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Indonesia and includes the works of Ibne Safi, Muhammed Zafar Iqbal, Nehad Sherif and Eliza Handayani. The conclusion (Chapter 6) revisits the myriad forms and expressions of scientific imagination, adding in visual arts and video games, with particular attention to the body of research on exoplanets. As evident from the range and breadth of the corpus, Determann does not confine his focus to the Muslim-majority countries of the Arabian Peninsula (and to texts only in Arabic) as he includes a multi-lingual corpus from countries in North Africa and South and South-East Asia including Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and others, thereby adding to the existing scholarship such as Ian Campbell’s Arabic Science Fiction (2018).

In the diverse and wide-ranging collection of texts that are referred to, there are fascinating and often startling references to head-scarf wearing robots, modestly dressed Martian swimmers, endorsement of a young girl’s marriage to an alien as long as he is a Muslim, as well as deliberations on the location of the Kaaba and the direction of daily prayers from outer space, some of which may lead the reader to ask: What use is the future when it is not imagined as a radical and rupturous departure from the past? The book also, however, underscores the political potential of science fiction since many of the authors conceive their writing as a form of resistance against colonial and neo-colonial forces, often through alternative histories and deliberately hyperbolic inversions. In the Malaysian author Faisal Tehrani’s novel 1515 (2011), for example, the Malays liberate Goa and capture Lisbon in 1515; in Abdelaziz Belkhodja’s (Tunisia) novel The Return of the Elephant (2003), it is the West that is on the brink of economic collapse while North Africa witnesses growth buoyed by technological advancements.

In the diverse and wide-ranging collection of texts that are referred to, there are fascinating and often startling references to head-scarf wearing robots, modestly dressed Martian swimmers, endorsement of a young girl’s marriage to an alien as long as he is a Muslim, as well as deliberations on the location of the Kaaba and the direction of daily prayers from outer space, some of which may lead the reader to ask: What use is the future when it is not imagined as a radical and rupturous departure from the past? The book also, however, underscores the political potential of science fiction since many of the authors conceive their writing as a form of resistance against colonial and neo-colonial forces, often through alternative histories and deliberately hyperbolic inversions. In the Malaysian author Faisal Tehrani’s novel 1515 (2011), for example, the Malays liberate Goa and capture Lisbon in 1515; in Abdelaziz Belkhodja’s (Tunisia) novel The Return of the Elephant (2003), it is the West that is on the brink of economic collapse while North Africa witnesses growth buoyed by technological advancements.

Determann’s book, thus, through meticulous research, presents a remarkable history of dialogue and cross-pollination between nations and cultures in the fields of science and science fiction, and points out how, in spite of Islamic opposition to science fiction in many places and its complex relationship with the state, SF has not only thrived, but it continues to be reimagined by Muslim authors from across the world. While the rich corpus of texts, by virtue of its sheer geographical and temporal breadth, might at times seem overwhelming, and the analysis, in places, a little hurried, this book presents a repository of hitherto unknown or lesser-known texts that would be invaluable to future researchers in the field.

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Mayurika Chakravorty teaches in the Department of English and the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies, Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). She completed her Ph. D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK, and her primary area of research is postcolonial speculative fiction from the global South. Her current research also focuses on children’s literature and the representation of children in literature and popular media. 

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Canada’s literary history is as bleak as it is illustrious. This is a bleakness which also permeates the global—and even local—reception (or, perhaps more accurately, the relative lack thereof) of many Canadian texts. Despite laying claim to a raft of innovative and influential authors, Canadian productions are often overlooked in broad literary discussions. Part of the problem arises from historical publishing and distribution limitations; Canada’s literary art has long been perceived to be a peripheral one, denied consecration in the hallowed halls of the major publishing houses. But this bleakness also manifests in the content of Canadian texts themselves, and, indeed, Canada’s literary output has become inflected with its own idiosyncratic tendencies, the most prevalent theme of which is, simply, perseverance, or, as Margaret Atwood once more famously phrased it, “survival” (1972). Allan Weiss’s latest non-fiction work, The Routledge Introduction to Canadian Fantastic Literature (2021; henceforth CFL) is an attempt to redress this imbalance as, from its opening sentence, it promises “an overview” (1) of its titular topic, and is complete, in this instance, with the backing of a major international publisher.

And an overview is precisely what the text delivers: CFL is a well-indexed and extensively-researched historical contribution to the field, replete with a survey of neglected or otherwise forgotten primary texts. Such a synoptic approach unquestionably has its benefits, particularly because, as Weiss notes midway through the book, “Canada did indeed have a tradition of fantastic literature, but it was largely invisible to Canadian culture as a whole” (100), not to mention to a broader international audience. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a title with such a detailed bibliographic knowledge of its subject as is to be found here: CFL will surely function to acquaint a broad array of readers with new (and old) literary works, and will likely provide a useful starting point for further research in the field. But its greatest benefit is simultaneously its greatest shortcoming: while CFL functions as an extensive directory of primary texts, it is one that tends to include only metadata. While the title certainly demonstrates an encyclopaedic expertise—and performs an ambitious archiving—of large swathes of Canadian ‘fantastic’ literary texts, the critical analyses offered of its entries are lacking in any corresponding ambition. Rather than endeavour to elucidate the idiosyncratic inflections apparent in Canadian ‘fantastic’ literature, CFL more often seems content to catalogue its products with little by way of an attempt to appraise their significance.

CFL, that is,basically comprises a list of primary texts that are in turn loosely related to periodized historical moments. The title thus functions according to a paratactic logic wherein its argument is implied via the accretion of the various informational fragments it provides being placed in close proximity. CFL is, then, “deployed in order to order,” to follow Liam Cole Young’s reflection on the role of categorisation: providing a database of potential knowledge, rather than establishing any of its own (30, emphasis in original). The theoretical ambition in CFL is thus etherised by the tabular form that it both performs and inhabits: an effective text does not arise from a combination superficial plot recounts; implicit alignments with broader (global) cultural and artistic trends; a re-treading of well-established theoretical ground, including total reliance on existing secondary scholarship to propel its narrative; and an unspoken expectation that the cited Canadian texts are of importance, without convincingly arguing that this should, in fact, be the case. And so, mileage may vary with regard to the use-value of this title: for those interested in adding to their collection another introductory text of the type that tends to dominate science fiction and fantasy (SFF) criticism, CFL may indeed offer a comfortable read, and provide a useful recital of primary texts that have likely remained heretofore unobserved; for those who are more demanding of extended critical insight, the title is almost certainly destined to represent something of a missed opportunity.

I suspect this dichotomy may also be the case for Weiss himself, given both his background as one of the leading scholars of Canadian SFF and the astute scholarly writing released throughout his career, of which flashes remain observable throughout CFL. Indeed, sections of many chapters contained within CFL are excerpted from material that has been published in singular form before, but the decision to jettison much of the rigorous critical analysis that marked these more focussed articles leaves much to be desired: collation is one thing, but condensation that results in a lack of insight is a very curious move for an academic title. There is certainly enough material here for a much longer—or another—book, because there is simply no way that the space limitations allow for a properly comprehensive survey. Another hangover of this partial compilation of previously published materials is that there is some repetition of content across the chapters, but, all things considered, this may be a net benefit to CFL, given that its individual chapters are relatively self-contained as a result, and could thus be easily set on introductory tertiary reading lists in isolation rather than assigning the title as a whole.

The somewhat idiosyncratic use of the phrase ‘fantastic fiction’ in the title is subsequently posited as an all-inclusive term for non-realist/non-mimetic texts, and Weiss tells us:

That is why fantastic fiction is a better umbrella term than speculative fiction. It covers all the genres that involve the creation of a secondary world, whether speculative or not. Some of the fantastic genres, the ones we categorize as speculative fiction, highlight the differences from our real world and consider the implications of the change, while others accept the secondary world as a given and focus on other things. (12)

Maybe so; there is certainly nothing intrinsically wrong with such a distinction, particularly as it does attempt to bring together potentially conflicting generic definitions. The chapter from which this extract is taken, however, also engages in a short-shrift dismissal of existing terminology—the sources ranging from Atwood to Wikipedia—directly prior to its own attempted restructuring of generic nomenclaturein CFL. As it happens, Weiss has previously lamented that “it seems that any book-length [criticism] of science fiction requires an introduction that reviews the various definitions of the genre, and sets out the scholar’s own” (2005, 48); the irony is that from the very first major chapter (“Terminology”) this current book-length study is swiftly bogged down in precisely this definitional dilemma, and CFL never really recovers from its initial theoretical stall. Furthermore, the initial intensive focus on definitions most markedly involves an extended discussion of the ostensible distinctions between ‘science fiction’ and ‘speculative fiction.’ One of the ramifications of this strategy is that science/speculative fiction is de facto made effectively synonymous with the entire ‘fantastic’ field across the remaining chapters, which is detrimental for the breadth of the analysis. Relatedly, the recurrent laundry lists encapsulating sometimes dubious subgeneric distinctions (and their attendant tropes) quickly becomes tiresome.

Chapter 5 (“The Flowering”) is by far the most interesting chapter of CFL overall, given that it speaks directly to the development of an infrastructure of national genre literature; it is a more technically-minded chapter, providing some solid and more specific recapitulation of the major players and publishing opportunities in the Canadian territories (for example, publishers; anthologies; magazines). Though each of the remaining chapters have their highlights, they are unfortunately of varying quality. This is partially related to their inconsistent length and oddly modular internal arrangement, with the latter issue being most evident where transitions between sections are jarring and/or unmarked. Some further thought should have been given to the scope, scale, and arrangement of the text. Weiss makes multiple concessions to the former issue, noting, for instance, that the overview of selected primary texts “does not come close to being exhaustive” (154), and that “it will be necessary to pick out only a few representative figures… while cautioning that many more could have been included had space permitted” (182-183). I certainly take Weiss’s point that “it has become far more difficult in recent years to make generalizations about Canadian fantastic literature overall due to its increasing size and diversity” (206), but I cannot help but wonder about the contents left on the editorial cutting-room floor; about the justification for the authors and works that did make the final cut (given CFL itself does not attempt to establish this); and, perhaps most significantly, if the broadly archival approach is particularly productive in the first instance, given the obvious length limitations. Beyond these concerns, though, there is also an odd tendency to take recourse in intentional fallacy at times; a recurrent fallback into phrasal and logical faults (including the aforementioned moments where fleeting comments are made without outlining their significance, and gestures are made toward outside sources rather than making an argument explicit in the text itself); and some incredibly awkward slippages in language. For an example of all three issues manifesting in a single compact quote, when Weiss introduces contemporary author Larissa Lai, he writes: “As a lesbian, she writes about gender themes” (194). Such comments reflect poorly on both the critical and the editing process, and there are other such missteps across CFL as a whole.

 “A word,” writes one of my favourite Canadian writers, “has power” (Weiss 2016, 12). Not all collections of words are equally powerful, however. In CFL Weiss writes clearly and efficiently for the most part, but there is little by way of the wit, verve, and wordplay that defines his excellent fiction and, to a lesser extent, his previous scholarly work. Indeed, the straightforward nature of the prose draws attention to some of the other weaknesses of the text: most markedly its argumentative contradictions and its general lack of theoretical ambition. The project is clearly a labour of love, but it does not add anything particularly substantial to our understanding of either the Canadian instantiation of SFF (which reads almost as an afterthought at certain points), or, more broadly, to our understanding of SFF itself. But it is always important to judge a text on its own merits, and what CFL does offer is an extensive reading list, and viewed in this light—as a kind of lightly annotated bibliography of Canadian primary fantastic texts (and history)—it is a useful addition to the corpus of SFF criticism that motions toward some important but historically overlooked texts that have remained peripheral to both popularity and criticism. Ultimately, for a title professed as an introduction to the field of Canadian fantastic literature, Weiss’s text is only partially successful, and I cannot but wish that the text was more consistently ambitious in its approach. It will be interesting to see whether survival is, in fact, on the cards for this style of criticism, and the book series (Routledge Introductions to Canadian Literature) of which CFL represents the inaugural entry.

WORKS CITED

Atwood, Margaret. 1972. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi.

Weiss, Allan. 2005. “The Question of Genre.” Further Perspectives on the Canadian Fantastic: Proceedings of the 2003 Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction & Fantasy, ed. Allan Weiss, 47-56. Toronto, ON: ACCSFF.

—. 2016. Making the Rounds. Calgary, AB: Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.

—. 2021. The Routledge Introduction to Canadian Fantastic Literature. New York and Oxon: Routledge.

Young, Liam Cole. 2017. List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to Buzzfeed. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

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Ben Eldridge is an early career researcher & 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.