Category: 54.4

Review of Comics and/or Graphic Novels

Dominick Grace

Vittorio Frigerio, ed. Comics and/or Graphic Novels. Paradoxa 32. Paradoxa, 2021. Paperback. 338 pg. $48.00. 9781929512447.

Paradoxa number 32 focuseson Comics and/or Graphic Novels as the issue title announces. Editor Vittorio Frigerio brings together an eclectic collection of essays with an international focus. Indeed a key strength of this collection is that it continues the encouraging trend of bringing scholarly attention to regions and traditions that have hitherto been largely ignored (most notably here in Zak Waipara’s consideration of Indigenous comics from New Zealand). The pieces are consistently interesting and often provide valuable connection across national lines. For instance, Carlo Gubitosa considers comics journalism in American, Italian and French contexts, and Justin Wadlow provides insight into the unlikely connections between American artist Craig Thompson and French artist Edmund Baudoin. Spanish-language comics, however, receive special attention, in often enlightening ways. For instance, I was completely unaware that R. F. Outcault’s Buster Brown had been appropriated/pastiched as the basis of a Brazilian strip, Aventuras de Chiquinho. Marcia Esteves Agostinho discusses this strip, probably not widely-known outside of Brazil, in terms of its depiction of racial relations in Brazil.

Like this one, the articles here are consistently fascinating. However, they are for the most part of little interest to scholars of literature of the fantastic. Only one article, Felipe Gómez ‘s “Will it be possible? Apocalypse and Resistance in Latin American Graphic Novels,” focuses on a science fictional topic. Frigerio also interviews Guiseppe Palumbo, who has worked on genre strips such as Diabolik.  In addition, he reviews Gébés’ post-apocalyptic Letter to Survivors. There is, therefore, some content that pertains to the interests of SFRA Review subscribers, but not enough, I think, to justify purchase of this whole collection. The Paradoxa website does allow purchase of individual chapters for $10.00 (https://paradoxa.com/no-32-comics/), so those interested might economically check out the relevant material. Comics scholars, however, will very likely find this a worthwhile book to possess.

Dominick Grace is the Nonfiction Reviews Editor for SFRA Review.

Review of Transparent Minds in Science Fiction: An Introduction to Accounts of Alien, AI and Post-Human Consciousness

Ane B. Ruiz-Lejarcegui

Paul Matthews. Transparent Minds in Science Fiction: An Introduction to Accounts of Alien, AI and Post-Human Consciousness. Open Book, 2023. Paperback. 144 pg. $23.95. ISBN 9781805110460.

Paul Matthews’ Transparent Minds in Science Fiction, as its title aptly suggests,delves into nonhuman consciousness representation in science fiction (sf), addressing its potential to explore what cognitive science shows us about consciousness through models of cognition particular to subjectivities which vastly differ from that of humans.

In a clear nod to Dorrit Cohn’s narratological work on fictional consciousness representation, Transparent Minds (1978), Matthews cleverly engages with previous literature pertaining to the area of research known as cognitive literary studies. While there are discrepancies regarding the official name for the field, as there is no unification among scholars, cognitive literary studies seems to be the broadest term which encompasses the research done by Matthews and the authors he mentions, i.e., that of the integration of cognitive science with literary disciplines, Matthews also engages other fields of expertise such as neuroscience and cognitive science,. to illustrate a fully-fledged and interdisciplinary image of what constitutes a consciousness, both in our empirical reality and in its fictional counterpart. In doing so, this monograph attempts to fill a research gap in a field which has predominantly limited itself to analysing non-speculative literature of the Anglocentric and Eurocentric canon. Thus, Matthews takes on the task of compiling examples of depictions of nonhuman consciousness spanning more than a hundred years of sf literary production. From foundational texts by Shelley, Lem, and McCaffrey to the more recent and likewise acclaimed additions of Jemisin, Ishiguro, and Leckie, to name but a few, Matthews thoroughly illustrates how extremely unfamiliar modes of perceiving and experiencing the world have been conceptualised.

From the beginning, Matthews endeavours to defend the potential of literature as a whole, and sf in particular, as a tool to engage in a rich imaginative exercise: firstly, as a means through which to conceive scientifically accurate and innovative cognitive models which subvert preestablished anthropocentric sf tropes regarding the nonhuman; and, secondly, through the formation and interpretation of metaphorical networks and systems of meaning brought about by our own cognitive system when interacting with fiction. As a result, Matthews emphasises the collaborative nature of meaning-creation, claiming that it consists of “author intention, reader understanding and mediation through the norms of the genre” (105). Hence, while stressing the role of authorial intent, this monograph deeply resonates with Reception Theory principles, as stated by Iser’s phenomenological account, whereby a literary work is created through the reader’s participation of filling in “gaps” or “blanks” in the text (6).

Chapter 2 is devoted to authors’ motivations for choosing nonhuman characters as the focus of their fiction, as well as the specific symbology and narrative techniques used to guarantee an adequate text-reader interaction, i.e., to avoid alienating the reader, such as merging alienness with animal iconography. Here, Matthews seems to greatly value authors’ scientific knowledge in fields such as neuroscience and biology, as he deems the plausibility of the nonhuman to be vital to merge the familiar and unfamiliar, particularly in the cases of potential future sentience, such as human-made A.I. and extended or enhanced consciousness.

In chapter 3, Matthews thoroughly explains the process of consciousness emergence, that is, the starting point of sentience, as posited by several neuroscientific, biological, philosophical, and psychological approaches. In perhaps the most theoretical chapter of the monograph, Matthews conscientiously takes the reader through an exhaustive yet accessible explanation of the different hypotheses delineating the so-called ‘awakening’ of sentience, from the development of senses and perception of oneself as different from the rest, to the identification of a goal and, with it, the motivation to accomplish it and obtain agency.

He then moves on to provide literary examples of non-human sentience which depict (parts of) these processes, dividing the next three chapters according to specific consciousness features: the individual mind, including terrestrial and alien non-human sentience, human-made A.I. and the extended human; the collective hive and distributed minds; and, lastly, the posthuman. In these chapters, Matthews presents a wide array of case studies to illustrate how the umwelt of a consciousness is shaped by sensory, cognitive, and emotional-motivational aspects of the self’s embodiment, and how there is an interplay of familiar and unfamiliar narrative elements to balance the psychological distance between reader and character. Matthews also pays close attention to the power dynamics involved in self-definition when the consciousness is collective, seen mostly as unequal manipulation or, sometimes, as an egalitarian gestalt relationship.

In his explanation of posthuman consciousness, however, one finds a slight inconsistency, as the definition of extended humans and the enhanced posthumans, in chapters 4 and 6 respectively, seem to overlap, making their classification as separate contradictory. One of the greatest achievements of the text is arguably the non-anthropocentric undertone of the research which aligns itself with posthumanist sensibilities. This can be seen in Matthews’ understanding of both experience and the act of reading as embodied and embedded, his conception of the possible and valid nonhuman umwelt(s), and the absence of anthropocentric and imperialist interpretations of nonhumans mainly found before ‘new wave’ sf, in favour of what he, perhaps rather vaguely, names “fine examples” of other-than-human consciousness representation (11). Therefore, the definition of enhanced posthumans only as transcended consciousness seems at odds with Matthews’ knowledge of posthumanism, as it indicates an inclination towards the ‘posthuman’ definition endorsed by transhumanists, that of a further step in humanity’s evolutionary history. This is even implied by the title of chapter 6, “Supercedure,”—the act of replacing the old and inferior with the new and superior, in other words, embracing transcendence, whereas critical posthumanism holds that posthuman consciousness can exist without transcendence.

Although the monograph does, in earnest, accomplish its goal, providing an extensive account of non-human consciousness representation in sf, certain in-depth linguistic and literary analyses seem to be lacking, which would have added to its mostly descriptive and expository nature. Additionally, the phenomenological approaches mentioned before could have benefitted from Caracciolo’s concept of “consciousness-enactment,” which shares Matthews’ reader-response tenets but to a different, non-materialist degree, understanding fictional consciousness not as an object to be represented, but rather experienced and enacted by the reader when engaging with literature (43).

Transparent Minds in Science Fiction delivers a highly accessible introduction to non-human sentience in the genre, with particular interest for literary scholars willing to embark on an interdisciplinary study of fictional consciousness and seeking a succinct overview of empirical studies on human and animal consciousness. Similarly, the opposite is likewise valid, as scholars in cognitive science may find the exposition of nonhuman characters here useful for a literary application of their research. All in all, I’d conclude that its case study of the unfamiliar nonhuman provides valuable insight into how our cognitive system works, particularly when engaging in acts of imagination.

WORKS CITED

Caracciolo, Marco. “Fictional Consciousnesses: A Reader’s Manual.” Style, vol. 46, no. 1, 2012, pp. 42-65. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.46.1.42.

Ane B. Ruiz-Lejarcegui is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and Literary Studies from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain, and a member of the research group REWEST: Research in Western American Literature and Culture. In 2022, she was awarded a competitive grant by the Basque Government to carry out her thesis on hybrid identity-construction and power asymmetries in contemporary American space opera. Her research interests also include critical posthumanism, cognitive narratology, critical discourse analysis and, as the focus of her previous research, H.G. Wells and Victorian science fiction.

Review of The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms

Jerome Winter

Taryne Jade Taylor, Isiah Lavender III, Grace L. Dillon, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, eds. The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms. Routledge, 2023. Hardback. 716 pg. $280.00. EBook $ 53.09. ISBN 9780367330613. EBook ISBN 9780429317828.

Consisting of approximately seven hundred pages, compiled by four editors, including roughly sixty contributing scholars and articles, and a bewildering array of theoretical perspectives, discursive territories, and primary texts, this new, indispensable handbook is a dauntingly monumental scholarly undertaking and a capacious reference resource for students, scholars, and general readers invested in pushing the boundaries of what gets included in discussions of the global sf genre. The structure of the handbook ambitiously spans the world in its geographical reach, with four major parts, each consisting of approximately fifteen articles, devoted respectively to Indigenous futurisms, Latinx futurisms, Asian, Middle Eastern and Asian, and African and African-American futurisms. For scholarly genre criticism that regularly bemoans the lack of global perspectives in even the most theoretical endeavors, this handbook, then, is a sorely needed corrective and a propitious sign, if one was needed, that the sf genre is indeed at a transformative stage of transition.

The editor Taryn Jade Taylor’s brief “Introduction” to the volume deftly lays out the holistic focus of the handbook in clear but expansive terms that the numerous and disparate individual articles then amply support and articulate. The titular argument is that the idea of plural, fluid, and multiple “co-futurisms,” as opposed to solely alternative or critical futurisms, challenges the ritual straitjacketing of global identity and its troubling consignment of vast swaths of the globe to the so-called “margins” or “periphery.” Whether viewed as resistant or hegemonic, such a monolithic representation of divergent global voices in stark and singular categories defined by the so-called metropolitan, imperial “center” or “core” has plagued the development of compelling cosmopolitan perspectives for centuries. Co-futurism, on the contrary, implies the envisioning of a collective global future and conceives a broadening sense of inclusiveness pluralistically and in a multitude of ways not exclusively dictated by the global North or perceived restrictively as an obverse image of the Western imagination.

One discursive area of overlap that many essays have in common, then, is how works involved with what is broadly labelled the emergent literature and media of co-futurism recover from the “apocalypse (2) of colonialism” situated in the actual historical past and not necessarily the counterfactual imagined future. And one consequence of a broad-tent conception of co-futurism is what happens when readings, as those advanced by Lysa Rivera, use a particular under-explored lens, such as that of “Chicanafuturism,” to interrogate the technocultural representation of marginalized people in texts not traditionally viewed as science-fictionally oriented, such as Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1993) and Cherrie Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (1995). Another consequence of conceiving such cultural productions as co-futurism is the coupling of diverse localized communities together under common, strategically allied banners, such as those proposed by Kristina Andrea Baudemann’s article on Darcie Little Badger’s (Lipan Apache) “Ku Ko Né Ä” story series, which shows how these sf stories present the importance of sustainable ancestral homelands for a shared notion of indigenous futurisms.

Aside from its wide-ranging global reach and broadly construed understanding of under-represented speculative literature and media, co-futurism also speaks to the problem of internal colonization and the long-term project of de-colonizing not only the pervasive and ongoing neo-colonial systems of material, social, and military inequities and injustices but also contemporary postcolonial cultural, psychological, and literary outlooks and attitudes as well. The Somali-American Sofia Samatar, for instance, draws on the foundational work of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon to analyze Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) and Ousmane Sembène’s Xala (1973) for their vivid postcolonial visions of nightmarish abjection and transgressive waste. And far from valorizing disruptive otherness as inherently technologically progressive or utopian, the handbook also draws repeated attention to the way the discrepant visions of the future offered by the de-colonized global cultures are not necessarily salutary or sustainable, such as Shadya Radhi’s contribution that contrasts the corrosively oil-driven and reactionary world of what Sophia Al-Maria calls “Gulf Futurism,” which decisively contrasts with the counter-hegemonic viewpoints of what Sulaïman Majali calls “Arabfuturisms.”

Similarly, Virginia L. Conn and Gabriele de Seta mine centuries-long discourses of “sinofuturism,” including contemporary Chinese science fiction by the likes of Liu Cixin, Xia Jia, Hao Jingfang, and Chen Qiufan, to argue that such literature and media both replicates and undermines pervasive techno-Orientalist anxieties and promises. Likewise, Catherine S. Ramírez’s discussion of Alex Rivera’s short film Why Cyberaceros? (1997), Alejandro Morales’s novel The Rag Doll Plague (1991), and Guadalupe Maravilla’s performance Walk on Water (2019), explores the fantasies and nightmares of foreign labor that shape the global imaginary, especially as it pertains to Latinx migrants in the United States, and the impact such intensely charged discourses have on the vulnerable and displaced plight of undocumented transnational migrants and refugees denied citizenship protections and that countries both disavow and depend on.

Hence, although all the essays uniformly underscore the urgent need for collaborative and collective visions of better global tomorrows, most essays also wrestle, additionally, with the complicated idea that reclaiming marginality and championing inclusive futures paradoxically hazards reinforcing neocolonial hierarchies between global core and periphery rooted in the very same narratives of development, modernization, and socio-economic advancement or sectarian nationalism. One innovative strategy out of this ideological cul-de-sac that many essays take, then, is to trace the cultural work that texts perform when they eschew progressive or future-driven narratives and imagine timelines that return to the worldviews of the past conceived a nonlinear pluriverse of reborn possibilities. Joy Sanchez Taylor, for instance, invokes an influential concept from one of the editors, namely, Grace Dillon’s “biskaabiiyang”—an Anishinaabemowin term that connotes the ritual healing of a cultural homecoming or return to self—to analyze Carlos Hernandez’s The Assimilated Cuban Guide to Quantum Santeria (2016), and its hybrid mixture of both particle physics and Afro-Caribbean religion, for its dismantling of the Eurowestern addiction to investing in disruptive futures that are increasingly insecure and precarious.  

Given the length constraints of this short review, the discussion above is only a fragmentary snapshot that has skimmed the surface of the mountainous research contained in this volume. I apologize for such omissions, but I know I for one gratefully look forward to regularly consulting the diverse riches of this handbook for years to come. As such a reference source, this handbook will be a necessity for academic libraries that wish to carry cutting-edge sf scholarships in the future.

Jerome Winter, PhD, is a full-time continuing lecturer at the University of California, Riverside. His first book, Science Fiction, New Space Opera, and Neoliberal Globalism, was published by the University of Wales Press as part of their New Dimensions in Science Fiction series. His second book, Citizen Science Fiction, was published in 2021. His upcoming book is on the depictions of the global imaginary in the sf oeuvre of Ian McDonald.  His scholarship has appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, Extrapolation, Journal of Fantastic and the Arts, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Foundation, SFRA Review, and Science Fiction Studies.       

Review of The Rebirth of Utopia in 21^st-Century Cinema: Cosmopolitan Hopes in the Films of Globalization

Sarah Nolan-Brueck

Martín, Mónica. The Rebirth of Utopia in 21^st-Century Cinema: Cosmopolitan Hopes in the Films of Globalization. Peter Lang, 2023. Ralahine Utopian Studies. Paperback. 240 pg. $60.95. ISBN 9781800794429.

Mónica Martín has seen every Anglophone film made in the past two decades. At least, that’s the feeling one gets while reading this encyclopedic accounting of films which depict her formulation of global cosmopolitan utopianism. In this, her first book, Martín expands on themes of intersectional feminism, environmental concerns, and the political potential of film—themes that fill her previous publications in venues such as Utopian Studies and Atlantis. The Rebirth of Utopia in 21^st-Century Cinema is the first monograph in Peter Lang’s “Ralahine Utopian Studies” Series to focus on film, greatly expanding the scope of collection. Martín interacts with the work of other utopian thinkers like Tom Moylan, Ruth Levitas, and Fredric Jameson, putting their theories in conversations with scholars of globalization such as Zygmunt Bauman, Gerard Delanty, and Ulrich Beck, and utopian film scholars such as Richard Dyer, Peter Fitting, and Celestino Deleyto.

In a post-pandemic era when “dystopia” feels too much like a contemporary descriptor, Martín argues, utopian thought is experiencing a needed resurgence. She states, “[t]his book contends that twenty-first-century cinema illustrates the rebirth of utopia, conceived as an open method grounded in cosmopolitan worldviews and aspirations” (2). By “open method,” Martín refers to stories which gesture toward egalitarian futures without attempting to forward a specific agenda or provide a blueprint for how such a society should operate. Rather, “[e]cocritical film spaces, caring protagonists, and cooperative networks” encourage viewers to imagine utopia as “a cosmopolitan method of critical resistance and transformative action, and also as a moral obligation toward future generations” (3).

Following the introduction, the text has four parts. The first, “The Art of Envisioning Life Otherwise: Utopia and Cinema,” sets up the framework for understanding Martín’s cosmopolitan, utopian filmic lens. Martín examines the ways in which film has become a form par excellence for depicting utopian possibilities, even though it has “been traditionally relegated to a secondary place within utopian studies in comparison to literary works” (32). Each subsequent section begins with a chapter which provides an in-depth discussion of the critical conversation surrounding the section’s focus, followed by a wide-ranging look at many films that exemplify this focus, and then a close reading of a film which showcases the focus through both plot and cinematic device.

The second part, “Hope amidst the Ashes: Cosmopolitan Horizons in Contemporary Post-apocalyptic Cinema,” begins with a chapter that discusses how “in social theories of globalization, threats, and negative consequences (like growing economic inequalities), cohabit with progress and opportunities (such as the emergence of transnational communities and ideologies)” (50). Martín examines post-apocalyptic films to consider their impulses toward either apartheid or cosmopolitan spatial solutions; she then provides a close reading of the plot and cinematic devices of The Children of Men (2006), which begins in an apartheid mode, and eventually opens into cosmopolitan interrelations and movement.

Part three, “Reformed Ontologies: Cinematic Philosophies of Hope and Care in Global Times of Crisis,” focuses on shifting global philosophy away from neoliberalism and individual gain, and toward “womb-informed nurturing dialogics” which encourage viewers to look to the future “with the eyes of those who need care and need to care for the world and others” (105). This section’s filmic overview focuses on films that depict marginalized characters surviving in worlds inimical to their well-being. Martín argues that these “survivors—with racial, gender, or class traits that lie on the margins of what counts as mainstream Hollywood—perform modes of heroic resistance that put forward inclusive imaginaries” (108). To illustrate this inclusive imaginary of survival, Martín turns to a reading of The East (2013), in which the main character, Jane Owen, discovers a new way of living by rejecting both her role as a member of the neoliberal establishment and a new opportunity to become part of an eco-militant collective. Rather, the protagonist becomes conscious of both ecological and social concerns, rejecting the violence her company helps visit on the earth, and the violence her new friends seek to visit on others to protect it.

The final part, “Intersectional Politics: Egalitarian Cultures Occupy the Streets and Movies,” takes a practical look at recent intersectional, global movements, and then examines how films “are engaging in political conversations that…contest hegemonic political models and cultures” by proposing their own “alternative paradigms” (151). In her final case study of The Hunger Games series, Martín reads Katniss as a boundary-crossing feminist hero: “Katniss’s political agency challenges the divides between identity and class politics, the personal and the political, the local and the cosmopolitan, the ecological and the social, the moral and the political”—an agency that is echoed, Martín states, in the real-life work of activists such as Greta Thunberg (180). Martín then provides a short concluding section, in which she describes cosmopolitan film as giving us a challenge: “to hope for the best and work together to see it happen” (188).

The Rebirth of Utopia in 21^st-Century Cinema is unique for its willingness to engage with multiple genres, finding the cosmopolitan utopian vision in realist and science fictional narratives alike. The collection of works demonstrates a dedication to crossing boundaries—of genre, of nationality, and of narrative. Represented in this work is an incredible range of films which depict coalitional relationships between diverse peoples and celebrate moments of freedom and hope in otherwise bleak landscapes. At a time when the dystopian genre and realism can feel as though they are collapsing into each other, Martín’s restorative readings provide an archive of cinematic tools for imagining a better future.

Sarah Nolan-Brueck  Sarah Nolan-Brueck is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California, where she studies how science fiction interrogates gender. In particular, she examines the many ways SF authors question the medicolegal control of marginalized gendered groups in the United States, and how SF can support activism that refutes this control. Sarah is a graduate editorial assistant for Western American Literature. She has been previously published in Femspec, Huffpost, and has an article forthcoming in Orbit: A Journal of American Literature.

Review of Hyperspace to Hypertext: Masculinity, Globalization, and Their Discontents

Sara Martín

Christopher Leslie. From Hyperspace to Hypertext: Masculinity, Globalization, and Their Discontents. Palgrave Macmillan Singapore, 2023. Hardcover, xxxii, 514 pages. €124.79. ISBN 9789819920266.

Christopher Leslie is an independent scholar with extensive international experience in the field of science and technology studies. He offers in his volume From Hyperspace to Hypertext: Masculinity, Globalization, and Their Discontents a triple perspective articulated by his work in STS, but also informed by science fiction studies and gender studies. Leslie retells the history of science fiction between the 1920s and the 1970s as a chronicle of how a narrow-minded coterie of white men constrained the genre. Feminist SF scholarship has provided ample evidence of this manipulation, but Leslie’s main merit is that he integrates in a single volume his detailed exposé of the entitled manipulators with a no less detailed exploration of the alternatives.

Leslie’s main thesis is that the consolidation of SF as a recognizable genre relied excessively on the paradigm by which white masculinity was presented as the only guarantor of civilized techno-scientific progress (implicitly imperialist), which prevented a more inclusive version of SF to emerge. His volume, subdivided into three main parts, considers the roles as masculinist gatekeepers of Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell, then, in the third part, the alternative, far more progressive work, of author and editor Judith Merrill. As the book blurb announces, the volume aims at showing how a STEM education can be “enhanced by adding the liberal arts, such as historical and literary studies, to create STEAM.” Above all, Leslie invites SF readers and scholars to reconsider the roots of the genre’s official history. His book might be described as a speculative reading of speculative fiction, since Leslie asks readers to consider how much richer SF could have been if its main editors, authors, fans, and historians had been persons with a far more open-minded outlook, instead of sexist, racist, and imperialist white men.

            Leslie has carried out very intensive, solid research for his volume, which is certainly fascinating, though—it must be noted—overlong. Most academic books run today to about 250/300 pages, and it is unusual to find one which is 514 pages long (526 with the introductory notes). This is a consequence of Leslie’s enthusiasm with his research and his method. He announces in the preface that he wishes to use close reading as an ethical tool, to offer proof of how the power-hungry alliance between imperialism, masculinism, and whiteness dominated SF and of the existence of valuable alternatives. However, the long segments on women authors such as Claire Winger Harris, Leslie F. Stone, L. Taylor Hansen, C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, or Judith Merrill, while excellent examples of close reading, are too extensive for the purposes of the volume. An additional problem is that although the volume appears to be a chronicle, it often goes back to earlier periods already discussed, slowing down the pace of the main argument. It is, besides, doubtful, whether the title adequately describes the volume. Leslie explains in the preface that ‘hyperspace’ (a term apparently invented by John W. Campbell for his 1931 novel Islands of Space) and ‘hypertext’ (coined in 1965 by Theodore Nelson) are convenient bookends, but this is not obvious. Readers might welcome a more direct title in which keywords such as ‘whiteness,’ ‘masculinity,’ ‘civilization,’ ‘engineering,’ and ‘science fiction’ were visible, and ‘globalization’ (which is not really addressed) absent.

The section on the Gernsback era is focused on destroying the myth of the pioneering editor of Amazing Stories, to present Gernsback instead as a man who endorsed an obsolete model of individualistic science, based on the 19^th century gentleman amateur. The appeal of this old-fashioned model, which Gernsback marketed as an editor between 1926 and 1936, was that it opposed the development of corporate science during the so-called Second Industrial Revolution. The young men being drafted into techno-scientific establishments as mere cogs in the machine, or being educated in the new engineering degrees, Leslie argues, found comfort in the stories of isolated geniuses found in the plots of Gernsback’s authors.

Women, Leslie notes, were not specifically excluded, but their “paucity” as “editorial advisors and inventors reflects a new effort by science and engineering experts to create a masculine domain” (21), which colonized most of 1920s and 1930s SF. Gernsback promoted an SF that showed male readers how to be men, naturalizing the “adaptable autodidact” as a man “capable of action in disparate contexts,” who is “most effective” (21) wherever the rational mind prevails. For Leslie, Gernsback’s main sin is that he espoused obsolete science that smacked of long-rejected Lamarckian and social Darwinist tenets, selling in the process a white supremacism that most male authors and readers embraced. Far from being a force for progress, Gernsback rejected any alternative visions provided by women authors, and backed male authors such as E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, whose inventive space opera lacked scientific accuracy and promoted racial pseudoscience.

This hypocritical lack of a solid scientific foundation and the dubious gender and race politics persisted under Campbell’s long reign, from 1938 to 1971, when he died. The Campbell era, which Leslie analyzes in Part II, only ended for good in 2019, when he was finally outed as a bigoted racist and misogynist and his name taken out of the distinction Analog was awarding to honor him since 1973. Leslie explains that Campbell’s fierce control of his authors and their fiction lowered standards, by imposing a model basically derived from boys’ adventures, which he had surreptitiously used in his own fiction. “His work,” Leslie writes, “squarely fits into mainstream ideas about manliness and civilization, directly connecting the burgeoning field of science fiction to the discourse about adolescents, who will be the backbone of a new global civilization” (192), specifically in Cold War times.

Leslie devotes in this Part II a whole chapter to Isaac Asimov, arguably Campbell’s main discovery together with Robert A. Heinlein. Leslie chastises Asimov because, despite being a Jewish man who had endured plenty of anti-Semitism, his own sexism and personal misconduct toward women became obstacles in the necessary transformation of SF into a far more inclusive field, particularly from the 1960s onward. As an editor, Leslie maintains, Asimov could have done much more to promote women authors but his self-presentation as an open-minded man actually masked a deep misogyny, which was not overtly questioned until the early 1970s.

Lacking the ingrained prejudices of men like Gernsback, Campbell or Asimov, Leslie argues, Judith Merrill opened up SF to new authors and readers, selecting for her yearly anthologies, published between 1955 and 1968, authors usually excluded by her male predecessors and colleagues (such as Samuel R. Delany). Although Merrill has been neglected in the official history of SF, Leslie claims, she did plenty to make the genre accessible to a mainstream readership and helped to open it up beyond the link between masculinity and technology, welcoming themes that eventually constituted the core of the New Wave. Instead of the individualism of Cold War masculinity, she promoted community, taking her political protest against the USA to the point of self-exile to Canada in 1969. According to Leslie, “Today’s effort to make science fiction more inclusive can be traced back to Merril’s” (408), and though this may be an exaggerated claim, there are indeed many reasons to celebrate this admirable woman as author and editor.

Part III concludes with chapter 9, “Science Fiction and the University,” in which Leslie openly criticizes how the new Science Fiction Studies of the 1970s relied, essentially, on the same masculinist discourse that Gernsback and Campbell had built. He complains that “It would have saved some time if science fiction’s entry into the university had been better informed about the genre” (500) and if the “filtering effect of fans infatuated by masculinist thinking” (500) had been counteracted much earlier with the identity politics and feminist scholarship that only flourished in the 1990s.

Leslie is adamant that “the false narrative” (488) by which men claimed that women were not interested in science or in science fiction is taking too long to dismantle and he is clearly disappointed that SF has not done more to disassemble it. The pity is that whereas SF offers the possibility of writing alternate history, in Science Fiction Studies we cannot build a wholly different version of the history of the genre. As Leslie does, and as countless feminist scholars have done before him, the version we have can be amended at particular points and corrected in its overall narrative arc, but we will never have an SF that started as a fully inclusive genre and that avoided the white masculinist pitfalls that Leslie describes so well. At least we can hope for a better future for the genre and its readers.

Sara Martín is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Dr Martín specializes in Gender Studies, particularly Masculinities Studies, and in Science-Fiction Studies. Her most recent books are American Masculinities in Contemporary Documentary Film (2023) and Detoxing Masculinity in Anglophone Literature and Culture (2023, co-edited with M. Isabel Santaulària). Dr. Martín is the translator of Manuel de Pedrolo’s Catalan masterpiece Mecanoscrit del segon origen (Typescript of the Second Origin, 2018). 

Review of Un-American Dreams: Apocalyptic Science Fiction, Disimagined Community, and Bad Hope in the American Century

Pedro Ponce

J. Jesse Ramírez. Un-American Dreams: Apocalyptic Science Fiction, Disimagined Community, and Bad Hope in the American Century. Liverpool University Press, 2022. Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies. Paperback. 264 pg. $39.99. ISBN 9781835537718. eISBN 9781800854475.

An alternate title for J. Jesse Ramírez’s provocative study of 20th century apocalyptic narratives could arguably be Apocalypse: This Time It’s Personal.  Ramírez refers to himself as “a child of apocalypse” in the preface: “I was born on the east—that is to say, brown—side of San José, California, when it wasn’t just the Capital of Silicon Valley but also the PCP Capital of the World. It was the beginning of Reagan’s Morning in America and the last decade of the Cold War” (ix-x, x). Reflecting on his own recurring dreams of apocalypse, Ramírez asks a question that will haunt each subsequent chapter and its reckoning with American end-time pop culture: “Why, then, do I always come back?” (ix).

The short answer is that for the apocalyptic dreamer, apocalypse is beside the point. Apocalypse, in its current usage, is impossible to imagine and represent because it requires knowledge of a world in which humanity as we understand it no longer exists. Put another way by historian Paul Boyer, “‘The only adequate television treatment of nuclear war […] would be two hours of a totally blank screen’” (207). Ramírez’s real focus is pseudo-apocalypses, which he defines in his introduction on “The Uses of Pseudo-Apocalypse” as “speculative negations of the postwar United States that situate the reader and viewer in relation to what cultural producers think America is and can—and cannot—become” (8). The selection of primary texts spans the years 1945 to 2001, corresponding to what some identify as the American Century, from postwar triumph to post-9/11 homeland. These are also the years when, in Ramírez’s assessment, science fiction became a staple of American popular culture, no longer limited to the niches of pulps and comic books. “For apocalyptic sf was the shadow cast by the brilliance of American superpower,” the author writes, “the bad conscience of the shift from ‘empire’ to ‘century,’ the negative that gestated like an alien parasite in the gut of the positive” (5).

Ramírez devotes much of Chapter 1, “The Last American: Earth Abides, Speculative Anthropology, and Settler Utopianism,” to the titular novel by Berkeley English professor George R. Stewart. Critical reception of Earth Abides, published by Random House in 1949, reflected a growing respect for science fiction after its futuristic fantasies turned to reality with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Praised by The New Yorker, Stewart’s novel tracks the human survivors of a deadly plague. The plague disrupts a human world overtaken by technology and thoughtless consumption, “the definitive flaw in the national character whose speculative transcendence is motivated by pseudo-apocalypse” (45). But digging more deeply, Ramírez discerns the persistence of racial hierarchies within Stewart’s ostensibly post-racial utopia: his white protagonist Isherwood “Ish” Williams sees his mixed-race wife Emma more as a pragmatic resource than an equal in this new world order, and this order itself depends on erasing the Indigenous past from the land that Ish hopes to resettle with his “Tribe,” the name used to designate Ish’s surviving group. Writes Ramírez, “the novel’s concluding image of the plague survivors as a tribe of white Indians proves that it’s easier to imagine the end of civilization than the end of the white desire to ‘go native’” (49).

In Chapter 2, “The Revelation of Philip K. Dick,” Ramírez assesses Dick’s status as an apocalyptic author by considering three of his novels: Dr. Bloodmoney, or, How We Got Along after the Bomb (1965), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), and VALIS (1981). While popularly associated with dystopian films like Blade Runner (1982—adapted from Androids)and Minority Report (2002—adapted from his short story), Dick emerges here as something of a utopian. The World War III of Dr. Bloodmoney features survivors who eschew corporate capitalism for the more modest prosperity of small business. “Dick doesn’t roll history all the way back to pre-capitalist modes of production, as George Stewart does,” Ramírez notes, “but his hope is equally damaged, equally bastardized by a capitalist realism that can imagine the future only as the sacrificial return to a ‘regular’ and outmoded past” (98). And the religion of Mercerism, so central to Androids, connects with Dick’s own personal relationship to Christianity, which informs his later work and spirituality. While acknowledging that “Dick’s presentation of Mercerism is far from uncritical,” Ramírez also observes, “It was the Pauline spirit of reformation that activated Dick’s sense that another Christianity, one beyond the neo-fundamentalisms of the evangelicals and the tired orthodoxies of the churches, was possible” (101).

Ramírez turns to film in Chapter 3, “National Insecurity in Night of the Living Dead.” The influence of George A. Romero’s classic (1968) can still be felt by fans of zombie films today. According to Ramírez, Romero’s influences included an unlikely source: American Cold War civil defense: “the national security state’s project to reeducate and train the US population for the ever-present possibility of nuclear war was itself a speculative fiction that peddled the illusion that nuclear war is survivable because it’s basically the same as conventional war” (115). But the resilience required for disaster preparedness does not account for the racial tensions between survivors captured by Romero. The presence of Ben, a black survivor of the zombie apocalypse, reveals the blind spot in what Ramírez calls “national security sf, which, like civil defense itself, took the white suburban family as its model and segregated African Americans in the cities that would have been targeted first in a nuclear war” (126). Ben’s exclusion from civil defense is made clear when he is killed by a member of a white rescue party. “Whereas national security sf celebrates the defeat of the un-American and the return to normality,” Ramírez writes, “Night implicates this bad hope in the renewal and preservation of an American Century whose security is founded on racist violence” (136).

Chapter 4, “How to Bring Your Kids up Alien: Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy,” considers its subject in the context of the Reagan years. Science fiction blockbusters like Star Wars (1977)and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) reflected the values behind Ronald Reagan’s successful presidential campaign: “Reaganite hegemonizing mobilized popular-cultural representations of Americanness that fused neoliberal economics with traditionalist ideologies of family and race” (142). The Reagan campaign’s sanguine attitude toward nuclear weapons inspired Butler to compose her trilogy of novels—Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989)—in which the survivors of a nuclear war must breed with aliens in order to survive. Ramírez observes, “pseudo-apocalypse gives Butler an alibi for speculating about whether sexual reproduction with a radically different form of life can alter the otherwise intractable hierarchy that founds Reagan’s America” (147). While Butler today is credited with building sf worlds that are more inclusive than those of her more canonical peers, Ramírez engages with her complex legacy as an apocalyptic dreamer who seems to connect hope for humanity’s future on traditional reproduction: “Butler never fully overcomes reproductive futurism. Xenogenesis’s bad hope is in some ways anti-queer, a heteronormative wish fulfillment that makes homosexuality and other antinormative desires useless and unthinkable. On the other hand, the radical otherness of alien sex serves as a pretext in Xenogenesis for speculation about queer sexualities and futures after the American Century” (148-149).

Chapter 5, “Waiting for the Martians: Independence Day and the Second American Century,” tackles one of the most iconic sf blockbusters of the 1990s. Ramírez credits director Roland Emmerich with imbuing the 1996 film with “global Americana” (184). When an alien invasion threatens the entire globe, our heroes unite under an inclusive banner that looks suspiciously like American imperial hegemony:

The aliens are represented as an undifferentiated horde with dark skin, oval eyes, unintelligible forms of communication, and blatant disregard for national borders. Second, human international unity is represented as an extension of America’s internal racial harmony. This second unity grounds the first; the United States can represent universal humanity because it’s already a nation of nations, the united races of America. (194)

Readers of Ramírez’s meticulous ideological autopsy will never hear the film’s signature speech—when President Thomas J. Whitmore (Bill Pullman) equates alien defeat with “our” independence day—in the same way again.

In his conclusion, “Pseudo-Apocalypse after the American Century,” Ramírez uses 9/11 as a kind of test case for the ideas in his previous chapters. This is by no means a trivializing thought experiment; for some witnesses, the scale of the attacks could only be processed in terms of Hollywood. “September 11 was movielike,” Ramírez reflects, “not simply because the attacks were visually similar to disaster movies; more importantly, our déjà vu was rooted in apocalyptic sf’s rituals of disimagined community. […] And in the event’s aftermath, when the attacks became a pretext for the United States to wage wars of imperial renewal in Afghanistan and Iraq, 9/11 repeated apocalyptic sf’s utopian motivation” (206).

While not necessarily a book only for specialists, the curious generalist should have a solid command of theory, Marx and Lacan in particular. It’s tempting to invite the general reader into this dense but rewarding study of sf apocalypse. Americans continue their apocalyptic dreaming, if the post-pandemic “normal” and the 2024 election cycle is any indication. The persistence of this dream—the apparent impossibility of imagining a future without it—suggests that, far from being a divided nation, we aren’t divided enough.

Pedro Ponce teaches writing and literary studies at St. Lawrence University. His latest publication is The Devil and the Dairy Princess: Stories (Indiana University Press), winner of the Don Belton Fiction Prize and a finalist for the 2021 Big Other Book Award for Fiction. His reviews have appeared recently in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction.He is the 2024 winner of The Tom La Farge Award for Innovative Writing, Teaching and Publishing.