Category: Nonfiction Reviews

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John Rosegrant is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst whose main interest is to help people live a full life integrating creativity and fantasy. He is also a Tolkienist and a creative author who has written many young adult fantasy novels. His scholarly work has been published both in psychology journals and in Mythlore: A Journal of JRR Tolkien. This dual perspective puts him in a unique position to write this book: a psychoanalytic and literary analysis of Tolkien’s relationship with loss and enchantment, both in his early developmental life and in his writing. To do this, Rosegrant mobilizes throughout the book concepts from three main psychoanalysts: Winnicott, Kristeva, and Freud. Instead of writing Tolkien’s biography and then exploring its meaning in the text or vice-versa, Rosegrant subdivides the book by themes. The book consists of a series of scholarly articles that seems to have been organized to recreate the hero’s journey schema. This structure works well to make apparent unconscious relationships between objects, affects, and ideas. However, it also brings its own issue: the reading is sometimes repetitive, as important events in Tolkien’s life are referenced repeatedly throughout the book.

Rosegrant’s main thesis is that “For Tolkien, enchantment remains always in sight but always threatened” (2), and that this unresolvable tension between enchantment and disenchantment “was so important in Tolkien’s creativity because it grew out of a psychological strain that he himself struggled with throughout his life” (5). Rosegrant adds, “By writing an enchanting story about the dialogue between enchantment and disenchantment, Tolkien gave us ‘product and vision in unflawed correspondence’” (174).

Themes of enchantment and loss are both well-explored in fantasy. Indeed, James Gifford proposes that “As a genre, [fantasy] does not direct attention toward the utopian speculation on what might be, but rather fuels the disappointment with what is ” (2018, 252). Here, the analysis focuses on the unresolved quality of this ambiguity: “The deepest truth lies not in resolving the ambiguity, but in the process of looking at the ambiguity directly and honestly” (111). Rosengrant notes: “What Tolkien uniquely and crucially adds is the twist that destroying the dark enchantment will also inevitably destroy good enchantment as well” (16). This way of reflecting on Tolkien’s legendarium makes me think of Tom Moylan’s critical utopia (Demand the Impossible, 1986) or Larissa Lai’s insurgent utopia (“Insurgent Utopias: How to Recognize the Knock at the Door,” 2018), works that discuss utopian impulses and dystopian consequences without resolving the tension that exists in their conversation.

Rosegrant argues convincingly that early life development (the loss of his estranged father at the age of four and the loss of his mother at 12) shaped Tolkien’s worldview and poetic explorations. Without defining Tolkien, Rosengrant suggests that these early experiences might have made him more vulnerable to subsequent loss (friends during WW1, his wife) and making him especially sensitive to the feeling of the loss of a “comforting and beautiful world” (17) and the “disenchantment of the world” (174). I particularly appreciated the discussions around how creativity can be a way for authors and readers to enter “transitional experiences”; a concept by Winnicott that describes an “experience that is transitional between the experience of Me and the experience of Not-Me” (20). Rosengrant is not necessarily implying that art is therapeutic, although I think he would argue it could be, but rather that there are some ways to engage with the experience of art that can make us travel between the realm of the Faerie and real-world responsibilities, helping us with the tasks of “developing as separate individuals and integrating […] into a world much larger than themselves” (22).

Le Guin critiqued psychological analyses of fantasy that were looking for rational answers while removing elements specific to fantasy: “The purpose a fantasy serves may be as inexplicable, in those terms, as is a dragon” (Le Guin 86). She argues that “to such interpreters the spell is a spell only if it works to heal or reveal” (86). Fantasy, is rather, to her, “creation meaning” (86). Rosegrant, while reading Tolkien through a psychological lens, does a wonderful job of taking faery and fantasy seriously and claiming their inherent importance in adulthood: imagination, play, creativity. In doing that, he honors beautifully Tolkien’s life work.

Rosengrant’s presentation is very convincing, which is both a strength and a weakness of the text. After the first chapter, the book starts to feel repetitive. The overexemplification feels anecdotical at times, as if we are collecting proofs through a rhizomatic thread instead of journeying toward a larger argument. Some chapters are better integrated than others, while some could have been left as standalone articles. Moreover, some parts can feel obtuse to folks who are not Tolkienist experts; if you haven’t read every story he ever wrote, you won’t find summaries of Tolkien’s work here. Furthermore, the shift in tone between literary and psychoanalytical analysis is better executed in some sections than others.

Le Guin has often said that she tells stories not for their resolution, but for their process; for her, they are “thought-experiments” (Le Guin in Lai, 2020, 30) that she conceptualizes as “heavy magic bags” (30), far removed from the straight, hard lines of traditional male heroism. Reading Le Guin, I always assumed she thought of Tolkien when she wrote about male heroism—and honestly I still think she might have—but I believe that further research on Tolkien’s view of what constitutes power and heroism, the internal fight against evil (fascism),  based on Rosengrant’s work, would be very interesting.

WORKS CITED

Gifford, James, A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism, & the Radical Fantastic. ELS Editions, 2018.

Lai, Larissa, “Insurgent Utopias: How to Recognize the Knock at the Door.”Exploring the Fantastic: Genre, Ideology, and Popular Culture, Edited by I. Batzke, ‎ E. C. Erbacher, L.M. Heß, and Corinna Lenhardt. Verlag, 2018. pp. 91–113.

Le Guin, Ursula K., “The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists.”, The Wordsworth Circle, vol. 38, no. 1/2, 2007, pp. 83–87, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24043962.

—, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Cosmogenesis, 2019 [1986].

Moylan, Tom, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination, Peter Lang, 2014 (1986). Ralahine Utopian Studies, vol. 14.

Dani Tardif is a québécois (french-canadian) non-binary queer artist and anthropologist, working across various mediums including video, sound, and both oral and written storytelling. Their practice blurs the boundaries between fiction and ethnography, magic and politics, exploring themes of vulnerability, grief, desire, and the interplay between the individual and the collective. They are now completing a creative writing MA at UQAR (Rimouski, Québec) exploring how fantasy and speculative fiction worldbuilding can be used to tell nuanced stories of conflicts and lateral violences in queer communities.

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Steffan Hantke’s Cloverfield: Creatures and Catastrophes in Post-9/11 Cinema asserts that J. J. Abrams’s Cloverfield franchise is a particularly well-suited cultural artifact through which to analyze the political, social, and formal influences of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on blockbuster entertainment in The United States through to the present day. 

Hantke titles his introduction “Some Thing Has Found Us,” making immediate the connection to monster films that Cloverfield invites while also suggesting that the “thing” can be read metaphorically, such as the speed of cultural currency in entertainment, cinematic authorship, reimagining originality and conventionality, domestic and international war, and capitalist and colonial critiques. The analysis draws upon a variety of methodologies, mirroring Hantke’s argument that Cloverfield is a multi-genre piece of media that cannot be assessed through singular means. He first invokes Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), suggesting that “the visceral experience in Cloverfield felt like the cinematic equivalent of the nightmare [of war] in Gravity’s Rainbow” (3). Cloverfield’s affective register, specifically “the sense of complete absorption in the moment and that of self-conscious familiarity underneath,” is the unifying center of Hantke’s analysis from which he then historicizes the diverse cinematic tradition (both in terms of audience reception and formal techniques) Cloverfield draws upon, the political and social complexity in which Cloverfield—released seven years after the events of 9/11—and its audience exists within.

The work begins by establishing the narrative and, by extension, social function of giant monsters throughout cinema history, complicating a surface level-reading of Cloverfield. Hantke argues that “there comes a point in the growth process of a giant creature when its size exceeds even the wildest flights of extrapolative fancy,” and it is at this point that it becomes accessible as and through metaphor (33). What that metaphor is, however, is highly contextualized. Thus, the first chapter is heavily invested in demonstrating that, on a formal level, Cloverfield is highly aware of its position in cinematic history and utilizes the visual language of the form to provide audiences with initial tools for engagement that are then upended with unsolved questions, placing the onus on the fans to assemble the pieces themselves.  

Chapters 2 and 3 are dedicated to parsing out the film’s context as a post-9/11 blockbuster and the narrative tools it uses to offer narrative space for critiquing or engaging with the implications of a highly militarized American response to the attacks and its effect on civilian lives without making any sweeping statements itself. Hantke argues that Cloverfield “was not coy” about using imagery that was “immediately recognizable iconography of terror” (55). Part of this is made possible using found footage as the visual framing of the film (entirely viewed by the audience through the conceit of a handheld camera operated by several of the main characters) that draws upon war footage of the era. Hantke ends these chapter with the core of his project: “the heritage of 9/11 is not war of nation against nation, but the cognitive paradox of not knowing anything while having all the facts at our command and responding to this conundrum with a vague yet not less powerful and pervasive sense of paranoia” (100). The use of found footage also draws attention away from the propagandized visions of nationhood or other such organizing narratives towards a very private and personal site of meaning making. Private joys are positioned not as a means by which to defeat the giant monster but to understand its effects.

That vagueness allows for the visceral effect that Hantke identifies in the introduction and, as he explores in chapters 4 and 5, that forms the foundation for the franchise itself. For Hantke, the “elliptical nature” of Cloverfield is both the means of its success as well as its end (101). Because Cloverfield offers few to no answers to audience questions, it leaves space for subsequent narratives that will draw the audience’s interest. In these chapters, it becomes necessary to parse out the role of the showrunner or producer, in this case J. J. Abrams, as a sort of authorial center to which audiences are likewise drawn. Hantke argues that Abrams’s model of franchise relies on “ellipsis and fragmentation, incoherence, and uncontrollably proliferating complexity” where other serial storytellers would view such techniques as a sign of a failing creation (133). And yet, because each subsequent film becomes further and further removed from the original context of a post 9/11 viewership and must maintain the fragmentation, there are no unifying characters or locations that bind the films together. Thus, Hantke argues that the third and final installment, The Cloverfield Paradox, “leaves viewers with little else to talk about than its relationship to the preceding two films in the franchise” (123). Interestingly, this is similar to Fran Hoepfner’s review of Alien: Romulus (2024) in which she states that while the Alien films share similar formulas, “their goopy scares still delight and disgust” largely because of their familiarity.

Hantke’s work offers a thorough close reading of Cloverfield both as a text and a franchise through which his impressive knowledge on cinema, post-9/11 history, and Hollywood’s innerworkings are on full display. However, in what could be seen as attempts to legitimize dedicating an academic text such as this to a popular culture artifact, Hantke makes vague and repetitive references to literary traditions such as the literary gothic, the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, and Gravity’s Rainbow without fully fleshing out or making explicit their usefulness to his argument or to the field(s) he is engaging with. What could have been a very informative integration of literary and film studies reads more like a haphazard space filler at worst and a weak or tangential argument at best.

The strengths of Hantke’s Cloverfield lie in its accessibility. Hantke’s illuminating close readings pair well with the heavily researched (and thoroughly footnoted) complex histories that he is very familiar with. It would be easy to become lost in the sheer number of references, and yet Hantke has structured his argument in such a way as to make it easily readable. The most compelling and useful part of his argument is, perhaps, the analysis of J. J. Abrams’s views on franchising and their influence on American blockbuster entertainment. Hantke offers a frame of analysis beyond Cloverfield itself and the content of this chapter remains potentially fruitful for additional research.

WORKS CITED

Hantke, Steffen. Cloverfield: Creatures and Catastrophes in Post-9/11 Cinema. University Press of Mississippi, 2023. Print.

Hoepfner, Fran. “Humans Are Killable. The Alien Franchise Isn’t.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 16 Aug. 2024, www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2024/08/alien-romulus-review/679479/.

Leah Olson is a PhD student at The University of Nevada, Las Vegas in English Literature where she holds a graduate assistantship. She holds a master’s degree in English Literature from Claremont Graduate University, with a certificate in Preparing Future Faculty. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century American literature, apocalypse/post-apocalypse, and visual narratives. She is particularly interested in the relationship between realism and speculative fiction across genres and time periods. 

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Any account of Lovecraft’s life stands in the shadow of S. T. Joshi’s comprehensive biographical work—A Life in 1996 and I Am Providence in 2010—and will hence either need to be argumentative or opt to take a specific approach to add to Joshi’s work. David J. Goodwin chose the latter and wrote a micro-biography, a “thorough telling of his [Lovecraft’s] relationship with New York City” (15), starting in 1921 and ending in 1926. This approach is largely successful: the sharp delineation enables Goodwin to explore specific aspects of Lovecraft’s life in-depth; taking a short period of his life allows for a closer analysis of Lovecraft’s day-to-day activities than a biography of his entire life could achieve. As a result, Goodwin recreates entire days of Lovecraft’s life in New York, substantiating this with exhaustive research in the form of close readings of Lovecraft’s sent and received letters, complemented by historical research to reconstruct the city as it was in the 1920s.

Midnight Rambles primarily concerns Lovecraft’s changing view on the city; as a concomitant, Goodwin barely focuses on Lovecraft’s admittedly small literary output of the period. After moving to New York in 1924, Lovecraft quickly accrued a circle of intellectual and literary friends—the Kalem Club—with whom he would embark on the titular midnight rambles. Just after moving, Lovecraft was enthralled by the city. This captivation soured over the years, as his marriage to Sonia Greene cooled, he failed to accrue a stable income, he moved from Flatbush to the lower-class Brooklyn Heights, and, perhaps most significantly, he was exposed more regularly to the city’s immigrant population. He ultimately left the city and returned to his native Providence, dubbing the former “the pest zone” (179). Goodwin analyses this changing—and oftentimes ambivalent—relationship while tracking Lovecraft’s circle of friends, daily occupations, and opinions of the city as expressed in his letters and as extrapolated from his activities.

Goodwin advances the argument that Lovecraft, enamored of the city’s colonial heritage, “pictured himself sauntering through New York of the late eighteenth century—a city decidedly constructed on a human scale, still existing alongside the natural world, and notably devoid of an appreciable number of non-English-speaking immigrants,” a “lost New York City, one in which he believed he might have thrived” (84, 94). This serves to explain why Lovecraft’s rambles were mostly at night; it is easier to envision a bygone, sanitized New York when there are fewer people on the street (99-100). This argument deftly weaves together two significant aspects of Lovecraft’s personality and life: his antiquarian interests and indelible racist opinions. This ambivalence towards the city runs parallel to “the complexity inherent in Lovecraft’s choice of friends” (37), such as the Jewish Sonia Greene and Samuel Loveman, or the liberal James F. Morton. Goodwin’s psychologizing approach to Lovecraft’s relationships with the city and its inhabitants—supported by meticulous research—pays dividends in sketching a picture of a complex man, not only warm to his friends and relentless in his rambling, but also an unrepentant racist. This conundrum is central to Lovecraft studies, and Goodwin handles it deftly and thoroughly.

Further innovations to the field are novel analyses of aspects of Lovecraft’s personality. Goodwin convincingly shows that Lovecraft was well in the know about cultural trends (90) and contemporary popular culture (127), repudiating the often-promulgated image of Lovecraft as a man out of time. Despite Lovecraft’s own misgivings about the term, Goodwin dubs him a bohemian, as Lovecraft aspired to earning “a living as a writer and keeping company exclusively with intellectuals, booksellers, and authors” (156), a far cry from the image of Lovecraft as a conservative recluse (171). In a similar vein, Goodwin suggests that Lovecraft might not have been the sexually disinterested prude he is often imagined as, contradicting popular and scholarly opinion (74-74, 150). Here, again, Goodwin’s approach pays off: the micro-biography format allows him to closely scrutinize Lovecraft’s engagement with pop culture in the city and his marriage with Greene, substantiating his innovative claims about Lovecraft’s personality.

The focus on Lovecraft’s life places his fiction in the background. Goodwin briefly mentions the stories drafted or written during Lovecraft’s New York years—“The Horror at Red Hook” (137-141), “He” (143), “Cool Air” (158-161), and the beginnings of the famous “Call of Cthulhu” (146)—but sparsely reads them. Instead, Goodwin briefly touches on how the city influenced the writing of these stories, keeping with the subject of the book: the relationship between Lovecraft and New York.

A scholar of Lovecraft’s tales in isolation from his life will have little use for Midnight Rambles. Those who are interested in Lovecraft’s habits, marriage, changing views on New York, antiquarian interests, stubborn adherence to his racist views, personality, or the Kalem Club, will find this book of great interest. Those in the middle, searching for the connections between fiction and man, will recognize a work invested in the idea that New York intimately shaped Lovecraft’s literary vision, allowing him to mature into the critically acclaimed later phase of his writing after his return to Providence in 1926 (170-172). Goodwin convincingly argues this point, all the while decisively showing the value of the micro-biography format to the field and beyond.

Martijn J. Loos is a Dutch PhD candidate at New York University’s department of Comparative Literature. He works at the intersection of science fiction and philosophy, having published on, amongst others, H. P. Lovecraft, Octavia E. Butler, Ray Bradbury, and Ted Chiang. He enjoys Belgian beers and anything with laser guns.

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Imperiled Whiteness examines how “seemingly progressive narratives” (23) in speculative fiction (SF) “consistently reproduced historically racist imagery” (23) and were “reinforced by concomitant political and social media narratives concerning race and race relations that stoke out-group hostility” (23).  To do this, author Penelope Ingram examines how connections between media events, fictions, and real life—what she terms “convergence culture” (24)—can make it impossible to discern the differences between reality and fictional representation. Integral to this convergence culture was a Covid-era proliferation of “zombie movies… where ‘good’ people must defend themselves against murderous, rapacious, undead ‘bad’ people” (4) within a broader media ecosystem, contributing to increasing real-life social and political polarization. 

Ingram’s methodology draws on various area studies, specifically cultural studies, media studies, postcolonial and race studies, philosophy, and film studies to elucidate the ongoing and longstanding success of white SF franchises. Ingram reads three extremely successful and profitable franchises, the Walking Dead, the Star Trek reboots, and Planet of the Apes, as produced during the Obama administration, through the increasing racial polarization of US politics. Ingram chose to analyze franchises, as opposed to individual works, to read across multiple texts, media, and the decades-long histories of Planet of the Apes and Star Trek. For contrast, she discusses well-recognized, profitable, and popular work by “Black SF creatives” (14) Jordan Peele and Ryan Coogler that forms a counterpoint to “Black life as it is represented in realist films” (27).  Of particular interest to Ingram is how convergence culture “turned whiteness into a commodity that was packaged and disseminated to a white populace” (9) by leveraging the idea of outside attack and ongoing peril faced by white people. Ironically, this peril can be depicted in the SF media ecosystem “precisely because it disseminates the notion that racism and indeed, race itself, are seemingly obsolete” (9). 

The book is divided into six parts: an introduction and conclusion that provide and wrap up the overall framework for analysis just summarized, three sections that consider the broad themes of contagion, animality, and monstrosity as they play out in three very popular and highly profitable white SF multimedia franchises, and a section that offers a contrasting perspective on the SF works of Peele and Coogler. The three sections on white SF each illustrate how a specific theme (contagion, monstrosity, or animality) functions metaphorically on a franchise level and in specific works to reinforce a sense that white people are imperiled by outside others. The work concludes with an alternative vision for rehumanizing racial others.

Ingram’s stated grounding in specific area studies—cultural studies, media studies, postcolonial and race studies, philosophy, and film studies—is generally solid. The film and media studies framework is especially strong. Ingram provides excellent readings of the Star Trek, Walking Dead, and Planet of the Apes franchises, related Hollywood and independent films, social media posting, and the role of commodity fetishism in ongoing discourses of race that reinforce the idea that white people are imperiled. Less clear is how work like Coogler’s Black Panther films function on a franchise level as a counterpoint to ‘white’ SF, given origins that, quite arguably, could be seen as at the very least seamlessly continuous with such productions. For instance, Coogler adapts a character first created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who are not mentioned in this monograph.

For a work analyzing race in speculative fiction, some important contextual gaps bear mentioning. Most noticeable is a lack of work in speculative fiction and science fiction studies, even very foundational work by Donna Haraway, whose ‘cyborg manifesto’ set the stage for future readings of race, class, gender, and posthumanity (or the relationships between humans, animals, and machines) in cultural studies, media studies, and film studies. Posthuman readings could have benefitted Ingram’s thoughtful focus on the convergence of multiple media and their material effects on lived reality. John Rieder’s work on colonialism and science fiction would have been another helpful addition, as would techno-orientalism as figured by David Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta Niu. These works analyze the role of race, otherness, and racialization in science fiction and fantasy. African futurism, which finds its focus outside the United States, would also provide some ballast and helpful context.  Another helpful grounding text—at least as a mention—might have been John Clute’s work on “fantastika” as a genre category. Another gap that seems odd, given the inclusion of both Walking Dead and Black Panther franchise elements, is an absence of work in comics studies. As it stands, Ingram reinvents approaches to SF studies, SF texts, and comics rather than engaging much valuable existing scholarship.

Overall, Imperiled Whiteness is an interesting and worthwhile read. As a teaching tool, it would most likely benefit faculty and students in media studies as its especial strength is in reading current events, social media, commodity culture, and speculative fictions as they converge within, impact, and create culture.  For scholars and students of SF, comics, or graphic narrative, this work has an important gap insofar as it does not meaningfully engage with the existing scholarship of these fields.  This is not to say that teachers or scholars should avoid the work, but that they will need to provide their own grounding in that scholarship to make much use of this text.

Lisa DeTora is Professor of Writing Studies and Rhetoric at Hofstra University in the United States. Her scholarship in health humanities, comics, and popular culture examines embodiment, quantum states, and posthumanity. Lisa’s paper on The Windup Girl and embodied identity appeared in Diasporic Italy in 2022.  Lisa co-organized panels on comics at SFRA (Dresden, 2023 with Umberto Rossi), and a seminar at Framing the Unreal a conference about intersections between science fiction and graphic narrative (Venice, 2024 with Alison Halsall).

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One of the key aspects of Jim Endersby’s magnificent study is the emphasis he places upon ‘participatory culture’: the extent to which different audiences reinterpreted and made use of the new—and as yet incomplete—theory of mutations, generating cultural meanings that went beyond its initial formulation in 1901 by the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries. As a result, Endersby’s analysis foregrounds the historical moment in which these reinterpretations and new uses were made. His book, though, is itself a participant, and an intervention, in the history of mutation theory which, as Endersby clarifies, has had a long, enduring afterlife even though de Vries’s account was largely discredited by 1930. Reading this book now, in the current context of neo-eugenics; demands for racial and sexual purity; the dismantling of the state in the name of efficiency; technological boosterism; and the distorting media effects of celebrity and propaganda, it is hard not to have a sense of déjà vu. History, by itself, does not repeat, but those who do not read history—who regard it, like the high prophet of efficiency Henry Ford, as ‘bunk’—are condemned to repeating its mistakes (usually at other peoples’ expense). The salutary effect of Endersby’s book, as detailed and as comprehensive as it is, is that it goes beyond a mere historical account and addresses concerns that are vital to the culture in which we currently participate. By revealing how contentious, unstable and, in many respects, downright wrong scientific knowledge was in the early twentieth century, Endersby compels us to also question the supposed certainties that are currently being trumpeted in the age of the ‘tech-bro.’

Joshua Glenn, on behalf of his series of MIT Press reprints, has dubbed the period 1900 to 1935 ‘the Radium Age.’ Yet, as Endersby convincingly argues, it should really be called ‘the Mutation Age,’ so powerfully did de Vries’s theory capture the public imagination. At the heart of its meteoric rise, dramatic decline and trailing iridescence was a single question: how did new species emerge? Although Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, still hotly contested and disputed by biologists at the start of the twentieth century, had indicated how certain species survived, it failed to explain how new species arrived. Since the process of natural selection was incalculably slow, how could new variants take hold without being swamped by the dominance of pre-existing biological forms? The apparent failure of Darwin’s theory to explain this discrepancy suggested that, if Darwinism was not totally wrong, it was seriously flawed, and open to new or resistant theories.

This space generated not only competing versions of Darwinism—alongside Darwin himself, there was still the legacy of Jean-Baptise de Lamarck’s theory of inherited characteristics as well as the work of Darwin’s contemporaries such as Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel, T.H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace, and August Weismann—but also contested definitions and usages of keywords, most notably, that of ‘evolution’ itself. Endersby pays particular attention to the concept of ‘experimental evolution’: that the process of evolution could not only be studied by experiment but also intervened in and accelerated. In a rebuff to historians of science, Endersby shows, both in his main text and the appendices that examine the contents of over 150 science textbooks published between 1900 and 1932, experimentalism was not primarily associated with the rediscovery of the work of Gregor Mendel. Mendelism, and the realization that the answer to the question of how new species arrived was a new theory of heredity based upon Mendel’s focus on hybrids and Darwin’s natural selection, only gradually took hold after T.H. Morgan’s work on fruit flies in the 1910s. As Endersby notes, even as late as the mid-1920s, biologists such as Julian Huxley were still conflating Morgan’s discoveries with de Vries’s theory of mutations: something that even Morgan and his colleagues did themselves.

However, the other key factor in de Vries’s greater popularity was that his work was simply more exciting and sensationalistic than Mendel’s plodding and seemingly esoteric observations with pea plants. Into the space opened up by the irresolution of Darwin’s theory poured the new journalistic literature, hungry for attention-grabbing novelties. Endersby draws extensively upon concepts such as bricolage, familiar from fan and subcultural studies, to show how ideas, still contested and unproven within the scientific community, slid into popular discourse and became entangled with other cultural and political ideologies. In a further critique of his own discipline, Endersby demonstrates that a narrow focus on the work of scientists, as evidenced by the elite readerships for scientific papers and academic journals, offers a drastically one-sided account of how scientific knowledge was popularly understood. Instead, although de Vries’s description of apparently spontaneous plant mutations was not translated until the 1910s, the idea was appropriated by US magazines a decade earlier. In an era of mass circulation and limited copyright laws, the thrilling concept of sudden mutations was rapidly disseminated, often in apocalyptic terms that declared the end of Darwinism and the revelation of how the evolutionary principle could be seized and manipulated. Whilst on the one hand, mutation theory seemed to offer the possibility of developing new foods at the expense of Malthusian fears of overpopulation, on the other hand (as Endersby shows), the apocalyptic rhetoric enmeshed with both theosophical ideas and the peculiarly Californian pseudo-religion of ‘New Thought’ in claiming that scientific discoveries, such as those by de Vries, could revive the occult knowledge of Chaldean wisdom and presage a new developmental stage in human consciousness. Although Endersby’s focus is on biology, his analysis dovetails with how physics and mathematics were also viewed in the same period as part of a spiritual awakening, for example, the role of theosophy again in Mark Blacklock’s 2018 account, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension.

This odd mix of American can-do and mystical otherworldliness was embodied by Luther Burbank. Endersby compares Burbank’s experiments with new plant species with his near-contemporaries, fellow botanist Lewis Hyde Bailey and electrical inventor Thomas Edison. Bailey, unlike Burbank, retained a pastoral view of nature: that the natural world was inherently good and morally sustaining, but that humanity’s role was to work with nature and cultivate it for the greater good of human need. Consequently, although Endersby portrays Bailey as a more conservative figure than Burbank, he nonetheless embodies what Endersby calls the ‘biotopian’ tone of the popular literature: a forward-looking view in which nature is not there to be managed but actively intervened in and reshaped for the progress of human society.

Burbank, like Bailey, was portrayed as a simple folksy figure—sensitive, caring, even maternal—but in his ruthless destruction of aborted experiments, Burbank also appeared to be indifferent to the natural world except as a vessel for human needs. His relentless approach led Burbank to being compared with Edison, the epitome of the engineer paradigm, as Roger Luckhurst has argued in relation to pulp SF, but (like Edison) Burbank was also called a ‘wizard’: the very folksiness attributed to him also seemed to describe a mystical wisdom, an ancestral knowledge that came from working with the very processes of natural development. Although such descriptions were patently false (one of Burbank’s chief proponents was Garrett P. Serviss, author of the Wellsian rip-off, Edison’s Conquest of Mars [1898]), Burbank was nevertheless content to go along with them. Again, like Edison, he was a ruthless and talented self-promoter, riding the wave of boosterism that was a keynote of the popular journalism. Whereas de Vries also attempted to promote himself through the same channels, he was hampered not only by his non-US identity but also by his academic background; Burbank’s lack of formal training was actually an advantage by playing up to his public image as an untutored, supposedly natural genius. In fact, as Endersby drily observes, nearly all of Burbank’s results were disasters, but that didn’t stop US governmental departments throwing lucrative contracts in his direction or academic institutions falling over themselves to be associated with him (although Burbank’s idiosyncratic and undisciplined approach proved a nightmare for his more professional colleagues). Who knows what might have happened if Theodore Roosevelt or W.H. Taft, so impressed by Burbank’s vaunted skills, had offered him a place in their administration, maybe heading up a department of national efficiency? Instead, as Endersby deftly describes, Burbank’s rhetoric of weeding out undesirable elements and cultivating previously unsophisticated ones neatly overlapped with the racialist discourse surrounding the contemporaneous US invasion of the Philippines.

As Burbank’s fame eclipsed de Vries’s initial popularity, calling into question public understanding of what constitutes ‘science’ or a ‘scientist,’ whilst also extending the biotopian impulse afforded by mutation theory, a very different trajectory emerged in Britain. Endersby takes as his starting point T.H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (1894), arguing that while Huxley rejected the idea of nature as innately good and viewed it instead as a plastic, material resource for human need, he was constrained by the Malthusian reinterpretation of original sin: that humans were inherently competitive and destructive. How could nature, on the one hand, be repurposed and improved at the expense, on the other hand, of the human desire for violence and conflict? Was it possible to not only intervene in the natural world but also human nature, if the ends justified the means?

As Endersby concedes, Huxley’s exploration of this ethical dilemma was inconclusive, but in the process, he outlined not only the terms of the argument to be taken up by his successors but also supplied a science-fictional (and residually Christian) imaginary: the bio-engineered future as a new Eden; a planned and cultivated garden that complemented the visions of Bailey and Burbank. This garden imagery, though, is profane rather than sacred, populated with artificially grown hybrid species. In describing the perversity of this biotopian nature, Endersby slightly misses a trick by not also noting the contemporaneous imagery of the hothouse flower that runs through the Decadent writing of the same period or, indeed, Arthur Symons’s description (only a few months before Huxley) of Decadence’s ‘spiritual and moral perversity’ as ‘a new and beautiful and interesting disease.’ H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), to which Endersby turns, is also in dialogue with the Decadent movement—the Eloi as lotus eaters, the Morlocks as vampiric predators—whilst Men Like Gods (1923), a central text for Endersby, fully embraces the artificial paradise favored by both Huxley and Symons. Endersby also glosses over the post-WW1 context of Men Like Gods, a vitriolic riposte to such apocalyptic novels as Edward Shanks’s The People of the Ruins (1920) and Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage (1922), but convincingly sets it alongside such key speculative essays as J.B.S. Haldane’s Daedalus (1924) and J.D. Bernal’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929). One of the most important aspects of Endersby’s analysis is the extent to which he troubles the blanket use of ‘eugenics’ to describe these writings. Whilst Wells’s infamous winnowing of African and Asian peoples in his essay Anticipations (1902) embodies some of the worst aspects of negative eugenics, both Men Like Gods and the essays of Bernal and Haldane either switched to more positive forms of eugenics or rejected the pseudo-science altogether, famously proposing, for example, the uses of artificial reproduction.

Both Bernal and Haldane had published in the pioneering pamphlet series To-day and Tomorrow, which sought to communicate both a world of ideas and competing visions of the future to a curious general audience. This democratization of scientific thought is also explored through Endersby’s extensive analysis of science textbooks, to which Wells contributed via The Science of Life (1929), his collaboration with his son G.P. and Julian Huxley. Besides detailing how The Science of Life offers a non-fictional counterpart to Men Like Gods, Endersby convincingly demonstrates how textbooks not only kept alive the now discredited theory of mutations but also preserved its authority by setting it alongside the more accepted theories of Darwinism, Mendelism and heredity.

Textbooks and pamphlets, seemingly more temperate than the hyperbole of popular journalism yet nonetheless infused with the same biotopian vision, were an important interpreter for political activists. Whilst Darwinism, in the form of social conservatives such as Galton, Haeckel and Spencer, seemed to offer a biological justification for the status quo, its emphasis upon the perversity and mutability of nature also lent succor for those seeking the overthrow of capitalism or patriarchy. Yet, the gradualism of natural selection, although approved by reformers such as Ramsey MacDonald, was anathema to more radical campaigners. Consequently, de Vries’s mutation theory, by declaring the spontaneity of change, seemed like a gift, and it rapidly became recommended reading (in one or other popularized form) for those on the revolutionary Left. Endersby pays particular attention to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) as both a feminist and socialist utopia which, unlike Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) or William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), actively argues for the re-engineering of nature. Although Endersby examines the Darwinian roots for Gilman’s racism, he balances this ideological blemish by stressing the extent to which she viewed gender as a cultural category and (like other turn-of-the-century feminists, it might be added) appropriated Darwin’s concept of sexual selection as a means of female intervention.

Another demographic for the textbooks were the young, predominantly but not exclusively male, readers of the early pulp SF magazines such as Amazing Stories. Just as he deftly alludes to fan and subcultural studies as part of his interdisciplinary approach, Endersby makes respectful use of critics such as Samuel R. Delany and Paul Kincaid to consider pulp SF as a discourse that effectively rehearses many of the themes that preoccupy his earlier chapters. In a survey of writers from David Keller and Jack Williamson to John Michel and Clare Winger Harris, Endersby explores not only how the concept of mutation was reinterpreted as part of an exciting series of optimistic technological visions but also how it informed the participatory culture of First Fandom: the so-called ‘backyard’ of the letter pages overlapped with Hugo Gernsback’s encouragement for readers to pursue their own ‘backyard science’ like miniature clones of Burbank. There is more that could be said here about Gernsback’s support of technocracy—a 1930s movement that has acquired contemporary relevance thanks to the fascist sympathies of Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather—but Endersby wisely leaves that for other writers to investigate.

Endersby contrasts the emergent pulp SF with the post-Wellsian scientific romances of J.D. Beresford, Julian Huxley and Olaf Stapledon. However, whilst Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930) clearly utilized the speculative visions of Bernal and Haldane, Endersby also observes how Stapledon’s work, alongside Wells’s Star Begotten (1937), influenced its US counterparts. To that end, Endersby pays close attention to how Huxley’s ‘The Tissue-Culture King’ (1926) was reframed within the pages of Amazing Stories, and how Beresford inserted a scientific dialogue into The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911) for its US publication, so as to clarify the origins of the mutant prodigy. (I will admit I was unaware of the details of this addition when I wrote about the novel in my own Modernism and Science Fiction; equally though, Endersby pays less attention than he might to Beresford’s usage of Henri Bergson’s ‘creative evolution.’) Leaping forward to such movie franchises as the X-Men, Endersby astutely observes that it is SF which has kept the folk-science of mutation alive long after the original theory’s demise; an observation that could have been developed further by noting how Stapledon’s concept of homo superior passed into the wider culture via David Bowie’s song ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ (1971).

In his conclusion, Endersby addresses the elephant in the room, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), but does so by emphasizing that what Huxley offers is not a eugenic but a bio-engineered future, coupled to Pavlovian conditioning, which critically reflects the optimistic visions of Wells, Haldane, Bernal and his own brother Julian. Endersby tends to downplay, though, Huxley’s own complicity in these same ideologies which adds greatly to (at least for this reader) the unpleasant ambiguity of his novel. However, in noting that Brave New World is ultimately a satire on the Americanization of modern life, Endersby observes that it can also be read as a critique of the hollow promises of Luther Burbank (albeit written by an elite English intellectual). Despite these criticisms, though, Huxley tended to side with the burden of ancestral heredity, the dilemma that his grandfather had contended with, rather than the potential of speculative heredity as proposed by his brother. Endersby concludes that the cultural effect of novels such as Brave New World is to dissuade us from intervening in nature—that nature, somehow, knows best—whereas existential crises such as climate change dictate that intervention, in recognizing and embracing the perversity of nature, may actually be the right course of action.

Lavishly illustrated, engagingly written, and beautifully packaged by the University of Chicago Press, The Arrival of the Fittest is a substantial achievement. Its capacious approach to the subject is testament to both the generosity and humility of its author. This is interdisciplinary research of the highest order: it transforms our understanding of the period into more complex and subtle forms whilst also setting a high bar for those to follow. Meeting that challenge would be the perfect response for a work that dramatically alters how we view the cultural field of the early twentieth century.

Paul March-Russell is editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction and co-commissioning editor for Gold SF (Goldsmiths Press). His most recent book, J.G. Ballard’s Crash (Palgrave Macmillan), was shortlisted for the BSFA Awards in 2025.

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MANTIS (1994-5) is perhaps best remembered for having brought one of the first Black superheroes to American television. Starring Carl Lumbly as the scientist turned vigilante Miles Hawkins, MANTIS piqued my interest as a child with a burgeoning interest in geography due to its memorable vision of security and surveillance in the dystopian metropolis of Port Columbia. In “The Eyes Beyond,” Hawkins must overthrow the City Eye, a fascistic, panoptic supercomputer, whose spherical lair made inventive use of the iconic dome of Vancouver, British Columbia’s Science World as a filming location. To this day, the booming voice of the City Eye, voiced by Malachi Throne, still occasionally haunts my dreams, perhaps summoned by the police helicopters I regularly hear overhead living in downtown Los Angeles.

Cities provoke fantasy, and speculative fiction has long been a powerful site for both reiterating and interrupting ideological common sense about relationships between urban space, race, class, violence, and power. Yet it is only recently that the city of speculative fiction has been afforded the sustained collective attention it deserves as an object of analysis in its own right. Originating in a 2014 American studies conference in Europe, Fantastic Cities gathers sixteen essays from scholars of film, literature, history, and urban studies examining visions of the urban in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, with a principal, though not altogether exclusive, focus on cities in the United States.

The volume opens with a first-rate theoretical essay by editors Stefan Rabitsch and Michael Fuchs that surveys cities’ seeming ubiquity and recurrence in speculative fiction and enumerates some recurring characteristics of the Fantastic City. Understanding cities’ imagined incarnations, they argue, matters because fantasy is so constitutive of “the world we know”. (14) Shaped by conventions, but assembling and juxtaposing forms of life in sometimes-unexpected configurations, Fantastic Cities are at once national and transnational, vertical and horizonal, and simultaneously bounded, expansive, and mobile.

Perhaps most crucially, Rabitsch and Fuchs contend, Fantastic Cities are palimpsestic, “in perpetual flux of (de)construction and (re)development, constantly redefined”. (25) This invocation of the figure of the palimpsest is an important early indication of this volume’s potential interest to critical geographers as well as literary and film scholars, as the physicality of the palimpsest’s persistent traces accords well with contemporary human geography’s materialist approach inquiry into the contested production of urban space. To undertake a palimpsestic inquiry into fantastic urban space is also a necessarily ethico-political project, requiring an openness to being haunted by remainders, ghosts whose presence is never fully erased.

The editors of Fantastic Cities are to be commended for the consistent standard of rigor and accessibility met by all the contributions, which are organized into sections on imagination, apocalypse, freedom, and ecology. Yet the volume’s most successful chapters are arguably those that embrace the palimpsestic approach outlined in the introduction, holding in consistent tension cities’ simultaneously material and fantastic dimensions, and remaining in meaningful dialogue with the normative and critical as well as descriptive aims of contemporary American studies as a field that has been revolutionized by critical political economy, a postnationalist turn, and the rise of critical ethnic studies.

Carl Abbott’s contribution, for instance, persuasively explicates Kim Stanley Robinson’s critical optimism about cities—which are so often troped in speculative fiction as spaces of alienation and anomie—as sites of experimental coalitions and provisional solidarities across race and class. From Washington, D.C. to Orange County to New York City to Mars, Robinson figures cities as places where people make do amidst the quotidian emergencies of climate change, capitalist development, and an overgrown military-industrial complex. In such perilous places and times, Abbott observes, Robinson nevertheless holds out hope and imaginative space for forms of urban “community animated by vigorous democracy”. (75) Chris Pak’s chapter, on visions of terraforming in the work of Robinson, Arthur C. Clarke, and Frederick Turner, takes a complementary angle, considering how fantastic cities can give rise to human relationships to nonhuman nature on terms that exceed capitalist and anthropocentric logics.

Though its source material hardly shares such optimism, Jacob Babb’s treatment of Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One (2011) is equally sophisticated. For Babb, Whitehead’s zombified New York is at once apparently “postracial” and brutal in its treatment of both zombies and the workers tasked with “clearing” the city of them. In such a grim scenario, Babb speculates, “Whitehead seems to be telling us that the only hope… is to abandon hope and face the bleakness”. (99) Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s chapter, on the vampire films Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), likewise finds considerable bleakness in extractive urban capitalist landscapes. That both films present sympathetic protagonists who eke out nourishment, beauty, enchantment, and pleasure however they can, Weinstock astutely suggests, renders “the vampiric taking of blood… preferable to the capitalist creation of human misery”. (115)

Three other chapters distinguish themselves in their theoretically rigorous dialogues with postnational and hemispheric visions of American Studies. María Isabel Pérez Ramos brings the cutting-edge decolonial criticism of Walter Mignolo to bear on dystopian visions of desert cities in the U.S. Southwest, praising writers like Leslie Marmon Silko and Rudolfo Anaya, who turn to Indigenous and Chicanx ancestral knowledges for viable alternative visions of eco-futurity. J. Jesse Ramírez’s interpretation of Peruvian American director Alex Rivera’s dystopian film Sleep Dealer (2008) intervenes in longstanding debates on alienation in Marxist science fiction criticism, rightly insisting that cognitive estrangement is always relative, and materially anchored in specific histories and geographies of race, class, and nation. And James McAdams finds in Samuel Delany’s novel Dhalgren (1975) experimental, innovative, and radical visions of social selfhood that become possible only in a postnational urban America—an American city in which “the social mythology America has created for itself [is] removed”. (192)

As an urban geographer and American studies scholar with a foot (or at least a few toes) in science fiction studies, I read Fantastic Cities with great interest. The book’s accessibility makes its eminently teachable. In fact, I began referring undergraduate students to it before I had even finished it. Although not every chapter excited me as much as those foregrounded in this review, as is perhaps inevitably the case for anyone reading an edited volume cover-to-cover, the volume fully succeeds in bringing the city from the background to the foreground of speculative fiction studies, and will no doubt be an important touchstone for subsequent research.

David K. Seitz is Associate Professor of Cultural Geography in the Department of the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California and extended faculty in the Cultural Studies Department at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of A Different ‘Trek’: Radical Geographies of ‘Deep Space Nine’ (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) and essays on Star Trek published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacobin, Science Fiction Film and Television, Geopolitics, The Geographical Bulletin, and Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society. He lives in Los Angeles.

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Bioware’s Mass Effect is an unexpected but welcome entry in this Palgrave series on canonical texts in science fiction and fantasy. Jerome Winter’s book achieves Palgrave’s stated goal of “destabilizing” traditional notions of the canon by placing the videogame franchise alongside more traditional classics of the genre such as Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965). Winter focuses on the first three Mass Effect games—released between 2007 and 2012 (and remastered in 2021)—in which players control Commander Shepard using third-person shooter and roleplaying mechanics to rally the galaxy against Lovecraftian space monsters known as Reapers. Winter explores the thematic and narrative elements of this trilogy, but also focuses on how the unique interactivity of videogames enhances and complicates the storytelling.

Winter situates the Mass Effect trilogy within the “well-worn conventions of the SF genre, specifically the familiar subgenre of space opera” (2). Yet, while he notes that space opera has influenced videogames since at least 1962, the trilogy stands out as unique both for its embrace of genre tropes and its subversion of those tropes. Mass Effect echoes the pulp sensibilities of authors such as E.E. “Doc” Smith, and indeed contains direct allusions to those texts, but rejects their “cardboard characters, black-and-white morality, torturous plotting, and dated ideological baggage” (4). Instead of retreading the pulp-era trope of human colonization of exotic planets, humanity in Mass Effect is a junior partner in an established galactic civilization.

The first chapter of BioWare’s Mass Effect focuses on the text’s unique features as a videogame, combining analysis of the skill-driven shooting gameplay and narrative agency afforded by the player’s ability to choose dialogue options. Indeed, the game’s binary morality options—in which players can choose ‘paragon’ or ‘“renegade’ responses at critical points in the story—bestows meaningful agency on players by allowing them to exercise their unique political, social, and personal values. Mass Effect uses this mechanic to force players to engage with problematic space opera tropes, such as the implicit xenophobia in how these stories depict insectoid alien species. Winter pushes back against the perennial moral panic about videogames by citing BioWare data showing that 92% of players chose paragon options (17).

Winter then examines the Mass Effect trilogy’s treatment of politics, which he interprets as a “blistering satire of modern war” and “neo-missionary eco­nomic colonialism” (29-30). Unlike most military shooter videogames, Mass Effect does not glamorize violence as the only or necessary response to threats. Indeed, depending on the player’s choices, some of the nonplayer characters’ arcs undercut traditional justifications for vigilante justice. The story even underscores the importance of diplomacy, righting historical wrongs, and overcoming bigotry as the player must build an alliance of alien species against the Reaper threat. Mass Effect also points out the economic injustices caused by corporate exploitation in ways its pulp-era predecessors rarely did.

This chapter provides a helpful corrective to stereotypes about the politics of videogame storytelling, but perhaps overstates the extent to which Mass Effect subverts genre tropes. The Citadel Council, the story’s equivalent to a galactic government, refuses to heed Shepard’s warnings about the Reaper threat, leading the player character to join the human-supremacist militant group Cerberus in the second game to continue the fight. The final game clearly rejects Cerberus’ worldview and requires the player to defeat the group, but continues to perpetuate genre tropes depicting soldiers as uniformly honorable and political institutions as untrustworthy or ineffectual. The human representative to the Council even ends up betraying the player character and the anti-Reaper alliance in the third game.

The third chapter of BioWare’s Mass Effect covers one of the most celebrated aspects of the Mass Effect trilogy, namely its commitment to diversity and inclusion. Players can choose the gender of their character, with a female version of Commander Shepard that challenges the default straight white male option in military shooters. Winter situates this version of Shepard in the tradition of female science fiction action heroes such as Ellen Ripley in Aliens (1986). The game also has homosexual characters and LGBTQ-coded romance options, allowing players either to roleplay based on their own sexual identity or to explore sexualities different from their own. Importantly, Winter notes that players still confront story content dealing with sexuality and discrimination even if they choose to play as a straight white male Shepard.

The book concludes by showing how Mass Effect incorporated contemporary real-world extrasolar planetary science into its world-building, making it a vehicle to educate players about astronomy. The later games have options to scan planets for mineral resources, which provides scientifically plausible information about the planet’s atmosphere and geology. The games leverage this scientific research to inform the evolution of the aliens that populate the galaxy. These exotic planets and species have the defamiliarizing effect typical in science fiction, while the scientific plausibility helps maintain the player’s suspension of disbelief.

Other books in this Palgrave series typically start with biographical information about the author and historical context of the canonical text, but the Mass Effect trilogy is the product of a corporation with a team of writers and developers. Winter spends little time in chronicling the history of the BioWare studio or its staff. This approach is probably necessary for analyzing a text with so many creators, especially as no single auteur had creative control over the whole story (the lead writer left midway through the series). Bioware’s Mass Effect engages more with authorship in the chapter about representation, where Winter quotes several BioWare writers who defended the studio’s commitment to LGBTQ representation against backlash.

Winter’s decision to cover only the original Mass Effect trilogy is understandable for a Palgrave series focused on individual canonical texts, but it does have the effect of overlooking key texts in the franchise that would complicate his analysis. The fourth game, Mass Effect: Andromeda, revives the older colonialist and discovery genre tropes that Winter claims the trilogy eschewed. The player character goes to a new galaxy to terraform planets for human habitation while rescuing the Angara, an alien species coded as ‘noble savages.’ At the same time, the game also builds on the trilogy’s then-groundbreaking LGBTQ representation with more options for same-sex romances, including five bisexual characters. Both the pulp-era tropes and LGBTQ representation were controversial with players at the time, albeit for different reasons. Winter’s brief treatment of two tie-in novels to the game suggests fascinating possibilities to interrogate genre tropes and settings. A coda to Bioware’s Mass Effect that engaged with Andromeda and other tie-in media would have been appreciated and helped clarify the extent to which Winter’s analysis of the original trilogy applies to the rest of the franchise.

Bioware’s Mass Effect is a concise and persuasive argument for treating the videogame trilogy as part of the science fiction canon—the only interactive media so far covered in this Palgrave series. Readers unfamiliar with Mass Effect might be surprised to learn about its thematic depth, subversion of genre tropes, and engagement with sexual identity. Those familiar with the games might learn how Mass Effect draws from and challenges a long tradition of space opera.

Dominic J. Nardi received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan and teaches about human rights at George Washington University. He coedited The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV (Palgrave, 2020), Discovering Dune (McFarland, 2022), and Studio Ghibli Animation as Adaptations (Bloomsbury, 2025). He has written academic articles about politics in Blade Runner and Lord of the Rings, and has been a guest on various podcasts to discuss science fiction. He has played through the Mass Effect trilogy twice.

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One of the philosophical cornerstones of the Star Trek universe is the Vulcan concept of “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.” Drawn from Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s belief in a human future marked by joy in difference, IDIC embraces the joys and possibilities signified by the vast array of variables inherent to existence. That concept has been personified multiple times in the various televised iterations of Trek through a number of ‘hybrid’ characters that are either products of Human/Alien reproduction, meldings of machine and organic, or sites for the merging or irreconcilability of two vastly different cultures. These attempts at living expressions of IDIC, designed not only to demonstrate the difficulties of finding one’s identity and place in the universe but to provide captivating foci for character development, though, have been imperfect at best. They achieve to some degree Roddenberry’s double goal of asking audiences to consider and reconsider the state of racial conflict in America and to imagine a future where racial differences are ignored and diversity embraced as a core value; however, as Burlingame-Goff’s thoughtful study shows, hybrid characters in Trek are problematically rooted in the hoary old literary stereotype of the 19^th century “tragic mulatto.” She also describes how many of the hybrids—characters designed specifically to showcase the limitless potential of creation—are governed by a simplistic essentialism (for non-Human species) that cuts against that potential. (All Klingons are violent and prone to anger, all Vulcans are pitilessly logical, all Ferengi are greedy capitalists, all Romulans are sneaky and duplicitous, all Orions are pirates, and so on. This is an aspect of Trek that has always bothered me as well as Burlingame-Goff, that Humans are allowed to be all sorts of things, but aliens in this franchise bend towards cultural and behavioral uniformity even as Humanness is always presented as the norm towards which aliens and hybrids should strive.) However, even in her criticism of aspects of hybridity in Trek, Burlingame-Goff is also careful to delineate the ways in which hybrids have shone light on the positive aspects of the Trek universe and been successful in expressing Roddenberry’s original intent to encourage an optimistic future in which we can all be what we choose to be.

Burlingame-Goff opens her study with a comprehensive look at the “tragic mulatto” figure from which Trek’s hybrids draw much of their inspiration. The “tragic mulatto” (a term coined by Black writer Sterling A. Brown in 1933) is a classic victim of dualistic, binary thinking where a person is one thing or the other: in this case, a mixed-race person with both White and Black ancestry (“blood”). “Tragic mulattos” were originally introduced in 19^th-century American abolitionist literature as living examples of the tragedies of African-American enslavement and the ways in which slavery pits Black against White. The objective of the writers who created these characters was to inspire empathy among primarily White, primarily female reading audiences, an empathy that hopefully would result in a greater popular agitation against slavery. Well-meaning, the “tragic mulatto” quickly evolved into a stock character delineated by certain common features, which Burlingame-Goff distinguishes as fourteen particular ‘core identifiers’. These include, among others, “Otherness and passing,” “tragic love,” “split nature,” “collective representation,” and “mediation.” It is indeed striking how many of these identifiers Burlingame-Goff defines code themselves to the various hybrids appearing on Star Trek, suggesting the ongoing attraction for audiences of the kinds of dramatic dilemmas these sorts of characters have presented for almost two centuries. Usage of this sort of stereotypical image can result in simplistic narrative shorthand that makes for easy, predictable storytelling, but it also has the potential for expanding our understanding of human (or alien) nature via a combination of familiarity and distance. Burlingame-Goff notes that one of Roddenberry’s stated goals for Star Trek was “to create a liminal space where he could examine racial issues” (13), but he also wanted to use race—as expressed through ‘mixed-blood’ Human/Alien hybridity —as a comforting and distancing shield to explore issues of human identity. To do this, she argues, he and his writers (as well as writers and producers of subsequent Trek series) relied heavily on the familiar “tragic mulatto” image, though incorporating into it evolving real-world attitudes towards difference and the struggles of multiracial people. 

Though Star Trek is rife with hybrid characters, this study focuses primarily on eight, above all the franchise’s arguably most well-known figure, Vulcan-Human hybrid Mr. Spock. Also considered are Data and Worf (both introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation), B’Elanna Torres and Seven of Nine (both introduced in Voyager), Odo (Deep Space Nine), Soji Asha (Picard), and Michael Burnham (Discovery). Burlingame-Goff divides these into three categories of hybridity (while noting that some characters exist across multiple categories): Biological, Technological, and Cultural. The chapter on Biological Hybrids (characters who are half-Human, half-Alien) opens by noting how Roddenberry “circumvented the need to rely on hackneyed derivatives of the outdated and socially problematic “tragic mulatto.” Repositioning the “tragic mulatto” in a science fiction universe populated by Aliens as well as Humans was a bit of sleight of hand that distracted audiences from the racist ideology connected to the original stereotype” (55). Trek hybridities rely heavily on racial essentialism to set the problems of interspecies existence in sharp relief. Burlingame-Goff looks at two characters in particular here. One is Spock, the child of a Vulcan father and Human mother. Spock’s internal war between his two heritages is a basic part of his character throughout Trek, as is his determination to identify purely as Vulcan, the dominant caste (allegorically, Spock’s Vulcan half, with its intelligence, self-control and reason, is equated with the “White blood” possessed by 19^th-century “tragic mulattos”, while his Human half, defined by emotion and instinct, equates to “Black blood”). Spock is forever unable to harmonize the two halves of his nature into a new, singular identity, but remains constant that his Vulcan nature (which is essentially unchanging) is superior. We do see Spock’s tragic hybridity given more expansion in later versions of the character, including his Kelvin Universe counterpart and his younger self as shown on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, but he remains a figure trapped by duality and his mapping to Burlingame-Goff’s core identifiers. The chapter also looks at B’Elanna Torres and her own struggles between her Human and Klingon biological heritages. Though Torres and Spock are both at war within themselves, Torres works over the course of Voyager to overcome her traumatic childhood (and ongoing Federation prejudice against Klingons) and reconcile her early rejection of her Klingon mother’s attempts to acculturate Torres to a new identity that incorporates both sides.

Burlingame-Goff turns her attention next to Trek’s Technological hybrids. She notes J.P. Telotte’s observation that “robots, androids, and cyborgs can serve as compelling images for ‘our’ current notions of self, as well as an effective metaphor for that sense of ‘otherness’ which underlies all our recent discussions about gender, race, and sexual orientations” (92). The closeness of machine to Human represented by this class of hybrids makes us question what it really means to be Human. When considering the android Data (admittedly entirely synthetic, but  still a key example of hybridity because of his paramount desire to experience humanity), note must be made of several Next Generation episodes that specifically examined Data’s ability to exist as an independent sentient being connected to a Human nature, particularly Melinda M. Snodgrass’ 1989 courtroom drama “The Measure of a Man.” Data’s struggles to embrace Humanness instill him with the same core identifiers that mark other tragic hybrids. His “daughter” Soji (as seen in Picard)—an organic being infused with fragments of Data’s positronic neurons—also carries many of these identifiers, including a “doomed love” and the possession of a “dark secret”: in this case, her synthetic nature (which is feared and hated by Romulans seeking synths out for destruction). However, Soji successfully combines her Human and machine natures into a being that can mediate between synthetic and biological beings and create a third way of living. Burlingame-Goff notes that “Soji’s narrative may come closest to Lydia Maria Child’s and Gene Roddenberry’s dream of mixed-heritage individuals bringing together the best of Humankind and ushering in a new era of harmony among the races” (128). Although she is prey to the same “tragic mulatto” stereotypes that mark her fellow hybrids, Soji demonstrates the hopeful possibilities inherent to the harmonizing of dual identities. This chapter also looks at the Human-Borg hybrid Seven of Nine and her own particular condition, as a former member of the Borg Collective forced by Captain Janeway and the crew of U.S.S. Voyager to embrace her humanity, collapsing her multitudinous identity into a simple binary and separating her Human nature from her previous collective Borg identity. Seven, certainly in her early stages as a character, is particularly tragic in her ongoing disconnection from her Human side that produces fear, mistrust, and disrespect by her crewmates, as well as in her distaste for her Human side as corrupt and inefficient and finding advantages to Borg existence. Although over time she comes to embrace more of her humanity, she is a constant example of Donna Haraway’s observation about cyborgs representing particular kinds of ‘breached boundaries,’ (121) calling into question established dichotomies in the Federation about organic life vs mechanical.

Finally, Burlingame-Goff looks at Michael Burnham, a Human fostered by Vulcans (specifically Spock’s parents). The young Burnham enthusiastically embraces Vulcan culture but is continually discounted by the society she wishes to join; her joining Starfleet inspires her to create a new, more integrated identity that brings together Vulcan logic with Human emotion. Burnham is a particularly visible example of the potentials of hybridity: Discovery is the first iteration of Trek to achieve visible racial and gender inclusivity, and Burnham herself, as a Black woman, is “a perfect representation of how race, class, gender, and cultural heritage intersect and overlap with one another” (166). Even as she, like her fellow hybrids, draws on the 19^th century “tragic mulatto” and its racially fraught implications for much of her character and her internal and external conflicts, Burnham is an embodiment of the Trek franchise’s evolving and strengthening commitment to IDIC and the truth of a diverse universe. Even imperfectly, all the tragic hybrids under investigation here take viewers forever forward towards thought-provoking examinations of our own humanity, and in them we see much of what makes Star Trek continually relevant to our changing times.

Jeremy Brett is an archivist and librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, Texas A&M University. There he serves as Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection, one of the largest of its kind in the world. Both his M.A. (History) and his M.L.S. (Library Science) were obtained at the University of Maryland, College Park. His professional interests include science fiction, fan studies, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.

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

He notes his early enthusiasm for the show:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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