Category: Nonfiction Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bruce Lindsley Rockwood, Emeritus Professor of Legal Studies at Bloomsburg University, Pennsylvania, is a long-time member of SFRA, having served as Vice President (2005-2006), and regularly writes reviews for SFRA Review from his retirement home in Midcoast Maine. He edited a symposium “Law, Literature and Science Fiction” for the Legal Studies Forum (XXIII #3, 1999), has taught and published on law, literature and science fiction, and attends SFRA and WorldCon with his wife Susan when possible (most recently in Montreal and Spokane, and the June, 2021 virtual SFRA). A fan of all things Terry Pratchett. Since retirement he has taught Environmental Law and Ethics for Coastal Senior College, https://coastalseniorcollege.org/ and serves on the land use advisory committee for the town of Damariscotta.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORKS CITED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fans of speculative fiction are, by definition, those who enjoy the unknown, the hidden and the what-if. Science fiction and fantasy stories present fresh perspectives on what we think we know about the world and new realities for us to explore and contemplate. So when a book makes the tantalizing claim that it contains the secret history of the genre, it’s practically an irresistible temptation to anyone interested in the origins, growth, and development of SF. Despite its subtitle, however, Lost Transmissions is less a cohesive historical overview than it is a compilation of individual insights into little-known episodes in science fiction and fantasy that have taken place throughout the years. The book comprises articles, interviews, and guest essays on speculative fiction projects in a range of categories, such as literature, film and television, music, fashion, and more. This is not to say that readers won’t find interesting and engaging historical information in this book. In fact, there is plenty of that. It’s just that the history is delivered in independent presentations, rather than as a continuing and connected historical narrative. The fact that the subtitle may be somewhat misleading is recognized by both the author and by Jeff VanderMeer, the award-winning writer and editor, who provides the foreword. Although they both use the phrase “secret history” when describing the collection, VanderMeer refers to the collection variously as an introduction, a catalogue, and a jumping-off point for exploring SF, while Boskovich notes, with her emphasis, that “above all, this is not the secret history, but a secret history” (xi).

That being said, the presentation of Lost Transmissions delivers its material in a nice, semi-chronological order within categories. The first nearly hundred pages are devoted to literature, a perfectly reasonable starting point given that this is how most readers are likely to have become enthusiasts of the genre. Following a quick nod to Mary Shelley, there are entries on other lesser-known contributions to science fiction and fantasy writings, from the 1500s through to the twenty-first century. When the articles discuss writers who are perhaps more recognizable and better-known to the mainstream, such as C.S. Lewis, Harlan Ellison, and Philip K. Dick, it is in order to reveal backstories and information that, in all honesty and deference to the name of the book, could very well be considered to be secret histories. They are stories that are most likely unknown to anyone who is not at least a moderately serious reader of these writers. The section on film and television is not quite as robust, with entries ranging from Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) and Metropolis (1927), through Star Wars (1977), Dune (1984), and Aliens (1986). One feels that there must be many more unknown or abandoned speculative fiction projects in Tinseltown than what we are presented with here, but the stories that are included are interesting behind-the-scenes tales of the film industry. The categories of architecture, art and design, music, and fashion are all smaller sections, while the final category, fandom and pop culture, is nearly as large as the section on film and television, perhaps because it is somewhat of an umbrella term, encompassing comics, role-playing games, computer gaming, and more.

As noted previously, these are individual glimpses into and untold stories of the genre, not a comprehensive, linear discussion of the development of speculative fiction. For example, David Barr Kirtley’s essay on Robert Asprin’s Myth series is less about the books themselves than the influence they had on Kirtley’s life and career. Boskovich’s article on the art of Michael Whelan briefly touches on his role in the growing popularity of realism for fantasy and science fiction book covers in the 1970s and ‘80s, but misses the opportunity to discuss his work in context with his contemporaries, such as Darrell K. Sweet. But this sort of criticism is practically unavoidable in an endeavor such as Lost Transmissions. The more any reader knows about any given subject, the harder it is for the book to deliver fresh, new, “secret” knowledge. In his foreword, Vandermeer openly acknowledges that some readers are likely to feel that their own particular favorites have been overlooked or under-represented.

This is why one of Lost Transmissions’ strengths is its wide range of scope. Boskovich’s articles, nearly four dozen of them, vary in length from just two paragraphs to several pages. All are interesting and most contain information that will be new to the average reader. Another nearly three dozen guest essays are provided by contributors including well-known names and award-winning personalities, such as Charlie Jane Anders, William Gibson, Lev Grossman, Annalee Newitz, and Neil Gaiman, and they range in tone and content from academically informative to personally reminiscent. Four interviews with genre writers are all thoughtful and interesting glimpses into the lives of the authors. New or casual fans will find this book to be, as VanderMeer puts it, “an utter revelation,” (ix), while even the most scholarly of readers will be able to use the information here (including sources, credits, and a comprehensive index) as a resource to spark new avenues of inquiry. In the unlikely event that a reader finds no new or hidden knowledge, it is still fascinating to read what people like Gibson and Gaiman have to say about the genre in their own words. All in all, any quibble with the subtitle is ultimately a minor issue, and Lost Transmissions is a worthwhile addition to the collection of anyone who has more than a passing interest in science fiction and fantasy.

A non-Native native of the American West and a recent transplant to New England, Raymond K. Rugg works in Speculative Fiction, Speculative Nonfiction and Speculative Poetry. He presents regularly as an independent scholar at regional and national academic conferences and his writing has appeared or is upcoming in publications including Abyss & Apex, Asimov’s and Foundation, The International Review of Science Fiction. More information at RaymondKRugg.com.

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The edited collection The Cyberpunk Nexus seeks to explore the film Blade Runner (1982, 1992, 2007), the wider Blade Runner franchise, and the film’s enduring influence throughout popular culture. Published by the Sequart Organization, who specialize in popular (i.e. non-scholarly) criticism, the collection blurs the distinction between academic and non-academic criticism through its formal mimicry of academic norms: the inclusion of footnotes, a contributor section, and the use of ambiguous language. This ambiguity can best be seen in the collection’s blurb that states that the book is written by “film historians” and “subject-matter experts.” However, despite this, and in contrast to many other examples of popular criticism, The Cyberpunk Nexus seems far more comfortable with its non-academic pedigree, with arguments and observations that are self-consciously embedded in the personal or subjective, with only the occasional dalliance with pseudo-academic objectivity.

The book is broken into five sections that respectively cover the texts that inspired Blade Runner, the music and multiple versions of the film, the themes of the film, the further adaptations and spin-offs from Blade Runner, and a final section covering Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Most of the essays are a mixture of compendium and opinion from well informed fan-commentators/researchers. Among the many contributors to this 28-essay collection are popular critics, media practitioners, and academic scholars. With a foreword by Paul M. Sammon, it acts as a (sort of) companion piece to Sammon’s own Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (1996), supplementing Sammon’s focused and detailed accounting of the ‘making of …’ with a broader discussion of Blade Runner as a complex and evolving intertext.

There have been two previous scholarly essay collections on Blade Runner. Retrofitting Blade Runner (1991), edited by Judith Kerman, focused more specifically on debates arising from the film itself with some attention paid to the adaptation process, while The Blade Runner Experience (2005), edited by Will Brooker, engaged in a wider discussion of the reverberating influence of Blade Runner throughout popular culture. Other than updating the discussion, and including responses to the 2017 sequel, the true value in this collection can be seen in the fan perspective many of the essays offer and the testimonials from creatives who have added their own texts to the ever-expanding Blade Runner intertext.

To highlight the non-scholarly nature of the fan essays that dominate this collection is not an attempt at stigmatization. Rather, it is to recognize that these essays have not been produced in light of academic stricture or in an effort to satisfy the machinery of analysis. Therefore, the use-value of these essays can be seen in the, sometimes quite lengthy, accounts of preferred textual readings. Whether this collection is indicative of the wider genre-fandom community or is a more limited reflection of the specific communities engaged with Blade Runner, there are two key takeaways to consider. The first is that, where adaptation has occurred, fidelity to the original persists as an important measure of success. Second, fidelity is not a straightforward measure, applied as it is in this collection with nuance and complexity.

Across the collection, contributors discuss the necessity and desirability of divergence from the source material, citing the vagaries of filmmaking and the expectations of cinema audiences as part of their justification for this. Whether these arguments are convincing or not, they reveal a sophisticated approach to adapted texts by engaged audiences. Therefore, fidelity is deployed to critique the success of any changes or divergences from the source, rather than being used to denounce the differences themselves. The engaged audience whose voice is well represented by this collection combine, as part of their critical apparatus, preferred readings of both source and adaptation while also juggling questions of authorial intention through engagement with extant critical (popular and otherwise) literature and paratexts. This sophistication somewhat flies in the face of the logophilia that continues to haunt Science Fiction Studies and the denunciation of fidelity criticism that remains a shibboleth of Adaptation Studies.

A further usefulness of The Cyberpunk Nexus is the inclusion of an essay by Bryce Carlson, who was part of the team that produced the graphic-novelization Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (2009) for BOOM! Studios. This memoir-essay covers Carlson’s evolving role in the adaptation from novel to comic book, as well as describing some of the practical and legal challenges that the project had to overcome. Carlson notes, with lawyerly finesse, that:

It wasn’t an adaptation because Blade Runner was the adaptation and had all the rights that went along with it. And it wasn’t an illustrated novel because we didn’t have novel publishing rights … It was a “graphic novelization” in the true sense of the term. (265-66).

This question of rights didn’t just affect how the project conceived of itself but also impacted the design choices available. Carlson goes on to state that they had “one big artistic obstacle … We were not allowed to do anything that looked like Blade Runner” (267). Rights ownership and exploitation is a hot topic right now within media studies generally and also within the hard sciences with discussion of vaccine patent ownership entering mainstream discourse. Therefore, this is a timely account by Carlson that will be of interest to any science fiction scholar engaged in the debates about copyright and its Janus-faced impact on contemporary creativity.

The primary weakness of this collection is in the lack of reliable citation or attribution in the essays that cover production and release histories. The usefulness of these essays is undermined by the inability to return to the origins of the data points. This is shame, as it turns exhaustive research and compiling into hearsay. And one would need to redo the research oneself in order to be confident in its veracity. Furthermore, and as already pointed out, this is not an academic collection. Therefore, any scholars seeking an academic introduction or interrogation of Blade Runner, adaptation, genre cinema, or cyberpunk as a cultural force are looking in the wrong place. Instead, this collection provides many valuable insights and signals a number of trailheads for future study, while also serving as a choice example of contemporary genre fandom that reveals a continuity with the origins of sciences fiction criticism; that is, criticism carried out by a community of highly motivated, articulate, and, mostly non-academic commentators.

Terence Sawyers is a film and media scholar who insists he is not a SF scholar; despite this the vast majority of his research continues to overlap with SF scholarship, go figure. His primary research area is the adaptation of SF writer Philip K. Dick into film and television. He also side-lines as a conspiracy theory theorist and is a dabbler in the history of occultism. When not sifting through layers of simulated hyperreality he can be found hosting About Film (aboutfilmedinburgh.wordpress.com), a regular public engagement event held in the meat-space that is Edinburgh, Scotland. 

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Robert Markley’s Kim Stanley Robinson is a wonderfully crafted and targeted introduction to one of the most significant writers in 20^th century science fiction. Robinson’s works of fiction depicting climate, interstellar travel, planetary politics, Martian terraforming, and utopic visions have been a vital backdrop in science fiction over the last 40 years which are only becoming more relevant today. Markley’s work in categorizing Robinson’s contributions to science fiction is the perfect volume both for an amateur who is new to Robinson and is unsure where to start, and for well-versed academics pursuing research within this field. Kim Stanley Robinson is neither a chronological index of Robinson’s work, nor is it a biography but rather a panning camera which zooms in and out to tastefully pull apart the key themes, messages, and lessons within Robinson’s major works. Robert Markley is a professor of English at the University of Illinois and is well equipped to write on Robinson, both with his friendship with the author as well as his shared interests. Markley has several publications in the field of climate change, science fiction, and the environment. These include “Ecological Footprints: Crusoe’s Island and Other Alien Environments,” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction; “Literature, Climate, and Time: Between History and Story,” in Climate and Literature; and “Nation and Environment in Britain, 1660-1705,” in Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1660–1714 and represent a small sample of his larger canon of work and themes closely connected to Robinson’s own interests. In the Introduction, Markley examines the threads of ecological, utopian, and Buddhist threads in Robinson’s works. Markley’s volume balances deep literary analysis with a personal and engaging exploration of Robinson and his work. He devotes close analysis to Robinson’s works, treating them with the same weight he has given to other great works of literature such as Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674), whilst still emphasizing the impact of family, background, and connection to the land have had on Robinson’s fiction. This focused exploration reveals an extensive understanding of Robinson’s work and highlights why Robinson is truly a modern Master of Science Fiction.

Markley’s chapters are categorized by key works, with Chapter One being devoted to Robinson’s short fiction and Years of Rice and Salt (2002). Chapter Two and Three focus on the Three Californias Trilogy (1984-90) (which explores different visions of California) and the Mars trilogy (1992-96) respectively. Chapter Four defines Robinson’s Cli-fi through the Capital Trilogy (2004-07), an insightful exploration into this vital theme of ecology within Robinson’s canon. Chapter Five looks at four of Robinson’s novels, from both earlier and later in his career, which critique the familiar motif and celebration of intergalactic travel, unpacking the political and ecological conflicts Earth must face. Finally, Chapter Six looks at Robinson’s most recent works, Aurora (2015) and NY2140 (2017).

Chapter Six neatly tracks the direction of Robinson’s most contemporary works, focusing on two alternate futures for mankind. In Aurora, the ship narrates the lives of intergalactic explorers looking for their new home. The work problematizes and critiques the space fantasies so often explored in science fiction and asks questions about the nature of AI, environmentalism, and the problems of long-term ship life. NY2140 is a story from the perspective of a collection of different characters who try to survive in a highly capitalistic and flawed new society which has become a water-logged New York. The work is highly critical of our current passivity to climate change with a key character, the “citizen,” an unnamed everyman who berates previous generations for doing next to nothing to prevent the disasters of the new Anthropocene. Rather than producing a depressing pessimistic piece, Robinson offers hope through his depictions of people working together, sharing kindness and love, and dismantling capitalistic and selfish structures, remembering that it is vital that we take care of our environment.

Markley’s Kim Stanley Robinson is an affordable and vital exploration into the life, works, and impact of Robinson’s fiction. In the Introduction, Markley identifies the words “utopia,” “explore,” and “reframe” as key words which might arise if a word search were done on the book. In addition, I would like to add “ecology”; whilst politics, space exploration, sociology and science are key themes, Robinson (and Markley) remind us that mother nature always bats last. Robinson’s utopias and works over the last forty years are only becoming more and more relevant. Utopias are sometimes considered as pure fantasies, too removed from current situations. However, Robinson’s Utopias are grounded survival guides for a real-world future, which are only becoming more relevant today. Robinson reminds us the need and demand for skilled and ethically charged writers to create them.

Whether one is researching cli-fi or science fiction and wants to explore deeply the themes of Robinson’s works, or whether one is new to the author and unsure where to start, Markley’s introduction is both comprehensive and accessible.

The literary critic Wayne Booth states that we often “underestimate the extent to which we absorb the values of what we read” and that fiction can shape our ethics and understanding of the world (41). In a similar vein, Robinson believes that we as a society are all writing our own science fiction novel, collaborating together when we read his works. If this is the case, then what better work to mimic than one which promotes ecological conservation and community, and seeks to question capitalistic tropes.

WORKS CITED

Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. The University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Tara B. M. Smith is a PhD student at the University of Sydney’s Department of Studies of Religion, Australia. Her PhD thesis explores the significance of Science Fiction in understanding the future and the way the genre is relevant and impacts cultural, social, religious and environmental landscapes. Tara’s interests include conspiracy theories, cli-fi, New Religious Movements, comparative religion and literature portrayals of the environment. 

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This overview of Joanna Russ’s life’s work is part of the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series, edited by Gary K. Wolfe, which has given a series of in-depth accounts of science fiction writers including William Gibson, Octavia Butler, and Arthur C. Clarke. In this volume, Jones surveys Russ’s career in extreme detail, bringing in the most relevant of secondary sources as well as interviews with those who knew her and worked with her. The book is organised into chapters that each cover a span of years in Russ’s career so that her critical works and reviews are given attention alongside the fiction of those years. This structure serves to foreground the skill of the reviewer to an unusual degree, giving some useful insight into Russ’s thinking at different periods of her life. Russ’s career as a critic was an expression of her love of and commitment to science fiction, and Jones’s structure conveys this to the reader, allowing the reviews to give a wider sense of the science-fictional context for Joanna Russ’s work. There are times where the format stifles the more interesting possibilities of such a survey. For example, the blow-by-blow account of The Female Man’s plot is perhaps a bit unnecessary; Russ’s most well-known work of fiction is recounted chapter-by-chapter and, while Jones’s descriptions are always well-written and engaging, this is perhaps not essential for a book that is still regularly to be found on book shelves and university syllabi. Perhaps this aspect of Jones’s overview will be welcomed by undergraduates and those seeking to discover Russ’s work for the first time, but if one wishes to know a text in such detail it might be wiser simply to read the novel. One might recall the final line of Russ’s short story about female writers, “Swordblades and Poppy Seeds”: “Are you truly curious? Then read our books” (quoted in Jones, 146).

Where this style does come into its own, however, is in Jones’s use of first-hand accounts of science fiction symposia, fan culture, and magazine culture. These elements, so crucial to science fiction’s production and reception, are not often given sufficient breathing space in academic accounts of the genre, and Jones redresses the balance here in some of the highlights of the book. The chapter on the Women in Science Fiction Event gives an account of the Khatru symposium, named after the magazine that organized this exchange of letters on feminism in science fiction between key figures, including Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr., and Samuel Delany. Jones gives a good account of the flavour of these exchanges, offering the reader the context necessary to unpick the complex personality politics of the debate. Alongside analysis of the letters and context from the contemporary period, Jones gives information gleaned from later interviews with the participants so that their insight into the event decades after the fact gives an account of the importance of these exchanges in shaping the situation of women in science fiction today. This analysis is perhaps the highlight of the book, gleaning precious insight from texts that are not widely studied and available.

The study also gives space for some useful analysis of Russ’s role in the science fiction community, with Jones describing Russ’s situation through a reading of Sam Greenlee’s novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969). Greenlee’s novel tells the story of the first black CIA agent and plays on the multiple meanings of the term “spook” to refer to ghettoized African Americans, spies, and ghosts. The idea of the spook who “sat by the door” is one who is displayed prominently to give a (probably false) impression of the organisation’s progressive credentials. Jones argues that Russ was, in many ways, treated as a “spook who sat by the door” as an uncompromising lesbian feminist in a genre that had a tendency to treat women as inferior. Jones’s commentary here is fascinating, and speaks to other situations in which the sf community tends to fixate on a singular individual in order to compensate for the genre-wide failure to integrate excluded groups – an example might be the profusion of scholarship, and placement on course syllabi, of Octavia Butler as a stand-in for African American women in general, a problem that is only now beginning to be eased through the rise of authors like N. K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor.

Another highlight of the book is the attention it pays to Russ’s feminist activism and writing beyond her commitment to sf. In particular, the section on her essays from 1981-89 (137-44) gives a particularly tantalising account of Russ’s engagement with feminisms during this period, an engagement that encompasses some of the movement’s key conflicts and contradictions, including the risks of essentialism and the tension between the violence of patriarchal sexuality and the urgency of finding an authentic female sexuality; a tension which Russ, in an unlikely move, negotiates through her love of Kirk/Spock slash fiction. The brief quotations from Russ’s essays of this period are an invitation to dive deeper and to discover the ways in which the contemporary debates in feminism shaped not just science fiction and literary criticism, but the parameters of feminist debate and women’s place in society today. Highlights such as these will make this book a valuable addition to any scholar seeking to understand Russ’s work in its literary and political context, while offering a detailed introduction for those approaching it for the first time.

Anna McFarlane is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Glasgow working on traumatic pregnancy and its expression in science fiction, horror, and fantasy. She is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (2019) and is co-editing The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities. Her first monograph is a study of William Gibson’s novels, Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing Through the Mirrorshades (Routledge 2021).

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