Category: Nonfiction Reviews

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Qiana Whitted’s EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest, the latest volume in Rutgers’s Comics Culture series, is of more value to comics scholars than to SF scholars, but it is nevertheless both eminently readable and a valuable addition to pop culture scholarship. As Whitted notes in her introduction, despite the general high regard in which EC comics are held, they have received relatively little scholarly attention. In this volume, Whitted focuses on the so-called “Preachies,” the stories in various EC titles (mainly Shock SuspenStories) that were “designed to challenge readers’ assumptions about racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice, Cold War paranoia, and other anxieties over social difference and American heterogeneity” (5). Whitted does not attempt to do a high-level survey of how EC stories addressed social concerns, and rightly notes that a great many of them have little or no (overt) social commentary. Indeed, she cites William Gaines’s testimony from the US Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings in 1954, in which he differentiated between the “preachies,” which carefully spelled out the messages readers were expected to receive, and stories designed merely to entertain. Instead, she focuses specifically on the more obvious examples of the “preachies,” notably the story “Judgment Day!” written by Al Feldstein and drawn by Joe Orlando, originally published in Weird Fantasy #18 in 1953 and reprinted in one of EC’s final comics, Incredible Science Fiction #33 (1956), as a poke in the eye to the Comics Code Authority. EC subsequently shuttered its comics division. While Whitted could have fruitfully expanded her study by looking more broadly at EC comics (I would especially have been interested in her take on New Direction titles such as MD and Psychoanalysis, the latter title especially, with its proselytizing for the benefits of psychotherapy), the focus on a few key stories allows her space not only for extensive and detailed historical context but also for deep dives into the stories on which she does focus.

For readers of SFRA Review, the most relevant chapter here is chapter four, “‘Battling, in the Sea of Comics’: EC’s Invisible Man and the Jim Crow Future of ‘Judgment Day!’” This famous story recounts the visit of Tarlton, representative of the Galactic Republic, to the planet Cybrinia, to determine whether its robot inhabitants, descended from (if robots can indeed descend from ancestors) robots first built on Earth. Tarlton discovers that there are two robot classes, orange and blue, and that the blues are treated as distinctly second-class, despite being identical in manufacture to the orange robots, except for the colors of their external shells. Tarlton determines that the robots are not yet ready for admission into the Galactic Republic. Probably unsurprisingly to readers today, but very much controversially when the story first appeared (this issue was the basis of the Comics Code Authority’s attempt to bar EC from reprinting the story in 1956), Tarlton, who has worn his space suit throughout the visit, is revealed in the final panel of the story to be Black. Whitted’s reading of this story is detailed, subtle, and nuanced. Especially beneficial are her detailed comments on the historical context of Jim Crow, other relevant comics stories of the time, and, most interestingly—for me, anyway—her linking of the story to Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, published in 1952, one year before this story was first printed. Whitted reads the imagery and dialogue (even its use of ellipses) closely and carefully to build a complex reading that acknowledges not only what makes the story important but also the ways in which its proselytizing intent is complicated by its own assumptions. This chapter alone makes the book of value for scholars of SF, especially those interested in issues of race and of colonialism as explored in SF.

The whole book, however, is of enormous value to comics scholars. While Whitted has little to say about the vast catalogue of other SF, fantasy, and horror stories published by EC (and there is indeed much room to consider the merely entertaining stories, as well as the “preachies,” through the lens Whitted applies), her study nevertheless engages deeply and insightfully with EC’s complex legacy as a comics publisher renowned for its overall quality while also at times criticized for its formulaic storytelling and often pat moralizing. Whitted assumes a middle ground, between EC idolatry and the tendency of some scholars to attempt to apply a corrective to the often uncritical admiration of EC via harsh critique. This book is especially valuable for comics scholars but also of use for SF scholars, especially ones interested in SF in visual media.

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Dominick Grace is professor of English at Brescia University College in London, Ontario. He is the author of The Science Fiction of Phyllis Gotlieb: A Critical Reading and the co-editor of several books, many focusing on comics and graphic novels.

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Sideways in Time collects essays derived from a 2015 conference at the University of Liverpool. It opens with a Foreword from prolific speculative fiction author Stephen Baxter and includes ten essays that are bookended by an Introduction and an Afterword by the editors. With a couple of exceptions, the contributors are based in Britain or have British academic connections.

That scaffolding described, the editors deserve a shout-out for their Introduction. In eleven pages they provide a quick and clear review of the critical literature on alternate history from H to G (Hellekson to Gallagher) and make a cogent argument for simple and direct terminology that avoids awkward coinages like allohistory and in-crowd references like Jonbar Hinge. Use “alternate history” and “point of divergence” and people will know what’s being  talked about. They also make a case for considering alternate history as its own genre or category that overlaps science fiction but also draws from counterfactual history and historical fiction, attracts mainstream writers, and morphs easily into television thriller mode.

The ten essays touch on some familiar landmarks of alternative history: Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1836), The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), The Man in the High Castle (TV version, 2015-19). Other contributors treat less frequently studied texts, such as short stories by Alfred Bester and John Wyndham, as well as introducing English-language readers to a Spanish novel from 1998 and a set of twenty-first century films and anime from Japan. All of the pieces offer interesting takes, and every reader will have their preferences. One of mine is Jonathan Rayner’s “Forever Being Yamato: Alternate Pacific War Histories in Japanese Film and Anime,” which explores a fascinating set of feature films and animations. It is a good start at developing a complement to the extensive analysis of alternate “Hitler wins, or doesn’t he?” fiction by Gavriel Rosenfeld and Catherine Gallagher. A second is Chris Pak’s “’It Is One Story’: Writing a Global Alternate History in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt.” A third is Karen Hellekson’s “Agency and Contingency in Televisual Alternate History Texts,” which energetically analyzes eight separate television series and mini-series (Maine winters must be good for bingeing).  As a group, the essays raise several questions about the character and boundaries of alternate history, which the editors interpret broadly.

A first issue is the tension between “timeline stories” and “lifeline stories.”  The former explore the social, political, and cultural effects of a divergence and work in the same realm as do the more abstract counterfactuals that historians sometimes propose. The latter focus on single individuals whose personal stories change through time travel interventions or passage to a parallel world. In very rough division, the essays in “Part I: Points of Divergence” deal with timelines and those in “Part II: Manipulating the Genre” with lifelines. The point of this boundary question is whether something to be called alternate history needs to dramatize counterfactuals with implications for social groups, societies, or nations. “Straight” alternate history hews to the plausible, whether its scope is as specific as Simone Zelitch’s Judenstaat (2016) or as broad and deep as The Years of Rice and Salt. Authors who work in this vein are interested in how their characters interact with the changed society, which remains “realistic” in that we can understand how things might get from the point of divergence to the society being described.  Some of the best examples, of course—Philip  Roth’s The Plot against America (2004) or Jo Walton’s “Small Change” trilogy (2006-08)—are able to span the two interests by placing compelling characters in alternate timelines where they have to cope with very interesting dynamics of politics and power.

A second issue involves the mechanisms that generate the alternate history. Is the divergence based on an event that is conceivable within the context of the time, such as the assassination of Elizabeth I or southern victory in the American Civil War without extra weapons from the future? In contrast, does the story depend on the speculative physics of parallel worlds with convenient portals tucked away in a basement? Or on equally speculative time travel scenarios in which a Japanese warship from the twenty-first century can materialize in 1942 (the manga series Zipang [2000-09]) or a history professor (!) joins the time patrol to save the world (Michael Crichton’s Timeless [1999])? Utilization of alternate physics offers abundant options for authors to play with but may thin the “history” part of the alternative. It also brings these sorts of alternate history firmly into the science fiction camp.

On a different side of the Venn diagram are stories that fall in the realm of fantasy with fully implausible, non-scientific premises. Stephen Baxter suggests distending the category to alternate cosmologies, favorably citing the flat Earth in Philip Jose Farmer’s “Sail On, Sail On!” (1952), Chloé Germaine Buckley’s essay explores Shadows over Baker Street (2003), edited by John Pelan and Michael Reaves; its contributors imagine Lovecraftian monsters, shape-shifters, and other supernatural phenomena perplexing reimagined versions of Sherlock Holmes. La locura de Dios (1999) by Juan Miguel Aguilera seems born from a kinky coupling of H. Rider Haggard, Dan Brown, and Erich von Daniken. The analysis in these essays is interesting, but I wonder if the texts are alternate history or some other category such as fantasy, fantastic adventure, or magical realism (the latter being perhaps the best slot for Colson Whitehead’s  alternate-historyish The Underground Railroad [2016]).            

There is a matter of intellectual interests behind these boundary issues, for different readers engage most deeply with different aspects of human experience. I’ve been studying, practicing, and writing “straight” history for multiple audiences for longer than I’ve been writing about speculative fiction, and find alternate history that engages the dynamics of societal change to be the most challenging and the most capable of imagining more just as well as more unjust societies. One might guess as much from the individual essays that I’ve cited. Readers of Sideways in Time whose predilection is for narratives that focus on the thoughts and emotions of individuals or that play with the weird and fantastic will have a different set of favorites. To paraphrase the editors, they will be drawn to the narratives that expand, stretch, subvert, and redefine the genre. For all of us, however, the collection is worth reading and consulting.

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Carl Abbott retired after teaching Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University in five decades (but not fifty years!). His book Imagining Urban Futures was recently published in Chinese translation.

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Apocalypse is never singular, but multiple. This is “Wyndham’s rule,” the main premise with which Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer opens Theory for the World to Come. Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology (the title of the first chapter and its contents detail what Wolf-Meyer means by the term), an interesting and thought-provoking study of the future and the conditions of possibility that make it happen.

This compact volume of just over 100 pages is, despite its brevity, is packed to the brim with contingent and at times even radical ideas on topics as widespread as catastrophe, city planning, race, human nature, and politics. This interest in seemingly disconnected topics also extends to Wolf-Meyer’s cross-disciplinary methodology, which groups speculative fiction, personal diaries, and social theory in a common effort to interrogate the many possible dimensions of our imagination about the future.

The future—and its limits—are exactly what lie at the heart of this book: the “world to come,” with all its problematic folds and inexplicable weirdness. How can we trace back the way our world has come to be, and understand its temporality as a complex continuum of historical variables? How can we develop new ways of comprehending what’s going to happen in the next few centuries if we haven’t yet absorbed the many undetermined possibilities of our present? And, more importantly, how can we deal with the idea of an “end” to what we’ve built? Can we change it, or should we resign ourselves to impending doom? These and other questions lead Wolf-Meyer to explore the ways in which twentieth and twenty-first century speculative fiction—in both literature and film—have  advanced different social theories that provide us with usually unorthodox as well as revealing answers about our past, present, and future.

The structure of the book follows a straightforward premise: if the threat of annihilation looms on the horizon, as Wyndham’s rule seems to suggest, then speculative fiction must address this notion and produce social theories relevant for a future at risk of never materializing. From this standpoint, the author identifies three different forms of narratological social theory under the guise of “future historiography” (19): extrapolation, intensification, and mutation. These modalities manifest themselves as narrative or even thematic devices designed to propel the conversation about the future beyond its commonly agreed limits and to advance discussion on alternative ways of portraying what’s to come. Accordingly, each chapter explores different fictions and ways of employing future historiography to produce coherent and relevant social theories.

The first three chapters after the introduction (“Detroit Diaries, 1992-1999,” “White Futures and Visceral Presents: Robocop and P-Funk,” and “The Revolutionary Horizons of Labor and Automation: Blue Collar and Player Piano”) deal with the idea of “intensification” (19), analyzing futures in which present issues are not really resolved, but rather expanded on, both in significance as well as spatial and social presence.

Images Wolf-Meyer brings forward during these first few pages include Robocop’s (1987) ultra-violence as an expression of repressed humanity and P-Funk’s music as an attempt to recover such lost humanity during the 80s; Player Piano’s (1952) representation of automation as a reflection on the meaning of labor, and Detroit as a city of technological promises degraded into a racially segregated sprawl. Each chapter is short and direct, not wasting any time to get to the main topics the author seeks to put into the spotlight: race politics, human nature, and the possibilities of automation in a posthuman age.

The following two chapters (“California Diaries, 2008-2015,” and “Extrapolating Neoliberalism in the Western Frontier: Octavia Butler’s Parables”) focus on extrapolation as a narrative device employed to represent present problems in scenarios radically different from our own. In his “California Diaries,” Wolf-Meyer reflects upon how living—and, particularly, buying a house—in California forced him to accept the fragility and indeterminacy of a future “so precarious, so subject to change” (53), where catastrophe is always around the corner, while his study of Octavia Butler’s work makes some interesting points about the inner logic of capitalism and its ever-consuming nature, revealed through extrapolation and a rather fascinating proclivity towards devastation and crisis, something the author also finds a characteristic feature of life in California.

The final three chapters of the books (“New York Diaries, 2015-2018,” “The Nihilism of Deep Time: Man after Man and After,” and “Mutating Temporalities: Slipstream Christopher Columbus”) deal with mutation, or the speculative expression of change as a chronological and temporal construct. This section opens with the “New York Diaries,” in which the author explores life in a secluded town where the future “never seems to come” (72), thus rendering thinking and worrying about it as unnecessary exercises in frustration.

This notion of an unmanifested future, precluded from experience, is also present in his study of “deep time” (82), which posits that in the larger scheme of things, human existence and humanity’s self-made so-called apocalypse, is not only circumstantial, but irrelevant altogether. This pessimistic conviction is then contested in the final chapter of the book, which turns its attention to the possibility of alternative futures, or “mutant temporalities” (91) that would allow, at least in theory, for possible “ways out” (100) of the unavoidable apocalypse that we, as humans, seem so stubbornly obsessed with bringing about.

In the end, this is indeed a book about the future and the many natural and artificial threats it faces; but it’s also a deep and well-researched study on the expression of hope through speculative fiction and social theory during the last fifty years. Through his analyses and account of personal experiences, Wolf-Meyer provides a panoramic view of the many attitudes towards the future we have developed over time: Should we fear it? Should we try to stop it?  Escape it? Transform it? The possibilities are numerous, and if there’s something to be taken from this book, it is the idea that an undetermined future is not necessarily a bad one. Indeterminacy means possibility, and possibility means opportunity for change. For Wolf-Meyer, this is the conviction that motivates speculative fiction to represent different scenarios and outcomes to problems we, today, might see as simply insurmountable. It also helps us to understand the trends that have brought us to where we are and, ideally, to try to remediate them before it’s too late, because any theory for the world to come should at least address our experience with time and space and project it beyond our imagination into—if not better, at least different—ways of experiencing reality.

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Gabriel A. Saldías Rossel is an Assistant Professor at the Catholic University of Temuco in Temuco, Chile. He holds a PhD in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature. His areas of expertise include Latin American literature, utopian studies, politics of catastrophe, critical theory, science fiction and fantasy studies. Currently he is researching the utopian implications in the representations of catastrophe in current Latin American novels. 

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The title of this collection is, without any doubt, catchy, and the dystopia part in particular feels very topical at the moment. While I am writing this review, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis and the protests against the murder of George Floyd, Donald Trumpʼs unique blend of viciousness and ineptitude is reaching new heights (or lows). The images we see from Washington, with armed forces in front of the Lincoln memorial, certainly have a dystopian feel to them. But, as it so often goes with catchy phrases, the title proves on closer inspection also to be quite problematic.

The problem is twofold and really concerns both parts of the book’s title. First, surprisingly few of the fourteen essays collected in this volume actually deal with proper utopias or dystopias. While opinions among scholars differ about how loosely the concept of the positive utopia should be understood, dystopia is quite clear-cut as a genre. Dystopias deal with a society which is worse than the one we live in. But neither Hamlet (c. 1599-1601) nor Edgar Allan Poeʼs “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), which Christine Jackson analyzes in her article, are set in dystopian societies. It is, of course, legitimate to read Poe or Shakespeare against the backdrop of the Trump presidency (as Stephen Greenblatt has done so beautifully in Tyrant), but the mere fact that Claudius has murdered Hamlet’s father does not make him a dystopian ruler. Claudius may be a bad person, but there is little evidence that he is also a bad king.

Similarly, Daniel Adleman reads Bret Easton Ellisʼs notorious American Psycho (1991) as a critique “of the callous cultural logic that underpins the utopian ideology of the US neoliberal project”. (70) It certainly makes sense to see Ellis’s murderous protagonist Patrick Bateman as a kind of proto-Trumpist—as Adleman points out, there are more than thirty direct or indirect references to Trump in the novel—but again it is not really clear how this relates to the concepts of utopia and dystopia except in the most general way.

While some might consider this criticism to be narrow-minded genre policing, it is telling that the editors give only short summaries of the individual articles in their introduction, but fail to come up with any kind of conceptual framework which would help to explain or contextualize their selection.

Utopia and Dystopia in the Age of Trump is not targeted at scholars of utopias or sf. This becomes evident in Jeffrey Barber’s chapter, which is a compressed introduction to and history of sf and utopian writing with a special focus on the theme of sustainability that ends with thoughts on the Trump presidency. While the overview given might prove useful to readers not acquainted with sf theory, the link to contemporary US politics does not go much beyond the assessment that sales of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) have soared after Trump’s election.

And this brings us to the book’s second, more serious problem: The question of how much it can tell us about Trump which is enlightening or relevant. Much has been and is still being written on the 45th US President. An obvious disadvantage of an academic book like this is its long gestation time. Utopia and Dystopia in the Age of Trump was published in June 2019, which means that probably none of its chapters was written later than the end of 2018. Not surprisingly, some of the essays therefore already feel outdated. Sometimes painfully so, such as Tom Shapira’s chapter on Judge Dredd, in which he likens special counsel Robert Mueller to the comic’s eponymous protagonist. Like the judge, a member of a special unit who is police, judge, jury, and executioner in one person, Mueller is “an authoritarian figure, a straight and narrow professional, stern of gaze and relentless in his task”. (188) Shapira’s observation that even people for whom a character like Mueller used to be something short of a bogeyman suddenly rooted for the special counsel is intriguing, but the sad fact that the Mueller report amounted to nothing in the end gives his essay a quite unexpected punch line. Unfortunately, unlike in the comic, in real life the crazy President was not brought down by a disciplined servant of the state.

As an introduction to Judge Dredd—which unlike Hamlet really deals with dystopia—Shapira’s chapter works well, as do Matthew Paproth’s discussion of the TV series Black Mirror (2011- ) and Kate Waites’s chapter on Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and the Hulu TV series adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). But in each case the connection with Trump—which should be the whole point of the book—seems forced and not very productive. Waites’s contribution is typical in this regard. Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale (2016- ) is probably the first example that comes to mind when people think of dystopia in the age of Trump. The adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel does indeed feel very timely, and some of its iconic elements, like the handmaid’s red dresses and white winged hats, have become symbols of the #MeToo movement and of resistance against Trump in general. In her analysis, Waites concentrates on visual strategies of the show, though, and says little about Trump.

The already mentioned lack of a theoretical framing for the volume becomes particularly striking with David L. McNarron’s chapter, which closes the book. McNarron discusses Albert Camusʼs classic novel The Plague (1947)—which has gained new topicality thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic—and Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (1973), an obscure French book which has in recent years become a favorite among the alt-right. McNarron’s reading of the two novels ­– which manages to turn Camus’s deeply humanist novel into a plea for nationalism – culminates in a surprising call for strong borders and unabashed support for Trump’s policy.

What is the point of this chapter? Do the editors intend to bring some kind of balance to the selection of texts which are with the exception of McNarron’s decidedly anti-Trump? Is it meant as a refreshing provocation? Since the book lacks a coherent concept, the readers are left to wonder.

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The Wayne State University Press has published nearly 40 volumes in the TV Milestones series; surprisingly, it has taken on The Twilight Zone, one of the most celebrated TV shows ever made (so much so that it has been rebooted three times, with limited success, as well as adapted into a feature film) and arguably the seminal show to make the fantastic legitimate adult fare on TV, only in 2020. Barry Keith Grant’s volume is as compact as the other entries in this series, and it is a quick and easy read. Non-academics should find this a perfectly accessible introduction/primer. However, the book is also thoroughly researched, well-grounded in the scholarly tradition associated with the show, and insightful in its own right. Anyone interested in The Twilight Zone, whether as a fan or scholar (or both) will find this book valuable.

Bookended between an introduction and a conclusion waggishly entitled “Zoning In” and “Zoning Out” are three chapters exploring, as Grant outlines his plan in the introduction, “the interrelated questions of authorship, genre, style, and ideology in the context of The Twilight Zone”. (14) Throughout the book, Grant balances relatively deep dives into key episodes with quick summaries of linked episodes. As a result, he manages to be comprehensive without being superficial.

The first chapter, “’Once Upon a Time’: The Twilight Zone and Genre,” focuses on “the place of The Twilight Zone within the various modes of the fantastic, showing how it combined them with other generic traditions to offer social criticism cast as moral fables”, (17) but crucially also explores in some detail how the show works as a hybrid of genres, folding in, notably, elements of film noir, as well as other genres (e.g. the then-popular on TV Western; several episodes of the series are explicitly Westerns or at least are set in the West).

Chapter Two, “’The Prime Mover’: The Twilight Zone and Authorship,” addresses the extent to which the show represents a unified vision. As Grant notes, the show is indelibly associated with Rod Serling, who created the show, oversaw the production (for the first few seasons, anyway), wrote a significant percentage of the episodes, and, most significantly perhaps, hosted the show, stamping his personality on each episode and himself becoming a TV icon as a result (so much so that he is folded into the final episode of the first season of the latest reboot). While Grant acknowledges the complexities of auteurist criticism, he makes a compelling case for Serling’s voice and characteristic concerns as the dominant elements of the series. 

Chapter Three, “’What’s in the Box’: The Twilight Zone and the Real World,” is perhaps the book’s most interesting chapter, delving as it does into The Twilight Zone’s hallmark social commentary. Grant carefully contextualizes the show historically, showing how it responds to current concerns and anxieties. He also deftly documents its own tensions, arguing that the conflicting condemnation of collective action as dangerous (the show’s famous “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” [1.22, March 4, 1960] being perhaps the paradigmatic example) weighed against the show’s consistent condemnation of selfishness, greed, and other dangerous manifestations of individualism constitutes the “thematic tension at the heart of the show” and “places it squarely within the debates that have informed American culture and political thought from the nation’s beginning”. (98)

Also central to Grant’s argument is his recognition of the tension between art and commerce, a tension he recognizes as built in to Serling’s own conflicted view of television as, on the one hand, a commercial medium reliant on formula and beholden to sponsors but, on the other, a popular medium that could be used artfully to engage in social commentary. Grant notes that The Twilight Zone “reveals the tensions between artistic ambition and commercial capitulation at a pivotal point in the history of the medium”, (100) but that Serling was largely successful (with some instances of unsuccessful episodes scrupulously noted): “With The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling joined the ranks of such otherwise very different American artists as Walt Whitman, Frank Capra, and Frederick Wiseman, all of whom have sought in their work to find ways to integrate the individual within the great democratic project of the nation”. (99)

This book is a valuable addition to Twilight Zone scholarship, acknowledging the work of previous scholars while also advancing the study of the show. Its clear and accessible style makes it ideal for undergraduate students, perhaps especially in media courses, but its depth and insight make it valuable for advanced scholars as well. I would recommend it for any library interested in remaining current with studies of the fantastic across media.

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This book is a concise view of philosophical topics using the classic television series The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) as the basis of its explorations in 21 short essays. It follows the standard format for the series by having various authors explore concepts in short 9-14 page essays that allow the reader to delve into heavier material. Although being familiar with the series helps, it is not necessary, as detailed examples from the series are given to provide clarity for the reader. Readers will also find many episodes are discussed repeatedly, as they apply to numerous topics and concepts. Most of the chapters include direct references to the philosophers and their writings, documented and indexed for ease of reference. These essays are well divided into subsections under headings offering expansions on ideas from the main premise: “First Dimension: Facing the Zone”; “Second Dimension: Beyond the Boundaries of You and Me”; “Third Dimension: The Wondrous Land Called Truth”; “Fourth Dimension: As Vast as Space and Timeless as Infinity”; “Fifth Dimension: Our Twisted Imaginings”; and finally “The Dimension that Can’t Be Named or Numbered.”. Most readers should enjoy the bite-size nature of the information which is designed to make it more accessible to the general public and specifically to the fans of the series. This format is the same as has been used for other volumes of the Popular Culture and Philosophy series, giving continuing readers greater context and understanding.

What I found most interesting were the chapters that asked questions about the concept of the Twilight Zone as a shadow of our own world. The Twilight Zone was written by a group of horror writers from southern California in the late 50’s and early 60’s that as Matt Cardin says, “founded their sense of the fantastic in everyday reality and the experience of characters that might live next door” (quoted in “No Place Like a Non-Place,”by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Juan Ignacio Juvé and Emiliano Aguilar, pg. 131).  We also learn that except for just a couple of episodes, an element of supernatural, the future or aliens, was used to create twists or surprise endings. These thought plays provide ideal bases for the philosophical thought exercises in this book. The pairing is as natural as that between Candid Camera and sociology. Rod Serling and his associates created a series that created thought experiments that illustrate the great theories of the philosophers, although not by design. 

The chapters exploring specific theories are more interesting than the others, providing as they do a detailed framework including examples to aid the readers’ comprehension. Philosophers discussed range from Aristotle to recent philosophers so current that the writers provide timelines indicating when episodes came out between major works by these contemporary figures. Many of the essays require the reader to invest time to absorb and work through the ideas expressed after reading. My favourites include “No Place like a Non-Place,” by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Juan Ignacio Juvé and Emiliano Aguilar, in which they explain Marc Augé’s Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology Of Supermodernity via the episodes “Will the Real Martian Please Step Up?”, “The Four of Us Are Dying,” “The Hitch-hiker,” “The After Hours,” “The Passersby,” “Passage on the Lady Anne,” and the classic “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”;“The Twists and Turns of Second Chances,”by JohnV. Karavitis, describing Soren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (which is about the aesthetic versus the ethical world) in episodes including “A Nice Place to Visit,” “A Game of Pool,” and “Devil’s Printer”; and “The Pleasure of the Twist,” by Stephen Scales, discussing Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions with references to “The Hitch-hiker,” “The Lateness of the Hour,” and the classic “To Serve Man.” The essay “The Science of Alternative Realities,” by David Morgan, is a wonderful treat for this science fiction and comic reader as it explores the theories of alternate dimensions and timelines. The book has enough layers to be read multiple times and remain on your bookshelf for years of reference and enjoyment. 

“Memories Are Made of This,” by Clara Nisley, mentions David Hume’s belief in continued existence briefly before moving into a consideration of  “And When the Sky Was Opened” and “The Trouble with Templeton”; the relevance of Hume could have been explored in more detail  Other chapters work better, such as  “Lost in Time,” by Elizabeth Rard, which discusses the time travel paradox with examples from the episodes “The Rip Van Winkle Caper,” “Last Flight,” and “No Time Like the Past.” “The Twilight Zone on Our Doorstep,” by Tim Jones, is most intriguing in its exploration of where The Twilight Zone actually existed. “A Shadowland Called the Twilight Zone,” by Trip McCrossin, on how Serling’s art mirrored the events of his time, showing his own opinions, will be of interest to film historians. Serling’s contribution to later movies is discussed in “The Science of AlternativeRealities,” by David Morgan, as Serling’s ideas can be seen in blockbusters and feature length movies, although Serling’s contributions were unaccredited. Many of the essays are well-developed persuasion pieces on the theory and the related episodes, and they serve as fine examples of how to form an argument.

Given The Twilight Zone’s popularity and reputation, I am surprised it was not covered earlier in the series. This book would be a great companion piece for any philosophy course if the instructor uses an episode or more to illustrate some philosophical theories. As someone who watched the Twilight Zone recently, I found that this book provided a great opportunity to explore theories in philosophy more easily than the complexity of the theories would indicate.  Reading these essays will encourage the reader to find the episodes online, or set up their PVRs. For those who enjoy some of the reincarnations such as Black Mirror and others, including the recent reboot of The Twilight Zone itself, this book connects well to a more innocent time in television that explored many concepts long before these recent imitations began to do so.

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Since 1966, the Star Trek franchise has made significant contributions to popular culture, spanning six television series, one animated television series, thirteen full-length motion pictures, and numerous novels, comics, video games, and other media tie-ins. The franchise has frequently been described as “Wagon Train to the stars,” stemming from shared themes and a format with the television program Wagon Train, which follows the adventures of settlers in the American West during the nineteenth century as they travel from Missouri to California. The program was popular in the fifties and sixties just prior to the original Star Trek’s premiere on NBC in the fall of 1966. Wagon Train, like Star Trek, was episodic in nature, each week’s program taking place in a new location as the settlers moved West followed by a new location in the next week’s episode.

While much has been made of Star Trek’s connection to the genre Western and the mythos of the westward expansion of the United States, very little has been made of the franchise connections to a shared Anglo-American naval tradition. Stefan Rabitsch, in his book Star Trek and the British Age of Sail: The Maritime Influence Throughout the Series and Films, seeks to right that omission. This book is the first major publication to argue that Star Trek owes as much of its legacy to a trans-Atlantic naval tradition as it does to the American Western. It would be just as accurate, if not more so, to state that Star Trek is as much “Horatio Hornblower in space” as it is “Wagon Train to the stars.” The volume itself is divided into two major sections: “Elementary, Dear Trekker (A Primer)” consisting of three chapters, and “Rule, Britannia! Britannia Rules Outer Space in Star Trek! (A Voyage),” four chapters. The volume also includes a shorter preface, introduction, and conclusion, and an impressive bibliography and extensive endnotes.

Rabitsch’s approach is principally literary, rather than historical, and oriented in a post-colonial approach. He centers his argument on, but does not limit it to, C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels, a series of novels centered on the career of a British naval officer in the Age of Sail, particularly during the Napoleonic wars. The novels were published between the late nineteen-thirties and mid-sixties, and thus were very much part of popular culture at the time that Star Trek was released. These novels were set at the height of British imperial power, and, as they were hugely popular on both sides of the Atlantic, tap into American interest into its own historical colonization and growing awareness of its increasing prominence on the world stage, as well as British notions of empire during the Age of Sail. Forester’s Hornblower was a combination of skilled strategist, charismatic leader, dedicated naturalist, and caring friend—the prototype for a Starfleet captain.

The author’s focus on Forester and his literary works should, in no way, be taken as a lack of intellectual rigor or scholarly attention. Rabitsch not only shows fluency in critical theory, but has also clearly mastered several literary corpora, which he has incorporated into his book. To begin with, Rabitsch is intimately familiar with the bulk of the Prime timeline in the Star Trek franchise consisting of the first five live-action series, the animated series, and the first ten theatrical films. He largely excludes Star Trek: Discovery, as the series was in its infancy at the time the volume was being prepared for publication, and the Kelvin timeline (i.e. the J.J. Abrams films). When necessary, Rabitsch also incorporates production notes and other archival texts related to the production and development of the franchise. His knowledge of Forester’s Hornblower corpus, as well as the life and writings of Horatio Nelson and James Cook, nineteenth century British naval officers on whom the character of Hornblower was largely based, is equally impressive. Furthermore, Rabitsch manages to interweave these various threads into his prose to create a compelling argument, frequently presenting an idea from Forester of historical accounts of the British navy, followed by a methodical analysis of the same point in each of the Star Trek series. The depth of Rabitsch’s analysis gives his work a feeling of completeness and elevates his argument that “Hornblower in space” is a much better description of the franchise than “Wagon Train to the stars.”

This is not to say that Rabitsch’s analysis is above reproach. At times, the author seems to be so concerned with his postcolonial analysis, in which he compares the Federation and Starfleet to British and American colonialism, that he ignores conflicting evidence that would undermine that narrative. This is particularly evident when it comes to Star Trek: Enterprise, which depicts a time in franchise history in which Earth was not among the more influential planets, prior to the foundation of the Federation. With this said, Star Trek and the British Age of Sail deserves praise for the quality of content, the depth of research, and the clarity of thought, and should be of value to any academic interested in the history of the Star Trek franchise.

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Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s M Archive is the second installment in a planned trilogy that explores a speculative future landscape, ravaged by the effects of late capitalism, environmental devastation, and the exploitation of black and brown bodies. In the introduction, Gumbs credits M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing (2006) as a literary ancestor to M Archive. For Gumbs, the “M” in M Archive has a multitude of meanings—including magic, muscles, memory, and importantly, more. She describes her text as a “speculative documentary” (xi)—an inventive literary form that she imagines could be written by future survivors, who are witnesses to “the realities we are making possible or impossible with our present apocalypse” (xi). Fundamentally, Gumbs’s work is concerned with “black life, black feminist metaphysics, and the theoretical imperative of attending to Black bodies in a way that doesn’t seek to prove that Black people are human” (xi). In other words, Gumbs uses speculative documentary as a space in which to trace the possible impact of humanity’s exploitative labor and environmental policies, which rely on the subjugation of black and brown bodies—especially women of color—in order to create profits for others.

Just as Gumbs pays homage to Pedagogies of Crossing, she also references several other key intersectional feminists and scholars of color over the course of her narrative. Writing in lower case text, she resists the linguistic conventions one typically associates with scholarly works of theory. Instead, she subtly references her foremothers, such as bell hooks, who shift the standard linguistic paradigm to create new ways to engage with theory and praxis. The result is a text that is an intriguing mix of stream of consciousness, poetry, speculative fiction, and black feminist theory.

Furthermore, each section begins with a selection of the Periodic Table of Elements, in which Gumbs highlights different elements that set the tone for that portion of the text. Told from the perspective of a futuristic researcher, Gumbs’s text invites the reader to sift through layers of detritus to uncover the cultural artifacts below, in order to understand the harm that humanity has caused to itself and the planet as a whole. She breaks her book up into the Archive of Dirt, Archive of Sky, Archive of Fire, Archive of Ocean, and Baskets (Possible Futures Yet to be Woven). Each section then explores the cause and effect of the environmental catastrophe that Gumbs imagines ruined the planet and forced the surviving members of humanity to adapt and live underground to escape from the toxins on the surface of the planet after the ozone layer had been destroyed.

In Archive of Dirt, the speaker begins with a description of the capitalistic greed and disregard for other living beings that caused her ancestors (us) to treat everything as though it were expendable. Gumbs’s words pack a punch, leaving the reader with reverberating images of the body as containers for waste— “simply put, every piece of the planet was filled with trash. Our minds notwithstanding. Our bodies included”. (46) From there, she delves into the painful and traumatic process by which humanity had to give up the old ways of being in order to adapt to the harsh landscape in the post-apocalyptic future. The speaker discovers that in order to survive, humanity must become one with the Earth—both by reestablishing our connection to the planet that sustains us and by moving underground. In Archive of Ocean, Gumbs makes a powerful connection between science and spiritualism, reminding the reader that water is “the place where evolutionists and creationists agree that life began, the source of all the salt we breathed to get here, lives with us”. (11) Gumbs continues to advocate convincingly for the need for a belief in both science and the soul over the course of the text, ultimately showing the reader that humanity can survive only if it attends to both.

Finally, in Baskets, Gumbs further speculates on the limitations and possibilities that could define humanity. She rejects an individualistic way of thinking and encourages readers to think of themselves as part of a larger system. Yet, she cautions that any feeling of universalism must not overshadow the dark history of human exploitation (exemplified by the slave trade) or the need for intersectional thinking when describing the experiences of people of color. As Gumbs writes, “there did come a time when the species was united on the planet as human, but it was not what anyone had dreamt. And it was too late to truly benefit those of us who had been called alien. We who had nonconsensually generated the human across time” (171). In other words, universalism could potentially be just as problematic as individualism, if it erases the identities and hardships faced by cultural “others”.

Overall, I believe this text will be of particular interest to scholars and readers who appreciate literary forms that meld poetry and theory, such as Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back (1981) and (Gumbs’ earlier work) Revolutionary Mothering (2016). However, I would not recommend it as a primer into intersectionality or black feminist thought, as Gumbs takes for granted the readers’ familiarity with her many references to feminist concepts and black feminist writers, including bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, among others. In doing so, Gumbs shifts the onus onto the reader—to study foundational black feminist scholars and practitioners, and to learn from their theories, in order to avoid the future that M Archive uncovers.

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I first found Global Frankenstein, part of Palgrave’s relatively new Studies in Global Science Fiction series, when I was searching for material for my first-year seminar course titled “Global Frankenstein.” Both my idea for the class and this ambitious anthology participate in the 200^th anniversary celebrations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which may or may not be the first modern science fiction text. Regardless of where you may stand on that issue, the popularity of the mad scientist and the monster for those 200 years certainly justifies the hoopla. I was particularly excited by the global moniker, however, as I am always eager to learn more about how the novel has been received, translated, adapted, and transformed beyond English-speaking cultures. All too often, “global” content still remains Western and Eurocentric, and I hoped this volume would help me avoid this problem in my own course.

Sadly, Davison and Roberts have not been as successful in collecting scholarship on Frankenstein’s international travels as I hoped, a shortcoming that they admit frankly in their introduction: “Despite its title, this critical collection cannot fully convey the enormity and scope of Frankenstein’s global reach [. . ..] we acknowledge the linguistic and cultural limitations of this collection and welcome other international interrogations”. (8) As a scholar and teacher who was drawn to their text specifically because I hoped to find an English-language consideration of that global reach, I would have preferred a different title, or perhaps a subtitle that clarified these completely understandable difficulties. The blurb claims that the book “reassesses Frankenstein’s global impact for the twenty-first century across myriad cultures and nations, from Japan, Mexico, and Turkey, to Britain, Iraq, Europe, and North America.” Indeed, articles touch on works from all of these countries, but the analysis definitely focuses more substantially on direct readings of Shelley’s text and its British, American, and European afterlives than those in the other countries on this list. Nevertheless, the number of non-English Frankensteins covered within this volume is notably higher than any other collection I have seen, so perhaps my disappointment exceeds justification.

Having noted my reservations regarding the title, I must declare that the essays in this collection comprise a thorough, thought-provoking, and occasionally brilliant body of scholarship. Sixteen essays are presented in five sections, devoted to the novel’s science, corporeality, stage and screen adaptations, illustrations and literary adaptations, and “Futuristic Frankensteins.” The editors have each contributed, Mulvey-Roberts with an analysis of the surgical context of the novel and the contemporary French artist ORLAN’s radical body modifications, and Davison with an intriguing account of balletic interpretations of Frankenstein. I applied the adjective “ambitious” earlier in this review—the range may not be “global” in the specific sense that I had hoped for when I saw the title, but in terms of sheer scope and comprehensive consideration of where the influence of Shelley’s text can be found, the word is appropriate. In addition to the usual textual issues and filmic adaptations that any collection must address, the plastic surgery as art and the danse macabre are joined by stage plays, television series, picture books, graphic novels, interactive digital texts, video games, memes, philosophical riffs, and even a poem as afterword.

When these authors focus their attention on Shelley’s text, they provide cogent analysis in thoughtful conversation with earlier scholars. The editors’ introduction succinctly reviews the critical history of the novel, noting major critical insights as well as the biases that inflected them. The essays advance many of these conversations. For example, Bruce Wyse reads the novel’s deployment of disability and disgust and the evolution of those themes in texts from Bulwer Lytton to Doctor Who, noting ways in which these adaptations “broaden the representational purview of Frankenstein to clarify its subtext” (89) through the lens of disability studies. Carolyn D. Williams explores the marked lack of humor in the original novel as a symptom of Shelley’s concerns with decorum, a “dangerous strategy” because “like Gothic monsters, laughter, if banished, may return with devastating effect” (91). In addition to her careful reading of Shelley’s manuscript and revisions, Williams also considers the challenges and opportunities this creates for critics, interpreters, and adapters.

As the essays move further from the original novel to explore its global and cultural adaptations, they provide nuanced considerations of a wide array of responses to and reworkings of Shelley’s text, direct and indirect. Many essays in the collection concentrate on the visual traditions, and some of the strongest—and most international—focus specifically on illustrations, comics, and graphic novels. Emily Alder provides an especially interesting analysis of how Frankenstein adaptations for children, even in such apparently simplified forms as picture books, show exceptional sensitivity and creativity as they “alter the original’s script about otherness, acceptance, and responsibility [in order to] answer back to oversimplification of Frankenstein through film and popular discourse” (223).

Sometimes the connections become rather attenuated. Xavier Aldana Reyes pursues the creature’s influence on the specific subspecies of zombies produced through human-engineered viruses as well as recent portrayals of sympathetic zombies. While he acknowledges that most zombies are rightly distinguished from Frankenstein’s creature, Aldana Reyes argues that these “lumbering creatures who walk the line between life and death may now be embodying the most relevant aspects of the myth” (179) for current audiences. I am not sure yet if I accept the argument (in part because I don’t know enough about zombies), but I want to run it past my students. This satisfies the purpose that drew me to the collection in the first place: to stimulate my thinking about the novel and enrich my teaching with new examples, insights, and questions. Less successful for me, though still provocative, is Tanya Krzywinska’s review of Frankenstein’s impact on video games. With few direct game references to consider, Krzywinska focuses on visual and creative aesthetics several iterations removed from the original text. While I don’t doubt their lineage, I do wonder what to do with it.

I cannot conclude my review without addressing the final essay, written by the renowned Fred Botting, “What Was Man . . .? Reimagining Monstrosity from Humanist to Transhumanism.” Botting questions the relevance of Shelley’s novel today, a cultural touchstone easily mined for metaphor but otherwise displaced by more modern monsters: “Frankenstein and creature—all two-human [sic]—seem to have no place, deleted by global posthumanism, either in the voracious supersession enacted by the attractive vampires of neoliberalism or in the nonhuman hordes of walking dead that testify to a transhumanist future present, subsisting as refuse, less than meat, and barer than bare life” (310). Botting finds a powerful reimagining in Bernard Rose’s film Frankenstein (2015), but one which may mark the end point of the Frankenstein myth, clearing the way for “some cyborgs, chimeras, hybrids, and posthumans [to] begin, without fear or fantasy, to foster some other imagining” (315).

Taken as a whole, Global Frankenstein provides a varied and fascinating array of critical approaches to Frankenstein itself as well as a truly remarkable range of related works. If more of those works are from Western, and especially English-speaking, cultures than the title suggests, I recommend following Davison and Mulvey-Roberts’ excellent collection with further scholarship on the international reach of Shelley’s hideous progeny.

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Geeks, nerds, fans, and the like are in the middle of an interesting era. Although big-name companies like Marvel Comics are devoting more energy to diversification and inclusivity, fans themselves appear to be growing increasingly divisive over concerns related to “authenticity.” This ongoing question of who is allowed to be a fan and what that entails for people of different genders is at the heart of Suzanne Scott’s Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry.

Stemming from the toxic fan culture wars over the past decade, Scott’s work is less concerned with female character media representation and more invested in interrogating how female fans continue to be marginalized by both the industry and fan culture at large. Due to Scott’s focus on the time period from 2006 to 2017, her work is significantly informed by the growing presence of men’s rights movements, anti-feminist agendas, and, of course, the results of the 2016 United States presidential election. Scott perceives the political climate to be one in which white, cisgender, heterosexual males endure under a logical fallacy, that “more for someone else [minorities] will inevitably mean less for me [white, cishet men]” (3)—regardless of whether the topic is immigration, reproductive rights, or fandom. As Scott explains in detail in Fake Geek Girls, it would be remiss to overlook how these misogynistic practices outside of popular culture have grossly impacted the making of an androcentric geek culture.

In her introduction, “Make Fandom Great Again,” Scott establishes this political lens, while also positioning her work alongside critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, as well as media scholar Henry Jenkins. While acknowledging that there is over half a century between the former and the latter, Scott deftly brings their voices together, along with her own. As she explains, Adorno’s, Horkheimer’s, and Jenkins’s foundational work on convergence culture gave her an entry point into more critically examining its effect on female fans. Although the convergence culture industry has empowered some fan identities, it is important to stress how it has continued to silence others. Furthermore, as Scott notes, “a key distinction is that fans themselves are now working as the agents of the convergence culture industry, reinforcing these industrial predilections and routinely using them to alternately dismiss and harass female fans” (12-13). And this is precisely what Scott theorizes about in the six chapters contained within Fake Geek Girls.

Chapter 1, “A Fangirl’s Place Is in the Resistance: Feminism and Fan Studies,” examines the feminist roots of early fan studies and the debates over whether incorporation or resistance is the better way to participate (also known as the affirmational/transformative dichotomy). In preparation for her subsequent chapters, Scott maps out how the convergence culture industry’s continued pressure to participate in the “appropriate” brand of fandom has marginalized female fans and the historically feminist practices behind the initial fan studies movement. To illustrate this phenomenon, Chapters 2 and 3 both look to specific representations of fan identity in the media, highlighting how frequently female fans are pathologized. From the 1986 Saturday Night Live “Get a Life!” sketch and a 2008 Entertainment Weekly comic to the 2011 “Idiot Nerd Girl” meme, there is no shortage of examples that depict the distinctive difference between the purported legitimacy that comes with being a “fanboy” and the dismissiveness and skepticism associated with being a “fangirl.” Scott asserts, “By identifying geek girls and fangirls as too ‘normal’ or ‘mainstream’ to be ‘real’ fans, male fans belie (or attempt to combat) their own normalcy within the convergence culture industry, positioning themselves as simultaneously the oppressors and the oppressed”. (95)

Accordingly, the unfair pressure placed on fangirls to prove their authenticity has driven many of them to fall prey to fan labor schemes perpetuated by the convergence culture industry, as highlighted in chapter 4 “Terms and Conditions: Co-Opting Fan Labor and Containing Fan Criticism.” Flowing from a discussion that takes place at the end of Chapter 4, Chapter 5 focuses on Chris Hardwick, host of Talking Dead and founder of Nerdist Industries. Here Scott analyzes the ways in which Hardwick performs as a fanboy and how he is able to use his fan identity for professional gain in a way that is currently unavailable for fangirls. The final chapter, “From Poaching to Pinning: Fashioning Postfeminist Geek Girl(y) Culture,” Scott critically examines how fangirl clothing companies such as Her Universe have perpetuated a curated fangirl lifestyle. To challenge this pre-packaged fangirl existence, Scott offers the concept of “strategic pinning” on Pinterest – inspired by the early-nineteenth century “strategic scrapbooks” created by women’s rights activists – as well as various crossplay activities, in order to highlight diverse fangirl experiences.

Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry is without doubt an important text for media scholarship and fandom studies. It’s meticulously researched, politically relevant, and it significantly revisits and reimagines early convergence culture theory. That said, due to its heavy theoretical nature, it lacks readability and, at times, appears disorganized. Due to its price point, it would be ideal to assign for a class. However, it is not textbook material. It is a book to digest slowly and sporadically, rather than read front-to-back, and Scott does not take time to explain terminology so as to make it more accessible for an interdisciplinary audience. Although an informative and interesting book on gender politics and fandom studies, due to its overall structure it is best suited for the serious media studies scholar alone.