Category: Nonfiction Reviews

Non-Fiction Reviews

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

Sarah Nolan-Brueck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hyperspace to Hypertext: Masculinity, Globalization, and Their Discontents

Non-Fiction Reviews

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

Sara Martín

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Non-Fiction Reviews

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

Pedro Ponce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Palgrave Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century

Non-Fiction Reviews

Review of The Palgrave Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century

Sébastien Doubinsky

Laura Horn, Ayşem Mert, and Franziska Müller, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century. Palgrave, 2023. Hardcover. xi + 437 pg. $199.99. ISBN 9783031137211. Ebook $149.00. ISBN 9783031137228.

The Palgrave Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century is an extraordinarily ambitious and exciting book, which sets academic publications in a quantum state, as it conflates two absolute antinomic identities: speculative fiction and solid scientific research.

The volume, which presents itself as an anthology of academic articles, is edited by three established researchers: Laura Horn is an associate professor at the University of Roskilde, in the department of Social Sciences and Business; Ayşem Mert is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science at Stockholm University; and Franziska Müller is Assistant Professor for Globalization and Climate Governance at the Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences, University of Hamburg. As they state in their introduction, dated some time after 2072, “the book seeks to open up a glimpse into the many worlds, and by extension many futures, of contemporary global politics,” based on a new discipline called “quantum social science,” (2) which appeared, according to the authors, after a scientific breakthrough and a number of related political, social, and climate crises.

The volume is divided into six sections (“Theory and Concepts,” “(In)Security,” “Governance and Technology,” “The Anthropocene,” “Culture and Identity,” “Practices and Reflections”), followed by a conclusion written by the editors. All articles are written from a 22^nd century perspective, reflecting both on the “present” state of the world and events and situations of the past—that is, our very own 21st century. To give an idea of the scope of the book, here are some chapter titles: “The Evolution of Global Society Theory” (Barry Buzan); “Strategic Partnerships in Twenty-Second Century Global Politics: From Weathering Storms to the Politics of Anticipation” (Andriy Tyushka and Lucyna Czechowska); “’Big Daddy Don’t Like That!’ Global Rule by Planetary Algorithm” (Ronnie D. Lipschutz ); The UNCorp Quantum Mechanism for Wellbeing” (Isabella Hermann), just to name a few.

Each part and article focuses on some aspect of socio-economics and political science (in the largest sense possible) as well as methodologies and analysis tools through case studies. Each author uses a blend of contemporary sources (20^th and early 21^st century) and imaginary sources from the future (22^nd century). In the introduction, we learn that this academic revolution is mainly based on two 20^th and 21^st centuries authors, Ted Chiang and Douglas Adams. The double reference is both surprising and amusing, but defines very well the DNA of the book: on the one hand, we find the complex and paradoxical narratives of Chiang and on the other, the extreme (and often comical) relativity of scientific theories found in Adams’s stories.

Concerning the latter, we are told that:

Fundamentally instrumental in this was the revalidation of late twentieth-century philosophical thought, in particular the work of Douglas Adams. His seminal pentalogy HHGTTG did not get recognition upon publication other than as a novel, whereas by the mid-2030s it had been established that it had, in fact, much to say on the subject of parallel universes. (3)

As for Chiang’s influence, it is stated that:

The qurative turn was a natural consequence of the quantum revolution. Social scientists found a starting point in Chiang’s visionary text from 2019, where he posed the questions that would come to define quration… Can a single quantum event by itself lead to visible changes between the two branches? Is it possible for broader historical forces to be studied using prisms? (6)

The essays in this volume are thus extremely interesting quantum objects themselves, as they simultaneously draw on various historical, scientific, and fictional elements. The reader can thus choose to define what they observe according to their own position: political and social fictions, serious predictions, or pure fiction, just to give an idea of the many possible identities that can be affixed to each and every article in the volume.

There is a common trait, however, to all these predictive narratives: like science fiction, they put our present times in perspective and make the reader reflect on the realities that they are confronted with on a daily basis, whether it is geopolitics, religion, society, climate, environment or even academic research and theories. In many ways, this “handbook” will remind many readers of Stanislaw Lem’s “Solaristics,” that is to say the published research on Solaris, the mysterious living planet which is impossible to communicate with, and even define or analyze properly. In Solaris (1961), solaristics are vain and lead nowhere—it’s just an accumulation of hypothesis and useless knowledge. What this volume points at is in many ways the same that Lem does, except that it accepts our reality (the Solaris planet in Lem’s novel) as an ever-changing complexity, in order to playfully (but also seriously) reveal the limits and the flaws of our scientific reflection on the current global state of the planet. By simultaneously de-framing and re-framing our traditional understandings of socio-economics, political science, and sociology, The Palgrave Handbook of Global Politics in the 22^nd Century actually offers us true insights on the world we are living in, as well as possible alternatives to our traditional ways of thinking and—most importantly—implementing solutions to the problems we are confronted with.

As a conclusion, we could say that this volume is a terribly useful book for all those who are tired of the common ideological discourses and are looking for other solutions. If not truly a “Solarpunk” book, it nonetheless gives us a reasonable hope that the academics of the future will prove more imaginative than the dominant schools of today. And “speculative science” would by all means be a welcome and much necessary new field.

Seb Doubinsky is a bilingual French dystopian writer and poet. He is the author of the City-States Cycle, comprising, among others, The Babylonian Trilogy, The Song Of Synth, Missing Signal, The Invisible, and Paperclip. Missing Signal, published by Meerkat Press, won the Bronze Foreword Reviews Award in the Best Science-Fiction Novel category in 2018. He lives in Denmark with his family and teaches literature, history and culture in the French department of Aarhus University.

The Hundred Greatest Superhero Films and TV Shows

Fiction Reviews

Review of The Hundred Greatest Superhero Films and TV Shows

Dan Brown

Zachary Ingle and David Sutera. The 100 Greatest Superhero Films and TV Shows. Rowman & Litttlefield, 2022. Hardcover. 328 pg. $45.00. ISBN 9781538114506.

With a title like The 100 Greatest Superhero Films and TV Shows, it’s easy to imagine this new volume by Zachary Ingle and David M. Sutera is the kind of resource diehard comic fans would keep on hand to settle heated barroom squabbles.

“Hey, what’s the best superhero movie ever? I say it’s 1989’s Batman with Michael Keaton.”

“No way! Obviously, Superman from 1978 is a superior film and Christopher Reeve is a hero for the ages.”

“Let’s see what Ingle and Sutera have to say. They’ll know.”

But this is not a Guinness Book of Superhero Movie World Records. Heck, the co-authors don’t even present the motion pictures and TV shows they discuss in numerical order from best to worst, so those readers looking for a Comic Book Resources-type of extended listicle are bound to be disappointed. Instead, what the two experts provide is a perceptive account of the major superhero releases since the advent of talkies, plus a rationale for how each individual film fits within that larger history. Stated in a word, this book is foundational. It belongs on the bookshelf of every serious superhero scholar.

This 311-page tome goes way beyond rehashing superhero trivia, most of which is well-known by now anyway, and well into the realm of thoughtful cultural analysis. Ingle and Sutera explain at the outset their shared project is “to lay the foundation to encourage more critical discourse on the historical, social, aesthetic, cultural, technological and economic elements of the superhero film” (8). They endeavour to show how properties such as Angel (1999-2004), Captain America: Civil War (2016), and Watchmen (2009) have been shaped by, and have helped shape, global pop culture from the era of Hollywood serials to our current age of streaming. They succeed. And in doing so, this book ups the ante for all researchers following in their footsteps. This compendium is a masterwork for one simple reason: The co-authors take superhero culture, in all its manifestations, seriously.

It’s true comic books were once read mainly by children, but those days have been gone a long time, even though when your local newspaper bothers to cover comics or fan conventions there are inevitably interjections like “Zap!” and “Pow!” in the headlines. Some may be reluctant to face the fact that, with new Marvel properties debuting seemingly every few weeks, superheroes have moved into the mainstream of our society (even as comics themselves have become the preserve of a niche, aging audience). Today’s young superhero fans don’t want to read about a character like Batman, they want to BE Batman, which they can do easily on their cell phones.

All of that said, there is certainly room to quibble with the works the writers deem worthy of discussion. For example, both the Bob Burden-derived Mystery Men (1999) and the Kurt Russel film Sky High (2005) are included here only as honourable mentions. Yet there’s an argument to be made that every superhero adaptation being made in 2023 is a parody, so those little-seen efforts are crucial because they paved the way to the current widespread ironic posture regarding costumed do-gooders. Why the short shrift? Would Deadpool have even been possible on the big screen without those early experiments at squeezing laughs out of the genre’s conventions. Ingle and Sutera also place special emphasis on the Fox X-Men series of movies. While it’s true films such as X-Men (2000) and X2 (2003) are historically important, some would argue they are objectively bad works of art—which isn’t the only consideration for inclusion in The 100 Greatest Superhero Films and TV Shows, but surely how crappy they are as entertainments bears mentioning?

Perhaps a better title would have been Why Superhero Films and TV Shows Matter. As mentioned, the book doesn’t include a numbered ranking (chapters are organized alphabetically by title), so it encourages the reader to do more than skim each entry, thus moving toward a fuller understanding of why certain adaptations landed the way they did. The authors also grapple with the… strangeness of some of these franchises. They look at superhero films and TV programs with fresh eyes by setting aside the conventional wisdom that has developed about each character in the intervening years or decades. It’s also true that this volume, released in 2022, was destined to be out-of-date the moment it came out, given the breakneck pace of superhero releases. The DC filmic universe, for instance, was in a much different place 12 months ago than today, having effectively been brought to a conclusion with the Ezra Miller Flash movie last summer, Superheroes are important to our culture. There’s a lot to be learned from this thought-provoking history, and with more superhero movies and shows on the way a second volume is not only warranted but would also be welcomed.

Dan Brown has covered pop culture as a journalist for more than 30 years for organizations like the CBC, the Globe and Mail, and National Post. He is a graduate of three Ontario universities and wrote his M.A. thesis on antidetection in the short fiction of Alice Munro. He teaches arts journalism at Western University and is the “mentor on staff” at the Western Gazette, the school’s student-owned and -operated newspaper.

Supernatural: A History of Television’s Unearthly Road Trip

Fiction Reviews

Review of Supernatural: A History of Television’s Unearthly Road Trip

Dominck Grace

Erin Giannini. Supernatural: A History of Television’s Unearthly Road Trip. Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. Hardcover. 238 pg. $36.00. ISBN 9781538134498. EBook. $21.50. ISBN 9781538134504.

Cult TV phenomenon Supernatural, which ran for fifteen seasons (the longest run for a genre TV show, Giannini insists, though the definition she is using of “genre” would seem to narrow the concept to the fantastical, since westerns Gunsmoke [1955-1975] and Death Valley Days [1952-1970] both had longer runs and produced significantly more episodes—and one also would need to exclude medical dramas and crime shows from the “genre” category to give Supernatural the nod), has received a remarkable amount of critical attention, from monographs to essay collections, from scholarly studies to books for general audiences. Giannini’s history of the show has scholarly heft but a style that makes it accessible to general readers, and at a mere $36.00 for a hardcover book is also priced for a non-scholarly audience. It would probably be accurate (and I do not do so pejoratively) to describe Giannini as an aca-fan, engaging in serious study of a TV show she evidently loves. Features such as her “Highly Subjective List of 30 Must-See Supernatural episodes” in the Appendix speak as much to fandom as scholarship (and the fact that I would have weighted my own such list more heavily in favor of earlier seasons should make clear my own aca-fan propensities.

Giannini traces the genesis of the show in her introduction by contextualizing its origin in 2005 in the historical events of the time, and then devotes the first three chapters, in a section called “In the Beginning,” to the earlier television stew from which show creator Eric Kripke fished out ingredients and to the genesis of the show specifically, from Kripke’s own personal and work history. Part of the show’s richness can be traced to the diverse influences that shaped its development. Though Supernatural can be categorized as horror (as Giannini notes, always a tough sell on network TV, given the restrictions of the graphic and transgressive elements endemic to the genre), its influences are diverse, and perhaps thanks to the show’s fifteen-year run, it was able (sometimes gleefully) to employ a lot of generic slippage into its run. Indeed, Supernatural developed into a remarkably self-conscious show, including overtly meta episodes and ultimately a protracted and plot-central meditation on the complexities of the creative process and the relationship between fans, artists, and art itself. These chapters are especially useful for their careful and thorough grounding of the show in its historical and social context, a topic Giannini continues to explore in more detail in the balance of the book, as she tracks the show’s development across its fifteen-year run. This unit concludes with an overview of the show’s main characters, as well as of significant characters who appeared less frequently.

Part two consists of four chapters, under the section title “The Supernatural World.” The first of these chapters revisits somewhat the historical context elements of the preceding unit. Indeed, a feature of this book is a fairly modular construction, with individual chapters evidently designed to be read easily as single units. This does lead to some repetition. However, here Giannini makes some interesting interventions. Her detailed consideration of the show in relation to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), though strong in its own right, is hardly surprising. Surprising, and insightful, is Giannini’s subsequent detailed discussion of Supernatural in relation to Roseanne (1988-1997), as shows representing blue-collar life on screen. The other chapters delve into Supernatural’s other major influences, such as folklore and religion, throughout its run. Early seasons often built on urban legends, myths, and folk tales; later seasons created extended narrative arcs in which the Judeo-Christian god (primarily; others also appear) is central. The final chapter in this section considers the complex and shifting perspectives on politics across the show’s run, offering interesting readings of how the show’s politics shifted under different show-runners.

The final section, “’People Watch This?’ Supernatural’s Cultural Impact,” steps away from the show proper to consider its influence. The book therefore neatly turns from exploring what Supernatural emerged from to considering what has emerged from it. Giannini begins with a recap of the history of how television has been marketed and consumed, providing perhaps more detail than is really needed for her purpose, but she nevertheless offers useful insights into how the show capitalized on emerging technologies such as streaming to broaden its audience and develop a passionate fan base—and therefore to become a “tentpole” show for the CW, used to help grow audiences for other CW offerings The final chapter focuses on fandom and perhaps downplays the complexities and conflicts therein. Supernatural’s passionate fans have not always seen eye to eye, as Giannini’s chapter title suggests: “Beyond ‘Sam’ and ‘Dean’ Girls” refers to the division among fans of each of the two lead characters. Nevertheless, Supernatural fandom has been active in positive ways, to which Giannini draws appropriate attention. This real-world influence is perhaps a more important legacy than Supernatural’s status as “one of the texts that ushered in a golden age of television horror” (156) or as possibly one of the last long-form serials on TV (if one excludes shows such as soap operas, anyway); “its legacy, from content to distribution, continues to resonate” (156), Giannini concludes. One could do worse.

Dominick Grace is the Non-Fiction Reviews Editor for SFRA Review. He is co-editor, with Lisa Macklem, of Supernatural Out of the Box: Critical Essays on the Metatextuality of the Series (2020) and A Supernatural Politics: Essays on Social Engagement, Fandom and the Series (2021).

Women, Science and Fiction Revisited

Fiction Reviews

Review of Women, Science and Fiction Revisited

Sarah Nolan-Brueck

Debra Benita Shaw. Women, Science and Fiction Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Hardcover. 181 pg. $119.99. ISBN9783031251702. eBook ISBN 9783031251719. $89.00.

Debra Benita Shaw’s Women, Science and Fiction Revisited is an updated version of the author’s 2000 work, Women, Science, and Fiction: The Frankenstein Inheritance. Key differences between the volumes include the removal of some chapters focused on short stories that are now out of print, the reworking and addition of new commentary to others, and the addition of chapters on texts which were released since the original publication. Each chapter focuses on a main text or textual pairing; Shaw examines Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Katharine Burdekin’s Swatiska Night (1937), C. L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” (1944), James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Your Haploid Heart” (1969) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985 novel and still-running 2017 TV show), Naomi Alderman’s The Power (2015), and finally, N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became (2020). These texts, Shaw argues, showcase representative critiques that American, British, and Canadian female authors made of popular feminist ideas and contemporary trends in thinking around technology—hence the title, Women, Science and Fiction, rather than women in Science Fiction.

Shaw’s most radical claim is that “the time of sf is over” (9). She writes, “the criteria that distinguished the genre and which governed the mode in which extrapolation functioned are now no longer sustainable” (9). In this assertion, Shaw is following a critical pathway to its extreme; while many have claimed that, in our age of technological intensification, the boundaries between the speculative and the real are breaking down, Shaw takes this contention to its logical end. Though she does not imagine SF to be dead, she does claim that the forms of SF which we’re most familiar with are no longer viable, and that the most productive speculative works are now those that trouble a traditional view of how SF operates; in other words, works that push at the boundaries of genre in a self-referential fashion. Further, Shaw sees the need to define SF in opposition to other, less logically ordered genres as the hanger-on of colonialism, and “the taxonomic ordering of the world which structured scientific imperialism” (9). This contention is most clear in Shaw’s discussions of The Left Hand of Darkness and The Handmaid’s Tale. Shaw argues that in our contemporary moment, both have taken on new resonances that change their narratives from extrapolations into allegories for our current crises of climate and bodily legislation, respectively.

As with genre, Shaw challenges her reader to forgo the distracting exercise of erecting rigid gendered definitions and boundaries. In her introduction, Shaw writes, “The question of who or what is a ‘woman’ and who is authorised to speak for and to women seems to be overwhelming the more important work of challenging the patriarchal social structures which, fundamentally, have defined these terms in the first place” (1). The more pressing mission, then, is avoiding definition in opposition to masculine ideals in general, which can lead to unintentional collusion in patriarchal projects of ideological, legal, and physical control. Shaw is careful to challenge ideas of essentialism that align the female figure with “Nature.” In chapter four, Shaw discusses Donna Haraway’s “The Cyborg Manifesto” as a response to a branch of feminism which equates women with nature—a dangerous conflation, Shaw states, because it gives patriarchy a powerful tool to align women with reproduction and commodify the female body. This formula is best articulated in a line Shaw uses to describe Swastika Night: “Hence the text extrapolates the appropriation of separatist consciousness and ecofeminist mythology by a patriarchal regime happy to collude with the idea that the future of the planet and the future of women are inherently linked” (117). Throughout, Shaw denies the proposal that a world made of women would be one without problems, or that a society built on unequal power dynamics could lead to equality.

Shaw’s work makes a strong case for the contemporary relevance of each text discussed, and for the ways that political and environmental changes have altered the way we read and understand several older texts. In marking this shift, Shaw turns to N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, which she seesas part of the “rise of the new weird,” a less “hopeful” and “naïve” turn which recognizes and challenges “the limitations of genre fiction” (172). Given that The City We Became is a fantastical, surrealist novel, which does not seem to engage with more traditional science fiction elements, its purported role as sign of development or shift in generic boundaries is somewhat questionable. In other words, I remain unconvinced that Jemisin’s novel is the best example for Shaw’s argument. The contention, however, that the execution and goal of extrapolation has been fundamentally altered does offer conceptual tools for examining fiction in a post-Trump, post-Covid-19, rise-of-AI era, in which future shock has taken on a whole new meaning. Shaw’s proposed shift in SF raises important questions as to how SF has served or challenged feminist ideologies in the past, and how these ideologies and their fictional outgrowths can remain critically relevant in an age when science fiction seems to be morphing into science fact with terrifying speed.

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

The Grey Chamber: Stories and Essays

Fiction Reviews

Review of The Grey Chamber: Stories and Essays

Indu Ohri

José Alaniz. Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia. Ohio State UP, 2022. Studies in Comics and Cartoons. Ebook. 248 pg. $37.95. ISBN: 9780814281925.

In Marjorie Bowen’s short story “A Famous Woman,” the protagonist, Tellow, grows fascinated with a statue of Gabrielle Buzot that he notices in a French village, but her history remains frustratingly unexplained to him. Tellow wonders, “surely among all those books there was some information about Gabrielle Buzot? A famous woman! What could she have been, what have accomplished to become famous? A beauty, a heroine, a great lover, a fearless patriot, a poetess?” (239). In a self-referential move, Margaret Gabrielle Vere Long—aka Marjorie Bowen—bestowed one of her names on a fictional woman whose claim to fame has been forgotten.

Like Gabrielle Buzot, Bowen’s accomplishments have been overlooked for decades, even though she published 150 novels and 200 short stories during a successful career spanning from 1906 to 1952. The result of five years of research into Bowen’s life, career, and oeuvre, John C. Tibbetts’s collection of her short stories and nonfiction, The Grey Chamber, is meant to demonstrate the versatility of her writing while still emphasizing her Weird Tales. Tibbetts has also released the first full-length scholarly study on Bowen, The Furies of Marjorie Bowen (2019), and the recent collection The Devil Snar’d: Novels, Appreciations, and Appendices (2023), which covers Bowen’s novels and critical reception. As the foremost expert on Bowen’s life and work, he builds on previous Bowen scholarship by Michael Sadleir, Edward Wagenknecht, and Jessica Amanda Salmonson in his collection. Overall, I think The Grey Chamber fulfills Tibbetts’s two goals of persuasively arguing for the recovery of Bowen’s literary works and exhibiting her writing in a variety of genres. Bowen’s modest description of her literary talents as “an inexhaustible fund of invention, a fluent and easy style, a certain gift for colour and drama, and such a passionate interest in certain periods of history that I was bound, in reproducing them, to give them a certain life” (307) holds true throughout the collection.

In the introduction, Tibbetts provides a biographical account of Bowen’s upbringing as an impoverished child with an unstable family life; despite these hardships, she succeeded through her persistence, hard work, and self-education. Bowen was a prolific author who wrote to support different family members at various times throughout her life: her abusive mother, sickly first husband, mysterious second husband, and three sons. Her works proved so popular that her historical fiction and true crime novels were adapted multiple times into well-regarded films. Along with outlining Bowen’s biography, the introduction offers literary background about her short stories and essays that Tibbetts repeats in the two forwards to each section, “Part One: Selected Short Stories” and “Part Two: Selected Essays.” Instead of repeating information found elsewhere, the introduction could have situated Bowen’s work and long career in the broader social, cultural, and historical contexts of her day. That being said, Tibbetts’s edition includes valuable paratextual materials such as a headnote before each nonfictional work, informative footnotes, and a timeline of Bowen’s life.

Part One features eighteen of Bowen’s short stories in different genres, among them ghost stories, contes cruels, social satires, historical fiction, and crime stories. Tibbetts deems her entire canon of short stories a “colossal achievement” that is “nothing less than Bowen’s own La Comédie Humaine. I can think of none of Bowen’s contemporaries—who can boast such an extensive, learned, and varied output” (32). His selections show the diversity of Bowen’s work across the aforementioned genres as well as the supernatural fiction for which she is remembered today. While the collection contains Bowen’s widely anthologized Weird Tales, I want to draw attention to her stories written in other genres. In the dreamlike fantasy “The Sign-Painter and the Crystal Fishes,” two eccentric characters are locked in mortal combat over a pair of magical fish. The dowager widower in “Madame Spitfire” evokes the ruthless women of Bowen’s true crime novels as she schemes to foil the romance between her late husband’s illegitimate daughter and her tenant. Finally, “An Initial Letter” displays Bowen’s gifts for writing historical fiction and comedy through its portrayal of members of John of Gaunt’s court (including Chaucer) as a cast of colorful medieval characters like those that inhabit the prologue of the Canterbury Tales.

Part Two presents Bowen’s essays on subjects such as Modernist women’s novels, Queen Elizabeth I’s astrologer John Dee, English royal coronations, William Hogarth’s artistry, Bowen’s unorthodox religious views, and her literary career. The essays nicely balance out the short stories in Part One by supplying her wide-ranging and unconventional opinions on different issues. The inclusion of both literary forms allows for a rich dialogue to emerge between Bowen’s views on topics such as the Weird and her representation of them in the short stories. For example, the autobiographical writings detail her childhood fear of ghosts, demons, and haunted houses, which likely explains why she often wrote about these entities in her later supernatural fiction. In her study of John Dee, Bowen observes that his communications with angels through a dubious medium, Edward Kelley, “might have been written today at any séance, save the language is more beautiful and the thought more noble than that usually employed or expressed by modern seekers after psychic knowledge” (324). Readers can trace how Bowen’s childhood fears and cultural movements such as Spiritualism shaped her Weird Tales such as “Scoured Silk,” “The Crown Plate Derby,” and “Florence Flannery.”

A comparison of the two sections uncovers a surprising contrast between the portrayal of female characters in Bowen’s short stories and her nonfictional reflections on being a woman writer in a male-dominated literary industry. This disparity suggests her complex attitude toward women’s rights: skepticism of political feminism’s effectiveness and yet sympathetic attunement to female oppression. In her memoir The Debate Continues (1939),Bowen recalls how her mother—a failed author—discouraged her from pursuing a literary career because Bowen’s first novelwas violent and tragic, which made it unsuitable for a female writer. Her stories “The World’s Gear,” “Scoured Silk,” “Madame Spitfire,” and “A Famous Woman” critique the social, financial, and professional inequities that women negotiated in the past and in Bowen’s day. The essay “Women in the Arts” celebrates Modernist women’s novels for “reveal[ing] with delicate precision the woman’s point of view, and analys[ing] with a tenderness, and yet a realism that no man could achieve, the woman’s heart, mind, and soul” (314-315). At the same time, Bowen claims that female authors such as Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and Rosamond Lehmann lack the best male authors’ “genius.” She also insists that these authors should join the general Modernist revolt against human folly, rather than opposing “the once-proclaimed wrongs of women” (316).

Instead of remaining obscure like Gabrielle Buzot’s history, Bowen’s life, short stories, and nonfiction writings, as carefully selected and contextualized by Tibbetts, evince that her work is worth rediscovering and will reward further scholarly inquiry. This collection does a superb job of recognizing her fame as a writer of Weird Tales and highlighting her achievements in other genres. It will make Bowen’s works easily accessible to students, general readers, and scholars so that they can learn more about this once “famous woman.”

Indu Ohri is a lecturer of Humanities in the College of General Studies at Boston University. Her current book project examines how the ghosts in women’s supernatural fiction reflect various unspeakable social concerns of late Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain. Her research and teaching interests include Victorian and Edwardian women’s ghost stories, Victorian authors of color across the British Empire, and the intersection between digital humanities and pedagogy. Her work appears in Victorians Institute Journal Digital Annex, Preternature, The Wilkie Collins Journal, Victorian Studies, and European Romantic Review.

Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia

Fiction Reviews