Category: Nonfiction Reviews

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The works of C. S. Lewis are often discussed through the lens of Christian apologetics, but Lewis was influenced by more than just theology. In his study The Lion’s Country: C. S. Lewis’s Theory of the Real, Charles W. Starr examines the philosophical influences, particularlyIdealism, that Lewis incorporated into his fiction. Starr traces Lewis’s development from a materialist atheist to an idealist theist and finally to an orthodox Christian. Central to both this progression and to Lewis’s fiction is the question of what constitutes reality. The relationship between God and humanity, the meaning of experiences in the material world, and the nature of the afterlife illustrate Lewis’s theories of the real. Starr’s assessments offer a nuanced understanding of the progression of Lewis’s thought through the decades of his writing career.

The book is organized into ten chapters, each focusing on a particular component of Lewis’s concept of the real. Chapters include subjects such as desire, mystery, and transposition,  amongst other topics, and each chapter touches in some way on the development of Lewis’s thought. The book concludes with a never-before published manuscript by Lewis, a collection of notes for a book that was never completed entitled “Prayer Manuscript” that describes Lewis’s vision of what it is like for humans to gradually experience reality.

It is a commonplace in Lewis biographies to note that Lewis was an atheist as a young man, but Starr focuses more on Lewis’s materialism than his atheism at this point in his life. Starr observes that “Lewis the atheist makes himself visible in his earliest use of the term fact. In 1916, the young C. S. Lewis had been an atheist for several years and had become a demythologizer” (28). The word “fact,” Starr argues, is of central importance to Lewis, because it is synonymous with “reality” (23). Limiting his concept of reality to mere fact, however, was not enough for Lewis. Starr says that Lewis’s longing for something he could not quite understand made him seek something beyond fact: truth. This led to Lewis’s turn towards Idealism and theism (29). Convinced that Idealism would explain his longings, Lewis began to believe there was something beyond the material world. Starr says, “The move from Atheism to Idealism was no less than a recognition of the existence of spiritual reality—something really there that transcended the physical” (29). Yet, as Starr points out, what Lewis ultimately rejected about this viewpoint was his belief that all matter is evil. Once Lewis converted to Christianity, he saw a connection between the spiritual and the physical that suggested not only that matter was not evil, as he had previously thought, but that there was a hierarchy of reality. Starr suggests that “Lewis abandoned his own brand of idealism (which saw spirit as good and matter as evil) when he became a theist, thus adopting the third view “that there is a reality beyond nature” (87). Starr also notes Lewis’s change in thought concerning materialism when he says, “This younger Lewis is very different from the Christian convert who described transcendent reality as the most concrete existence there is. Lewis’s previous philosophical war with the flesh was not a part of his Christian way of thinking” (109).

One of the most important concepts in Lewis’s beliefs is the notion that there are different levels of reality. Starr points out this concept in his analysis of The Great Divorce. In this novel, the closer one gets to heaven, the more “real” things become. Conversely, as Starr explains, “Hell (the farthest place from God) is smaller than a pebble on Earth and smaller than an atom in heaven” (121). In contrast to the beliefs of his youth, the Christian supernaturalist Lewis sees the material world as the lowest part of a progression that eventually leads to the ultimate reality, God. Starr explains that in this core image of Lewis’s belief system, “heaven and heavenly beings are more solid than are we and the Earth we live on. We are ghosts and shadows and our world but a cheap copy of the heavenly one to come, like a landscape painting compared to the real place” (121). These same ideas may be seen in The Last Battle when the heroes of Narnia, after their deaths, keep going further up and further in to Narnia, thus discovering different layers of that magical land, each more real than the last. Starr comments that “each reality is hierarchically more real, somehow larger than the ones without” (89).

Using these biographical and philosophical backdrops, Starr discusses Lewis’s works. He typically comments on several of Lewis’s works in each chapter, and the books he most frequently references include The Silver Chair, The Last Battle, Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, A Grief Observed, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and Till We Have Faces. Starr’s engagement with these texts is thoughtful and engaging, and his observations would certainly be helpful for both scholars and general readers. Starr’s tone wavers a bit between academic and conversational, and in some places he drops scholarly objectivism and speaks instead from a position of faith, making the book have more the feel of a popular religious book than an academic work. And though Starr clearly demonstrates his familiarity with both philosophy and Lewis scholarship, more engagement with both of these fields would have lent more weight to his discussion of Lewis’s texts. Incorporating more material on Idealist philosophers, particularly those who influenced Lewis’s thought as a young man, would have been enlightening. Furthermore, placing Lewis in conversation with these theorists would have blunted criticism that is sometimes made against Inkling scholarship that the field is too insular and does not connect the Inklings to other movements or authors. Additionally, the scholarship on Lewis that Starr does cite, while useful, is often too briefly considered and feels more like name-checking than genuine engagement. Since this is a relatively brief volume, adding more secondary sources would have fleshed out Starr’s discussion and made important connections.

This work is nevertheless a valuable contribution to Lewis studies. With engaging prose, Starr ably explains the difficult philosophical concepts behind Lewis’s fiction. Both scholars and general readers interested in Lewis should find this book appealing. This volume not only provides insight into Lewis’s world-building, but it also serves as a wonderful demonstration of how fantasy can be used to express the complexity of human experience.

James Hamby is the Associate Director of the Writing Center at Middle Tennessee State University, where he also teaches courses on composition and literature, including Victorian Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale. His dissertation, David Copperfield: Victorian Hero, explores how Charles Dickens created a new hero for the Victorian Age by reconceiving his own life through the prism of myths and fairy tales.

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I began drafting this review from a treefarm in the Salish Sea that used to be part of a vast swath of Pacific Coast temperate rain forest. Like much of the Pacific Northwest, the land was logged over at the beginning of the last century, grazed for several decades, then left alone aside from occasional selective harvesting. It’s now an expanse of same-aged 90-to-120-foot-high conifers, traversed by footpaths and a few dirt roads, with widely spaced, even-sized treeboles; light and rain filter down to low brush at the forest floor.

How different from Robert Holdstock’s impenetrably dense, insanely haunted, and topologically and chronotopically esheresque Ryhope Wood, composed of “primeval” woodland, “untouched forest from a time when all of the country was covered with deciduous forests of oak and ash and elder and rowan and hawthorn” at the end of the last ice age.¹ Plugging into the fantasy topos of an unknown space that is impossibly bigger inside than outside, Ryhope Wood is also, as John Clute memorably termed it, an “abyssal chthonic resonator”: it generates—in psychic collaboration with the individuals who enter it—avatars of basic story patterns and experiences that are, in Jungian terms, universal among human beings—among which is surely the attraction to and fear of forests.² Though my own experience of woodland, probably like that of many of Holdstock’s readers, is no more chthonic than the tree farm I’ve just described, his vision of a mysterious, unmappable, actively rebarbative wildwood in the heart of darkest Herefordshire is compelling.

Paul Kincaid has produced a concise but valuable companion to Mythago Wood (1984), the prize-winning first volume of the Mythago Wood series, with an introduction, three thematic chapters, and very brief coda. Given the dizzyingly nonlinear and recursive temporal structures of the narrative (not to mention how these are repeated and complicated in four subsequent novels), rather than attempting to offer a definitive interpretation or universal theory of Holdstock’s work(s), Kincaid sets himself an appropriately circumscribed goal: to suggest “something of the originality, the importance, and the downright strangeness” of the text.³ The novel’s complexities, recursivities, and echoic intertexts are derived from the premise that basic story patterns are immanent in every human consciousness; in the psycho-generative spaces of Ryhope Wood they play out differently for each traveler based on individual cultural contexts and memories, but they are recognizably familiar plots driven by such figures as the absent father, the quarreling siblings, the rescued child, the supernatural hunters, the hero’s journey to restore the Land.

Kincaid documents Mythago Wood’s impact and influence on fantasy-writing in the last decades of the twentieth century, noting that itwon both the British Science Fiction Award and the World Fantasy award and “has consistently been named as one of the best and most important works of fantasy from the twentieth century” (4). In 2012 the British Fantasy Society renamed their top prize the Robert Holdstock Award, in recognition, Kincaid asserts, of his “entirely new way of writing fantasy” (4). What’s new is Holdstock’s play with narrative temporality. Having explored time travel in earlier science-fiction novels, Holdstock brought to the fantasy genre a more complex model of narrative temporality that changed the kinds of stories it could engage. Before Holdstock, fantasy was associated with the ‘there and back again’ structure of the quest, in which time and the narrative move forward to the resolution of the hero’s journey:

… the structure of time commonly plays little or no part … : past and present are consistent, practically static. The idea that time might be layered, that the same myths might take radically different shapes, that the past might interpenetrate the present and the present might interpenetrate the past, has no part to play in stories of the rightful heir being restored and evil being defeated. (3)

With a new level of temporal complexity, Kincaid claims, “Mythago Wood remakes fantasy from the perspective of science fiction” (3) and effects “a reimagining of the whole fantasy landscape” (4).⁴ The impacts for both plot and character are significant: in Holdstock’s novel, “there is no return from [the] quest, the land is not healed, the hero is not restored,” and “there is no true hero just as there is no villain”; each character “is transformed utterly, and so everyone becomes both hero and villain of their own story, and neither” (4). In consequence, the narrative remains endlessly open: “what healing there is, is not the end of this story but rather the beginning of another story, a story which also cannot be ended” (8). The focus of the novel—as the reader gradually realizes—is the power and agency of the Wood as it collaborates with the traveler in shaping the story and transforming the teller. The Wood is the figure and engine of transformation.I offer here a brief summary of the novel to confirm Kincaid’s assessment of the work’s radical weirdness.

Part I: the narrator, Steven, returns from WWII service to his family’s home at the edge of Ryhope Wood. His distant, preoccupied father has died and his older brother Christian has developed a weird relationship to the Wood, which has never been surveyed or mapped. Christian has been pursuing their father’s research into the wood’s capacities to generate avatars of folklore and myths: the Night Hunters, Robin Hood, the warrior woman, Arthur, the shaman. Christian explains the basic premise in a useful expositional brain-dump:

“The old man believed that all life is surrounded by an energetic aura – you can see the human aura as a faint flow in certain light. In these ancient woodland, primary woodlands, the combined aura forms something far more powerful, a sort of creative field that can interact with our unconscious. And it’s in the unconscious that we carry what he calls the pre-mythago – that’s myth imago, the image of the idealized form of a myth creature. … The form of the idealized myth, the hero figure, alters with cultural changes, assuming the identity and technology of the time.” (original emphasis; 53-54)

The mythago emerges where a culture is under threat, fading when the hero figure is no longer needed but remaining “in our collective unconscious, [to be] transmitted through the generations” (53-54). Seeking to penetrate the Wood’s mysterious heart, the brothers encounter a huge boar/man in the Wood who clearly intends to kill them; Steven realizes this is, somehow, both a prehistoric demiurge and their father.

In Part II, Christian leaves to explore the Wood. Steven studies his father’s notes and maps and hires a fellow vet to attempt an aerial survey of the wood (blocked by bizarre winds). The Wood begins to grow into the house clearing, as if “a pseudopod of woodland” was “trying to drag the house itself into the aura of the main body” (95).⁵ Steven receives strange emissaries from the wood, including the avatar of Guiwenneth, a young red-haired woman-warrior who was raised by the Night Hunters.⁶ Different avatars of Guiwenneth had had relationships with Steven’s father and older brother, and now Christian re-emerges from the wood, almost entirely unrecognizable in his transformation into a violent warrior leader who appears to be decades older. His fighters seize Guiwenneth and disappear.

In Part III, Steven and his pilot friend plunge into the Wood to trace Christian and recover Guiwenneth. Christian had once imagined that if he could make it to the ‘heartwood,’ the icebound area behind the wall of fire called Lavondyss—the place of origin and possibly rebirth for the mythagos—he could emerge on its other side and return to ordinary life. But as Steven moves deeper into the Wood, he realizes from talking with different people they encounter that he and his brother are now part of a story that they don’t control—the story of a Kinsman who must kill his rogue relative, the Outsider destroying the land. As Kincaid writes, he must “abandon any hope of shaping his own story” (12): “there is no real world for [the brothers] to return to; they are both mythagos now, and mythagos cannot leave the wood” (13). In the final confrontation of the brothers, Steven believes he must kill Christian, according to the myth they are enacting, but Christian asks that they suspend the clash. He will use a shamanic ritual to pass through the fire and, he hopes. return to his previous life. Intending to send him a talisman for this journey home, Steven knocks him into the fire where, we infer, he dies. Guiwenneth arrives at the stone that marks her father’s grave, but she has been mortally wounded and dies in Steven’s arms. The father-monster re-appears and seems to tell Steven that Guiwenneth will return, before carrying her corpse into the fire. Two story-patterns are completed here—that of Cain and Abel and that of the kidnapped child—but the novel ends in a suspension: Steven settles in by the tomb of Guiwenneth’s father to await her return.

Kincaid’s single-word chapter titles, “War,” “Time,” and “Myth”, suggest his broadly thematic approach. “War” briefly discusses the WWI service of Holdstock’s grandfather, then turns to explore what it means that conflict is how mythagos are generated. George’s journal asserts that mythagos are formed at the intersections of conflicts between the cultures “of the invader, and the invaded”: “mythagos grow from the power of hate, and fear” (MW 51). Kinkaid concurs and points out the narrative implications: since mythagos “emerge from war and exist for no other reason than war …. (t)he hero figure, whatever hero might mean in this context, is a personification of the hate and fear of an invasion, and the cruelty of those invading” (25). On his reading, the end of the novel resolves the cycle of violence: “it is a novel in which war is what shapes and drives everything, but it is a novel in which peace and reconciliation is the only possible outcome” (30). Yet the end of the conflict does not allow Steven, any more than Christian, the ‘back again’ of the fantasy quest: instead, he will spend ‘the long years to come’ in a nearby village of “Neolithic peoples,” waiting for Guiwenneth to return.

In “Time,” Kincaid links Mythago Wood’s temporality to Holdstock’s earlier science fiction novels, which explored the fluidity and irregularity of time: “Time is, in a sense, the only continuing character in Holdstock’s work, yet it is never consistent” (34). Kincaid notes that the Wood is “not just … a confusion of all time; it is actively antagonistic to time as it is measured outside the wood” (41): Harry’s watch breaks when he enters the Wood; a reverse Rip Van Winkle effect ages Christian by decades more than his brother. Even as Steven encounters a kind of historical pageant of people who suggest the prehistoric past, Saxon England, the Middle Ages and Civil Wars, time is shown to be “a psychological rather than an ontological reality, working its changes and being changed by the imagination, by the very human force of story” (37). Kincaid borrows Stefan Ekman’s coinage “mythotopes” to describe the different time-space zones associated with different mythagos, and some readers have used these to create speculative maps of the wood, but the zones are unfixed and permeable, and the figures associated with them can turn up in other places and in other times.⁷ Poignantly, Christian imagines that if he can traverse the heartwood, he might be able to recover the time he has lost and the damage that has been done to his body, but the novel doesn’t confirm this possibility; nor do we find out whether, as the father-monster promises, Guiwenneth eventually returns to Steven. Carefully gathering up scattered narrative threads, Kincaid traces out the brain-bending temporal paradox of Mythago Wood: the prehistoric people tell Steven stories of the earliest mythagos, but these stories reflect the specific manifestations of the avatars that have been shaped by his own family’s engagement with the Wood. So which came first? Holdstock refuses to answer.
In “Myth,” Kincaid connects the “science fantasy” aspects of Mythago Wood with the cultural politics of early-twentieth-century (pseudo-)sciences. George’s journals employ a metabolic vocabulary of energies, vibrations, ley matrices, and auras to be mapped and measured. Alfred Watkins (1855-1935), the ley-line hunter, visits to show George his maps of the invisible tracks connecting spiritual power sites.⁸ The device George and his Oxford research pal create to boost his mythago-projecting abilities is “a sort of electrical bridge which seems to fuse elements from each half of the brain” (MW 55), involving a “curious” mask and “electric gadgetry” (MW 81) that Steven describes as “paraphernalia out of Frankenstein” (MW 83). Through these allusions, George is “plug[ged] directly into the conservative network of interwar archaeologists and folklorists” who longed to recover a glamorous national deep past (53). But Kincaid emphasizes that far from re-creating an English Golden Age of chivalrous knights and Merry Men, Mythago Wood “is deliberately designed to counter the familiar nationalist story” by highlighting the brutality and violence of the past and the indifference of Nature (55): it’s cold, dark, and nasty in there.

What’s more, once you go in, you can never come out. Steven’s friend Harry returns to the chicken/egg question: “If we do become legends to the various historical peoples scattered throughout the realm … [w]ill we somehow have become a real part of history? Will the real world have distorted talks of Steven and myself, and our quest to avenge the Outsider’s abduction?” (MW 225). As Kincaid points out, there can never be an answer to Harry’s question, because none of the characters ever return to life outside the wood. The implications for questions of agency and ethical responsibility are dissolved, not resolved, in the hallucinatory efflorescence of the narrative: although Kincaid asserts that Steven’s decision to wait for his lover’s return, “to become a part of the story of the valley ‘where the girl came back through the fire’” (67), is an act of free will, it’s hard to see how this decision is ontologically or ethically distinct from any actions he has taken since entering the Wood.

Kincaid’s exploration of Mythago Wood’s radical paradoxes culminates with his salute to Donald Morse’s proposition that Ryhope Wood, like the planet of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Vaster than Empires” or our current nightmares about AI, is a self-aware agential entity—a “dream creature [that can] dream other creatures into being” (71).⁹ Turning the screw of indeterminacy to its extremest tension, Kincaid even suggests that in returning again and again to the stories of Mythago Wood, Holdstock as author was “as trapped … as George and Christian and Steven.” However, this “productive entrapment” (71) is what enables the series’ “startling intellectual examination of the very nature of story” (78). If after reading Holdstock via Kinkaid you are not convinced that a clutch of archetypes exists that all humans can recognize, at least it will mean that you will never see that grove of trees in your local park in quite the same way again.

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NOTES

1. Holdstock, Mythago Wood (Orb Edition, 1984), p. 27. Further page references are given in the text of the review.
2. Clute, John. Look at the Evidence: Essays & Reviews (Liverpool University Press, 1995), p. 111.
3. Kincaid, Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, p. 13. Further page references are given in the text of the review.
4. Holdstock’s science-fiction novel Where Time Winds Blow was published in 1981, the same year as the prize-winning novella “Mythago Wood,” which forms Part I of the novel Mythago Wood (1984).
5. This detail is one of the reasons Farah Mendelson classifies MW as an Intrusion Fantasy rather than a Portal Fantasy in her taxonomy of fantasy types: yes, the Wood is an entrance into a mystery zone, but the Wood rather than the humans controls what happens: “In the portal fantasy the protagonist retains the upper hand over the otherworld. … In this novel, all the power is with the wood. It reaches out, disrupts; when it does draw the characters in, it is for purposes of its own” (Rhetorics of Fantasy, Wesleyan UP, 2008, p. 154). While MW may seem to be “resolving into a portal fantasy in the last third” of the novel, even then Steven and Christian are never the heroes: “[t]he protagonists and the reader are nakedly at the mercy of the intrusion, not in notional command of the adventure” (p. 156).
6. As readers hear more about this attractive avatar with superb weapon skills, they may be reminded of Terry Pratchett’s parodies of 1980s sword-and-cape fantasy warrior women (Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan; Conina, daughter of Cohen the Barbarian, etc.). In Lavondyss: Journey to an Unknown Region (1988), the second in the Mythago Woods series, Holdstock imagines a female character encountering Ryhope Wood.
7. Ekman, Stefan. “Exploring the Habitats of Myths: the Spatiotemporal Structure of Ryhope Wood.” In The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock: Critical Essays on the Fiction (eds D. E. Morse & K. Matolcsy), McFarland, 2011, pp. 46-65.
8. Watkins was a lifelong resident of Herefordshire.
9. Morse, Donald E. “Introduction: Mythago Wood – ‘A Source of Visions and Adventure’” in The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock: Critical Essays on the Fiction (eds D. E. Morse and K. Matolcsy), McFarland, 2011, pp. 3-11.

Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook: I write about environmental ethics and early modern fictions exploring human / arboreal relations, and I teach courses on ecofictions and eighteenth-century literature in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. My article on Holdstock’s Lavondyss and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, “Alternative Parturitions: Plant-Thinking and Human-Arboreal Assemblages in Holdstock and Han,” appears in Plants in Science Fiction: Speculative Vegetation, eds. Katherine E. Bishop, David Higgins, and Jerry Määttä (University of Wales Press, 2020). I visit the Salish Sea area whenever I can.

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The pervasive crises of our current historical moment unfold across many scales. Think of the two most prominent global crises of recent years: climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. Both are difficult to understand and respond to, in part, because of their scalar complexity. On the one hand, they are global in scope, crossing national and ecological barriers to touch the lives of all humans (and many non-humans). On the other hand, these massive crises are driven by physical, chemical, and biological processes below the threshold of perception: the release of carbon molecules and other pollutants in the case of climate change, and the spread of viral microorganisms in the case of COVID-19. A new collection of scholarly essays—Life, Rescaled: The Biological Imagination in 21st-Century Literature and Performance, edited by Liliane Campos and Pierre-Louis Patoine—takes an expansive, multi-disciplinary, and multi-genre approach to the scalar dislocations of the present. Made up of contributions from an international cohort of European and North American scholars, the collection examines the complex interchanges between scientific knowledge and cultural production in the effort to represent contemporary human and nonhuman life across a range of aesthetic forms. The essays place mycology, ecology, epidemiology, neurology, demography, and geology in dialogue with novels, comics, and performances in order to grapple with the epistemological and ethical challenges of the Anthropocene. The climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic provide the collection’s organizing context; together, the essays inquire into the representational strategies we need in a rapidly changing world of many complex scales.

Life, Rescaled intervenes, broadly, in scholarly conversations about the relationship between scientific knowledge and literary representation. Previous science and literature scholarship has examined the rich interchanges between biology and literature in the Romantic and Victorian periods,¹ but Campos and Patoine’s collection extends these investigations to the contemporary moment. The editors note in their introduction that biology’s central narrative and imaginary tropes have shifted in recent decades; the evolutionary tree and the double-helix of DNA, which dominated the twentieth-century biological imagination, have been displaced by the “wood-wide web” of mycelial networks and the spiky COVID-19 molecule, to name a few prominent examples. What representational strategies, the contributors ask, have artists in a range of media developed to grapple with the new images and narratives furnished by recent science? However, Campos and Patoine caution us against the tendency to assume that influence flows only in one direction, from sciences to the arts. Drawing from N. Katherine Hayles, they encourage us to attend to the “cross-currents” that move between science and artistic practice. Rather than tracing how science influences art, the collection explores “interdiscursivity and the cross-fertilizing of imaginaries between contemporary artistic work, popularizations of the life sciences, and philosophy” (5). Culture responds to changes in science and science is shaped, in part, by cultural concerns.

 “Science fiction” is therefore not a central term in Life, Rescaled, although several of the essays analyze works with “speculative” elements. Derek Woods reads current representations of fungal life through Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014); Pieter Vermeulen examines the current “population unconscious” through Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014); and Rishi Goyal considers representations of empty pandemic cities through Ling Ma’s Severance (2018). The editors make it clear that the contributions do not privilege any particular genre; they do “not find one genre more suited to multi-scalar aesthetics than another. Rather than which genre, the key question is which forms may best attend to heterogeneous scales of life…and their disparate temporal scales” (21). Each essay attends to a particular interface between aesthetic form and biological scale. While some of the artworks under consideration speculate about future or alternative worlds, the collection’s unifying concern is faithful representation of the empirical world’s complexity. The works tend to be experimental, or to inhabit the limits and boundaries of established genres, as they grapple with the scalar conundrums of our crisis-ridden world.

The collection’s greatest strength is the range of geographies, genres, media, and scientific fields with which it engages. While no one reader will be riveted by every single essay, it has something to offer any scholar with even a passing interest in the environmental, medical, or scientific humanities. Life, Rescaled may be of the most interest to teachers because it gathers a wide range of texts, from speculative novels to popular-science comics and experimental performances. Collectively, the essays provide an illuminating cross-section of ecologically engaged contemporary cultural production in many genres and from many countries. The strongest essays—such as Woods’s analysis of fungi and Annihilation and Goyal’s exploration of pandemics through Severance—bring together pressing scientific problems and nuanced textual interpretations in ways that illuminate ongoing cultural conversations. The collection’s weaker entries, in contrast, can feel like catalogs of relevant artworks, such that analysis gets buried in summary. These essays may offer inspiration for a teacher constructing a syllabus, but they are thin on insight and interpretation. Most readers will probably find themselves hopping between the essays that interest them most, rather than reading the book from start to finish. Despite its few weak points, Life, Rescaled showcases the wide range of aesthetic responses to climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and recent scientific innovations. It will expand any reader’s range of reference.

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NOTES

1. See, for instance, Denise Gigante, Life: Organic Form and Romanticism and Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction.

Zak Breckenridge is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he teaches in the Thematic Option Honors Program. His dissertation project approaches the twentieth-century environmental movement through the history of science and the sociology of literature. His other research interests include documentary film, science fiction, and the history of materialist thought. His writing has previously appeared in The Common, Colloquium Magazine, and The Salt Lake Tribune.

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The Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon series sets out, as described by its editors, to rethink science fiction and challenge traditional “notions of the canon, so long associated with privilege, power, class, and hegemony” (v). In pursuit of these goals, the series posits two key questions in relation to the specific texts under consideration: “Why does this text matter to SFF? and “Why does (or should) this text matter to SFF readers, scholars, and fans” (v-vi). D. Harlan Wilson’s contribution to the series, a critical companion to Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956), skillfully answers these guiding questions through its focus upon Bester as a pivotal figure in the development of the New Wave and cyberpunk movements. As Wilson argues, Bester’s commitment to pushing science fiction beyond its pulp roots was fundamental to the development of the former subgenre while the particular novel in question acts as an early landmark of proto-cyberpunk fiction. In this way, Wilson’s critical companion emphasizes the radical impact of The Stars My Destination, which propelled the canon past the frequently childish inclinations of its earliest works and towards new terrain, including complex analyses of privilege, power, class, and hegemony.

Wilson’s critical companion centers upon the thesis that Bester’s novel “mapped new terrain in postwar SF” and that it “accomplishes what pre-1950s SF novels failed to do in terms of style, structure, and attitude” (17). It is divided into sections covering the author’s career and the novel’s historical context, intertextual relationships with earlier and later science fiction works, and the text’s coded commentary on class, gender, race, and religion. The first chapter focuses upon the inspiration and resulting legacy of Stars, provides a biography of Bester, illuminates his role as both a critical writer of SF and a harsh critic of its contributors, and underscores the recurring tropes of Bester’s fiction. After a synopsis of the novel in Wilson’s second chapter, chapter three explores the literary influences that shaped Bester’s writing style, which Wilson characterizes as dominated by literary tropes and allusions. It additionally considers how Bester’s fiction hints at the future of the genre. Focusing narrowly upon the intertextual parallels existing between the novel and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), chapter four considers these novels’ mutual interest in “charismatic monsters and meta-referentially point to the inherent mad scientism of Shelley’s and Bester’s authorship as well as narrative itself” (17). The most pivotal of Wilson’s contributions in this chapter is his analysis of Stars as a palimpsest under which lie multiple undertexts whose relationships to Bester’s novel are worthy of consideration, including, in addition to Shelley’s novel, the archetypal monomyth and H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) (70).

Moving past these intertextual considerations, Wilson focuses his fifth and sixth chapters upon the commentary Bester includes in the subtext of his novel upon identity markers and religious belief. “Architectures of Psyche, Power, and Patriarchy” considers Bester’s social views and his encoding of them in Stars. Analyzing specifically the novel’s treatments of gender, race, and class, Wilson complicates readings of the text as simply conservative or, on the other hand, radically progressive. Through a careful analysis of the future Bester imagines and the ways the novel’s protagonist, Gully Foyle, embodies both this society’s values and capability of evolving, Wilson introduces welcomed nuance to his analysis of the novel’s subtext. As Wilson outlines, his key argument in this chapter is that Bester “was more evolved than his contemporaries and made strides toward greater equality despite his own construction and entitlement as a white male author” (75). In this way, he presents a balanced critique of Bester as a patriarchal reflection of the culture within which he wrote and as a writer who at times radically subverted widely accepted, conservative perspectives on race, class, and gender.

In the final chapter of Wilson’s text, he considers the pervasive nature of religion within the encoded message of Bester’s novel. In one particularly insightful segment of this analysis, Wilson outlines the textual and extratextual implications of Bester’s encoded critiques of religion as they relate to language. As the title of the chapter, “Speaking in Gutter Tongues,” signals, Wilson illuminates an important connection binding language and religion in Stars. More specifically, he illuminates how dialect and other linguistic elements signal religious affiliation in this imagined society. The protagonist’s “lower-class gutter tongue,” for example, underscores his lack of anti-religious identity (101). But, as Wilson keenly observes, this connection between religion and language works simultaneously as a reflection of Bester’s extratextual desires and intentions as a science fiction writer. Specifically, Bester, Wilson contends, takes on the religious mantle of an exorcist, a mantle similarly taken on by Foyle in the novel. Both Bester and his protagonist aspire to positively reshape “their respective worlds—one from the violence of upper-class tyranny and prejudice, the other from the limitations of SF writers who fail to live up to the genre’s great potential” (101). According to Wilson, language and religion remain, therefore, entwined both within and immediately outside of the novel. This underscoring of Bester’s commentary connecting language and religion within the novel’s plot and Bester’s perceived role as a linguistic exorcist of sorts makes up a pivotal strength of Wilson’s critical companion.

Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination: A Critical Companion is overall a valuable critical tool for a wide audience. It is well-suited both for students seeking a broad guide to Bester’s novel and scholars in search of an in-depth introductory analysis of its key themes, tropes, and encoded messages. Moving beyond a simple overview of Stars, Wilson utilizes theoretically sound and sophisticated critical approaches to interrogate the novel’s significance and impact upon the science fiction genre. With its emphasis upon the ways Stars challenged science fiction’s trajectory and conservative political messaging, Wilson’s critical companion is a strong addition to Palgrave’s New Canon series.

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Michael Pitts is lecturer at the University of New York in Prague. His first monograph, Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man, was published by Lexington Books in 2021. His research interests are positioned at the intersection of gender theory, speculative fiction, and utopian studies.

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Scholarly, analytical works such as Gendered Defenders demonstrate that, despite opinions in some quarters (including the already tiresome Internet hot takes about being “so exhausted by all the comic book movies”), superheroes have significant cultural value. They produce emotional attachments among their readers and viewers, and they truly do mean something to people. For generations, media consumers have seen their own desires for heroism and goodness reflected in Superman, their own psychological darknesses and conflicts in Batman, their identities as social outcasts and misfits in the X-Men, their belief in love and justice triumphant and the power of a female warrior in Wonder Woman, their frustration with the foibles and troubles of everyday living in Spider-Man, their joy and pride in the heroic Black experience in Black Panther. Whatever their origins, Earthly or cosmic, superheroes are part of our shared human identity. Carr and Carstarphen quote comic writer Grant Morrison in their book’s introduction, noting that Morrison speculates “that the superhero (regardless of gender) holds significant psychic resonance in a world without an optimistic view of the future, providing the reader a surrogate ‘spiritual leadership’; the best superheroines, for all their supernatural exploits, are connected to universal human experiences” (4). One of those experiences is that of gender, and thus Gendered Defenders was brought into being to examine how the Marvel Cinematic Universe has dealt with this most fundamental of human conditions and identities. The fact that the MCU does so, and that its varying treatment of superheroines has produced high levels of both dizzying excitement and high dudgeon (much of the latter inspired by Internet trolls), suggests the ongoing relevance of superhero media to the lived experiences of people. As the editors note, “[p]opular culture has value and power because it can be a conduit through which an individual adapts and forms their own identity…as well as a means of finding commonality and relationships with others and metaphors that provide strength and catharsis in one’s own life” (5).

The MCU looms particularly large in this ongoing phenomenon because of its highly visible and entrenched cultural presence. The MCU is one of the grandest examples of what Henry Jenkins calls ‘transmedia storytelling,’ a form of media production that involves using multiple channels of adaptation (films, comic books, novels, cartoons, games, and other tie-in products) to tell the integrated story of an integrated fictional world across both overlapping and separate narratives. (The editors note that the MCU, of course, is more problematic than traditionally reinvented and reimagined worlds such as the Arthurian cycle, because it is a wholly corporate owned- and directed product geared towards market share and profits at least as much as towards telling new or reinterpreted stories.) How the MCU portrays female characters has significant cultural impact, and—in the book’s core conceit—the evolution of Marvel superheroines over time “mirrors the development, struggles, and triumphs of women in the real world” (7). The MCU does not stand apart from the greater movements of human society, but gives us a reimagined mythology through which to view their evolution. There is great importance in that, and Carr and Carstarphen, in bringing together scholarly essays of thoughtfulness and deep social consideration, demonstrate that superheroines are not mere cultural confections or vehicles for selling toys, but are windows through which we might view ourselves and our treatment of gender.

The book’s opening section, with three essays by the editors, sets the stage, presenting the overall thesis as well as necessary context for understanding how Marvel has portrayed women in its past, and a call to examine Marvel heroines through the lens of a trans/linear feminism (a conceptual model coined by Carstarphen that allows for female agency to pass beyond traditional constraints in progressive personal journeys, obviating the old style master linear narrative). With all these considerations in mind, the majority of the essays in the book involve examinations and critiques of specific Marvel heroines and their relationships to expressions and emanations of power. J. Richard Stevens and Anna C. Turner analyze Carol Danvers (Captain Marvel), the first MCU heroine to be the center of her own film; the essay notes Carol’s evolving image (and problematic portrayals at times) over the decades in comics and her reworking into a figure of positive feminism in the 2019 film (and the comic books beyond, as part of the MCU transmedia experience) in which Carol takes control of her own past and her own identity. The book’s final essay also concerns Carol, examining her character via feminist trauma theory and characterizing her film as a trauma narrative that carries her from trauma to recovery to empowerment. Kathleen M. Turner Ledgerwood looks at the character of Agent Peggy Carter (the first MCU heroine to lead a television show) through the analytical lens of ‘standpoint feminist theory,’ that is, the framework that examines society from the points of view of women (as a marginalized group) in their everyday worlds and the ways in which women socially construct those worlds – it’s a particularly relevant frame for looking at Peggy, a character we see navigating her way through the white male-dominated and intensely gender-divided workplaces of the 1940s and evolving to connect viewers to subsequent waves of feminist thought and action. Amanda K. Kehrberg studies the complicated figure of Jessica Jones and the ways in which Jessica visually and vocally subverts and refuses not only the traditional hero role but the traditional binary concept of gender, particularly through her use (or NON-use) of the superhero costume.

In her essay, Rachel Grant examines the character of Shuri, T’Challa’s sister and the leader of her native Wakanda’s scientific endeavors. Shuri is an active example of an Afrofuturist counternarrative that prioritizes the heroism of intelligence and future thinking and promotes anti-colonialist (very explicitly, in Shuri’s case—viewers of Black Panther in the theater will well recall the many excited responses by audience members to her use of the term “colonizer” when speaking to white CIA agent Ross) structures and viewpoints. Grant notes that Shuri “defies gender stereotypes of Black women” and is “a role model that empowers women to be smart and innovative in fields dominated by the patriarchy” (102). Maryanne A. Rhett deftly analyzes Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel) as a new type of cosmopolitan, even global, heroine, who embodies multiple and overlapping identities (woman, Muslim, teenager, feminist, daughter), none of which dominate her character but all of which define her in different ways. In an unusually constructed piece, Stephanie L. Sanders uses the character of police officer and cyborg Misty Knight to represent the possibilities for Black women to be change agents in dismantling unjust systems and presents Misty herself as a source of intersectionality “where gender, race, and power relations are hypervisible” (132).

Julia A. Davis and Robert Westerfelhaus look at the character of Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow), the first MCU heroine, her status as an “outsider” hero (as a Slav on a primarily American team of heroes and as a hero operating within a secret world of espionage) and her sometimes problematic depiction as a physically objectified figure. Mildred F. Perrault and Gregory P. Perrault examine Pepper Potts, her evolving role/increased presence in the MCU across a close reading of multiple examples of Marvel transmedia (films, animated TV, comics, video games), and how her gender and gender roles have been performed in these various media. And Carrielynn D. Reinhard presents a careful and complex analysis of the character Squirrel Girl (who has not yet appeared in an MCU film, though I remain hopeful) that centers on the various ways in which transmedia storytelling can affect and complicate the development and portrayal of a character. Squirrel Girl is a positive character, promoting dialogue over confrontation and friendly diplomacy over fighting, and who focuses on intelligence, friendship, and female empowerment. In doing so she embodies multiple iterations of feminism and the contradictions therein, but Reinhard suggests that the nature of her corporate transmedia existence allows her to reflect and express feminist values but never truly seek to subvert systems of power.

Gendered Defenders is a wonderfully varied collection of thought on a wonderfully varied collection of heroines, and it is a welcome addition to the body of scholarly study of superhero media. [I do admit that I was surprised not to see an essay on Wanda Maximoff, whose journey from Avengers: Age of Ultron through WandaVision, I think, would make for a fascinating examination of female trauma and power.] If it suffers at all, it is only because, of course, it must inevitably fall behind as the MCU marches on and characters continue to grow and change, and new ones to be introduced. It would be interesting to see how some of the writers might change their conclusions in light of new MCU developments: for example, Peggy Carter becoming an alternate Captain America, or Shuri becoming the new Black Panther. New series like Hawkeye (featuring Kate Bishop) or She-Hulk (with Jennifer Walters) have brought new iterations of superheroines to our attention and express new directions that Marvel is moving in with respect to its female heroes. A sequel to this volume—a Gendered Defenders 2­—would not only be thematically appropriate to studying a transmedia universe fueled by sequels but would provide new and welcome insights into the continuing evolution of the vitally significant cultural figure of the superheroine.

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Jeremy Brett is an Associate Librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, where he is both Processing Archivist and the Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection. He has also worked at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region, and the Wisconsin Historical Society. He received his MLS and his MA in History from the University of Maryland – College Park in 1999. His professional interests include science fiction, fan studies, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.

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            The eminent science fiction critic and long-time curator of the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy George Slusser died in 2014, leaving behind multiple versions of a manuscript about the history and development of science fiction. Gary Westfahl, Slusser’s former colleague at the University of California, Riverside, compiled and revised these materials into this posthumous volume, which, barring any major archival discoveries, marks Slusser’s final contribution to the field he dedicated his career to.

Like Adam Roberts’s The History of Science Fiction (2006) and Brian W. Aldiss and David Wingrove’s Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1973), this project aims not merely to define science fiction in a new way, but to locate the historical origins of the genre. After a brief introduction, the first chapter traces the emergence of science fiction, and, although Slusser does not go back as far as Roberts, who sees even Greek epics as a kind of proto-science fiction, both critics understand the Reformation as a key moment in the development of the genre.

Employing Isaac Asimov’s definition of science fiction as a “branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings” (“Social Science Fiction”), Slusser identifies a series of scientific revolutions that swept across Europe and the United States beginning in the 17th century, which would go on to shape key proto-science fiction texts. For Slusser, the story begins in France, where the anti-clerical rationalism of François Rabelais passes through Michel de Montaigne to René Descartes, whose Discourse on the Method (1637) represents the first of a series of scientific paradigm shifts. Slusser argues that this advancement had an impact on French writing, producing a unique form of fiction, first visible in Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (1670), with its fictional concepts of the “human condition” and the “thinking reed,” which Slusser identifies as “the first genuine works of science fiction” (25). From there, we move to Germany, where the paradigm shift brought about by Immanuel Kant’s influence, especially his “synthetic a priori,” influenced E.T.A. Hoffman’s “Der Sandmann” (1815). Interestingly, it is only after identifying these Continental origins that Slusser turns to British literature.

Unlike many English-language critics, Slusser sees British literature as reflecting the impact of Francis Bacon’s “new science” at a relatively late moment. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818), which is often cited as the first work of science fiction, is brushed aside for taking a posture that is “quite traditional in stigmatizing science” (39). Instead, Slusser identifies H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) as the first British work of fiction that shows science—in this case, the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859)—impacting human activity. The final paradigm shift occurs in the United States, stemming from the philosophical innovations of Ralph Waldo Emerson, although this is only arrived at toward the end of the text, after the key characteristics of science fiction have been investigated.

The middle chapters take up particular themes and markers of the genre. For Slusser, key attributes include the scientist as protagonist, a quest for intellectual liberty, seminal objects or inventions that play a key role in the narrative, and a story in some way concerned with humanity’s advancement towards a transcendent transhumanism, best exemplified by J.D. Bernal’s The World, the Flesh, the Devil: An Enquiry into the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929). As with Roberts, Slusser sees space travel as a key setting for science fictional narrative, although his treatment of this subject primarily serves to underline the difference between the Anglo and French science fiction traditions, the latter of which he sees as bound up with the Cartesian conception of the cogito; although French travelers board rocketships and submersibles, just like their British counterparts, more often than not their journeys are actually explorations of a mental space that is simply reflected in the res extensa.

Throughout these investigations, Slusser does not shy away from controversy, and a number of established theorists and traditions come in for a heaping of criticism. Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) can only “conjure the old specter of the human form grotesquely distorted, stillborn” (211), while China Miéville’s work is “a personal form of urban fantasy whose purpose, it seems, is to confound genre readers while delighting critics” (288). Marxism and Marxist theory are viewed in a skeptical light, and deconstructionism is frowned upon.

Of course, a critical lens can be also applied to Slusser’s text, and when it is, one begins to wonder about the meaning of “world literature,” a term that seems to define the manuscript even as it is never itself defined. A reader might be forgiven for observing that a series of national, European, science fiction traditions are interrogated, with minimal description of the significant interactions between them until the final chapters. In addition, some readers might echo the criticism of the original reviews of the manuscript, which Westfahl reports requested extensive revisions because the book “was devoting too much attention to authors and texts that were not really part of the genre of science fiction” (xi). Although Westfahl sees exactly this as Slusser’s innovation, some scholars may question the usefulness of giving so much attention to certain classics of European literature and philosophy—Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Aristotle, Balzac—in a study of science fiction.

However, on balance, even scholars who are not prepared to sign onto Slusser’s account of the history of science fiction are likely to find his efforts to understand the genre from a more international perspective to be worthwhile. Slusser’s thorough examination of non-Anglo traditions, especially French science fiction, will be edifying for those who are accustomed to thinking of science fiction as an exercise primarily conducted in English. Crucially, in the book’s conclusion, Slusser engages fruitfully with writing from India, China, Israel, East Germany, Romania, and other terrains of “Global SF” (286). Along with the aforementioned volumes by Roberts and Aldiss and Wingrove, Science Fiction: Toward a World Literature makes a valuable contribution to the critical understanding of science fiction’s origins and is a worthy capstone to a vaunted career.

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Michael Larson is a visiting assistant professor at Keio University. He completed his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and received a Fulbright Grant to research the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan, later writing a nonfiction account of the disaster When the Waves Came: Loss, Recovery, and the Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami (Chin Music Press 2020). His current research focuses on science fiction and utopian studies and has been published in Poetics Today and Utopian Studies. In 2020, he received a three-year Young Researcher Grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

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        At a time when disputes—whether political, cultural, or merely pedagogical—are growing over what literature should be available to children in pre-K through primary school, and the very idea of encouraging librarians, teachers (and parents) to read aloud from, teach with, or make available to children picture books and early readers that challenge or encourage interest in science (much less science fiction!), especially for girls and diverse readers, Emily Midkiff has undertaken an arduous effort to address this challenge. Her goals are straightforward: to identify categories of picture books and early readers that exemplify ‘quality’ sf; assess how widely sf is available and read by or to children in our schools; to show how young readers are ready for, and appreciate, what she seeks to identify as “quality primary” age sf; and to encourage writers, publishers, and acquisitions professionals in the value of the production and promotion of quality primary sf. (5-8) Wider availability of such texts will better prepare younger readers to transition to more complex sf texts when they reach and exceed the storied “golden age” of 12 so often referred to in superficial discussions of who is “ready for” the genre. (18)

In her introduction, Midkiff discusses the example of a publisher’s initial reluctance to have Jon Scieszka include “too much science” in his sf series that starts with book 1, Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Robot (2014). (3-4) She points out that the book’s text and detailed illustrations include “the sort of plausible explanations found in sf for adults.” (3) Usefully, her close reading of this text includes excerpts from the illustrations in this book (6) and examples of intertext references contained in the story that will ring true to adult readers and primary age children who are exposed to movies, television, and other cultural markers of sf themes. For example Frank is shown “reading a copy of Asimov’s I, Robot when Grampa Al asks to know what he is working on” (4).

Midkiff argues that “sf for preadolescent children… is often approached with the belief… that scientific extrapolation and speculation in fiction are beyond most children’s abilities or interests” (5). Her book argues in essence that this is not true, and she supports this assertion with three interdisciplinary case studies (Chapter 4) to show that primary sf does exist, much of it fits her definition of quality, is appreciated when available, can provoke lively reactions and discussions when presented to small groups of children, and deserves wider acceptance and promotion. Her argument is that the “dismissal of primary sf is fueled by largely ungrounded beliefs about children, science, and genre.” (5)  The case studies are a School Library circulation survey of books checked out in all fields, as coded by Midkiff from records submitted (105-117), which tends to show that primary sf while underrepresented in collections, is more likely to be checked out multiple times than other fiction; a survey of librarians and teachers, 59 of whom responded to the survey request concerning whether they recommended or made us of primary sf in class; (117-129) and a small group read-aloud exercise of several stories where she read to children with parental consent, recorded the event and analyzed the responses of the children to the texts and each other’s comments (130-151).

Chapter 1 of the book commences with a review of two related questions: “What is Children’s Literature?” (9-12) and “What is Science Fiction?”(12-16), followed by an integration of the two: “What is Primary Science Fiction?” (17-27), and a “Guide” to identifying primary sf (27-30). This is applied to “The Case of Robots” (30-35), with a close textual analysis of Rian Sias’s Zoe and Robot: Let’s Pretend (2011). Midkiff usefully compares claims, arguments and examples from Brian Aldiss,  John Clute, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Grace Dillon, A. Waller Hastings, and in particular Farah Mendlesohn’s The Intergalactic Playground (2009) to lay out the scholarly critical background for her investigation of her theme, the value of primary sf.

She condenses this chapter into a three-part test to determine whether primary sf can be said to be ‘quality’: “1. Is there a speculative ‘what if’ question or extrapolative ‘if this, then what?’ question to the story?  2. Does the ending imply that something has changed in the world or that new possibilities have opened due to the events of the story, however small? 3. Would the story’s plot, themes or lesson be different if you replaced the sf components of the story with something realistic or magical?” (30)

Chapter 2 addresses the  general question of how readers read and interpret science fiction generally, discusses the “processes and protocols of reading sf” (37-42), and applies them to the forms of early childhood literature such as board books, popup books, picturebooks, early readers and so forth. She applies the “reader response theory of reading first described by Louise Rosenblatt” to how children read sf  (37), and cites the work of Darko Suvin, Orson Scott Card, and David Hartwell to discuss how the “sf intertext includes far more than just books” and provides a cultural foundation to facilitate children understanding and appreciating the themes and stories of sf texts (38-39). Her investigations show that “widely consumed reboots of Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who” and more prepare young children to successfully read and relate to sf (39) As for all reading instruction, Midkiff notes that “high-quality primary sf offers support—-or ‘scaffolding’—for young readers, ensuring that sf is accessible to children of various skill levels and backgrounds,” citing the work of Jerome Bruner and Lev Vygotsky (42). She applies a close reading of Chris Gall’s There’s Nothing to Do on Mars (2008), showing how the pictures provide context and meaning that challenges the text, and how the book “pushes back against the idea that sf and children’s fiction have conflicting patterns, and the text/picture tension is critical to that message.” (50-51) As another example she cites David Wiesner’s picturebooks Flotsam (2006) and June 29, 1999 (1992) (51-53), the latter one of the books she used in her read-aloud case study to assess how children react to a text in real time (132-145).

Chapter 3 focuses on “Reading Representation,” addressing the various ways in which primary sf, and particularly early childhood sf, tends in recent decades to provide more representation of, and opportunity for self-recognition of themselves, in girls and diverse communities than in children’s literature generally. She cites Lisa Yaszek’s observation that sf has always been “naturally compatible with the project of Feminism” (70).  Midkiff notes the conservative complaints about the Hugo awards to N.K. Jemesin for her Broken Earth trilogy, which was perceived as somehow a threat to genre sf  (70), but argues that primary sf is “in the direst need of attention to diversity” (71). Using the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC), https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/ , as a resource, she shows the low percent of the 4035 children’s books of all sorts published in 2019 that feature Black/African, Asian, Latinx, Pacific Islanders, Arab, or Indigenous  characters. Female characters are also underrepresented. Her own research shows that “High-quality, diverse primary sf books already exist, but they are not getting nearly enough critical attention or support” (72), citing the 357 primary sf books she identified in her study (87). Appendix A identifies the 357 primary sf books from the 1920s to the 2010s to support her analysis (157-178). Pros and cons of several representative stories are discussed, including Deborah Underwood and Meg Hunt’s Interstellar Cinderella (2015) : “The mechanical engineering  aspect of the story is sidelined in favor of the fractured fairy tale” (74). In contrast, Ben Hatke’s Zita the Spacegirl (2010) is seen to “satisfy several girl-friendly aspects in conjunction with speculation” (75). She reprints several pages of illustrations from the book to illustrate her explanation (76-77). Other examples include A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel (2015), and Ryan Sias’s Zoe and Robot: Let’s Pretend! (2011)

Midkiff then discusses “Alternative Futurisms and Primary Science Fiction” (83-91), exploring the potential for more diverse primary sf, acknowledging a few positive representative examples, while acknowledging their limitations. She explains: “To examine the extent of diversity in these books, I coded them into two categories proposed by Lee Galda et.al. in Literature and the Child: painted faces and culturally rich.” The former refers to a story that offers “visual cues of diversity” which may not otherwise impact the story line, while culturally rich stories have “a nonmainstream culture or identity… integral to the story.” (87)  She argues it is not enough to have “painted faces” representing diverse characters in illustrations, the stories themselves should be culturally rich to enhance young readers of all backgrounds engagement with the text (87-88).  One positive if rare example given is Cathy Camper and Raul the Third’s graphic novel Lowriders in Space (2014), discussed in detail with reprinted illustrations. (89-93)  The only primary sf discussed in her data set that features a Native American character is Adam Rex’s hybrid novel The True Meaning of Smekday (2007) (97-100). There is a Pearson statistical analysis of the correlation of gender, diversity and sf quality in the books in Midkiff’s data set (91 and Appendix A) which shows “quality is slightly correlated with female characters and not reliably correlated with diversity” (91).  I appreciate the attempt here to provide statistical rigor to what is essentially an impossible task, and the effort here provides  a template for future scholarship in the field.

The book concludes with two Appendices providing documentation of her sources and evaluations. Appendix A describes and lists the 357 texts she “read and analyzed for this study” covering works from the 1920s to the present (157-178). Books included were limited in three ways: they had to meet the definition of sf she provides in Chapter 1; be significantly illustrated to meet her emphasis on early primary readers as the target of her research; and her decision that there could be no more than 3 books in the same series (157). Books were grouped as Picturebooks, Early Readers, Comic Books, Graphic Novels, or Hybrid Novels. Each was evaluated for quality (Yes/No: was  Speculation and/or Extrapolation encouraged by the text?); whether they had female primary characters; and whether they promoted diversity by either of the broad categories discussed in Chapter 3: “painted face,” “culturally rich,” or none (161). Appendix B (179-186) contains a list of suggested recommended quality sf texts in the age appropriate categories she identifies. The book concludes with end notes (187-190), works cited (191-199) and an index (201-206).

Having read aloud a great many board and picture books over 50 years, many of them fantasy or sf, to our four children and our grandchildren, and as the son of one librarian and being married to a children’s librarian/early childhood educator, I was initially inclined to doubt her hypothesis that primary sf is not widely available or promoted. I thought of earlier Jon Scieszka books such as The Time Warp Trio series, with its own t.v.series spin-off,  https://www.timewarptrio.com/, The Enormous Egg by Oliver Butterworth (1956), The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet (1954) by Eleanor Cameron, and the Danny Dunn series of adventures by Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams, all of which have useful illustrations, are aimed at younger readers, and address science fiction tropes, as a few examples not mentioned in her book. And then there are, in addition to school libraries, other means of exposing children to sf she might explore to expand her sense of the contemporary reach of primary sf, such as the Bruce Coville and other books many children are offered in Scholastic Books Club newsletters and school book fairs over many years. See: https://clubs.scholastic.com/home [Although censorship of their offerings is creeping into what schools in some states can now offer; see: https://www.npr.org/2023/10/17/1206219484/scholastic-book-fair-diversity-book-bans and https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/us/scholastic-book-fair-race-gender.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare ] The omission of some of these authors and potential resources suggests that there is more sf (quality or otherwise) available to younger children than Midkiff may realize. On the other hand, school and town libraries have limited space and budgets, and books get worn out and deaccessioned, so some of the books I’m familiar with, as well as those discussed by Midkiff, may not be readily available. We are agreed that there is a need for more willing and eager young readers, and that this can be supported by more quality primary sf being written and published. Midkiff’s book should be included in the libraries of schools of education, and considered by public and school librarians as they review their acquisition policies and make more invitations to authors to visit for book talks in the children’s room. It matters.

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Bruce Lindsley Rockwood, Emeritus Professor of Legal Studies at Bloomsburg University, Pennsylvania, is a long-time member of SFRA, having served as Vice President (2005-2006), and regularly writes reviews for SFRA Review from his retirement home in Midcoast Maine. He has taught and published on law, literature, climate change and science fiction, and attends SFRA and WorldCon with his wife Susan when possible (most recently in Montreal, Spokane, and the June 2021 virtual SFRA).

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Andrew M. Butler and Paul March-Russell, the editors of this new collection by leading scholars of Arthur C. Clarke, begin with a riposte to the still pervasive marginalization of genre work in literary studies and culture at large. In a 1998 article for The Village Voice, Jonathan Lethem, a supremely genre-savvy writer, famously offered a broadside in which he characterized Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama as “reactionary SF as artistically dire as it was comfortingly familiar” (qtd. in Butler and Russell 1). If Rendezvous with Rama had lost its Nebula Award to Thomas Pynchon’s also-nominated Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973,Lethem facetiously conjectures that, then, the New Wave experiments of the SF genre would have at last escaped their commercial straitjackets, and the SF genre as a basic category of fiction would have evaporated with a collective sigh of “good riddance.”

Butler and March-Russell bristle at Lethem’s tendentious dismissal of Clarke’s brand of hard-SF fiction, but, more substantively, they challenge the equally unquestioned conventional binary that seeks to oppose a virtuosic genre-hybridizing and postmodern writer such as Thomas Pynchon to a less flamboyant innovator like Arthur C. Clarke who wrote, at least superficially, from within genre constraints. Indeed, with this impressively informed and diverse collection of essays that began at a 2017 centenary conference memorializing Clarke’s birth in 1917, Butler and March-Russell make a convincing case that the broad range and intricate subtlety of Clarke’s deep veins of literary-SF ore have yet to be critically assayed, let alone sufficiently mined. In their introduction, Butler and March-Russell argue that it is impossible not to read Clarke as a “homo duplex, a perpetually two-sided and enigmatic figure” (7). Indeed, the deeper and more carefully a reader looks, the more the lucid simplicity of Clarke’s career concerns seems to be, on closer reflection, a mysterious bundle of contradictions.

One of the overlooked ways in which Pynchon and Clarke are surprisingly likeminded is their obsession with fictively overcoming the inexorable laws of physics, such as gravity or entropy. Noting that the Overlords in Childhood’s End (1953) both fly and manipulate gravity, Thore Bjørnvig traces Clarke’s literary pedigree to the long tradition of eschatological and apocalyptic writing that levitates the future of humanity upward to disruptive visions of radical progress. Jim Clarke then picks up this fundamental paradox of Clarke’s rational-fantastic fiction to explore Clarke’s debt to what Clarke himself called his own unique blend of “crypto-Buddhist” metaphysics. Likewise, in “Clarkaeology,” Patrick Parrinder argues that even though Clarke’s fiction seems to be “strikingly forward-looking” (35), it also evinces a powerful sense of “belatedness,” betraying a keen interest in archeological theories about the diffusion of cultures, especially in the fascination with megaliths and obelisks.

Developing this critical analysis of Clarke’s unique twists on future histories, co-editor Paul March-Russell, in his own contribution to the collection, performs a close reading of The City and the Stars (1956) to argue that Lee Edelman’s notion of queer futurity can help readers understand how Clarke subtly subverts the common assumption that this prototypically hard-SF writer implicitly champions technological and imperial (galactic) progress. Similarly, connecting Clarke to Robert Heinlein’s movie tie-in Destination Moon (1950), the Russian SF writer Pavel Klushantsev, and the British SF writer E.C. Tubb, Andy Sawyer’s chapter argues that Clarke avoids straightforward propagandizing for Cold War ideology. Sawyer, though, cautions that Clarke wrote for an audience composed largely of technocrats and fans, and Clarke therefore soberly appeals to the power of scientific explanations and regularly evokes the sublimity of the cosmos, even if he also undercuts these semi-heroic gestures.       

   Another chapter that concerns itself with excavating the queerness in Clarke’s oeuvre would be Mike Stack’s “Clarke Dare Speak Not Its Name,” which explores the futuristic normative bisexuality of Imperial Earth (1975) against the illuminating historical backdrop of the partial decriminalization of homosexuality in the UK. In an essay that is equally attentive to textual details, co-editor Andrew Butler, drawing on theories of Freud, Heidegger, Haraway, and Derrida, explicates Clarke’s representations of tools in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and 2010: Odyssey Two (1982)as not only empowering prosthetic enhancements but also as unsettling posthuman transformations. With an emphasis on Clarke’s uncertain mixture of skeptical deflation and heady enthusiasm entirely in keeping with this nuanced volume, Helen M. Rozwadowski discusses Clarke’s writings and life of active undersea diving to show how Clarke probes the limits the frontier analogy for both sea and space.

This collection also incisively focuses on Clarke’s legacy with one chapter by Lyu Guangzhao on Clarke’s influence on Liu Cixin and contemporary Chinese SF, and one chapter by Joseph S. Norman on Clarke’s influence on Iain M. Banks and New Space Opera. Nick Hubble’s final chapter on the history of the Clarke Award and how the award has become more controversially unpredictable and less narrowly restrictive in its selective criteria over the years suggests the more or less consensus view today, in China Mieville’s clever pronouncement, that “any sufficiently advanced science fiction is indistinguishable from literature” (qtd. in Hubble 236). This chapter is a fitting conclusion to the volume as it revisits the dismantling of the problematic binary between SF and mimetic literature that the other important contributions to Clarke scholarship contained in this collection also consistently upend. This wide-ranging, insightful, and often scrupulously evenhanded collection would serve equally well SF novitiates, veteran Clarke scholars, and those interested more broadly in the contested boundaries between genre and mainstream fiction.            

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Jerome Winter is an SF scholar who studies literary space opera, citizen science, and pedagogy. His most recent published book is a critical introduction to the Mass Effect videogame series as an innovative iteration of space-opera narrative.   

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Many of us who read and write for this publication probably have the following in common: science fiction (and related genres) helps us think through abstract ideas, including literary theory. And I’d bet that many of us also share another common experience: we learned those literary theories from instructors who were themselves not familiar with science fiction, definitely not as a field of scholarship and maybe not even as fans. Kara Kennedy’s most recent book, Frank Herbert’s Dune: A Critical Companion, is the kind of book we needed, and I’m glad that now science fiction students and scholars will have access to this resource. 

This companion was published as part of the relatively new series Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, edited by Sean Guynes and Karen Omry. The series’ goal is that “the books will provide an understanding of how students, readers, and scholars can think dynamically about a given text.” Given the combination of Dune’s reputation in science fiction history, broad disciplinary appeal, and allure for teen and young adult readers, offering this kind of companion text to the novel seems particularly apt.

What immediately stands out about the book is its accessibility. The writing style and language choices are straightforward and jargon-free: easily understood by an undergraduate reader, or even advanced high school students. Although it provides a comprehensive overview of the novel’s themes, the book is short, less than 100 pages if you don’t count the bibliography and index, making it less daunting for readers as well as more likely that they will take in the breadth of information covered. To facilitate that brevity and clarity, the book covers only the 1965 novel Dune, so potential readers do not feel as if they need to have read and watched a whole franchise. In addition, there are six original color illustrations by Arthur Wheelan, which lend a delightful whimsy to a discussion of a text that is often taken very seriously. 

The structure of the book is also audience centered: it is divided into seven sections of about fifteen pages in length. Each section provides an overview of a related group of themes of the novel and begins with an abstract and list of keywords. All of this would allow a novice scholar or lay-reader to easily read the whole text or find what might be useful to help them engage with the novel. Topics covered include: historical and biographical context, political and religious institutions, ecology and environmentalism, and women’s agency. Two of the middle chapters stand out as offering attention to aspects of the novel that are under-theorized and misunderstood, respectively. Chapter Four analyzes the novel’s attention to mind and consciousness, dramatized through access to hyperaware characters’ interiority, in a world that, without computers, relies on heightened human consciousness. Chapter Five explores the protagonist Paul Atreides’s complicated relationship to the heroic archetype and traditional masculinity. Kennedy explains that Paul’s limitations and failures are part of Herbert’s critique of charismatic leaders. This chapter is especially important for readers who have not continued with the series to understand one of Dune’s central messages. The final chapter suggests avenues for future scholarship and exploration including translation studies, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial theory: it’s a call for future readers and scholars to create a robust body of knowledge that reflects the complexities and depth of the novel. At the end of the book is an extensive bibliography valuable for any Dune scholars, containing all significant works published on Dune up through 2022, and including several listed as forthcoming that were published after this book went to print.

If the book has a unifying claim, it’s that Dune played a significant role in the science fiction genre’s shift from stories driven by technology to a focus on people and the institutions they create. This is a result of the complexity of Herbert’s world-building, which is unpacked through the seven chapters. Ultimately, the book highlights the continued relevance of Dune’s themes and world-building to current life.

Given the book’s accessibility and its work to overview, rather than make an argument about, Dune, it’s ideal for undergraduate and graduate students, and advanced high school students, preparing to work on the novel for the first time: particularly for students working with the novel outside of a science fiction studies class. However, the overview could be useful to experienced readers and scholars looking to consider the many facets of the novel and possible directions scholarship might take. Teachers getting ready to teach Dune could find it valuable both as a preparatory and a secondary assigned source.

Kara Kennedy’s Frank Herbert’s Dune: A Critical Companion is part of an exciting larger trend in Dune scholarship which likely gained momentum from the 2021 Villeneuve film adaptation. This includes Kennedy’s previous book Women’s Agency in the Dune Universe in 2021; the first edited collection of academic work on Dune, Discovering Dune, in 2022; and a second Dune and Philosophy, also out in 2022. And we can expect another round of publications with Villeneuve’s Dune: Part 2 scheduled for release in November 2023 as the movies bring more attention to the source material. Given this revival, Kennedy’s Critical Companion will fill an important role in bringing new readers and scholars into the conversation. While the choice to focus only on the 1965 novel is an asset, I hope we will eventually see a critical companion volume like this for the franchise, potentially including the screen adaptations.

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Leigha High McReynolds, PhD is currently an Assistant Clinical Professor for the University Honors Program at the University of Maryland, College Park where she teaches classes on genetics and disability in science fiction. Most recently, she published a chapter on eugenics in Dune in Discovering Dune (McFarland 2022). You can also read her work at LARB, Ancillary Review of Books, and Tor.com. She offers classes on speculative fiction for the local D.C. bookstore, Politics and Prose and is a regular presenter at WorldCon. You can find her on LinkedIn and Twitter @LeighaMcR.

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An analysis or examination of the 2018 Marvel Cinematic Universe film Black Panther is a difficult proposition, since Black Panther is not simply another film: as Terence McSweeney tells us in the very subtitle of his study, it is an ongoing popular phenomenon that has touched the lives and hearts of millions of moviegoers. McSweeney opens his text with a quote from Carvell Wallace of The New York Times, in which Wallace states, “Black Panther is a defining moment for Black America” (3). That is no small thing for any cultural production, and a great deal of weight for a single film to bear. [It will be interesting to watch what happens now that the film’s sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, has been released, sans the sadly late Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa, to see whether the BP franchise can sustain the first film’s level of personal and societal impact.]

However, as McSweeney makes clear, Wallace’s comment is more than justified, not just by the countless numbers of ecstatic and joyful comments from Africans and people of the African diaspora all around the world, nor by the fact that a massive cinematic franchise/cultural touchstone finally centered a film on a Black superhero, but by the complex societal layerings that constitute the film. As McSweeney states, “[t]his book places Black Panther alongside these texts” [other seminal films that have had a significant impact on the ways in which viewers react and respond to culture] “despite the fact that it is just a superhero film, proposing it should be considered first and foremost as a richly cultural artifact in ways similar to them, each of which have resonated with audiences and found themselves both embedded into and impacted on cultural discourse” (italics in original, 21). In a world in which superhero-centered media is (still!) frequently regarded as somehow less compared to other film genres, or as not “real” cinema (most prominently and infamously, perhaps, suggested by film legend Martin Scorsese), McSweeney makes a powerful case that Black Panther does not transcend superhero films as much as demonstrate those films’ capacity—given the proper combination of script, director, actors, and cultural considerations—to be sources of significant psychological and cultural resonance. Just as importantly, they may become sites in which viewers, especially those neglected or misrepresented in the past by studios, can see themselves, their cultures, and their humanity represented accurately and on center stage. This new concentration on diverse representation of people has accelerated in the MCU in recent years, as Marvel Studios has been giving more prominence to female characters (Captain Marvel, Black Widow, WandaVision, She-Hulk), Muslims (Ms. Marvel), Native Americans (Echo in Hawkeye), Asians and Asian-Americans (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) and LGBT characters (The Eternals), for example. However, arguably none of these efforts have had the same emotional resonance as Black Panther, and part of McSweeney’s valuable study involves identifying the singular nature of BP in relation to American, African American, and African cultures. In the process, he also provides a well-constructed and thoughtful example of the scholarly value of analyzing a popular cultural text, especially one demonstrated to have lasting and powerful cultural impact.

One of the striking features of McSweeney’s study is its structure. He rarely repeats himself or describes the film in a recursive fashion, returning to the same scene or scenes again and again. Instead, he manages the admirable feat of detailing several important themes while proceeding in a more-or-less straight fashion from the beginning of the movie to its conclusion. It’s a refreshing method of writing a critical text that mirrors filmic chronology and, I think, lets insight build upon insight until the work’s conclusion, where the totality of the critical observations really makes itself felt.

McSweeney tackles a number of facets of BP’s production and influence that taken together demonstrate with convincing arguments the cultural significance of the film. The study’s first chapter explores the nature of Wakanda, placing BP firmly in the aesthetic and narrative traditions of Afrofuturism and African Futurism and showing how the film’s creators and designers carefully (although some might argue superficially) work to present Wakanda as a diverse and earnest exploration of various African cultures and practices. (I appreciate also McSweeney’s note that Wakanda is a powerful rebuke to white historians of the past who decried Africa as a place without history or civilization. One of the reasons for Black Panther’s emotional resonance has been its visual expression of a powerful and technologically advanced African nation, with a proud history and lively culture.) A second chapter looks at what might be an overlooked aspect of the film, namely its interaction with MCU and real-world geopolitics; again, he notes that Wakanda occupies a unique place in movie history. Black Panther “is a film that centralizes African culture, traditions, and characters in a way that no large-scale American film about the continent has ever done. Wakanda is a paradoxical construct in many ways: it is fictional, but it has real borders and relationships with other actual countries; it is not real, but its culture, architecture, and style are drawn from authentic African nations; and, finally, it is an imaginary creation, but this did not prevent it from possessing a tangible and affective symbolic power when the film was released in February 2018” (57). But in all the kudos for the film’s groundbreaking nature, McSweeney takes care to point out the problematic features of the film, many of which reflect its American origins—these include the positive portrayal of CIA officer Everett Ross (Martin Freeman), a jarring character choice considering the real-life CIA’s covert and undemocratic interference in the affairs of African nations. (One of the book’s most thought-provoking observations, something I recall noticing when I originally saw the film, was that the movie makes the interesting choice to make a white American intelligence operative one of the film heroes while making an African American (N’Jadaka, aka “Killmonger” [Michael B. Jordan]) whose stated desire is to empower Black people everywhere the ruthless villain. Black Panther is an interestingly layered movie from a racial point of view, and these sorts of dramatic decisions make the championing of the film more compellingly complex.McSweeney tackles a number of facets of BP’s production and influence that taken together demonstrate with convincing arguments the cultural significance of the film.

McSweeney devotes an entire chapter to N’Jadaka (and I note his decision to use the character’s given Wakandan name as a general rule, rather than referring to him as Killmonger, which is at once N’Jadaka’s nickname given him by his fellow US Army warriors and the name by which the character is called in countless reverent memes), seeking to analyze the fascination that much of the filmgoing audience has had with him. N’Jadaka is one of the most compelling and developed villains in the MCU, which accounts for much of his popularity. Betrayed as a young boy by his uncle T’Chaka (then the king of Wakanda), his story arc throughout the film is one of bitterness and revenge against the Wakandan royal family, but he is also driven by the desire to break Wakanda out of its self-isolation and take the lead in supporting Black people everywhere. (Is this policy ultimately a selfish, self-benefiting one, that ignores Wakandan responsibility to fellow Black people? It’s a question that the film leaves open to discussion, though it ultimately comes down on the side of increased Wakandan engagement as T’Challa appears before the United Nation to pronounce his nation’s arrival on the world stage.) McSweeney ably examines N’Jadaka’s contradictions (his attacks on colonizers while himself having the mentality of one, for example). At the same time, though, he points out the problematic point of Black Panther that “[i]n a genre that revels in violent altercations – indeed, one founded with violence as righteous and just – not only is Black Panther unable to endorse violence as emancipation for oppressed people all over the globe but it portrays the two men who would advocate it as villains, showing one to be in league with a terrorist like [Ulysses] Klaue and the other a sociopath that targets women on numerous occasions and will later advocate killing children” (113). The film’s relationship to “unacceptable” Black radicalism makes its image as a progressive film a bit muddier; this is not necessarily a criticism. In fact, these kinds of contradictions that McSweeney discusses in the book make Black Panther less a collection of flaws than a multidimensional production subject to numerous and equally valid reinterpretations. As McSweeney puts it, “[w]hat is clear is that Black Panther came to mean fundamentally paradoxical things to different individuals and groups, which, for some, might be regarded as evidence of its vacancy, but for others, of its fecundity” (177). The exploration of those opposing views and varying intensities of popular reception makes McSweeney’s very readable study particularly useful for film and popular culture scholars.

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Jeremy Brett is an Associate Librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, where he is the Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection as well as Interim Curator of the Women’s & Gender Studies and Area Studies Collections. He has also worked at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region, and the Wisconsin Historical Society. He received his MLS and his MA in History from the University of Maryland – College Park in 1999. His professional interests include science fiction, fan studies, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.