Category: Nonfiction Reviews

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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.

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Rox Samer’s Lesbian Potentiality & Feminist Media in the 1970s opens a window in time. A mix of literary, cultural, and material history gives this book a uniquely solid structure—reading it, I felt as though I could write a letter to Joanna Russ, and she would answer. I imagined James Tiptree, Jr./Alice B. Sheldon moving between typewriters and crafting a gendered persona beyond the narrow categories of male and female. These impulses stay with me, months after a first read. Lesbian Potentiality vibrates with energy, reminding us that the feminist passion of the past is not lost—but it is being recalibrated.

This ability to draw together diverse histories rests in Samer’s construction of “lesbian potentiality,” or the way the lesbian in the 1970s signaled “the potential that gendered and sexual life could and would someday be substantially different, that heteropatriarchy may topple, and that women would be the ones to topple it” (4). This potentiality, Samer argues, gives us a way to draw critical tools from a “too-close past, the 1970s and its liberation movements [that] are not queer enough to get us to the queerness that is not yet here” (8). The lesbian, then, became a symbol for a reconstructed future, in which women could move beyond definition in male terms, and restriction by male edicts. In an era of theory that attempts to transcend these gendered categories, Samer’s construction makes such a symbol relevant, while acknowledging that for some, it has lost some of its applicability and weight.

Samer brings many threads of “lesbian potentiality” into conversation in their expansive chapters. The first examines the national women’s film circuit, which allowed feminist media workers in the 1970s to build connections amongst themselves, to “meet the media-making desires of their local feminist communities,” and to produce activist works covering vast ideological ground (40). Samer discusses the deconstructionist methods of these creators, who sought to “demystify” the male-dominated industry and form (42). This flows seamlessly into the next chapter, which focuses on the role of documentary in women’s prison activism; this consciousness-raising (CR) action “refused prison’s demands for gender-conforming passivity” by demanding freedom for imprisoned women and foregrounded an intersectional feminism that “contends that freedom for Black women would mean freedom for all” (92, 93). Chapter 3 moves to a similarly collaborative, but less inclusive form of CR: the explosion of feminist influence in science fiction and the creation of a “counterpublic” in feminist SF fandom which “has not survived new generations but adapted with them”—a vital element that Samer tracks specifically through the ways in which the feminist science fiction convention (Wiscon) has expanded since its founding (140, 178). Lastly, their fourth and final chapter takes another look at the complex and frankly titillating history of Tip/Alli, or James Tiptree, Jr./Alice B. Sheldon, the SF author who famously wrote with a male pseudonym, and was “outed” as a woman, to much general/generic astonishment. Samer seeks to expand our understanding of how the author’s gendered self-perception slips easy categorization and contemporary terminology, making Tip/Alli’s narrative a fitting last chapter in a book that searches for more gender-inclusive tools to examine a moment characterized by identity-based organizing.

Despite the varied topics, Samer writes from an inside view—but not in the traditionally academic, separatist voice; Samer’s narrative emerges from the archive, from a personal investment in SF fandom, and from the establishment and evolution of institutions surrounding that fandom, like Wiscon and the Otherwise Awards. Their connection to their subject and their ability to draw together manifold elements into a cohesive study reveal a powerful investment into the materials and communities they describe. Scholars interested in discovering how to bridge the often wide gap between research and praxis, academia and activism, will find conceptual models in Samer’s text.

Lastly, Samer’s work is, above all, accessible and attractive to a broader audience. This book was not written for a select few; it is a celebration of a specific and fruitful era of lesbian potentiality, and a cautionary look at the dangers of clinging too tightly to a specific mode in an evolving cultural framework. Their writing is direct and clear, making complex concepts easy to parse. Samer’s work is some of the most accessible, refreshing, and pressing scholarship I’ve ever read. As Samer states, “potentiality, no longer lesbian but still oriented toward freedom, regenerates” (215). Their book is a call both to remember the strength and passion of a feminist, lesbian past, and to work toward an expanding, promising, and radical future in activism—toward a more open gendered future for all.

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

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Despite claims from some parts of the fandom that Star Wars should not be “political,” decades of scholarship have shown that George Lucas used Star Wars to comment on political controversies, from the Vietnam War to the Patriot Act. However, most scholarship focuses on the Star Wars films, overlooking the hundreds of novels, comics, games, and other stories through which fans engage with the franchise. Chris Kempshall’s The History and Politics of Star Wars is the first work to examine historical parallels and political themes across the entire Star Wars franchise, including Expanded Universe (EU) tie-in materials and recent TV shows on Disney+. This scope allows Kempshall to deliver fresh insights about Star Wars and politics, even to readers familiar with the existing literature. Indeed, the speed and relatively low cost of publishing makes tie-in novels an important vehicle for the franchise to engage with new political developments in a timely manner.

The first chapter of The History and Politics of Star Wars focuses on how depictions of the Empire have evolved since the Original Trilogy (1977-83), which borrowed heavily from Nazi iconography. During the 1990s, Star Wars novels began to reimagine the Empire as a flailing superpower like post-Soviet Russia with weapons of mass destruction and sometimes allied with the New Republic/United States. Some authors even created sympathetic Imperial characters who had honorable reasons for siding with the Empire. After Disney reset the canon in 2014, the Star Wars franchise returned to depicting Imperials as space Nazis with little moral ambiguity.

By contrast, Chapter 2 argues that the franchise’s pessimism about democracy has remained consistent across Star Wars media. Although Obi-Wan Kenobi described the Old Republic as a “more civilized age,” the Prequel Trilogy (1999-2005) revealed that the Senate suffered gridlock and corruption long before Palpatine seized power. Democracy fared no better after the Rebellion won. In tie-in novels published during the 1990s, the New Republic’s weak government was constantly torn by sectarian conflict, perhaps reflecting fears that the collapse of communism would lead to instability. During the Disney era, tie-in materials for the Sequel Trilogy (2015-19) continued to depict the New Republic as ineffectual, mostly because—in another echo of World War II—it refused to take the threat of fascism seriously.

Chapter 3 explores how the Star Wars franchise incorporates popular understandings—often based on Hollywood movies—of real-world warfare into its storytelling. Kempshall—a historian of World War I—notes that these popular understandings sometimes diverge from the reality. For example, in romanticizing the Vietnam War as a struggle between a technological superpower and a noble underdog, Lucas overlooked the importance of political ideology, perhaps explaining why the Rebellion lacked a clear vision for political and social change. Star Wars usually sanitizes warfare, but Kempshall points out that newer tie-in novels, such as Alphabet Squadron (2019), have begun to depict the personal and psychological costs of war.

Next, Chapter 4 explores the tensions between the Jedi adherence to the Force and their allegiance to the Senate. Kempshall compares Qui-Gon Jinn’s reluctance to overstep the Republic’s jurisdiction to free slaves in The Phantom Menace (1999) with the United Nations’ failure to stop genocide in Srebrenica. Just as popular culture became more morally ambiguous after the 9/11 attacks, the Jedi of The Clone Wars increasingly used unethical means—including torture—to stop their enemies. Kempshall suggests that the key difference between Jedi—and, by implication, America—and their adversaries is that the they took no pleasure from such harsh methods. He also points out the disturbing lack of accountability Jedi faced for their recklessness, or even falling to the Dark Side.

Finally, Chapter 5 addresses ethnic and gender representation in Star Wars media. Kempshall’s approach is more nuanced than most scholarship on this topic. He carefully weighs allegations that Jar Jar Binks and other Prequel characters embodied racist stereotypes, but then explains why some fans and scholars have defended those characters. This chapter also explores the franchise’s treatment of alien cultures and droid rights. More so than in the other chapters, Chapter 5 discusses fan reception of and engagement with Star Wars, concluding with the backlash to diverse representation in the Sequel Trilogy.

Kempshall wisely avoids debates about the “accuracy” of the franchise’s politics compared to real-world history, recognizing that Star Wars is more an exercise in mythmaking than in detailed world-building. Instead, he uses history as a lens through which to examine the political ideas, themes, and tensions within the Star Wars franchise. In addition, the book does not try to prove—as Harry Potter and the Millennials (2013) did—that Star Wars shaped the political views of its fans. As such, The History and Politics of Star Wars is best suited for scholars already interested in Star Wars and who want to better understand its political content, rather than readers skeptical of the franchise’s political relevance.

Just weeks after the publication of The History and Politics of Star Wars, Disney+ released the live-action TV show Andor (2022-), which both complicates and confirms Kempshall’s analysis about the Empire. One of the actors in the show explicitly compared the Imperial crackdown to the erosion of freedoms under rightwing populism.[1] To some extent, this is a central thesis of the book: Star Wars continually responds to and engages with new political developments. No matter what stories Star Wars tells next, Kempshall’s book will be an important starting point for years to come for future research into the historical influences and political themes of the franchise.

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NOTES

[1] Ben Travis, “Andor Is Star Wars’ ‘Scurrilous Take On The Trumpian World,’ Says Fiona Shaw – Exclusive Image,” Empire (August 2, 2022), https://www.empireonline.com/tv/news/andor-star-wars-take-trumpian-world-fiona-shaw-exclusive/.

Dominic J. Nardi, PhD, is a political scientist who has worked as a research analyst on human rights in Southeast Asia and China. He coedited The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV (Palgrave) and Discovering Dune (McFarland). His paper about political institutions in Lord of the Rings won a Mythopoeic Society award for best student paper in 2014 and was published in Mythlore. In addition, he has written about ethnic identity in Blade Runner 2049 and international relations in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

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The most recent crises of the capitalocene need little restatement. We are living through the global aftermath of COVID-19 and its uneven violence; sieges on democracy in the US (January 6th, the overturn of Roe vs. Wade, shooting and police brutality) and the UK (strikes and the absolute disintegration of social fabric in the UK with a government incapable of leading the country); and the Russia-Ukraine war and global supply chain disruptions, most accurately reflected in energy systems (both food and fuel).

Suvin’s warning, in his latest book, against this “new beast slouching toward Bethlehem: Global Capitalism without a Human Face” (101), then, takes on a profound urgency. The violent and uneven unfolding of the capitalist-climate crisis gives credence to the ultimatum that animates the collection: “Socialism or barbarism” (40). “Utopia or bust” (chapter 23). “There is no alternative” (343).

More in-depth arguments about the mechanism of sf and sf texts/authors take up a relatively slight percentage of the collection, with many of the same longstanding arguments reflected since Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (MOSF): the false value of popular fantasy (chapter 2), a rejection of Orwell (chapter 22), the esteem of Ursula K. le Guin’s fiction (chapter 11), the cultural force of science and Darwinism (chapter 14), as well as militarist sf (Chapter 9). While the chapters are presented and numbered in chronological order, Suvin groups them into 4 categories: (1) narratology and epistemology, (2) the political context and prospects or potentialities of SF, Utopia/nism and Fantasy, (3) extensive probes in and for these two last years, and (4) short incidentals or paralipomena.

As a whole, Suvin’s intellectual meditations on the role of sf and criticism today in this book are more condensed, arguably more accessible, but no less powerful. The collection takes stock of our current situation and the dialectical relationship that sf has with this socio-historical reality. The two key questions Suvin asks are, “Where are we?” (290) and “What are we doing wrong?” (294).

The answer to the first centers on the deluge, focused most clearly in the last two chapters of the collection, in which Suvin tackles the crises of the capitalocene and COVID-19 pandemic. The flood has become an increasingly resonant late-capitalist metaphor, surfacing in the most incisive critiques of the climate-capitalist crisis (Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine [2007], Junot Diaz’s post-Haitian Earthquake “Apocalypse” [2010], and again in Philip Wegner’s preface to Defined by a Hollow, “Emerging from the Flood in Which We Are Sinking: Or, Reading with Darko Suvin (Again)” [2010]). Suvin likewise describes the capitalocene as an “overwhelming antiutopian tsunami we are drowning in, swimming desperately each and every moment to take hold of a bit of sustaining jetsam and flotsam or even to come within sight of an island” (290). The two foci he identifies within the capitalocene, “war and ecocide” (291), are particularly striking in a book published a month before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Suvin emphasises, however, that the crisis of our time is also a cultural one: the global culture industry has been inundated with works which present visions of pseudo- or antiutopia. He writes that “one of the greatest tricks that global late capitalism ever pulled is to cloak its own exploitative practices in the guise of utopia” (5). The flood of supposedly utopian books, films and TV series is instead characterised by nihilism, escapism, or naive optimism in capitalist technoscience. This deluge represents a withering of our utopian imagination, signalled by an inability to imagine the transition to a radically different future. The book is concerned, then, with the urgent task of combating antiutopian forces within world-capitalist ideology and mass culture industries.

In answering the second question, “What are we doing wrong?” Suvin provides a twofold response. Foremost, he returns to the inherently utopian impulse of sf’s formal mechanism. He is one of the most prolific dialectical, Marxist, historicist critics dealing with sf and Utopia, and his establishment of the inseparability of the two, calling the latter the “sociopolitical subgenre of science fiction” (76) in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (MOSF), has been widely affirmed by scholars including Fredric Jameson, Philip Wegner, and Tom Moylan.

However, instead of unfolding traditionally academic, detailed arguments around sf as a socio-historical literary genre, the book consists of an assemblage of sources that offer brief but powerful summaries of what sf does. Indeed, the familiar concepts of cognition, estrangement and the novum do not, in this collection, receive the same depth of treatment as they do in Suvin’s earlier writings. In MOSF Suvin asserted the relevance and connection that the form of sf has with the reader’s own socio-historical reality. The great detail of his argument was necessary to the end of claiming a space for literary criticism in a discourse that had up till then (the 1970s) treated utopia as a political program.

In Disputing, however, these concepts receive little exposition, mentioned only briefly in his treatment of other themes and their political relevances in the 21st century (see chapter 9 on militarism, 128) or summarised in shorter discussions (see chapter 5 library questionnaire response, 91). These engagements with sf texts are situated within each piece amongst wider reflections around global politics or musings of a more personal note.

Suvin’s chimeric book thus reads as a hybrid between a political manifesto, autobiography, and a book on utopian form—rather than a theoretical book exploring sf’s utopian impulse. The collection of works in Disputing makes it collage-like, a form that Jameson describes as characterising our late-capitalist age. The “sequence of qualities or styles… becomes in itself a kind of narrative structure opened up to some properly allegorical investment” (Allegory 320); it transforms the “structural function of the author himself” (Archaeologies 263) and the work of interpretation.  Like the truly new Novum Suvin describes, one that is “by definition yet unknown, strange, and risky”, the revision that Suvin suggests for criticism in this book is “not only more like a ball of yarn or amoeba rhizomatically reaching here and there, it is uncertain and open” (21) in a time when the “primacy of linear plot is to be spurned” (21).

Through the varied collection, then, Suvin argues that literary theory and criticism in the 21st century need to move beyond what and how we read. Situating his treatment of sf amidst a more general, urgent critique of capitalocenic ideology, Suvin refines the goal of literary criticism to centre political epistemology as a key goal.

The result of this dialectical, historicist method that Jameson and Suvin share results in an understanding of culture in which the limitations of our own historical and ideological positions mean that true utopia, or radical difference, feels impossible to perceive. Yet in Disputing, Suvin defines quite clearly the antiutopia we find ourselves in, and even sketches a minimum and maximum utopian program of a post-COVID-19 future (chapter 24). On the one hand, there is capitalism and all that accompanies its “GOD imperative (Harvey, “Grow or Die”)” (291): violence (333), fascism, and animality (308). On the other, there is socialism/democracy (91), freedom (339), sensual bodily experience (15) and care (333).

Overall, the explicit call to arms in Disputing is partly a response to the times we find ourselves in and the need to find means of survival. Suvin insists that criticism today must involve “not only writing about fiction” (123) but also looking towards “an integral epistemological rethinking… for which the tools have (yet) to be invented” (123). The urgency with which Suvin writes about Utopia is also accompanied, however, by a sense that he is settling into the long sunset of his prolific career. Suvin himself admits that Disputing “may well be (his) final one on SF and utopia” (20), and the collection contains reflections on the passing of his peers and colleagues (chapters 10, 19), as well as his career (chapter 6, chapter 7 “Autobiography 2004,” chapter 16).

What tasks, then, does Suvin leave us?

The most obvious one is to vigilantly guard the line between “useful and harmful” (248) fictions. This has always sat uncomfortably with post-Suvin critics. In the face of climate breakdown, Suvin’s heuristics provides limited mileage in analysing bad utopias at best, and disregards a huge proportion of cli-fi works at worst. Eric Smith also points out the risks of policing the distinctions between high and mass culture, in a time when our discipline is dismantling the canon and including an increasing number of works from the Global South.

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WORKS CITED

Diaz, Junot. “Apocalypse”. Boston Review, 1 May 2011, https://bostonreview.net/articles/junot-diaz-apocalypse-haiti-earthquake/.

Jameson, Fredric. Allegory and Ideology. Verso Books, 2019.

—. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. 2005. Verso Books, 2007.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Penguin Books, 2014.

Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Westview Press, 2000.

Smith, Eric. Globalization, Utopia, and Postcolonial Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Suvin, Darko. Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction and Political Epistemology. Preface by Philip Wegner. Ralahine utopian studies vol. 6, Peter Lang, 2010.

—. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. 1977. Edited by Gerry Canavan. Peter Lang, 2016.

Wegner, Philip. “Utopianism”. The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, ed. Rob Latham, Oxford UP, 2014, pp. 573-584. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199838844.013.0045.

Ada Cheong (she/her) is a PhD candidate based at the University of Exeter. She is fascinated by the alimentary anxieties surrounding the world-food-system, and the ways in which issues such as industrial meat, ultra-processed foods, GM technology etc. register culturally in sf works from the 1970s onwards. Her research more generally concerns the politics and culture of the Capitalocene, and critically engages with the fields of the Energy Humanities and world-ecological literary studies. She is also a communicator and writer for the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission.

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Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene represents a major and overdue intervention in fantasy studies: in contrast to the long presence of ecocriticism and environmentalist thought within science fiction studies, fantasy has received only sporadic and admittedly often superficial attention from such critical perspectives over the past few decades. At the same time, the book is also not a typical collection of academic essays, its highly heterogenous contents including, among many other surprises, a number of pieces of visual art; poetry from both Native storyteller Joseph Bruchac and Katherine Applegate of Animorphs fame; and short fiction by both leading scholar of Indigenous futurisms Grace Dillon and magisterial fantasy scholar Brian Attebery, the latter also being one of the book’s three editors. Attebery joins Czech scholar Tereza Dědinová—herself also a co-editor of the 2021 collection Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction: Narrating the Future—and noted scholar of literature for young people Marek Oziewicz, whose 2008 monograph One Earth, One People: The Mythopoeic Fantasy Series of Ursula K. Le Guin, Lloyd Alexander, Madeleine L’Engle, and Orson Scott Card broke considerable ground in bringing insights from ecocriticism to the study of genre fantasy. The three members of this editorial team obviously bring very different perspectives that have enhanced the range and depth of the collection, which as a whole pays more attention to children’s and young adult literature than we might expect, and—while covering mainly Anglophone literature—also works to move beyond Anglo-American traditions and conceptions of the fantastic, particularly via Indigenous imaginaries, a vital move for a project that aims to advocate for truly “planetarianist” thinking, to use one of Oziewicz’s key terms (58). While some of its individual essays naturally articulate more substantial or more compelling arguments than others, the collection deserves to be read by anyone interested in how non-realist genres have risen to the challenge of imagining other worlds in the shadow cast by human industrial civilization.

The volume contains 16 conventional academic essays by scholars and an even greater number of short contributions from artists and authors of ecofictional works—including Jane Yolen, Nisi Shawl, and Shaun Tan—which may take the form of poems and/or brief reflective essays. I should note at the outset that the different academics contributing to the book find the concept of the Anthropocene itself more or less useful to think with, often preferring one of the many alternative terms in ecocritical discourse that do not center the human (such as Donna Haraway’s Cthulhucene), or no such term at all; for example, Kim Hendrickx’s chapter “On Monsters and Other Matters of Housekeeping: Reading Jeff VanderMeer with Donna Haraway and Ursula K. Le Guin” concludes that “the ecology and story of the Southern Reach make a case against the Anthropocene as a concept to think with beyond its geological designation” (230). Oziewicz’s introduction likewise explains the editorial perspective: “In this book we invoke the Anthropocene at once as a synecdoche of human supremacist worldview and as a humbling recognition that the planet has been irrevocably altered by human activities” (3). Overall, Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene showcases a diversity of perspectives on a diversity of texts, although a few common points of reference soon emerge: Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016); Attebery’s own Stories about Stories (2014); Ursula Le Guin in her capacity as both theorist of fantasy and storyteller; N. K. Jemisin; Jeff VanderMeer; Rebecca Roanhorse; and even John Crowley’s Ka (2017), among other authors and texts referenced in more than one essay. Notable, too, is the near-absence of Tolkien, the fantasy author to have attracted the bulk of the existing scholarly attention when it comes to environmentalist concerns in the genre: more recent fantasies take pride of place here, and often those explicitly engaging with climate change, extraction, and other specific features of our own world’s Anthropocene.

Glancing through the index, one will in fact notice that among the longest entries are not individual authors or works, but abstractions such as “hope” and “responsibility,” the second often tied to Haraway’s concept of “response-ability.” (Haraway’s work occupies a place of such prominence in this book that one wonders if its blending of academic discourse, poetry, and parable emulates Haraway’s own inclusion of “The Camille Stories” in Staying with the Trouble.)Oziewicz’s polemical introduction and his later chapter most clearly articulate his own vision of a “fantasy for the Anthropocene” that might “assist us in the transition to an ecological civilization,” a kind of “applied hope articulated through stories” (64), but similar conceptions of fantasy as a technology of hope appear throughout the collection. Jacob Burg, for one, finds in fantasy and fantasy scholarship the potential for “the makings of an ideological resistance starter kit […] to conceptualize and, more importantly, act upon the Anthropocene” (209). Although its editors thus intend the collection as in part a celebration of fantasy’s capacity to imagine alternatives to and ways out of Anthropocenic and otherwise ecocidal patterns of thought and action, individual contributions prove perfectly willing to critique the limitations of some of the genre’s most beloved texts and authors in this arena, both historically (Tolkien) and much more recently (China Miéville in Un Lun Dun [2007] and even Jemisin herself).

By way of illustration, Derek J. Thiess’s “Convert or Kill: Disanthropocentric Systems and Religious Myth in Jemisin’s Broken Earth,” sure to be the book’s most controversial chapter, approaches Jemisin’s trilogy quite skeptically and understands it very differently from Burg, who frames it as a radical kin-making project at odds with Thiess’s assessment of its limitations: in Thiess’s reading, “by privileging our society’s dominant religious myths,” the novels “subvert their own disanthropocentrism and reinforce a Christian exclusionary religio-politics” (195). Burg’s chapter, by contrast, praises the works of four 21st-century fantasy authors, including Jemisin’s Broken Earth books, as “myths of (un)creation” that “adopt a salvaging spirit by articulating possibilities of life outside of the Anthropocene’s linear progress narratives and teleological thought” (208). While I personally find Burg’s analysis much more persuasive and am not certain that I would arrive at quite the same conclusions as Thiess—that for instance the novels run the risk of “re-entrenching the very divisions drawn in the colonial project” and “recreate mythic structures indistinguishable from the missionary Christian beliefs that have informed colonialism for centuries” (202, 205)—I agree with him that the relationship between Jemisin’s works (as well as other contemporary fantasies) with “mythic” Christian narrative structures merits more attention. More generally, this kind of against-the-grain reading strategy is one we need more of in fantasy studies, and also serves as but one example of how the collection as a whole does not engage in naïve or otherwise Pollyannaish polemic positioning of fantasy as some simple solution to the climate crisis. Burg articulates very well the more modest but still optimistic perspective that characterizes the book: “Of course, fantasy is not a magical balm for all of our planetary woes, but its ability to combat crisis comes just as much, paradoxically, from its ethical and imaginative failures as from its rich store of environmental symbols” (209).

Burg’s chapter also capably covers four authors and a substantial body of theoretical material in an impressively efficient manner, as, I came to notice, do so many of the other chapters. I suspect that the editors restricted contributions to a fairly tight word count, but the authors typically make excellent use of the length they have been allotted, whether their chapters require, for example, an explication of Indigenous epistemological frameworks alongside analysis of two contemporary retellings of niuhi mo‘olelo, or traditional stories about Hawaiian shark shapeshifters (Caryn Lesuma’s chapter); or an examination of a transhistorical, transcultural tradition of imagining “oceanic-chthonic hybrids” (150) spanning, among many more, Hans Christian Andersen’s version of “The Little Mermaid” (1837),Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo (2008),and Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017). In the latter case, Prema Arasu and Drew Thornton argue compellingly that “these films are part of the contemporary search for re-entangling humans with other forms of life, including those despised or monsterized” (150), although their chapter does represent an instance where I would have appreciated another thousand words or so in which the authors could have covered the contemporary fishman’s less sympathetic precursors, such as H. P. Lovecraft’s Deep Ones. As written, the chapter can mention Lovecraft’s name but little more, and the shadow of “Innsmouth” looms large over this otherwise excellent piece. Sometimes the challenge the contributors face is simply covering a big book in the depth it requires in a relatively short space, a challenge to which John Rieder’s unexpected piece on Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017) rises particularly well. The inclusion of this notably realist piece of hard science fiction under the umbrella of fantasy and therefore in this volume may perplex, but Rieder examines how the novel “engages in rewriting one of Western culture’s founding myths, the myth of the Flood” (137), and argues that it concerns itself with the fantasies of capitalism and capitalism’s possible counter-fantasies, such that “its main thrust is counter-fantastic, not so much in its realistic detail as in its overarching project of undermining the fantastic inevitability of the neoliberal capitalist status quo” (146).

Other chapters cover a multitude of texts and subjects, including: the striking resonance between Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series and the principles of permaculture; a complex but finally misdirected critique of extraction as a driver of climate change in Disney’s Moana (2016); Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch series (2011- ) and how both play and YA might address the crises of the Anthropocene; New Zealand YA author Margaret Mahy’s tree-filled fantasies from the perspective of critical plant studies; the “hopescapes” of the Harry Potter franchise and how we might understand even the theme parks to provide, in a limited way that I think I ultimately find yet more limited than the author does, “opportunities for ecological literacy” (103, 110); and the emergence of a fundamentally “queer ecology” in recent television shows that “model queer ecologies for their young viewers to learn from,” namely Steven Universe (2013-2020, She-Ra (2018-2020)­, and The Legend of Korra (2012-2014) (116-117). I would also highlight Alexander Popov’s chapter “Staying with the Singularity: Nonhuman Narrators and More-than-human Mythologies” as especially illuminating: with a charming narratological penchant for diagrams, Popov argues that some modern fantasies have begun processing the Anthropocene “by shifting nonhuman perspectivization and focalization from the supernatural to the natural” (41), a maneuver that allows works such as Crowley’s Ka to explore “the very possibility of inhabiting shared semiotic worlds” beyond the human (45). The collection also finishes strong with Markus Laukkanen’s valedictory chapter “Literalizing Hyperobjects: On (Mis)representing Global Warming in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones.” Laukkanen deftly avoids simplistic readings of George R. R. Martin’s series that would declare it some kind of direct climate change allegory, instead mobilizing Timothy Morton’s concept of the hyperobject very persuasively in order to demonstrate that what the books may suggest about climate change they accomplish through a broader thematic emphasis on phenomena at the same incomprehensible scale: “[T]he books incorporate the logic of hyperobjects and thus render global warming available for representation and understanding” (242). Laukkanen judges the HBO adaptation to be increasingly less invested in such tremendous elemental forces in favor of the anthropocentric political intrigue to which its own new title gestures. While Attebery’s opening chapter on Ka and the variously anthropocentric and disanthropocentric trajectories of genre fantasy writ large matches Laukkanen’s well as the other solid bookend for the collection—and Attebery’s series of framing elemental parables interspersed throughout provide this collection with a productively disorienting character—it is Oziewicz’s writing that is finally the most forceful and indeed moving in its emphasis on what he diagnoses as “the ecocidal unconscious” and how fantasy might defuse it (58). His concept of “planetarianism,” defined as “at once, a biocentric philosophical commitment to standing up for the planet and an applied hope articulated through stories” stresses the need for a “hope-oriented imagination” to move us towards a biocentric future (58-59). If he is correct in his hope that “fantasy for the Anthropocene can disrupt the fantasy of the Anthropocene” (58), fantasy authors and fantasy scholars alike may have a larger role in bringing about a more just and inhabitable future than we think.

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Ryan Lizardi’s Existential Science Fiction is an ambitious book with a misleading title, as the focus is on recent science fiction cinema with a brief two chapters on video games. A better title might be 21st Century Existential Science Fiction, and Lizardi inserts a self-critique in the introduction pointing out this discrepancy:

It is a weighting of sorts, as the two historical chapters each cover roughly fifty years of science fiction media content and the lion’s share of the rest of the book covers ten years, from 2010 to present. Any researcher who was so inclined could write an exploration of existential science fiction media and flip this imbalanced script… I embrace that criticism… (xii).

This book represents a single constellation of existential fiction when there’s a whole night sky to explore, but it could still be useful for those focusing on the major works covered: Solaris (1972, 2002), Gravity (2013), Ad Astra (2019), Interstellar (2014), Arrival (2016), Annihilation (2018), Legion (2017–19), Westworld (1973 movie and 2016–present tv series), and the video games Assassin’s Creed (2007–2020), BioShock (2007 –2013), SOMA (2015), and Death Stranding (2019). There is a logical underpinning to these selections, though a weakness inherent in existentialism is that it can be perceived in anything, as best evidenced by the dark hilarity of the comic strip Garfield Minus Garfield. Another issue with Lizardi’s approach is that he is applying a philosophy historically dominated by white men to a group of narratives largely by and about white men; even in places that lead to obviously more feminist interpretations, such as in Gravity and Annihilation, Lizardi ignores questions related to gender, as well as race, to focus on aspects of “human” responses. Intersectionalism has taught us that we need to be careful with such a universal flattening of experiences, as too often they are skewed towardness maleness and whiteness.

The book’s first chapter fast forwards past any mention of Kierkegaard or Nietzsche and gets immediately to the heart of Lizardi’s primary focus, film theory, starting with the existential themes in 1902’s A Trip to the Moon and 1927’s Metropolis. He quotes heavily from Bradley Schauer’s Escape Velocity: American Science Fiction Film 1950 – 1982 (2017) throughout this section, using Schauer’s arguments to highlight the 1951 film Destination Moon as the progenitor of modern science fiction movies, as he states it is “important to examine for its semantic genre elements and its syntactic existential characteristics,” and it has a “heavy reliance on verisimilitude and science over action and otherworldly antagonists” (8) which he proposes is a critical element of existentialist science fiction. After a brisk whirl through the cinema of the 1950’s, the second chapter posits 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as the next major film in the existential megatext, as we well as both versions of Solaris (1972, 2002)and Blade Runner (1982, 2017), while discussing how other forms of non-human (alien, AI) intelligences create an existential crisis for humans. Lizardi is well-researched throughout this chapter; he balances direct evidence from the films, statements from their directors, and academic essays, in order to draw comparisons across decades of Hollywood cinema.

Jean-Paul Sartre finally makes his appearance in the third chapter on Gravity and Ad Astra, where Lizardi asserts one of his main theses: “I would also argue that this contrast [between the harsh reality of outer space and the precarity of life] is sometimes the most crucial element of existential science fiction, as it allows audiences to focus more intently on the philosophical elements without the distracting sensational and implausible action so prevalent in early science fiction media” (37). He uses Sartre to posit that the environment of outer space puts the human subject in an atheistic state of crisis, considering they are literally beyond the Earth but not in any kind of heaven or afterlife, and Lizardi convincingly claims that the astronaut symbolizes humanity at the edge of the technological sublime. However, it should be noted that he does not use time-stamp notations for any of his references throughout the entire book, so those looking to pinpoint specific moments in the films will have to look them up themselves.

The following chapter analyzes Arrival and Interstellar as the recent “smart” science fiction films; Lizardi theorizes their existentialist themes could not coexist with more traditional movie plots. He writes, “Their emphasis, however, is not on the antagonism present in so many other science fiction media that encounters other planets and aliens, but instead is on a deep dive into science” (49). Lizardi then compares Arrival to the film Contact (1997) while contrasting it to Independence Day (1996),and he has many useful observations relating to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in how these films approach communication with aliens. He also uses evidence from the original source material, Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life” (1998), something he doesn’t do with the earlier chapters, pointing out the existentialist themes related to the awareness of death in both mediums. He continues this approach in the next chapter on Annihilation, using sections from Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (2014) along with personal interviews from director Alex Garland, who used a unique method of adapting the book into the movie by purposefully incorporating ambiguity throughout the entire process.

The next chapter on the tv series Legion feels out of place compared to the previous ones, as the show is sourced from the X-Men comics and employs a much more slippery type of “comic book logic” than even mainstream sci-fi, yet it doesn’t really fit with his later video game chapters, either. The streaming revolution has launched dozens of science fiction tv series with notable existentialist themes in the past decade—several different shows from the same time period would have made more sense for analysis here—notably Orphan Black (2013-2017), Altered Carbon (2018-2020), Black Mirror (2011-2019), Humans (2015-2018), The Expanse (2015-2022), Stranger Things (2016- ), or Sense8 (2015-2018). Fortunately, Lizardi gets back on track with the following chapter on Westworld because he ties it to the existentialist themes in the original film while adding to his earlier observations on the uncanniness of artificial intelligence.

The final two chapters are on video games; the chapter on SOMA and Death Stranding is much more compelling and thematically appropriate than the one on Assassin’s Creed and BioShock. The latter two games are types of Alternative History, and Lizardi focuses on these games while ignoring related media and novels, such as the The Man in the High Castle (1962, 2015-2019), making the chapter feel like it belongs in a different book altogether. Also, while the earlier BioShock games are very atmospherically existentialist because of the post-apocalyptic, claustrophobia-inducing underwater setting, Lizardi’s arguments begin to break down into long sequences where he is doing little more than summarizing the game’s plot and providing casual observations. An example of this is from pages 116-121, where he goes into extensive detail surrounding the final installment of BioShock Infinite (2013) and the related downloadable (DLC) content, but he does not directly quote from the game or bring in the works of other scholars. This lack of rigor unfortunately causes the book to end in a wandering state of confusion rather than in a satisfying, Nietzschean cosmic apotheosis, but perhaps this makes it even more existential, after all? It is up to the reader to construct their own “bad faith” argument here.

In summation, Existential Science Fiction will be useful for anyone interested in tracing the genealogy of some modern existential science fiction films, but the inclusion of the tv series and videogames makes the latter half feel disjointed.

Jess Flarity is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Literature at the University of New Hampshire. His dissertation is tentatively titled The Splintered Man and seeks to track the fracturing of masculine identities in American and British fiction throughout the 20th century.

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Sami Ahmad Khan’s Star Warriors of the Modern Raj was published in June 2021, and is, by its own admission, “a fan’s alternative,” “a beginner’s guide,” and “a critical catalogue” of twenty-first-century Indian Science Fiction originally written in English (ISFE) for the uninitiated with “SF, in general, and Indian SF in English, in particular” (xiii). The “catalogue” spans an impressive breadth of contemporary ISFE and abstains from engagement with the questions of aesthetics and literariness of ISFE as its “critical” focus is to lay bare the ideological/material, mythological, and technological forces that the 21st-century ISFE is imbricated in and engages with. Deeply conscious of the plurality that ISFE itself hosts and the “congruences and conflicts” (xiii) generated in transposing global SF structures onto India’s SF output, Khan not only “flits across [theoretical] vantage points that arise out of markedly different contexts” (xiv) but also offers an “IN situ Model” that frames his manuscript. The model and its three theses—“transMIT thesis,” “antekaal thesis” and “neoMONSTERS thesis”—are explained in text and through a flowchart in the second chapter of the introductory first section. Khan primarily employs the “transMIT thesis” in this monograph, which also informs its three core divisions—(Ideology/)Materiality, Mythology, Technology; these are bookended by a forty-page introduction and a short concluding chapter.

The first of the five sections is called SF-101 and has three chapters that lay the groundwork for the central three sections of the book. The first chapter, titled “Whoever Loses, SF Wins,” comprehensively charts the longstanding global debates about and difficulties in defining the genre of SF. It shows how the conversations have moved from understanding SF as a genre with fixed boundaries to a mode where the “actants” and “communities of practice” of SF keep it fluid and mutating (15). This chapter is quotation heavy but seamlessly woven together largely from Western critics’ works, contributions from Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay being the exception, to trace the movements and oscillations of SF criticism.

Chapter 3, “Prayers in the Rain,” employs reworked metaphors from Indian metaphysics (atman, paramatman, Vaikuntha), philosophy (dualism, manifestations, transcendence), and math (kilo, mega, yotta) in an attempt to define ISFE by identifying its various distinct features while also searching for its core/soul. The riot of metaphors in this short chapter demonstrates that the constituent components of ISFE—India, science, science fiction, and the English language—are themselves changing, contested, and escape easy definitions. Further, in a convoluted fashion, he recasts Roger Luckhurst’s argument in “The Many Deaths of Science Fiction: A Polemic” that Anglo-American science fiction is ashamed of its pulp origins and wishes to be legitimised by being accepted in the mainstream literary canon; Luckhurst calls this SF’s death wish. Khan expands Luckhurst’s argument by activating the metaphors of atman and paramatman and Plato’s theory of forms to state that all tangible manifestations of regional, national, and global SF aim to be merged with a higher transcendental conception/spirit of World Literature—essentially all SF, including ISFE, desires to leave its generic identity behind to meet and be validated by global literary standards.

The second section of the book, Materiality, has three chapters. This part outlines his classification of the three orders of Others/alterity that ISFE works with. Grade III, or the Civilizational Other, is an amalgam of India’s religious, political, and national threats outside the border; Grade II, or the Social Other, is the overlap of the internal class and caste structures; and Grade I, or the Gender(ed) Other, is constituted by the concerns raised in the sphere of sex and orientations. The three chapters in this section examine various ISFE texts and how these Others are “(re)interpreted and (re)created” (45).

The third section, Mythology, begins with Khan’s three portrayals of god(s) in ISFE—gods as extraterrestrials (from other planets), gods as socio-political indictments (from other temporal locations), and gods as hyperintelligences (from other technological axes) —and the first three of the four chapters of the section discuss ISFE texts relevant to these depictions.

The five chapters in the fourth section, Technology, deal with the broad areas of emerging technological advancement that occupy the Indian science fictional imagination and their varied uses in the selected narratives: genetic engineering; cyber threats; chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons; alien hyperintelligences; and global climate change.

The concluding chapter, “ISFE: A New Hope,” ties together the previous three sections, demonstrating that the post-2000 ISFE is conscious of and responding to the networks of power and discourses they are embroiled in. Despite having his transMIT thesis attested, Khan alerts readers against any essentialising qualities of ISFE and admits that many ISFE might not have any immediate political entanglements. 

The book’s three main sections progress in an orderly fashion, and their larger pattern of organisation becomes immediately perceptible to the reader. The chapters in these three sections include detailed summaries of the texts being discussed, enabling the readers to follow the argument. Broadly, too, the book is accessible, at times because of and at other times in spite of its easy gliding through SF theoretical terms and frames, Indian lexicon, popular western SF, and math and scientific references. Khan neatly delivers what he promises and additionally gives an overview of an indigenous critical framework for Indian SF, even though his incessant application of “science to SF criticism” (4) can be befuddling. His critical survey of Indian SF and its broad recurring themes is a timely and meaningful addition to the recent flood of the body of works on Indian SF, such as Shweta Khilnani and Ritwick Bhattacharjee’s Science Fiction in India: Parallel Worlds and Postcolonial Paradigms (2022), Urvashi Kuhad’s Science Fiction and Indian Women Writers (2021), Suparno Banerjee’s Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity (2020), and Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s Final Frontiers: Science Fiction and Techno-Science in Non-Aligned India (2020). Khan’s extant corpus of fictional and critical writings blooms with this work and will be a great beginning resource for readers and researchers looking to orient themselves with regard to twenty-first-century ISFE and its thematic engagements.

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WORKS CITED

Luckhurst, Roger. “The Many Deaths of Science Fiction: A polemic.” 1994. Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, e-book, edited by Rob Latham, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, pp. 59-73.

Jahnavi Gupta is an M.Phil. graduate (awaiting viva) in literatures in English from the University of Delhi, India. Her research interests include speculative fiction, women’s writings, young-adult literature, and graphic novels. She has previously published in Guwahati University’s (India) journal Margins and in All About Ambedkar. Over the past two years, she has taught language and literature courses at various Indian universities and is currently working as an English Language Instructor at IIT Jammu, India.