Category: Nonfiction Reviews

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Rachel S. Cordasco’s Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium is an exceptional volume that can be at the same time overwhelming even for readers with a sound knowledge of speculative fiction. Reading Cordasco’s volume is proof that not even the most committed reader has a good grasp of the vast international dimension of an already enormous field, even if we think only of its Anglophone version.

Cordasco, an experienced writer, editor, reviewer and translator, has been running the website Speculative Fiction in Translation (https://www.sfintranslation.com/) since 2016 because, as she writes in the “About” section, “Speculative fiction offers us a unique perspective on the different peoples who call this planet home, and translation is itself a way of turning the alien into the familiar.” Her website continues the work done by Israeli SF author Lavie Tidhar in the World SF blog (2009-2013, https://worldsf.wordpress.com/), which he started, as he explains in his final post (“A Last Word”)  “partly as an excuse to promote my then-forthcoming anthology of international speculative fiction, The Apex Book of World SF—but mostly out of what can only be described as an ideological drive, a desire to highlight and promote voices seldom heard in genre fiction.” The impact of English-language original speculative fiction is massive (in this and in most genres), and both Cordasco and Tidhar set out to try to offer a more panoramic, truly cosmopolitan, vision. Cordasco’s website presents reviews, interviews, and, most interestingly the section SFT Source Language Lists (https://www.sfintranslation.com/?page_id=11605) which offers constantly updated bibliographies of SF translated into English from fifty-seven languages. This is a truly formidable task, and one must marvel that a single person can carry it out, even assuming she has many collaborators.

The website lists are the origin of Out of This World, which offers chapters for fourteen of these fifty-seven languages: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. These are the languages with a minimum of ten volume-length texts translated into English since the 1960s, the criteria Cordasco has followed, as she explains. In the “Introduction” Cordasco presents Out of This World as a reference volume and a guide, and warns that she is extending the field covered in her website to speculative fiction (rather than only SF), fantasy, and horror. Each chapter has an introduction by a guest writer from the linguistic area presented, who briefly surveys the history of SF, fantasy, and horror in their language. This is followed by a second survey by Cordasco of the texts translated into English, briefly describing their contents. Finally, each chapter offers a bibliography of translated primary sources in chronological order by original publication date, notes, and a bibliography of secondary sources.

Cordasco’s volume is, no doubt, a gem, and it cannot be sufficiently praised. At the same time, it is, as noted, a daunting book since it requires a type of reader willing to take in a torrent of information, or to use the volume as a guide to a years-long (if not decades-long) process of becoming familiar with other traditions. There is, besides, the doubt of whether the SFT Source Language Lists already mentioned fulfil the same purpose in better ways. The online lists lack the very helpful introduction or the insightful comments on each of the translated texts that the book chapters offer, being pure bibliography. Yet, I remain personally mystified by our insistence to publish as print or digital volumes information that might work best as an online resource, perhaps a database, or even an app.

Cordasco stresses that her purpose is to guide Anglophone readers curious about how their favorite genres work in other languages; though, of course, she is also helping non-native readers of English to reach other speculative fiction traditions. Cordasco supposedly wants readers to check her volume whenever they wish to read foreign authors unknown to them rather than read the book from beginning to end, just as nobody (or almost nobody) reads dictionaries. Yet, perhaps what is missing is a basic beginner’s list with, for example, just one work from each of the fourteen languages selected. Or clearer instructions about how to use the volume. Reference books are not reader-friendly and, arguably, cannot be so because of their very nature. In that sense, it is interesting to see how the website Worlds without End has transformed David Pringle’s popular guide Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels into a user-friendly webpage (see https://www.worldswithoutend.com/novel.asp?id=8146).

Pringle’s selection, additionally, is based on a round figure, which is more or less manageable for a committed reader in small steps. In contrast, Cordasco’s volume mentions hundreds of books. It must be acknowledged, at any rate, that at least these books are mentioned because they are available in English. In contrast, Dale Knickerbocker’s equally excellent edited volume, Lingua Cosmica: Science Fiction from around the World (2018), also published by the University of Illinois Press, whets an appetite that often cannot be satisfied because of the lack of the corresponding translation into English. It is, in fact, advisable to read both volumes together to fully understand how much brilliant speculative fiction is still in need of translation into English and whether what is available is sufficiently representative.

To conclude, please give Rachel Cordasco’s Out of This World a warm welcome in your personal or college library, for it deserves it. Her invitation to enjoy the riches of many diverse speculative fiction traditions needs to be accepted, both regarding the fourteen languages dealt with in the volume or the fifty-seven of the website. It is actually very good news that her volume is so formidable, for this means that there are countless treasures in speculative fiction to be discovered by anyone who can read English. And if any publisher gets hold of the book, hopefully they will receive the message that the presence of the other traditions still underrepresented in English needs to be urgently increased.

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

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Robert Yeates’s study of the image of the American city is an ambitious book. It endeavors to analyze how American urban spaces are portrayed in science fiction, and not just in prose fiction but in various media: radio drama, film, comics, games, and the “transmedia franchise” (works that began in one medium and then have been adapted for others), as well as magazine fiction. Each chapter traces the depiction of the city in one or a few texts that Yeates treats as representative of the genre and the medium.

The book’s ambition is both its strength and its weakness, however. After an introduction laying out his theoretical foundations, and explaining why he moves beyond consideration of fiction alone, Yeates devotes about 150 pages to the texts themselves. There is good reason to look at how the various media treat the theme, especially given how much post-apocalyptic science fiction in the twenty-first century is in the form of movies and games, but it is quite a challenge to deal adequately with all this material in such a short study. The effort is certainly admirable, but practical considerations mean that in some cases only one or two texts must stand for many more that may or may not fit Yeates’s claims for the genre or medium as a whole.

Furthermore, some of Yeates’s textual choices are debatable, to say the least. Until film, games, and television came to greater prominence in post-apocalyptic SF, prose fiction offered numerous and varied visions of life after the near-end of humanity in both short stories and novels over a long period. Yeates shows some familiarity with early texts in the field, but provides a somewhat brief and derivative history of apocalyptic science fiction. He relies heavily on some sources, particularly W. Warren Wagar’s Terminal Visions, while not mentioning Martha Bartter’s important article “Nuclear Holocaust as Urban Renewal” at all in his literature review and only incorporating her insights in Chapter 3, where he discusses film. Giving prose fiction just one chapter gives short shrift to all that material from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) to current cli-fi. He focuses only on magazine fiction—that is, short stories—and of all the choices available he chose to look at Jack London’s hardly representative “The Scarlet Plague” (1912). The story undeniably deserves more attention than it has received, but what about Stephen Vincent Benét’s “By the Waters of Babylon” (1937) or Harlan Ellison’s “A Boy and His Dog” (1969), to name only two? Yeates discusses London’s story in the context of the pulps, but while it was published during the days of general-interest pulp magazines, it predates the science fiction pulp era and it first appeared in a British large-circulation magazine.

Other textual choices are equally questionable. In looking at radio drama he analyzes, in addition to original scripts, adaptations of stories like Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950) and “Dwellers in Silence” (1949), both of which were later published in The Martian Chronicles (1950); one cannot help wondering why he did not study the original stories instead. More curiously, when he turns to film he devotes most of his chapter to two adaptations of novels by H. G. Wells on which George Pal worked, The War of the Worlds (1953) and The Time Machine (1960). While the first moves the action to Los Angeles, the second remains set in London, putting it well outside Yeates’s scope. He also discusses Things to Come (1933) more briefly—another film based on Wells and, as he acknowledges, set in London. Many more films could have been analyzed instead, including ones he names, like The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959) and Panic in the Year Zero! (1962) among the earlier nuclear-holocaust films by and about American cities, and innumerable later ones dealing with both nuclear and non-nuclear apocalyptic events. On the other hand, he does an excellent job of laying the theoretical groundwork for the study of visual representations of disaster and the post-apocalyptic city. He analyzes the way Los Angeles appears in Blade Runner (1982), although less in the original film than in the transmedia adaptations of it. 

There are some other gaps that he might have been filled in. For instance, the chapters seem somewhat disconnected; while some common motifs, like ruins and their effects on the audience, are traced through the various media, each chapter seems to offer a distinct argument, and less attention is paid to how the aural and visual media perpetuated tropes that had been established elsewhere. Also, a more comprehensive account of the city in fiction, as constituting the site of both corruption in tales going back centuries, and utopia in Plato and then the Renaissance and later, might have contextualized the science fiction better.

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WORKS CITED

Bartter, Martha A. “Nuclear Holocaust as Urban Renewal.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 1986, pp. 148-58.

Benét, Stephen Vincent. “By the Waters of Babylon.” Miller and Greenberg, pp. 240-52.

Blade Runner. Directed by Ridley Scott. Warner Brothers, 1982.

Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles. Doubleday, 1950.

Ellison, Harlan “A Boy and His Dog.” Miller and Greenberg, pp. 335-73.

London, Jack. The Scarlet Plague. Mills & Boon, 1915.

Miller, Jr., Walter M., and Martin H. Greenberg, editors. Beyond Armageddon: Twenty-One Sermons to the Dead. Donald I. Fine, 1985.

Panic in the Year Zero! Directed by Ray Milland. American International, 1962.

Shelley, Mary. The Last Man, edited by Anne McWhir, Broadview, 1996.

Things to Come. Directed by William Cameron Menzies. United Artists, 1933.

The Time Machine. Directed by George Pal. MGM, 1960.

Wagar, W. Warren. Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.

The War of the Worlds. Directed by Byron Haskin. Paramount, 1953.

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. Directed by Ranald MacDougall. MGM, 1959.

Allan Weiss is Professor of English at York University in Toronto. His monographs The Routledge Introduction to Canadian Fantastic Literature and The Mini-Cycle appeared in 2021, and he is the author of articles and has given conference papers on Canadian and fantastic literature. He has been Chair of the biennial Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy since 1996, and has edited three volumes of proceedings from the conference. He has also published three short story collections, Living Room (2001), Making the Rounds (2016) and Telescope (2019), and stories in various journals and anthologies.  

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Julie Grossman and Will Scheibel here offer a valuable addition to the TV Milestones series of short, affordably-priced studies of, well, TV milestones (though some may quibble about whether some of the shows selected for study merit that categorization, and one certainly should question the suggestion that most TV milestones are American, given the paucity of non-American shows considered in the series so far). Given that these books are typically short, and reduced further in word count by the inclusion of images, Grossman and Scheibel face a serious challenge. Though the original series consists of only 30 episodes (the pilot plus twenty-nine regular episodes), Grossman and Scheibel unquestionably had also to deal with the prequel movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), and the series reboot as Twin Peaks: The Reboot (2017), consisting of an additional 18 episodes, or Parts, as co-creator David Lynch prefers to define this project as a single work rather than a series of episodes. They have chosen as well to consider various connected works, from the movie version of the pilot (created for European distribution as a stand-alone film and therefore given an ending partly cannibalized for the series proper) to the numerous paratextual tie-ins, mostly books, that the series generated. Since their books consists of only 89 pages of text and two of notes, and since they acknowledge that “the Twin Peaks story world invites an exhaustive filling in that produces the illusion of completion; on the other hand, such filling in could be, in theory and perhaps actually, endless” (83), it is unsurprising that, for all of the book’s merits it perhaps leaves as much unsaid as do the various iterations of Twin Peaks.

This is not a criticism of this engaging and insightful book, or if it is, it is a minor one. Grossman and Scheibel demonstrate formidable knowledge of Twin Peaks and of the critical tradition it has inspired already, deftly referencing a significant amount of previous scholarship without descending into merely repeating what has been said before or overwhelming the reader with citations. Grossman and Scheibel address important questions about the show. Perhaps their most useful contribution to Twin Peaks scholarship comes in Chapter 3, “’I am dead, yet I live’: Femmes Fatales and the Women of Twin Peaks.” Lynch’s treatment of women in his work has often inspired criticism, but Grossman and Scheibel ably argue not only for the extent to which women as depicted in Twin Peaks are complexly grounded in various filmic traditions (notably film noir) but are also themselves depicted complexly and with both nuance and sympathy. Grossman and Scheibel are in agreement with the ongoing rehabilitation of the reputation of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,and its focus on Laura Palmer speaking insightfully to its sympathetic depiction of Laura and praising Sheryl Lee’s fearless performance. The book devotes a brief chapter to the depiction of three characters, Leland, Dale Cooper, and Laura, all of which are useful, but the one on Laura is a welcome reading of Lee’s bravura performance.

Less interesting (to me, anyway) is chapter 5, “Peaks Paratexts: Adaptation, Remediation, and Transmedia Storytelling.” While Grossman and Scheibel make a solid case for how Twin Peaks blurs not only generic and formal lines within film but also the lines between different media via the numerous paratextual materials (treated, it would seem, as canon), my own preference would have been for a few more pages of close analysis of the television show. The book grapples from the beginning with the extent to which Twin Peaks is seen very much as the work of David Lynch—which is of course significantly strengthened by both the prequel movie and 2017 reboot, all directed by Lynch and cowritten by Lynch—but they also point out that this construction of the show as a “’Lynchian’ text” comes “notwithstanding the inherently collaborative nature of television authorship” (10), which this auteurist view tends to overlook. However, the book itself tends to keep the focus primarily on Lynch or the Lynchian aspects of the show. For instance, the bulk of season two passes largely without comment. One might argue that this is justifiable given the generally lower esteem in which much of season two is held, but the book not only presents itself as focusing on Twin Peaks, not Lynch, in its title but also explicitly acknowledges that there is more to the show than Lynch. The paratext chapter is the clearest acknowledgement of this, but a deeper look at the non-Lynch and non-Lynchian components of the show itself would have offered a fruitful, because generally less-explored, direction for a chapter.

Nevertheless, this book is an easy read that offers both a useful overview of the show itself and the critical tradition surrounding it, and valuable insights in its own right. Fans of the show should find the style accessible (academic jargon and bafflegab is largely absent), while students and scholars will find both a useful refresher and intriguing lines of inquiry—again, notably in the way women (and the feminine generally) are handled. Recommended for any library with a Film/TV collection, and affordably priced for anyone interested in the show.

Dominick Grace is now an independent scholar, after 30 years in the academy. His primary area of research interest is popular culture, especially Canadian SF and comics. He is the author of The Science Fiction of Phyllis Gotlieb: A Critical Reading, co-editor of several books, including ones on Canadian comics and Canadian literature of the fantastic, and author of multiple essays on topics ranging from medieval to contemporary literature.

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J.R.R. Tolkien is perhaps the best-known and most widely beloved author of fantasy literature. Additionally, his scholarly essays such as “On Fairy-Stories” (1947) and “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1936) are key works in the theoretical development of speculative fiction. As Grybauskas rightly notes, “[t]o call Tolkien the father of modern fantasy may feel like a slight to earlier writers like Morris, Dunsany, and Eddison, yet his influence in this arena is plainly great; his works have been adopted as a blueprint for those who followed” (100). While criticisms of Tolkien’s pacing, characters, or writing style may be somewhat justified, where Tolkien’s fiction excels and establishes a nearly unparalleled model for those who follow is the depth of his worldbuilding. Tolkien’s world feels lived-in, with a history, literature, folklore, and languages that span millennia; his readers encounter this world through poetry, elusive references, and passing remarks which give Middle-earth a feeling of great depth. In A Sense of Tales Untold: Exploring the Edges of Tolkien’s Literary Canvas, Peter Grybauskas explores Tolkien’s worldbuilding through the lens of the untold tale – the story that is referenced or only briefly sketched out, but never explicitly retold as part of the narrative. 

The body of A Sense of Tales Untold measures in at 122 pages of dense but very readable prose, followed by twenty-five pages of detailed footnotes, an expansive bibliography, and a thorough index. Grybauskas’ book is clearly the work of both a devoted scholar and an avid fan. The detail of the work’s critical apparatus alone would make A Sense of Tales Untold a useful addition to the library of any Tolkien scholar or fan, but the content contained therein warrants a prominent place on the shelf for this book. 

Following a brief introduction to the question examined in his book, Grybauskas in chapter 1 dives straight into his analysis of the untold tale. He does not begin with Tolkien’s fiction, but with one of Tolkien’s favorite works: the Old-English poem Beowulf. Here, Grybauskas discusses the numerous other tales alluded to by the Beowulf poet, and how the richness of allusion gives the poem a sense of weight and history. This chapter outlines a key cornerstone of Grybauskas’s argument and demonstrates just how influential the poem was on Tolkien’s thinking, frequently referencing Tolkien’s own critical commentary on the poem. While Beowulf is the main emphasis of this chapter, Grybauskas shows his familiarity with the Anglo-Saxon literary corpus and makes frequent, supplementary references to other works in the literary canon.

The following two chapters dive into specific events in the history of Middle-Earth: The Last Alliance, formed to defeat Sauron at the end of the Second Age, and the Túrin saga, set in the distant First Age. While these two events are not the only moments in Middle-Earth’s history that Tolkien alludes to in The Lord of the Rings, they are two which frequently appear on the edges of Tolkien’s fiction and in which “Tolkien found a lifelong playground for untold stories” (xx). Details of these untold tales have been expounded by Tolkien’s son Christopher, in the decades following the elder Tolkien’s death, but there are still details left untold, the sense of which still shapes the experience of reading The Lord of the Rings.

Grybauskas’ fourth and fifth chapters depart from a direct analysis of The Lord of the Rings and instead focus on other areas of Tolkien’s fiction and on the “afterlives” of Tolkien’s legacy (xxi) and his influence on later literature, film, and video games. Chapter four deals principally with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Tolkien’s fictional poem based on the Old-English poetic fragment The Battle of Maldon, and spends a considerable amount of text discussing Ernest Hemingway’s “iceberg theory”—an idea related to Grybauskas’ untold tale—that much of a story lies submerged below the surface. Grybauskas’ fifth chapter is one of the highlights in an already excellent study of Tolkien’s work due to the particular care he places on the analysis of video games as an expression of Tolkien’s legacy specifically and the genre’s importance to speculative fiction broadly. Plenty of critical attention has been paid to fantasy film and literature, but far too often scholarly study shies away from video games, a manifestation of fantasy which is increasingly becoming the most significant medium through which fans interact with the genre. It is refreshing to see a scholar such as Grybauskas treat it with the scholarly attention that it properly deserves. 

A Sense of Tales Untold is generally an excellent treatment, not just of Tolkien’s work, but of the theoretical groundwork of worldbuilding in speculative fiction. That is not to say that the book is without flaw. Grybauskas’ extensive knowledge of Anglo-Saxon literature is clearly demonstrated in the vast number of sources he references and the detailed treatment he gives to each. However, even though he acknowledges the influence of Norse, Celtic, and Finnish sources on Tolkien’s storytelling, it is equally clear that Grybauskas does not possess the same mastery of these literary traditions as he does of the Anglo-Saxon, and his work would have surely benefitted from more knowledge of these literary traditions. Additionally, his fourth chapter dealing with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth falls somewhat flat and feels almost as though it were an afterthought added to the book rather than part of his comprehensive argument.

Those criticisms aside, A Sense of Tales Untold should almost be required reading for more than those with a broad interest in Tolkien or speculative fiction. The book is reminiscent of one of Tolkien’s most influential theoretical works, the essay “On Fairy-Stories,” in that it seeks to investigate the importance of worldbuilding in fantasy literature, and how successful authors craft fictional worlds which feel as alive and lived in as our own. It would not be a surprise if A Sense of Tales Untold becomes a classic text that will be studied for years to come.

Russell A. Stepp is a natural fit for speculative fiction. He holds a BS in Physics Astronomy, master’s degrees in Comparative Studies, Medieval Icelandic Studies, and Medieval Studies, and a PhD in Medieval studies. He has a particular interest in medieval Icelandic fornaldasögur and mythological poetry. He currently teaches AP Physics and Astronomy at Aristoi Classical Academy, a public charter school in Katy, Texas.

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Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction is noteworthy for the sheer variety of the novels that are under scrutiny, as well as for its large geographical scope. Though slightly imbalanced when it comes to the representation of Latinx and Asian communities, the volume’s inclusive intent is truly something to be acclaimed: the chapters take us from Nigeria to Australia, from Ireland to the US, while also exploring both Western writers’ and First Nations authors’ works. The genres of the novels examined are as varied as the definitions of ‘race’ they suggest since genres such as dystopian fiction, fairy tale, detective fiction, steampunk, Neo-Victorian fiction, Indigenous Futurism, and even BL (Boys Love) manga overlap and intersect.

Drawing from a strong body of theoretical works focusing on science fiction and YA fiction, as well as other topics such as the representation of women in such literature, the book also leaves ample room for the inclusion of the work of racialized theorists and academics, such as W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of ‘double consciousness,’ Grace Dillon’s seminal work on defining Indigenous Futurism, or Kwaymullina’s take on decolonizing literature not only as a writer but also as a teacher. The wide range of the contributors’ status is also appreciable; authors range from established professors to PhD candidates, sometimes even current YA fiction writers. This range enhances a feeling of dynamism that matches the contemporary surge of attention concerning matters of race in both literature and scholarship and cannot but be telling regarding the growing contemporary interest in and demand for YA literature.

This collection is easy to navigate, with four clear and well-devised sections that emphasize the book’s obvious didacticism: I. Defining Diversity, II. Erasing Race, III. Lineages of Whiteness, IV. Racialized Identities. Those general topics are addressed, according to the different novels that are studied, without essentializing YA literature from one specific country, continent, or point of view (western, Indigenous, or racialized). For example, while focusing on representations of whiteness and their legacy when it comes to power relations, the third section contains three chapters that each adopt a different standpoint: one focuses on Cassandra Clare’s The Infernal Devices series’ intricate relations of domination and the depiction of Asian masculinity inspired by Chinese worldviews and culture, another explores disease-induced dis/ability in an American adventure that takes its origin in Chicago (the Divergent series by Veronica Roth), and the last chapter studies the rewriting of colonisation and its oppression of First Nations Peoples through stereotyping and appropriation (Chaos Walking, Patrick Ness).

Starting from racial representation and the question of the definition of the Other, the collection does not simply debunk racial stereotypes nor does it take for granted postracial worlds that could too easily be equated with utopias. By first questioning the treatment of whiteness and how it is reified in stories which mostly rely on white protagonists (even though they may debunk patriarchal hierarchies), it then moves to a reflection on what it really entails to set a story in a postracialized society; while warning against adopting a colorblind approach to racial issues, it emphasizes the erasure of race as dubious and even counter-productive as it more often than not re-establishes racist ideology and reproduces domination. In fact, erasing race appears to be complicit in neoliberalism’s systemic racism and reproduces structures of western colonialism and racism.

Talking about race is not as easy as advocating for a more diverse cast of characters, whether they be of different skin colors, backgrounds, ethnicities, species or classes. The chapters do not abide by a mere Manichean way of looking at the question of race in YA dystopian fiction, questioning and qualifying rather than asserting; they rather perfectly delineate it and do not shy away from tackling the shortcomings of the novels, informing their study with a critical reflection. A few examples would be the rewriting of white heteronormative and patriarchal power relations and hierarchy in Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series, the lack of LGBTQ diversity (ch.3&5), or of historical contextualization regarding imperial oppression. The use of English as universal language is also criticized as going against the wish for diversity, while picturing the Asian Other as one homogeneous whole recalls the 19^th century’s anthropological considerations (ch.8).

Overall, Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction makes a good effort at drawing attention to intersectionality: not only are racial hierarchies considered, so too are gender and sexual dynamics, strongly drawing from feminist and queer studies, as well as disability studies. Even though there is a noticeable intent to approach intersectionality, one mild reproach could be that rather than really grounding their study in intersectionality, some articles seem to use those topics as metaphors for racial concerns. A running dialogism between concepts—rather than a mere juxtaposition, considering them as if they were similar—could have helped the readers not to feel sometimes confused because the topic shifted from race to the representation of disability, for example. The threads weaving together those themes felt sometimes loose and could have been tightened a little more if the metaphors were pedagogically repeated and rearticulated throughout the chapters.

To conclude, this book’s targeted audience encompasses academics and students interested in YA fiction but also focusing on science fiction and speculative fiction, ranging from subgenres such as Neo-Victorian steampunk to Indigenous futurism. It could also be used to broaden the research fields of academics not particularly versed in YA fiction but showing interest in postcolonial and decolonial approaches, whose concerns would converge with the general theme of the book, that is to say the depiction of race and the struggles for self-representation and epistemological justice. Having said that, readers should be warned that there will surely be novels that will be added to their TBR list after closing Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction.

Laura Singeot is an associate professor in Cultural and Visual studies at Reims University, France. She is interested in the representations of Indigeneity in contemporary Indigenous literatures from Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand, from novels and poetry to dystopic Young Adult fiction and Sci-fi. She is also researching new museology and Indigenous visual art, especially digital and new media art, focusing on its integration into global networks of creation, curation and reception. Her methodology rests on a comparative transdisciplinary approach, drawing from concepts theorized in decolonial thought.

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Sarah Annes Brown is a scholar both of Shakespeare and of Science Fiction, among other literary subjects. She is especially interested in “patterns of influence and allusion,” according to her Anglia Ruskin University bio page. While no doubt many scholars are interested in Shakespeare, SF, and literary influence—and indeed, much has been written about Shakespeare’s presence in and influence on SF—Brown has provided an important addition to the study of Shakespeare in/and SF by giving us, as the book’s back cover blurb reports, “the first extended study of Shakespeare’s influence on the genre.” This book is essential reading for anyone interested in how Shakespeare has informed (and in some cases, how his works have been informed by) SF, both because of her own insights and because of the expertise with which she weaves together earlier scholarship on the subject.

This compact book (I would have been happy to have had an additional hundred pages to read) consists of an introduction that speaks to the reason Shakespeare may be of abiding interest to SF authors (beyond his general cultural capital and ubiquitous influence), followed by seven chapters exploring the interpenetration of Shakespeare and the following SF subcategories and conventions: time travel, alternate history, dystopian fiction, contact with aliens/travels to space, science and magic (a chapter focusing primarily on The Tempest [1610/11] and its SFnal elements/presence), posthumanism (including constructed beings such as robots—one section and illustration notes echoes of Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull with Chewbacca holding C-3PO’s head), and post-apocalyptic fiction. Throughout the book, Brown provides extensive references to prior work on Shakespeare and SF—indeed, she perhaps directs readers more to earlier texts than she builds her own analyses, which I will address further below—and cites a remarkable range of (mostly) SF texts. She identifies SF, and specifically written SF, as her primary interest, but does provide occasional discussion of non-SF and, more extensively and insightfully, the Shakespearean presence in filmic form, especially Dr. Who and Star Trek, with other notable examples (e.g. Forbidden Planet [1956]) thrown in. The main thematic through line is the tension between Shakespeare being depicted as a transcendent figure (perhaps most notably in works in which even aliens idolize Shakespeare, but in other contexts as well, such as Shakespeare’s frequent presence as a cultural touchstone in post-apocalyptic SF, or in alternate history stories in which his presence or absence changes the course of history), and a more skeptical/revisionist view of Shakespeare as having a reputation that exceeds his actual worth. She refers recurringly to Borges’s paradoxical construction of Shakespeare in “Everything and Nothing” (1964) as exactly that.

Brown tackles many of the obvious candidates for consideration, from books with Shakespeare actually in the title, such as Clifford D. Simak’s Shakespeare’s Planet (1976; I was a bit disappointed that she did not pick up on the fact that the figure of Oop is an evident echo of V. T. Hamlin’s famous time-travelling caveman, who encountered Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a story in 1953) to such obscure texts as John E. Muller’s (Lionel Fanthorpe) 1965 novel, Beyond the Void, a book I had never heard of. Even readers familiar with Shakespearean appearances and echoes in SF will probably find references here to texts about which they know little. That said, and as noted above, Brown also limits herself, generally, to SF, so one might quibble with which exceptions she chooses to address. I doubt anyone would argue against considering Neil Gaimin’s use of Shakespeare in his Sandman (original series 1989-1996, with several ancillary projects published since), as Brown does, though Shakespeare appears in only a handful of stories (albeit key ones), if for no other reason that the fact that in 1991, issue 19, which offers a take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595/96), won the World Fantasy award for short fiction. However, one might argue that the comics series Kill Shakespeare (2010-2014, with several subsequent tie-in series), by Anthony Del Col and Conor McCreery, would have merited consideration, given its premise, and despite its aesthetic limitations. For entirely personal reasons, I would also have liked to see Brown say a bit more about Phyllis Gotlieb’s use of The Tempest in her 1976 novel O Master Caliban!.

The nature of the book, though, as well as its length, make comprehensiveness and deep dives, if not impossible, certainly difficult. Even within her defined limits, Brown has a lot of territory to cover, so she frequently offers only brief commentary on many works (few texts are given more than a handful of pages) and frequently directs readers to more detailed studies of the texts she references. Brown primarily hits the high points of how the works she considers reflect her thesis, with a fair bit of plot summary (often necessary, given the number of texts touched on; no reader is likely to be familiar with all of them) and relatively little detailed analysis or close reading. The book provides a very useful overview of significant texts that have invoked Shakespeare, often providing valuable insights, and Brown provides readers with the tools to track down studies of individual works.

Despite Brown’s scholarly rigor, this book is written in a clear and accessible style, and with no small degree of wit. While noting the difficulty SF authors face in trying to create a plausible voice for Shakespeare when they try to depict him, Brown herself demonstrates an admirable facility with language. While the book’s primary audience is academic, this book would be accessible to undergraduate students and probably advanced high school students, so it could serve as a useful recommended reading text for such audiences. Consequently, it would be a worthy acquisition for university, college, and even high school libraries, though its price point will probably dissuade potential readers from purchasing a copy.

Dominick Grace is the non-fiction reviews editor for SFRA Review. Occasionally, he takes advantage of that role to claim a book for himself. He also belongs to the group of those with a scholarly interest in both SF and Shakespeare.

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Science fiction (often abbreviated throughout this volume as SF), as a genre, has far more potential than just to provide scaffolding for media franchises that have dominated Anglophone ‘fandom’ spheres, such as Doctor Who or Star Wars. Modern translation studies and its dissemination into other fields, such as SF, carries the tools to decenter and destabilize the Anglocentrism of these media ventures. And it is precisely at these intersections that Georgia State University’s Ian Campbell makes a powerful case for inclusivity in SF. A scholar of Arabic science fiction and its translation into English, he binds together articles incredibly diverse not only in language and/or place of origin, but in genre and across  time. Campbell dispenses this attitude readily to the intersection of SF and translations studies—a mission statement from the volume’s beginning:

SF as a genre evolved largely—though by no means exclusively—in English and in Anglophone cultures. In these cultures, even readers who don’t care for SF will likely have a clear understanding of the characteristics of the genre; they will be accustomed to the tropes and discourse of SF to an extent that readers in other cultures may not. There are many languages and cultures where SF has a firm presence: Russian and French at first, then Japanese, Spanish and Korean, and Chinese and some of the languages of the Indian subcontinent. There are still other cultures (notably, in sub-Saharan Africa) where literature is often written and read in English but where SF is a comparatively new phenomenon. This is in no way to say that people from such cultures cannot or do not understand SF: of course they can, and among other things, the expansion and distribution of SF film and television have gone a long way toward bridging that gap. (Campbell 7)

This volume does not show up empty handed or without evidence for Campbell’s vision for international science fiction. It does, though, fight for inclusion in a field dominated by ‘angloisms’ and by extension, one that has historically been white, misogynist, and queerphobic. Painfully so. An antidote is to bring attention to other canons, authors, ideas, and corpuses, moreso by introducing the Anglo world to non-Anglo SF instead of the other way around. Walt Disney Studios and its affiliates have that market cornered.

So in conducting a review for an essay anthology on translation, naturally I find myself trying to bring my own parable to the rather long and oblong table of discourse Campbell puts together neatly in Science Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation. To start, looking from my primary field of English medieval literature(s), I see the work of science fiction and translation both together and separately in this anthology as a reckoning of an irresistible force and immovable object, not unlike the most memorable section of Venerable Bede’s (c. 673-735) Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Therein, he sought to translate “Caedmon’s Hymn” (aka, the first ‘poem’ in English) from the Old English to Latin and subjects the reader to the force and object which complicate translation (signaled in bold, emphasis and translation mine):

Hic est sensus, non autem ordo ipse verborum quae dormiens ille canebat; neque enim possunt carmina, quamvis optime composita, ex alia in aliam linguam ad verbum sine detrimento sui decoris ac dignitatis transferri.

(This here is the sense, though not the order of the words themselves, of which he was singing while sleeping. Although they are not able to be “sung”, however excellently composed, out of one language to another, it is not possible to translate without hurting the charm and merit of them.)

In translation studies, then, from Bede to Campbell, there is the teleological battle between conveying the sensus verborum (sense of the words) and the methods transferri (to carry over, to translate). The tension between this ‘force(s)’ and ‘object(s)’, and the subsequent consequences of prioritizing one over the other, is the joy and angst inherent in works of translation. Now, applying the metaphor to science fiction and its speculative relatives, we, the initiates of this field, see a similar tension between the conventions of what is ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ SF, hard SF being speculative literature whose diegesis explicates the fiction in terms of mathematics, physics, engineering, or otherwise what may be construed as ‘STEM,’ while ‘soft SF’ may focus instead on the framings of psychology, sociology, history, or the legacy of literary lineages that converge onto the text.

On the whole, the wide array of science fiction materials may necessarily use both hard and soft SF in the development of worldbuilding, narrative scaffolding, and aesthetics, just as the translator carefully balances the sense of the words against how to translatus them—that is: “trans” (across) and “latus” (been carried). So then, the exegesistic direction across the essays—crafting theses on corpuses ranging from Swedish sci-fi epics to Cuban enslavement narratives in verse, feminist utopias found from Spain to Quebec, international translations of subversive Anglo SF tomes from Phillip K. Dick to A Clockwork Orange—runs along and around the political ramifications, consequences, and contexts surrounding the works of translation and precisely how they came to be.

Science fiction, famous for encompassing rich and original (and English-language-based) worlds such as those found inButler’s Dawn Trilogy and even the ill-fated Cyberpunk 2077, is shown in Campbell’s anthology to be more composite and diverse than the dichotomy of hard and soft SF. The breadth of geography and genres themselves expand in SF, together and separately, when ‘anglophonics’—that is the collocation of both Anglo and Americans literatures, media and mores – is no longer the dominant corpus that is expanded upon and invested into. Touching on the Swedish sci fi epic Aniara and its subsequent translations, Dr. Daniel Helsing, Linnaeus University, writes that:

[t]raditional poetic metaphors evoke images that are unspeakably insufficient to capture the universe, yet they may lead to a sense of comprehension. They are thus not only ineffective when trying to grasp the universe; they may also be misleading. In this sense, traditional metaphors can be said to use domesticizing strategies when translating the findings of science into any natural human language. (Helsing 86)

Traditional literary devices, systems, and ambitions, no less traditional audiences, is where SF and its international author base meets the hard work to convey the majestic sublime of space and all the hopes it can contain for the reader and author alike. However, staples of ‘the classics’ definitely do contain speculative and SF imaginings. I would, though, as a premodern scholar, further emphasize that speculative and science fiction has its origins long before Jules Verne. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale (c. 1390s)  or Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)are both powerful exempla of premodern speculative fiction—one in verse and one in prose. An understated job of translation is not only carrying over the sense of the words, but also being able to translate time: looking to the past and looking for the future within it. That is, traditional devices of literature do not have to exclude science fiction or international visions of it. In fact, they can help and historically have shaped speculation in literature. However, we are as critics also able to separate and diminish the mores of exclusion that movements of literature historically have. Science fiction has us looking to the stars—and they should be shining as brightly as possible.

Campbell’s volume is an indispensable collection of new voices and media spanning from at least the 1830s to the close of the 2010s, which not only makes the case for inclusion within the field but provides a tangible, though far reaching, web from which to choose a new vision for SF. This involves, for the casual reader or the adherent, letting go of certain attachments to what SF can and cannot be. It may involve breaking through at least two well-established binaries: the dichotomy of hard and soft SF, and from translation studies down from Bede’s time: the angst between sensus verborum (the sense of the words) and transferri (what is actually carried across from translations). In a world where the lenses of SF and conscious reality seem to blur more and more, Campbell’s volume and the authors included are a beacon of hope.

Alice Fulmer (she/her) is an MA/PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, ESL teacher, and poet. She is pursuing a Medieval Studies emphasis, and planning a prospectus on digital cultures and late medieval British manuscript culture. Her debut collection Faunalia (2023), on Gods and Radicals/Ritona Press, is a love letter to the great god Pan.

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When H. P. Lovecraft died in 1937, not a single book of his stories had been published. This is a fact we are frequently reminded of in S. T. Joshi’s The Recognition of H. P. Lovecraft: His Rise from Obscurity to World Renown. This thorough study attempts to explain at least part of Lovecraft’s meteoric rise to worldwide fame by charting public discussions of his life and work. I use the slightly vague term “discussions” to describe the materials Joshi draws upon in this study because they are incredibly wide-ranging. He assesses all kinds of engagement with the Lovecraftian paper trail, from critical notices, scholarly tomes, and translations to rock music and pulp films. Despite some diffidence in the preface about whether he is the correct choice to author a book such as this, perhaps because of his own considerable stake in the recognition of Lovecraft, it soon becomes clear that nobody is better placed than Joshi to track and evaluate these developments. The reader gains useful insight into the circumstances that led to Lovecraft gaining popularity in a society that is arguably even weirder than the early twentieth-century one he inhabited. Joshi does not confine his study to Lovecraft’s fictional works, but also examines the legacy of his essays, poems, and philosophical thought.

One imagines that this body of research could have been rendered as a vast bibliographic list of items that make mention of Lovecraft. This might have proved useful for academics searching for a database comprising every important piece of public recognition. Indeed, Joshi acknowledges such previous projects, particularly where they do manage a significant act of textual excavation, but this book could appeal to an audience of casual Lovecraft enthusiasts as well as academics. It acknowledges that the story of his ascent is a fascinating one in itself. Yet, Joshi is careful to prioritise the impact of the fiction and not let the substance of his discussion become trapped in tangents about the author’s personal life.

The Recognition of H. P. Lovecraft begins with a newspaper column on the meteorological station Lovecraft built and ran as a teenager. His fascination with astronomy was what first encouraged him to write a letter to Scientific American. Lovecraft’s membership in the United Amateur Press Association opened up a new world of colleagues, friends, and rivals. Joshi briefly covers this amateur press career, but the book is primarily invested in responses to Lovecraft’s imaginative work. Indeed, members of the UAPA were generally not receptive to the fiction, but by the time Joshi moves on to examine Lovecraft’s pulp career, the engine of approbation is beginning to get started. Fictional outings in Weird Tales and Amazing Stories were met with acclaim, although Joshi is careful to point out that the editor of Weird Tales did not choose to publish letters critical of Lovecraft’s work.

Despite the famous caricature of Lovecraft as a reclusive genius, Joshi makes it clear that his friends and associates were the ones who kept his memory alive long enough for the popular paperbacks and movie adaptations of the 1960s to filter into serious scholarship in the late 1970s. The remarkable aspect of this trajectory is just how many setbacks Lovecraft’s reputation suffered and overcame. An interesting case study is that of 1945, a watershed year which soured into an annus horribilis. During this year there were many publications concerning Lovecraft, including an Armed Services Edition of The Dunwich Horror, illustrating the traction Lovecraft was gaining in the English-speaking imagination. In Joshi’s opinion, the tide was turned by an extremely negative review by Edmund Wilson, an eminent American critic. In him, Joshi appears to have located the quintessential case of the literary snobbery that would dog anyone who wanted to take Lovecraft seriously as an artist for years to come. In particular, Joshi highlights Wilson’s comment about Lovecraft being more “interesting” than his work (113). It becomes clear in the last part of the book as to why Joshi thinks that these probings into the author’s personal life are something to be regarded with suspicion.

The latter chapters are nothing short of gold dust for any scholar seeking a comprehensive and informative history of monographs and articles on Lovecraft. The canonisation of Lovecraft as a literary titan, in addition to the seismic effect of his work in science fiction internationally, makes the general recognition of his talent seem a foregone conclusion by the time we reach the ninth chapter of the book. Joshi admits that a total audit of Lovecraft-related media by this point in time is basically impossible. Nevertheless, readers of SFRA Review will no doubt already be familiar with much of what Joshi covers in terms of the growth of Lovecraft in popular culture.

The most polarising aspect of this book is undoubtedly how it approaches the recent controversies surrounding Lovecraft’s prejudices. Joshi makes no bones about his negative opinion of “virtue signalling” (305). His main objection to the attacks on Lovecraft is essentially what many of Lovecraft’s defenders have said in the past, namely, that his views were conceived in a historical context that deserves to be considered. He also argues that the criticism of Lovecraft’s worst lines often devolves into slander and has achieved little more than the defacement of every other facet of the man’s personality. The end result has been the condemnation of the entire person rather than his views, many of which Lovecraft regretted later in life. Joshi does not hesitate in calling out cynical personalities who profited from Lovecraft’s legacy only to trample on his reputation later.

Joshi ends by reminding us of the most important point. Whatever we may think of Lovecraft the man, this controversy has had little effect on the sales of his fiction around the world. The Recognition of H. P. Lovecraft is ultimately a testament to the power of the stories, which have proved resistant to many different crises, and will certainly survive many more.

Beatrice Steele is a PhD researcher and freelance writer from Guildford, England. She gained a Master’s in eighteenth-century literature from the University of Oxford in 2022 and is now undertaking an AHRC-funded PhD based at the University of Exeter. Her research interests include Victorian science, visual culture, and astronomy. She is also a regular contributor to the Dotun Adebayo Show on BBC Radio 5 Live. In her spare time, she likes to read and write poetry. She recently won second place in the Jane Martin Poetry Prize, a national competition run by Girton College, Cambridge.

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The underlying idea of Olivier’s study, namely that objects in horror films are more than they seem, is probably intuitively evident to anyone who has ever watched a horror movie. But rather than focus on the props that come to mind—the haunted houses and cursed objects—Olivier attends to objects that sit on the margins of the plot and seem to be benign, familiar, and even mundane.

Olivier’s object-oriented readings of horror films offer detailed analyses which illuminate the ‘secret lives’ of these domestic objects on screen. This object-led approach is also reflected in the book’s structure and its visualization: Household Horror takes the reader on a tour of an apartment and guides them through four sections titled “Kitchen/Dining Room,” “Living Room,” “Bedroom,” and “Bathroom,” each containing chapters on objects which we would expect to find in these rooms (for example, the “Bathroom” contains chapters on the “Radiator,” discussing Lynch’s Eraserhead [1977], on “Pills” which probes the medicated female body in The Bad Seed [1956], Rosemary’s Baby [1968], and The Exorcism of Emily Rose [2005], and lastly the famous “Shower Curtain” from Psycho [1960]). The floor plan of a one-bedroom apartment preceding the first chapter functions as an additional flat, visual table of contents mapping all of the objects discussed in the book. This structure already illustrates Olivier’s approach. Rather than ordering his analyses according to “traditional strategies of coherence such as chronology, country, director, and subgenre,” readers are free to “roam” among the object-themed chapters (2), which can be read in any order.

In the short introductory chapter, Olivier establishes the theoretical orientation of the following analyses. Setting out to follow objects’ ‘secret lives,’ the book announces its inspiration by reference to work within the material turn that seeks to decenter the hierarchical organization of humans and objects. Olivier cites Ian Bogost and his elaboration of object-oriented ontology (OOO) as the basis for “treat[ing] objects as beings that surpass the roles given to them as props or decor” (3). This re-perspectivization recovers the various pieces of furniture, tools, and devices that form the unremarkable tapestry of everyday life from the background and grants them center stage. Viewed through the lens of OOO, horror films, Olivier argues, turn this domestic landscape inside out and foreground humble objects as central participants on a par with humans.

Methodologically, Olivier combines a range of approaches, two of which seem to be particularly characteristic of his project: He takes the reader on contextual excursions into the histories, inner workings, and material make-up of objects, detailing their usually obscured or forgotten ‘lives’ on their own terms and then tying them back into the films. For example, one of the objects in the first section, “Kitchen/Dining Room,” is the microwave which Olivier reads as a pivotal element in Gremlins (1984): “The microwave is a gremlin-sized chamber of atmospheric terror rooted in wartime research, embroiled in spy scandals and health scares—it is an inspirer of tabloid stories and urban legends and possibly the least understood device in the kitchen” (30). It is, Olivier suggests, much more than a convenient appliance as its public and imaginary lives complicate its status as a mundane domestic appliance, not the least, because microwave ovens are a relatively recent addition to kitchens. Their new owners in the 1980s were particularly fascinated by rumors and sensationalized stories about the dangers of microwaves, because the technology evokes the threat of nuclear radiation (35). This residual uncanniness of objects seems to emerge from their incomplete domestication due to their relatively recent adoption in homes. Mining the history of the refrigerator, sewing machine, and typewriter, Olivier provides compelling interpretations of their roles in Possession (1981), Silence of the Lambs (1991), Carrie (1976), and The Shining (1980) and includes readings that draw out the complicated processes of domestication that these technologies underwent. Their horror, Olivier’s readings also suggest, lies in their continued, but obscured, connections with histories and networks outside the home. Other object-led excursions consist in attending to the inner workings of devices, offering physical routes into black-boxed objects, as Olivier demonstrates with regard to call tracing in Black Christmas (1974), where “The call is taking place not only at two ends of a phone line but also at a police station and in a switching station” (60). Olivier then dwells on the latter as much as on the former two locations and opens up a constitutive but hidden space within the network. In this way, histories and technologies that lead outside the films (and outside the home) are reinserted into the analyses in a movement reminiscent of Elaine Freedgood’s ‘old’ materialist “strong metonymic reading” (see her The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel of 2006) which recovers the cultural and historical meanings of objects outside the literary text and then weaves them back into the narratives.

Olivier further centers objects through the straightforward but effective strategy of translating plots into lists (4). This re-segmentation based on the object rather than subject, assisted by phrases that highlight the non-human agent, as in “table events” (80, Noriko’s Dinner Table [2005]), “remote-control phenomena” (123, Poltergeist [1982]), “bed scenes” (184, The Exorcist [1973]), or “typographic events” (212, The Shining), subtracts human agents and provides inventories instead (also the diagram of phone calls in Black Christmas, 56). The ‘inventory’ is a key figure and programmatic device in Olivier’s study to which he returns in the brief conclusion: “Household Horror takes a simple inventory of household objects, explores the deformations caused by their presence in cinematic horror, and produces new objects as readings” (312), relying on the “gentle knot of the comma” (312, quoting Bogost).

Household Horror is a readable and jargon-free study that demonstrates the benefits of object-led analyses through the sheer range of illuminating case studies rather than abstract theory. Reading it from cover to cover, as I have done following the protocols for reviewing academic monographs, is probably less effective than picking and choosing chapters that are of interest either because of the films they analyze or the objects featuring in them. The book, or rather its individual chapters, would thus be of interest not only to students and researchers of horror but also to anyone wondering how film (and, indeed, literary studies) can put OOO into interpretative practice.

Sabina Fazli is a postdoc in the collaborative research center ‘Studies in Human Categorization’ at Mainz University, Germany. Her PhD thesis was in English literature and has been published as Sensational Things: Souvenirs, Keepsakes, and Mementoes in Wilkie Collins’s Fiction (2019). The book explores the significance of sentimental objects in sensation fiction. Her research interests are now in magazine studies, and the material and affective side of periodical reading, independent, experimental, and zine publishing, as well as Neo-Victorian and steampunk fiction.

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We live in dystopian times, at this early stage of the twenty-first century. Against a backdrop of environmental disaster and increasingly violent geopolitical manoeuvrings, a raging viral pandemic continues to exacerbate long-developing global inequalities. Meanwhile, dystopian fiction has also become inescapable. Novels such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) are once again topping global bestseller charts, television series including 오징어 게임 (Squid Game) (2021-) have come to dominate on-demand streaming services, and film adaptations like The Hunger Games franchise (2012-2023) continue to break various box-office attendance records. Annika Gonnermann’s Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21^st Century Dystopian Fiction (henceforth Absent Rebels) responds directly to this booming popular cultural embrace of dystopia, but makes a further seemingly provocative claim: such “classical” (12) fictional dystopias are effectively meaningless for the current age. Gonnermann argues that this type of dystopian fiction (which she identifies as material containing a “focus on political entities” [17], primarily totalitarian regimes) – particularly as such works increasingly infiltrate mainstream channels – cannot act as a subversive critique of its cultural status quo, but can exist only as a commodity that offers light, somewhat anachronistic, entertainment. While Big Brother is certainly still watching, Big Brother is also being watched, in record numbers.

Absent Rebels posits that the commodification of dystopia is a direct result of the economic milieu that engulfs contemporary Western culture: neoliberalism—that most highly aggressive and unchecked form of capitalism—functions by flattening, incorporating, and ultimately commodifying everything, even its own potential critique. According to Gonnermann, this leaves classical dystopias neither adequate nor appropriate for representing—much less challenging—contemporary forms of political organisation, because “the state’s monopoly of power” (18) is now subsidiary to the logistical and financial networks that underpin globalized capital. Gonnermann proceeds to claim that a “new relentless bleakness” (304) is evident in certain exemplary contemporary dystopian texts – her selection consists of David Eggers’s The Circle (2013), Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last (2015), M.T. Anderson’s Feed (2002), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005)—and is beginning to “rejuvenate” ( 19) the genre in order to “spell out the inevitability of free-market capitalism” (304) and its attendant violent social impacts. Presented by Gonnermann as “especially progressive and subversive” (18), she argues that her chosen texts are identifiable by their lack of “rebels and dissidents,” (19) which means that they “urge readers to explore the possible alternatives to the dystopian world presented to them on their own” (19, emphasis in original). For Gonnermann, the lack of protagonists who can challenge the economic system that they are depicted as existing within reflects the truncated possibility of meaningful resistance in a more broadly networked society that features no clearly identifiable antagonists. The texts thus act as “phenotypes of a neoliberal economic system” (241), and function to “map out the contradictions of contemporary neoliberal capitalism” (19). Absent Rebels, then, is a timely and sometimes innovative contribution to the field of dystopian studies and is impressive for its ambition, even if it is rather frustrating to witness this ambition only inconsistently realised across the text.

The limitations are unfortunately apparent from the opening of Absent Rebels, which does read rather like a postgraduate dissertation, desperate to prove its bona fides in an overdetermined manner: the early definitional sections are laboured, and the literature review of canonical dystopian literature and literary history that comprises the first major chapter of the book is rather cumbersome, as are the frequent and extended footnotes that addend the text.[1] More problematically, however, Absent Rebels is underlain by a number of somewhat problematic assumptions that remain completely unchallenged. Take Gonnermann’s starting point, for instance:

What makes dystopia so fascinating is its ability to capture cultural anxieties and voice them in literary terms, so that it acts as a mouthpiece and tool of diagnosis and critique for social, political and economic developments… dystopian fiction is always meant as a normative criticism of the socio-historical and historical characteristics of its own origins. (38; 40 emphasis in original)

Claiming an invariable one-to-one correspondence between textual representation and societal critique is a basic misjudgement, because it presumes, amongst other things, that critique is in fact the raison d’etre of all dystopian texts: a highly dubious presumption given the cynically populist manner in which many such texts are written, produced and marketed.[2] But there is an even more fundamental supposition that informs Gonnermann’s claim: in positioning dystopia as a literary expression of extratextual criticism, and claiming that “the aim of any criticism is a transformation of the status quo” (45), she explicitly aligns dystopian texts with their authors’ attempts to engage in real-world revolutionary change. At its most fundamental, then, the premise about the essential function of dystopian literature is naïve in Absent Rebels: there is simply no necessary relationship between any specific piece of cultural production and extraliterary political effect or social reform. In this and other areas, and to its detriment, Absent Rebels repeatedly fails to distinguish between the fictional representations found within the pages of its selected texts and the external reality in which readers and writers live.

Relatedly, much of Absent Rebels understands its primary texts as predominantly, and oftentimes solely, didactic and veers, sometimes headfirst, into intentional fallacy. Take, for example, Gonnermann’s following rumination:

The challenge authors are faced with is to develop an appropriate imagery or language to capture neoliberal thought in its essence while avoiding the fallacies of methodological individualism, i.e. blaming individuals for systemic problems. (175)

What remains unclear is why—or even if—such innovations in form, theme or style are intended in the first instance, and, more crucially, why authorial intention matters in any case. The above quotation is indicative of a general trend by which Absent Rebels simply presumes the accuracy of each of its theoretical speculations, and frequently does not bother offering simple things like evidential substantiation. Indeed, the repeated blind profession of opinions on behalf of a hypothetical reader and the constant moralising throughout Absent Rebels can become fairly overbearing, even to a reader that is already sympathetic to its ideological starting point.

Credibility is further strained in Absent Rebels by the indiscriminate application of its central thesis to its primary texts. By reducing each of its focal texts simply to their relationship with “globalised predatory neoliberal mechanisms” (206), Gonnerman leaves any other themes that arise in the respective novels almost entirely adrift.

For all these problems, however, Absent Rebels does make some insightful observations on both a large and small scale. The foregrounding of theory – particularly in positioning capitalism as a kind of “hyperobject” (Morton 2013, 1) that is “almost impossible to criticise directly” (Gonnermann 66) – is highly productive, and some of the close readings of the primary texts are relatively compelling, particularly in the later chapters.[3] Indeed, Absent Rebels should be applauded for its serious exploration of contemporary texts and social systems. All in all, Absent Rebels is a book that demonstrates a lot of promise, but is heavily flawed on both a theoretical and a formal level. The fairly frequent errors with grammar and spelling are frustrating, and combine to undermine the text’s clarity and coherence in their own right, but also cause further issues with phrasing and stridency (for example, a claim that a text “obviously references” a specific event shifts to merely “hinting at” that event later in the same paragraph [152]). The latter issue is also likely responsible for some arguments being at odds with the evidence provided, instances of further dubious foundational bases provided for the claims being made, and occasional outright misrepresentation of some secondary source content.

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NOTES

[1] The copyright page reads “Zugleich Dissertation an der Universität Mannheim,” (translation: “At the same time dissertation at the University of Mannheim”) so this may be an unrevised thesis. I do hasten to note that this is a good, interesting and somewhat innovative dissertation, but that fact alone does not necessarily translate directly into a wholly convincing academic publication.

[2] Gonnermann herself makes precisely this point, in fact: “novels in general, and dystopias, struggle to maintain their integrity as channels of criticism [because t]hey are always products of a neoliberal market policy and are produced as commodities by publishing houses and marketing departments to satisfy consumer demand for the highly popular dystopian genre” (2021, 67). Accordingly, it is one of the constant frustrations of Absent Rebels that Gonnermann seems unable to consistently maintain her own argumentative line(s).

[3] Morton describes hyperobjects as “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (2013, 1).

WORKS CITED

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Petrozza, Mille (Kreator). “Terrible Certainty.” Terrible Certainty. Berlin: Noise Records N 0342-2, compact disc. 1987.

Ben Eldridge an early career researcher of Literatures in Englishes & the current Vice-President of the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand (ACSANZ), who lives and works primarily on unceded Darug and Gadigal land. If not performing the exploitative, unpaid labour that is intrinsic to the functioning of the modern neoliberal ‘academic’ sector, Eldridge can be found either denouncing technocratic management or—like his personal avatar, the Canada goose (Branta canadensis)—honking eternally into the void of existential despair. This, he realises, may be a tautological claim.