My life in books

Morgan's Heinlein re-read project was supposed to be in support of reading this. She read the first two chapters, and was picking away at the rest in between refreshing her memory of the novels and stories being discussed. It ends in the middle of a sentence, which seems appropriate.

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Hugo-winning scholar Farah Mendlesohn has turned her skills to a long-needed project - a critical analysis of the work of foundational science fiction writer Robert Anson
Heinlein - in a tour de force with the serendipitous title of The
Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein. As Mendlesohn examines Heinlein’s life and his writing, the reader becomes aware of Heinlein the author, who, like many of his non-genre colleagues, wrote because he had a great many things to say - about the human condition, and science fiction was the best medium he could think of to say them in.

This characteristic of Heinlein’s - having something to say about humanity, about society, about how humans adapt to changes in their lives and environments - has led to the belief that Heinlein was a contradictory writer, with inconsistent opinions and ideas. This is perhaps because he went beyond the conventions of sf writing of his time, where the author either had no message, or was holding forth on his ideas in the work under consideration. Heinlein’s characters have viewpoints that are not necessarily his own. His books explore themes and ideas rather than telling everyone what to think about them. Heinlein wants you to think, and Mendlesohn has taken up the task of showing us what he wanted to think about - which was not always what it looked like.

Heinlein was handicapped in this goal, however, by his own flaws as a thinker and writer. He questioned so much - sexuality, religion, ethics, relations between men an women - but failed to question his own sources and assumptions about them. He admired the easy satire of Twain - but never achieved it himself.

Mendlesohn has taken this complex subject and pinned down the complications in Heinlein’ writing, revealing

Heinlein project, revisited: now that Farah Mendlesohn’s book on Heinlein and his work is out and I’ve started reading it, it’s really time to finish the project I’d set for myself, to reread all his sf and fantasy work so I could appreciate her text more readily. I’d finished up the early novels and the short stories, so now for a quick tour through the juveniles.

The juvenile is an odd thing. It usually begins with the protagonists squarely set in the category of children, because they need to be people that a young person can identify with as someone like them, or at least like them in a few years. These days we also have the young adult novel, which lets us fudge things, pick almost adult protagonists that perhaps could reasonably overthrow a government or build a ship that will take us to the moon. But for adults to read and believe that a child could do these things requires a strong ability to invoke a sense that yes, it could happen. Never mind that n our past, people we’d consider children have in fact done such things - we don’t see the possibility of children doing it n now. Thus, with Heinlein’s first juvenile, we begin within pages to accept the ideas that an adult man with access to used rocketry equipment and some radioactive fuel can build a space ship - more, would choose to do so - with three teenaged amateur rocket enthusiasts.

Reading the juveniles together in close sequence allows for an interesting reading of the exploration and colonisation of the solar system, at least among the first half dozen stories. Whether this reading was part of Heinlein’s intentions with these books, I do not know. But viewed together, it seems to be on the one hand, Heinlein’s view of how and why civilisations spread to new worlds, and on the other, how to discover and train the kind of ethical man who will carry the best of a civilisation to its new home.

Rocket Ship Galileo, 1947

Heinlein’s first post-war novel, and first juvenile novel was not sold to Campbell at Astounding. It focuses on three budding young rocket scientists and their trials to build a real space ship - something a lot of kids were engrossed in in the late 40s and 50s, when it seemed as though every neighbourhood had some kind of space exploration club. Of course, this is set a bit in the future, when rockets are already a part of life, but the moon is still a goal. So these kids and their science club have a head start over the youth Heinlein anticipated as the audience for his novel.

What’s interesting about the protagonists, young Art Mueller, Morry Abrams and Ross Jenkins is that they’s all highly intelligent and motivated, they attend a science-and tech oriented high school, and they have adult mentors who let them actually get away with building a space ship. They are also a varied group - Morry is Jewish, and Art is German, his father a defector.

Most of the book is straight procedural with a shot of mystery/espionage - what has to be done to build and crew a space ship, and how to handle mysterious break-ins and other disquieting events while doing so. In places, it reads like a rocketry manual rather than a novel. It gets busier, of course, when they find both a secret Nazi base and ruins from an ancient civilization awaiting them, and end up saving the world by the skin of their teeth. Pretty impressive for a bunch of scholkids.

From a teenager’s perspective, it’s a great adventure story, but read from the viewpoint an adult, it sure looks like criminally negligent exploitation of three naive young men by a single-minded scientist who can't persuade anyone to give him the backing to carry out his experiments in a safe and ethical manner. Instead, he uses the unpaid labour of the boys and never discloses the full scope of the risks – particularly the indications that someone who is not averse to violence is trying to keep him from getting to the moon. Also, what is up with the parents of these boys? Two boys simply tell their parents about the scheme, and they say “if that’s really what you want, dear.” The third set of parents initially say no, but when creepy exploitative scientist talks to them about using their kids as unpaid labour and risking their lives in space, we discover that all the parents are really worried about is their kid not going to a good school in the fall – and when creepy scientist promises to tutor the boy, this makes it OK.

As a story, there are a number of things not particularly well thought-out, but Heinlein was at the beginning of his career writing juveniles, and he hadn’t quite hit on the formula for making a protagonist young enough, but not too young, which is a tricky thing to do.


Space Cadet, 1948

Space Cadet is the classic boy’s boarding school juvenile dressed up as a training camp for an elite force of Peacekeepers. It’s also a picture of how to train the ideal individual, if that person also has to be a spaceman and a peacekeeper.

The first half of the novel covers the basic training of the protagonist Matt Dodson and his friends, with special attention paid to those psychological moments that set out the change from civilian mindset to that of the committed patrolman, and more importantly, the spaceman. This is something common to Heinlein’s writing about living in space - the idea that there is a kind of psychological distinction between the spacing outlook on life and the ‘groundhog’ outlook.

Once Matt and his friends are truly cadets, the action begins. On their first cadet mission, their ship locates a lost vessel, carrying information indicative of an ancient civilisation. They then encounter a nasty confrontation brewing between humans and indigenous Venusians that only the Patrol can resolve, proving that after everything they’ve been through, they are true members of the Patrol. T

Red Planet 1949

Heinlein’s third juvenile is set on Mars, and among other things continues to drop hints about Martians, which will come to fullness in Stranger in a Strange Land. Here we meet young colonist Jim Marlowe, his friend Frank Sutton, and his Martian ‘pet’ Willis. No one in the colony has any idea that Willis is actually an infant of the dominant species, but Jim forms a close rapport with him, and senses that he is more than just an animal. When Jim and Frank go away to boarding school, at one of the communities on the path from the northern settlement, where the colony spends the summers, to the southern settlement, where it spends the winters, Wills goes with him.

But major changes that will affect all the colonists are in the air, and they begin with the Headmaster banning pets and confiscating Willis to sell to a zoo on earth. Jim and Frank discover this, and the company’s plans to end the habitual migrations, and escape the school in an attempt to get home and warn their families.

They run into some serious difficulties, but thanks to Willis, Jim and Frank are accepted as water brothers to Willis’ family, and are able to bring proof of The Company’s perfidy to the Martian settlers. Here as in other places, Heinlein’s inclinations are capitalist but anti-corporatist, as the human settlers defeat the Company and force a reevaluation of the new policies, while the Martians ensure that those who wanted to put Willis in a cage are never seen again.

Farmer in the Sky, 1950

In Farmer in the Sky, we begin to see the somewhat dystopic future for earth that is hinted at in Red Planet and some of the historical sequence stories - population pressure driving immigration, scarcity of resources, rationing.

Farmer in the Sky is a book about the perils of homesteading, a topic Heinlein was clearly attracted to, and would revisit in other novels, particularly Time Enough for Love - and if a particular theme is of importance to him, then it will be found somewhere in Time Enough for Love.

Bill Lermer and his father George are unhappy on Earth. George is a widower who wants a new beginning; Bill wants a different kind of life. Naturally, the new arrivals on Ganymede discover that conditions are far from what was claimed, the Colonial commission has set things up to work in the worst possible way, the current settlers resent them, and life on Ganymede is going to be ten times harder than they’d thought it could be....

But it’s possible, with some good will, and what follows is a manual on what you need to think about to colonise a new planet, and what not to do. Again, there is a strong suggestion that there are people who are ‘right’ for the rigours of a life away from earth, and it’s made quite clear that those who aren’t ‘the right stuff’ aren’t really pleasant people to be around, at least in Heinlein’s eyes. The kind of person needed for the job of space man or planetary colonist is the sort of person Heinlein sets his readers up to identify with. And the events of Farmer in the Sky are exactly what one would expect to find in an examination booklet on finding out if one has what’s needed to be the best colonial settlers.

Between Planets, 1951

In previous juveniles, Heinlein has implied some tensions between Earth and various colonial governments, and the colonies, developing independence, filling up with (at least for the first few generations) people who have, and are, the ‘right stuff.’ In Between Planets, one of the few real interplanetary citizens - Donald Harvey, a young man born in freefall, his mother a Venusian, his father from Earth, both scientists now living on Mars - gets caught in the middle of an interplanetary war when Venus declares its independance while he is at school on Earth. His unusual birth circumstances mean that no one trusts him, and no one is willing to do the obvious thing of sending the neutral citizen to a neutral planet. And as it turns out, he’s not exactly neutral - his parents represent an unknown but active factor in all the negotiations and allegiances, and they’ve committed Don to something he doesn’t know about, without his consent or understanding. This will leave Don with two serious ethical issues - first, which of all the people who want the secret he knows, are the people his parents would have trusted, and second, does he agree with his parents?

Between Planets is straight action all the way to the end, with very little of the blatant ‘how to be the right kind of person’ training in the earlier books. What we see instead is Don navigating the path to an ethical decision.

Rolling Stones, 1953

Rolling Stones is a comic, picaresque novel about an eccentric family of Lunar colonists, and in some ways resets the cycle we’ve seen in the earlier juveniles. Now it’s Luna that’s beginning to be too quiet and commonplace for the born explorer. As Hazel Stone, a character one will see as a child revolutionary in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, says to her complacent son, ‘Your mind may not be made up; mine is. Luna is getting to be like any other ant hill. I'm going out somewhere to find elbow room, about a quarter of a billion miles of it.’

The Family Stone consists of Hazel Stone, engineer and veteran of the revolution, her son Roger, also an engineer by trade, formerly mayor of Luna and currently a comic strip writer looking for a change of pace, his wife Edith, a doctor and sculptor, and their children, Meade, the irrepressible twins Castor and Pollux, and the youngest of the family of supergeniuses, Buster, aka Lowell, potential telepath and certified pain in the neck. Before very long, his restless family has convinced Roger to buy a family spaceship.

Before you can say “second star to the right..” the Stones are off on a Grand Tour of the solar system, with virtually al the action resulting from Cas and POl’s generally unsuccessful attempts to not quite con the locals into a business scheme. At the end of the book, they have floundered through Mars, an Asteroid mining city, and Ceres, and are preparing to ramble on toward Titan. The ideal colonist now lives in space.

In Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada, his 1997 collection of essays focussing on aspects of Black culture in Canada, Rinaldo Wincott, African-Canadian writer and academic, suggests that his readers “read the essays as an attempt to articulate some grammars for thinking Canadian blackness.”

He goes on to expand on what he means by “writing blackness”:

“Writing blackness after the civil-rights era, second wave feminism, black cultural nationalism, gay and lesbian liberation, the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill spectacle, the Rodney King beating and L.A. riots, the Yonge Street Riots, and the O.J. Simpson trials, is difficult work.Yet, writing blackness remains important work. Black postmodernity insists upon being chronicled as it makes fun of and spoofs the very notion of writing blackness. A certain kind of upheaval of blacknesses exists which makes apparent the senselessness of writing blackness even as we are compelled and forced to write it.

“In a Canadian context, writing blackness is a scary scenario: we are an absented presence always under erasure. Located between the U.S. and the Caribbean, Canadian blackness is a bubbling brew of desires for elsewhere, disappointments in the nation and the pleasures of exile— even for those who have resided here for many generations. The project of articulating Canadian blackness is difficult not because of the small number of us trying to take the tentative steps towards writing it, but rather because of the ways in which so many of us are nearly always pre-occupied with elsewhere and seldom with here. It seems then that a tempered arrogance might be a necessary element of any grammar that is used to construct a language for writing blackness in Canada. A shift in gaze can be an important moment.

“The writing of blackness in Canada, then, might begin with a belief that something important happens here. If we accept this, finally, then critics can move beyond mere celebration into the sustaining work that critique is. A belief that something important happens here would mean that celebration could become the site for investigating ourselves in critical ways. We can begin to refuse the seductions of firstness and engage in critique, dialogue and debate, which are always much more sustaining than celebrations of originality.”

Thus, the act of discussing and critiquing black literature, music, film, art, becomes a declarative and profoundly political act - it announces that Black Canadian culture and art exist, that they are situated here, in and among other Canadian cultures, and that they are important, worth not just noting, but debating, being taken seriously. In writing these essays which deal with themes, aspects and artefacts of Black Canadian culture and history, Wincott asserts their value and importance and announces the necessity of acknowledging that these subjects are every bit as central to the Canadian cultural identity as the subjects written about by white critics. It is a revolutionary declaration.

The essays that follow cover a diverse range of subjects, from the complexity of Black Canadian culture in relation to African-American culture within the context of the Black diaspora, to the poetry of M. Nourbese Philips and Dione Brand to the films of Clement Virgo and Stephen Williams. With his essays, Wincott asserts the centrality of exploring blackness in the works of black Canadians, and the importance of this to Canadian culture as a whole. Black art is a part of Canadian art, and discussions of messages about blackness must be recognised as a legitimate topic in Canadian cultural criticism.

I’ve always intended to read something by John Crowley, but somehow until now I’d never got around to it. But when PM Press decided to include him in their Outspoken Authors series, it finally seemed the right time to make a start. Said volume, titled Totalitopia, is a collection of short fiction and essays by Crowley, augmented with an interview and bibliography.

The first story in the collection, This Is Our Town, was in itself enough to make me happy I’d decided to read it. It is a fascinating and multilayered exploration of childhood, faith and memory, set in a small American mining town that has seen disasters and, possibly, miracles. The narrator is a young girl from a relatively poor Catholic family, who converses with her guardian angel and believes that prayer, free will, and God’s omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience can be reconciled in such a way that, somehow, good will prevail - and who, in looking back as an adult, longs for that childhood certainty of faith.

What if, when the aliens come, they offer to do your chores? Why might they do such a thing? What would be their ulterior motive - for as everyone knows, aliens always have an ulterior motive. The short story Gone suggests one possibility.

And Go Like This is a story inspired by a quote from Buckminster Fuller: “There is room enough indoors in New York City for the whole 1963 world’s population to enter, with room enough inside for all hands to dance the twist in average nightclub proximity.” Crowley writes this as if it happened, all the people in the world painstaking transported to NYC, assigned spaces, and then, when all are accounted fir, the music starts on a hundred thousand records players and the world twists. But the twist is also a psychological one, for what would it mean, that for a brief point in time, the whole of the world were neighbours?

The title piece, Totalitopia, is an essay - serious in intent for all its lightness of tone - on the predictive tendencies of science fiction. Crowley advances various approaches to predictive SF, notes that many futuristic utopias and dystopias are actually commentaries n present conditions rather than serious attempt to forecast the future, and discusses a few of the classic texts, even advancing his own ‘prediction’ - which bears certain resemblances to my own ideas of utopia, something which disposes me to think I may enjoy more of this author’s works - before concluding:

“It will be strange. It is forever unknowably strange, its strangeness not the strangeness of fiction or of any art or any guess but absolute. That’s its nature. Of course holding the mirror up to nature is what Hamlet insisted all playing, or pretending, must do; but—as Lewis Carroll knew—the image in a mirror, however scary or amusing or enlightening, is always reversed.”

In the essay “Everything that Rises,” Crowley gently critiques the transhumanist movement - which he links to a strain of primarily Russian scientifically-inspired mysticism known as cosmism. Immortality, the transference of mind to mechanical rather than biological substrates, the transmission of the human data stream at the speed of light, the development of the superintelligent AI - all these speculations on the future of mind are part of this movement, and come under Crowley’s eye.

The concluding essay is a review of the works of another author I’ve never read, Paul Parks. Here Crowley does the work of a reviewer well, for in Paul Park’ Hidden Worlds he makes me think quite seriously about looking into some of the books he discusses.

The volume ends, as all of the books in this series do, with an interview conducted by Terry Bisson. Between the sentiments expressed in the interview, and my feeling of profound delight with both fiction and essays collected in this volume, I have the distinct sense that I have missed out on something I would have enjoyed very much in not reading Crowley earlier, and despite the clamourings of thousands of other books demanding to be read, I really must find space for more of his work in the never-ending queue.

Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal, is a collection of tributes, homages, memories, essays and other writings in honour of this vastly influential, respected and beloved author. It follows in the vein of other recent collections honouring James Tiptree Jr, aka Alice Sheldon, and Samuel “Chip” Delany.

Alexandra Pierce says in her Introduction to the collection:

“This book collects some of the ways people relate and connect to Butler, with each section’s title a quote from a letter or essay within it. The first section, ‘Your work is a river I come home to’, focuses on how Butler has inspired people: in their work, in their lives. In the second, which uses a line from Butler’s own essay ‘Positive Obsessions’, authors reflect on systemic and current political issues that Butler either commented on or would have, were she still alive. ‘Love lingers in between dog-eared pages’ includes letters and essays mainly interested in Butler’s fiction—from Kindred to Xenogenesis to Fledgling—with reactions, arguments, and reflections on her work. Next, in ‘I am an Octavia E. Butler Scholar’, are letters from some of the Octavia E. Butler Scholars: Clarion and Clarion West students who received the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, set up by the Carl Brandon Society in Butler’s honour after her death. The following chapter fits neatly after the Clarion one: ‘Forget talent. There is only the work’. It features writers reflecting on how Butler influenced their writing through tutoring at Clarion or otherwise. The subsequent section, ‘I love you across oceans, across generations, across lives’ includes, broadly speaking, love letters. They recount ways in which Butler and her work changed something about the writers in situations as individual as the people describing them. The book is rounded out with a memorial that appeared in Science Fiction Studies in 2010, highlighting Butler’s many contributions to science fiction as well as examining how Butler has been studied. And we end with Octavia Butler’s own words, in an interview with Stephen W. Potts from 1996. It was important to us we allow Butler to speak for herself.”

Butler’s work has always been important to me; like so many others, I count her as one of my favourite authors, someone whose work has not only entertained but challenged and inspired me. One of the most important things to me about Butler’s work is how unapologetically political she is, in the broadest sense of examining existing power relations and social injustice, and imagining ways to survive, resist, oppose, change, create a more just and community-oriented world. That’s a feeling shared by many of those who contributed to this volume.

Mimi Mondal writes in her Introduction about the experience of editing this volume in the aftermath of the 2016 US elections, of being an immigrant from India, who had seen the country of her birth elect a “right-wing religious demagogue” in 2014.

“I remember staying curled up in bed way past daytime on November 8, trying to grasp for a reason to get up and finding none, absolutely none. My landlord at the time, an otherwise extremely active and optimistic gay man in his early fifties, was lying crumpled in the other bedroom. My mother, on the other end of a cross-continental phone call, was advising me to stay indoors, in case there was backlash in the streets. Where was I going to go now? What was the point of doing anything, writing anything, believing anything? Someone like me wasn’t wanted anywhere—not back at home, not even in this other country which had taken so much of my faith and love. Once again, I was back to being a number: the gunk that needed to be drained out of the swamp, denied visas to stay or work, turned back from airports, put on the other side of a wall, and made to pay for it too.

It was through this endless numbness that I walked into this project. I felt barely functional, but I took it up because I had read and loved more of Octavia’s work in the meantime, because I had never stopped feeling grateful for the scholarship, because I had to keep my brain and my hand going. I had been an editor before. Even on a really bad day when nothing else made sense, I could mechanically line-edit pages and pages of text. I did not expect this anthology to hold me together, make me cry tears of gratefulness, help me draw strength and hope, through the next few months as wave after wave of bad news kept hitting. I expected these letters to fondly reminisce about a favourite author whom some of the writers may have met, but I did not expect unrestrained conversation about politics, or avowals of continued resistance and solidarity. I expected to help create a tribute volume, something elegantly detached and intellectual that went well with the muted shades of libraries and halls of fame, but the letters in this anthology are alive, bleeding, screaming, urgent—in a way that reflects my own state of mind at these times.”

These are the things that Butler calls forth from us, the passions for justice, for resistance, for struggle, for speaking and writing and performing truth in the face of unbridled arrogance, privilege and power.

In essays and more personal narratives, writers such as Andrea Hairston, Nisi Shawl, Karen Lord, Katheen Kayembe, Rachel Swirsky, Steven Barnes and Nnedi Okorafor - to name only a few - discuss Butler’s work, and talk with passion about what Butler meant, and means, to them. In turn, their words help the reader to clarify and expand on what Butler and her work mean to us.

She was genius, and giant, and she left us such generous gifts.

Beth Plutchak’s collection of essays, Borders, Boundary Crossings, and Reinventing Science Fiction, is a part of Aqueduct Press’ Conversations Pieces Series. The works - both fictional and non-fictional - in this series are intended to generate and explore conversations about science fiction. The conversations engendered by this series come in many forms, and touch on many things. The ways that genres influences each other, the ways that writers create works to augment, or subvert, or interrogate earlier works, the creation of variations on themes, the ways that social movements and political and historical events change our understanding of science fiction or key sciencefictional works or themes.

Beth Plutchak’s collection of works are a part of these ongoing conversations. The publisher’s description of the collection says:

“The personal is political, and the political is personal. This collection of essays and an sf tale explores the intersections of representation, science fiction, feminism, social justice, and fandom, specifically in relationship to the feminist sf convention WisCon. Plutchak argues that to build a new future we need new stories, stories that tell us where we have been as well as show us where we are going, and she uses feminist theory to analyze feminist sf fandom's history, present, and future.”

In the first of the essays in this collection, “Is WisCon Feminist?” Plutchak interrogates both the meaning of feminism and the positioning of WisCon as a feminist science fiction convention, drawing on the proceedings of a panel on the title subject at WisCon. She begins with her recollections of her early engagement with second wave feminism, and looks at the ways in which it failed:

“But, I always feel that what we really owe these young women is an apology; I think we need to tell them that if feminism seems irrelevant to their concerns, it’s not because it is irrelevant, it’s because we lost. We made compromises to achieve narrow goals; we threw our sisters of color under the bus. We convinced ourselves we weren’t like poor white women. We asked poor women and all women of color to wait. We wouldn’t ask for full reproductive rights; let’s get abortion and birth control first, we said. We wouldn’t ask for a restructuring of corporate capitalism we’d just be satisfied with equal pay and equal access for now. We wanted the ERA, equality with the boys, even though what the boys had varied wildly by race and class. We weren’t brave enough to think that through, not to mention the white women who never wanted to anyway, thank you very much.

Why do you think the same battles are being fought all over again? It’s not entirely our fault. We were played. But, we have to recognize that and own our part in it.”[1]

Plutchak goes on to discuss the struggle for a safe space for people of colour at WisCon, and how initial failures to act on that need were failures of feminism, and how anger at that failure led to the founding of the Carl Brandon Society. She closes with a discussion of the ways in which supporting the stories of the marginalised is one if the most important functions of an organisation that sees itself as a feminist science fiction convention.

In the next essay, “Challenging the Narrative of the Undeserving Poor” Plutchak takes on an issue very close to my heart, when she says: “We want to help the poor, I suppose, but we don’t want to help people who don’t deserve it, people who won’t help themselves. But, how do we know who is and isn’t deserving? Who controls that narrative? Let’s unwind this a little bit, shall we?”

I’ll interject myself into the conversation for a minute here. I get very annoyed when people make judgements about who “deserves” social assistance programs and who does not. If I was the ruler of the world, everyone would have a guaranteed annual income sufficient to provide them with a private and comfortable place to live, healthy food, full medical care, as much education as they want, clothes and access to recreational facilities, accommodations for disabilities on an individual needs basis. And this means everyone, even the hypothetical lazy slacker who gets all this and does nothing “productive” in return. Because we can’t measure “productivity” in any meaningful way. Lillies of the field, and all that. And simply by being a live human being, one deserves to be provided with the essentials for physical and emotional well-being. And fuck the judgements. So, back to Plutchak.

In this essay, she takes on the master narratives of poverty as the consequence of poor choices and the “culture of poverty.” She discusses the ways in which a comfortable white middle class person may fail to realise that poverty and marginalised status eliminate options that others may have, and that decisions that look like poor choices from outside may be the best way to survive.

In “Reinvent the Future, Change the World,” Plutchak makes visible the connections between science fiction, representation of the marginalised, social change and hope.

Plutchak includes two shorter essays which were included in WisCon souvenirs books (Plutchak edited the convention’s souvenir books for several years) and concludes with an essay looking at the history of WisCon from a perspective of working toward a feminist theory of decision-making that prioritises the needs of the marginalised, those with less voice and less opportunity to influence or create spaces that are both safe and fun for them.

Plutchak has titled this collection Borders, Boundary Crossings, and Reinventing Science Fiction, but as I read these works, I think that the recurring and overarching theme is more the failure of the imagination and how that has limited what science fiction can do - and how we can reinvent our world by truly expanding our imaginings, by telling the stories we haven’t had enough imagination to tell, or to accept and understand and inhabit when others tell them to us. I see this message in the single piece of fiction included in this collection, the short story “Game Theory.” This is a brilliant deconstruction of the generation ship/closed society trope in science fiction, and makes the point that until the patterns of dominance we have built into our society are altered, there can be no changes to our outcomes - and that story, the ability to imagine a different way, is part of how we come to change those patterns.


[1] As a feminist in her 60s who also began her journey tiward a feminist life with the theory and praxis of second wave feminism, I agree with this analysis. White feminism did focus on white concerns, abandoned anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles, failed to understand - or perhaps chose not to try - when, for instance, the Combahee River Collective showed us a path toward what is now known as intersectional feminism. Instead, we settled for a few victories in limited areas that benefited white women more than other women, other sexual minorities, other marinalised peole of any gender. We could have committed to the hard choices, to the long struggle for true social justice and a restructuring of a system that marginalised all but the wealthy and white. But we didn’t.

Race, Gender and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film, edited by Barbara Gurr, Assistant Professor in Residence in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Connecticut, is a fascinating collection of essays for anyone interested, as I am, in how these issues are presented in science fiction, and in the post-apocalyptic vision in particular.

I have always been rather a fan of the post-apocalyptic subgenre of speculative fiction, I think in part because it mirrors the worst fears of our society - how the world ends, which of the classical horsemen, or some other, newly imagined devastation, predominates our nightmares - and partly because it offers the opportunity to suggest what might follow if everything we know has been torn down. Will we recreate current social structures, classes, institutions, or will we strike out in new directions?

This is a collection of essays that look at our visual media and try to explore some of these questions. As Gurr says in her Introduction, “The writers in this volume are interested in the ways in which post-apocalyptic fictions interact with—produce, reflect, interrogate, accommodate, and resist—hegemonic notions of race, gender, and sexuality.”

Early post-apocalyptic imaginings tended to focus on the reconstruction of society after a devastating, often nuclear war, or as the result of science gone wrong; such narratives were heavily influenced by the experiences of WWII. The Cold War introduced the apocalypse brought about by stealthy invasion, the infection and spread of disease or mind control agents - The Invasion of the Body Snatchers being the classic film example. Infection of the body, and the body politic, and fears of immigration blend in both alien invasion and zombie narratives, which have become increasingly popular after the events of 9/11. All these scenarios and more are explored from various perspectives in these essays, which address works as varied as the Hunger Games films, Firefly, The Walking Dead, Falling Skies, Battlestar Galactica (the remake), True Blood, the Resident Evil films and others.

What many of these essays make clear is that despite the opportunities for change of all kinds inherent in the post-apocalyptic scenario, many of these works fail to really challenge contemporary gender, race and class relations. Even with the presence of major characters who are people of colour or white women, the societies being recreated remain patriarchal, male-centred, and white-dominated, and perpetuate existing stereotypes about race and gender. Through analysis of the social milieus in series such as Firefly and films such as Hunger Games, it becomes clear that simply having a female action hero does not necessarily imply a break with traditional gender roles - the presence of an exceptional woman serves merely to divert attention from the ways in which the status quo is maintained.

The post-apocalyptic narrative is, above all, a narrative of survival. Its tropes tell us what are the threats humanity fears will threaten its survival, and the parts of our culture that we believe are essential to our survival. It shows us what we fear and what we value, and lets us question whether our fears and values are indeed the ones that will affect whether we as a society will indeed survive.

Adilifu Nama, in Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film, explores and interrogated (as he notes in his Introduction) "... the intersection of black representation and science fiction (sf) cinema." Acknowledging that actual representation of black people in sf film is extremely limited (even more so in 2008, when the book was published), he adds:

"... in spite of the overt omission of black representation and racial issues in sf cinema, I have found that both are present in numerous sf films. Albeit implicit—as structured absence, repressed or symbolic—blackness and race are often present in sf films as narrative subtext or implicit allegorical subject. Most important, for this book, is the cultural politics of race that such representations suggest not only in sf cinema but alongside the sociohis- torical place that blackness has occupied in American society. As a result, the sf film genre is not merely an imaginative medium primarily focused on the future. Sf film is also a powerful lens by which to observe the collective racial desires, constructs, fantasies, and fears circulating throughout American society."

In discussing the ways in which blackness is both openly represented and covertly coded in science fiction film, Nama acknowledges that he is examining the genre in unaccustomed ways:

"Too often the sf film genre is regarded as addressing only signature divisions in the genre: humans versus machines, old versus new, individual versus society, and nature versus the artificial. In this book, however, I place black racial formation at the center of these common dichotomies. As a result, a more complex and provocative picture emerges of how sf cinema, in imagining new worlds and addressing a broad range of social topics, has confronted and retreated from the color line, one of the most troubling and turbulent social issues present in American society."

Nama organises his analyses into six general topics. In the book's first chapter, "Structured Absence and Token Presence," he looks at the meanings inherent in the absence of black (and other racialised) characters in sf films, the implications of imagined futures in which only white people (and often only white Americans) survive, and the way blackness is coded through the use of symbolic characteristics and animals or animal-like others. While noting a number of films which do incorporate black characters - many of which, in the earlier years of sf film, were produced during the brief flourishing of 'blaxploitation' films which presented and validated black experience - Nama shows how these 'token' black characters often embody white concerns about racial issues. Examining films produced in more recent years, Nama looks at the emergence of the 'safe' black hero - in many instances portrayed by a single actor, Will Smith - as a reassuring figure for white audiences.

In the second chapter, "Bad Blood: Fear of Racial Contamination," Nama "examines the theme of racial contamination in sf cinema and, by extension, America’s fixation with racial boundary maintenance." Fear of racial 'contamination,' and the history of eugenicist responses to this fear, can be seen both in coded implication and overt symbolism in a number of science fiction themes and tropes - mutants, zombies, androids, shape-shifting 'things' - that, when associated, as they frequently are, with dystopian and post-apocalyptic settings, underline the belief that 'blood mixing' is the first step to the end of civilisation.

The third chapter, "The Black Body: Figures of Distortion," begins with the observation that the black body has long been depicted in a distorted or exaggerated fashion in American media. Nama goes on to discuss how "... the black body is often depicted in sf film not merely in ways that connect it with a sense of the grotesque or a source and site of phantasmagoric spectacle but also as a cultural and political metaphor for racial difference." Nama also notes the ways in which the male black body is associated with violent phallic and sexual imagery, suggestive of the construction of black men as sexually aggressive and threatening.

In the fourth chapter, "Humans Unite!: Race, Class and Postindustrial Aliens," Nama explores various unifying interests - class notably among them - that appear to override interracial strife or threats. In a number of science fiction films, the evil corporation becomes the threat which brings together black and white, while in others, the threat of an even greater Other - the invading or infiltrating alien - stand in for loss of jobs and disempowerment in a postindustrial economy and "... make racial strife obsolete." Ironically, while downplaying black/white racial tensions, many of these films symbolically depict fear of Latin@ immigrants 'invading' the shrinking blue-collar labour market.

In "White Narratives, Black Allegories," Nama begins his discussion by noting that science fiction film is a genre that, while superficially recapitulating many of the tropes of the white-supremacist, colonialist 'Western' genre, it is notably more open to resistant and subversive readings. In expanding on this, he "examines the allegorical import of sf film not only in breaching and buttressing the ideological constructs of America’s racial hierarchy but also as sources of subversive pleasure, meaning, and play that often contest the “preferred” meaning..." The chapter discusses a number of films that in Nama's analysis are "...open to racial readings that engage the legacy of American slavery, the racial injustice of the American legal system, black crime, police brutality, black liberation, and “race” riots, as well as racial pro ling."

In the final chapter, "Subverting the Genre: The Mothership Connection," Nama "... shifts focus from Hollywood representations of science fiction blackness to those independent and extrafilmic productions that stand not only outside the mainstream apparatus of cinematic production but in some cases outside the cultural conventions of mainstream notions of blackness." In particular, he examines films which consciously engage with race and the black community. Nama also explores the relatively new movement of Afrofuturism which includes not only film, but "... art, independent black comic books, black music, and even hip-hop videos [which] have functioned as alternative sites where futuristic fantasyscapes populated by black people can find expression." In considering the importance of the Afrofuturism movement in black-created and black-centred cultural productions, Nama asks, as his closing remarks, "... sf film is an important symbol of the social progress of a society still struggling to come to terms with the legacy of American racism. If we cannot look toward the future to imagine new possibilities and solutions for a history of race relations marred with fear, violence, institu- tional discrimination, and deep-seated ambivalence, then where else?"

Judith Merril was one of the most influential American science fiction reviewers and editors of the 1960s. She introduced and championed the writers, works and revolutionary aesthetics of the British New Wave in North American, transforming the genre in the process.

In The Merril Theory of Lit’ry Criticism: Judith Merril’s Nonfiction, part of Aqueduct Press' Heirloom series, editor Ritch Calvin has brought together a number of works that illustrate the evolution of Merril's critical theory: review columns, anthology introductions, and other selected essays.

Calvin's introduction to the collection, which he titles "Introduction: The SF Aesthetics of Judith Merril," is in fact an essay that sums up the key aspects of Merril's thinking about science fiction - which she often referred to as science fantasy - as a mature theory of criticism. The essays of Merril collected in the volume show the development of that theory through her ongoing examination of the works of sff writers over the years. They also, as Calvin notes, offer

"...a history of SF, SF authors and editors, and SF publishing. In her reviews, introductions, and tributes, she chronicles the lives and work of many prominent and lesser known figures. She details the lives and deaths of a number of writers and editors. And she recounts the developments within the field as they happened. Over a period of twelve years, we get yearly, and sometimes monthly, updates on who is publishing, what is being written, and how the field is changing."

Reading through the introductions - the earliest of which is for the first edition of SF: The Year's Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy, published in 1956, is indeed very much a journey through history. As I read her discussions of the authors and works included in these volumes - some of the names still well-known, others barely remembered - I found myself transported back in time, to the memories of the child reading all the sff books she could find in her local library, spending her precious allowance on sff monthly magazines and the occasional new book she found in the carousel bookstands that used to grace variety, department and grocery stores.

I'm grateful to these reminders of the past, to have brought back to mind stories and authors whose works are rarely in the "Best SF Short Stories" anthologies that pick a topic or a decade and republish the great stories that are always republished. I'm also happy to be learning about authors whose work I somehow never encountered as a child - in the hopes that I may some day find an online repository where I can read them now.

A wonderful book for anyone interested in learning about, or revisiting, the history of the genre.

It has been said that the Inklings - the community of writers that surrounded C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams - was the most influential group of writers of the 20th century. In Bandersnatch: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings, Diana Pavlac Glyer traces the story of the Inklings as a working writers' group from its beginnings, detailing the evidence for the extensive influence the members had on each other's writing. The book itself is an adaptation of her earlier and more scholarly work, The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in community, and has been organised in such a way as to offer not only illuminative anecdotes about the writers and details of the process of critique and collaboration that marked their interactions, but observations on what made the group so successful in fostering each other's work and the lessons other groups might draw from that success.

The story of the Inklings begins with Lewis and Tolkien. Both employed in teaching English at Oxford, their association began when Tolkien, who believed that study of mythology and early languages was essential to the study of English, started a club, named the Kolbítar (Old Norse for “old cronies who sit round the fire so close that they look as if they were biting the coals") for the study and appreciation of old Icelandic literature. Lewis, long fascinated by Norse mythology, joined the club.

Then, in 1929, Tolkien asked Lewis to read his early draft of the Lay of Leithian, the poem about the love of the mortal Beren for the elven Lúthien Tinúviel, which would eventually become part of The Lord of the Rings. Lewis praised it highly - but he also offered a detailed critique on all levels, from conceptual matters to word choices. Tolkien responded with extensive revisions. Lewis then shared some of his own work with Tolkien, and eventually the two began meeting regularly to read and critique each other's work. They were eventually joined by Lewis's brother Warren, retired from military service, who had engaged on a project of editing the Lewis family papers for eventual publication (Warren Lewis would later turn his efforts to historical research and write several well-respected books on 17th century France.)

Glyer notes that while we tend to associate the Inklings with writing and scholarship, a third key element - like the first two, a matter of commitment, even devotion rather than simple interest - that bound them together was Christian theology and faith. As C. S. Lewis wrote when inviting Charles Williams to join their company, “We have a sort of informal club called the Inklings: the qualifications (as they have informally evolved) are a tendency to write, and Christianity."

Over time, the group, which adopted the name of the Inklings, grew to include other working writers - poets, essayists, scholars in a wide range of subjects from literature to medicine, novelists and playwrights - though not all participated to the same degree and several members came and went during the years. In all, 19 men are considered to have been members of the Inklings - Owen Barfield, J. A. W. Bennett, David Cecil, Nevill Coghill, James Dundas-Grant, Hugo Dyson, Adam Fox, Colin Hardie, Robert E. “Humphrey” Havard, C. S. Lewis, Warren Lewis, Gervase Mathew, R. B. McCallum, C. E. Stevens, Christopher Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien, John Wain, Charles Williams, and C. L. Wren.

Glyer focuses her attentions on the writers 'at the heart' of the Inkings - Tolkien senior and later his son Christopher, the two Lewis brothers, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams - detailing their influences on each other and their collaborative projects. What emerges is a remarkable portrait of a group of intensely intellectual and creative men who shared some of the most intimate aspects of their lives - their creative processes and their spiritual selves. A rich community of authors, whose individual works would influence many other writers beyond their circle. Without their connections to each other and the long ongoing conversation that encompassed them all, English literature of the 20th century - including genre fiction - would have been very different, and much poorer for the loss.