Science Fiction

Ask the average adult whether they like science fiction, and the answer will usually be “no.” But ask them whether they appreciate Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or remember Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking film 2001: A Space Odyssey, or enjoy watching the TV series Black Mirror, and watch them perk up. As it is still most commonly perceived, science fiction (hereafter SF) is a term that remains tainted by its perceived association with childish interests: shiny spaceships, goofy aliens, laser swords, and action figures. And even as the broader genre of fantastic fiction has come to dominate twenty-first-century Hollywood, this mainstream visibility and commercial might has done little to diminish this stigma. On the contrary: the ubiquity of splashy franchises like Star Wars, The Hunger Games, and the seemingly endless onslaught of superhero movies has further strengthened the perception that SF is an inherently immature cultural form that one is expected to outgrow after adolescence—like comic books, video games, and loud music.Just as adult devotees of SF literature have congregated in fan clubs and associations over the past century to celebrate their favorite genre, a similarly committed subsection of academics has established itself—somewhat precariously—as an interdisciplinary alliance of SF scholars. Without much institutional support and only begrudging acclaim, this ragtag band of interdisciplinary scholars continues to study a wide variety of SF. Within academia, they are harbored primarily by English literature departments across the globe, which at least tolerate their existence, if only because of the obvious appeal their SF-themed courses reliably have for students.Sherryl Vint has long been one of the driving forces within the field. A frighteningly prolific author, editor, teacher, speaker, and organizer, she has been a tireless advocate of SF as a cultural form that deserves serious consideration—both as a literary genre and as a cultural form that offers its own critical method. She has coedited countless volumes, published an overwhelmingly long list of books and articles, shepherded a long line of PhD students through grad school, and founded the journal Science Fiction Film and Television together with fellow SF studies stalwart Mark Bould.This profile makes her the perfect author for a book that’s designed to introduce open-minded lay readers to the untold riches of SF. Her most recent book Science Fiction offers a thoroughly accessible entrance point that elucidates the genre’s many connections to technological innovation, philosophy, economics, race and gender, political theory, and many other societal domains. Her aim throughout is to clarify why SF is much more than escapist entertainment: as a fundamentally speculative genre that continues to generate countless “what if?” scenarios, Vint’s book approaches SF not so much as a narrative genre, but as “something like a toolkit for thinking through urgent issues in social life today” (18).This well-considered approach deliberately sidesteps some of the many classic traps of introductory books designed for a broad and non-specialized readership. Vint’s monograph refuses to reduce the genre to the kind of historical narrative that almost inevitably reproduces a tiresome retread of the most widely known authors, publishers, and other innovators. Nor does she promise to offer a survey of great works that either confirm or revise the existing canon of classic SF texts.Instead, her book is organized into six chapters, each of which clearly explains how the genre has provided tools for thinking about a particular topic that has been central to modernity. Beginning with the utopian tradition, every chapter features a breathtaking array of examples from SF texts across media, cultures, and historical periods. Throughout these six chapters, it is this immense variety that sells the book’s main argument above anything else. Not only does this vividly demonstrate the richness of the global SF tradition, but it also slyly establishes how ubiquitous the speculative urge has always been, and how science-fictional thinking has long been central to our technological age.In the chapter on the utopian tradition, for instance, Thomas More’s eponymous classic sits comfortably alongside a long list of lesser-known speculative works that followed throughout the seventeenth century—which are then related in turn to the dystopian tradition that emerged in the early twentieth century and has arguably become the dominant form for late-capitalist SF. Vint clarifies the utopian impulse across SF by emphasizing its use value as a tool for thinking rather than focusing on the more particular similarities and differences between various major works. As she convincingly argues, the utopian drive has remained central to SF even after its dystopian turn, as even the bleakest post-apocalyptic SF ultimately encourages us to believe that “with better choices we might avoid these nightmares” (33).By the same token, the seemingly contradictory conceptualizations of posthumanism that underlie SF’s many representations of robotics and artificial intelligence are also dialectically intertwined in the chapter “Robots, AI, and Transhumanism.” As her many examples illustrate, some SF authors have seen technological innovation as a straightforward extension of human abilities, while others have critically interrogated how those new powers have served to reinforce existing inequalities. While Vint’s own position on these topics is always crystal clear, her point is never to render judgment on authors or works by placing them on either end of a “good/bad” critical binary. Rather, this strategy firmly positions SF as a site of cultural production that both reflects and directs societal debates.The same strategy underlies every chapter, each of which briskly and confidently maps out an idea that may be obvious to someone steeped in the SF tradition. But to readers who are only casually acquainted with the genre, it is surely less than self-evident to assume that global SF has collectively introduced, explored, developed, questioned, and challenged all the major transformations that together define the modern age. Understanding SF not as an overlooked canon of masterpieces, but as a transhistorical and transmedial site of cultural production helps us recognize how central the genre has been to an age that has been shaped above all else by rapid technological innovation.A particularly impressive chapter in this regard is the section titled “Environment, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene.” After noting in its introductory lines how “no topic is more urgent than climate change and the ways it promises to transform all aspects of human life” (117), Vint proceeds to interweave examples from across two centuries of SF history. Drawing on examples that range from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) to more recent texts like the Afrofuturist film Poumzi (2009), she paints a striking portrait of how questions of climate and humanity’s relationship to the planet’s natural environment have always been central to the genre. A somewhat recent trend in more respectable contemporary literature has speculated about human-driven ecological transformations under the awkward moniker “cli-fi.” But throughout SF history, less prestigious genre texts like Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars and Frank Herbert’s Dune have offered equally meaningful ways of imagining humanity’s relationship to its natural environment. This yields what Vint describes as a form of “environmental rhetoric” that helps us understand SF as a “discursive way to grasp the present” (135).The only real downside of the book’s specific organization has its own strange irony: as Vint hardly ever stops to discuss any given text for more than two or three sentences, having more than a passing familiarity with many of these SF texts really does help one’s comprehension of the book. But then, readers who know more than a handful of the dozens upon dozens of novels, short stories, movies, and TV shows cited here probably won’t need this kind of introduction to the genre. A second inevitable drawback of Vint’s approach is that the onslaught of examples can feel repetitive after three or four chapters, each of which makes roughly the same point about SF’s relationship to a different theme. And given the number of authors and character names cited, some errors and misspellings do show up here and there—though this should surely be attributed to academic publishers’ nonchalance regarding precise editorial oversight.At any rate, these are decidedly minor quibbles about a book that makes for a dazzling introduction to the growing field of SF studies, and a compelling argument for understanding SF as a critical method. For readers who already love the genre above all as a form of entertainment, Vint’s book will certainly deepen their appreciation of how SF has maintained a constant dialogue that stretches far beyond the genre’s boundaries. And for readers who remain skeptical about a genre that is still widely perceived as inherently immature and sensationalistic, it has the power to open up a whole new world of science-fictional thought experiments across a wide variety of media.