Science Fiction/Criticism

(First published in The Blackwell Companion to Science Fiction. David Seed, ed. Blackwell, 2005.)

No popular genre of fiction has generated as much, and as diverse, critical commen­tary as science fiction (SF). Since it is in the nature of SF’s oxymoronic fusion of the rational and the marvelous to challenge received notions of reality — sometimes seri­ously, sometimes playfully — critical provocation is part of SF’s generic identity.

The commentary this remarkably answerable genre has inspired ranges from academic literary criticism to pronouncements by authors and reviewers, electronic discussion threads, postmodern cultural theory, informed speculations on global evolution, and sectarian disputes among practicing Klingons. Its critical voices include highly specialized professionals and amateur aficionados — and it is characteristic of SF culture that the lines between them are porous. Its critical problems involve not only the speculations and dilemmas SF artists pose in their fictions, but also implicit questions about the relations between entertainment and critical chinking, play and pedagogy, the values of humanism and technoscientific culture. As one commentator has written, SF criticism “has been, by any measure, one of history’s most extensive discussions about one particular branch of literature” (Westfahl 1999: 187).

Because of this breadth and fluidity, it is hard to delimit the field of SF criticism. For convenience, I will distinguish three main streams: literary, popular, and academic criticism. They are not always distinguishable, for often they treat the same questions, often in similar terms. Nor have they remained stable. Each stream reflects the interests of certain cultural groups and institutions, with their own protocols and tradi­tions, and these have sometimes mutated and converged, as cultural life in the technologically developed world itself has changed. In the remarks that follow, I will emphasize the social and intellectual contexts in which SF and its critical accompani­ment developed, rather than the many influential critical interventions themselves. I will also focus on developments in the USA and UK, where the overwhelming major­ity of SF works have been produced, and whose styles and debates have had a dominant influence on the SF of other societies.                                      

SF criticism per se emerged when SF itself did, in the early nineteenth century, as European writers began to depict future societies and alternate worlds without obvious fantastic framing, using the same concreteness and plausibility to describe their imaginary worlds as they used to describe actual travels and historical documents. Throughout the nineteenth century, scientific fantasy was dominated by two approaches. One was futuristic utopography, closely associated with the industrial utopianism of the French social philosopher Saint- Simon; the other was the tradition of pseudoalchemical fantasy, in which fantastic discovery and invention was colored by Romantic Naturphilososophie. The former aspired to break with literary culture, and gen­erated the populist-technocraric stream of SF criticism that began in earnest with Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaire (1863-1919). The latter, entwined with the genre of the Gothic, depicted its protoscientific ideas in terms of mythical or magical motifs handed down by literature. For the utopians, technology represented the benevolent conquest of scarcity and ignorance. For the authors of literary Gothic, by contrast, science was a symbol of human protagonists’ internal ethical conditions, a matter of soul rather than society. Its favored forms were the symbol-rich psychological dramas of isolated, fraught characters favored by the wave-front of nineteenth century Euro­ American literature.

The Gothic line of SF took mature form when Darwinian evolutionary theory provided it with a scientific narrative that could successfully challenge the classical literary model, within which material reality was merely a disguise for certain archetypes. It was H.G. Wells who, by applying ideas from evolutionary natural history to human self-construction in his early scientific romances, supplied the literary Gochic with scientific plausibility. As a contemporary French reviewer framed it, the dominant idea of Wells’ work is “the reciprocal evolution of Science and Humanity. Men create science, science, in its turn remakes mankind” (Parrinder 1972: 100).

The Wellsian model of scientific romance enjoyed great success. For the literary establishment, it represented a new poetry that fused knowledge of science and char­acter. It brought the undisciplined fantasy of popular adventure fiction under control by grounding it in the useful and realistic scientific worldview. The new genre also had opponents. Conservatives believed the science fatally narrowed the scope of the fiction. At the other end of the spectrum, scientific enlighteners objected to the way romance elements corrupted the truth of facts into pseudoscience.

It was, however, precisely this hybrid character that made Wellsian SF attractive to some of the most innovative of early modernist writers, like Vladimir Mayakovsky, Michael Bulgakov, Evgeny Zamyatin, Karel Capek, and the avant-garde playwright, Alfred Jarry, who, calling it the “‘hypothetical novel,” singled out the notion of thought experiment and fictive prophecy that would become one of sf’s most durable attractions:

The scientific novel — which could also be called the hypothetical novel — imagines what would happen if certain elements were in place. This is why, in the same way that hypotheses come true one day, some of these novels, at the moment when they were written, are novels of the future. (quoted in Evans 1999: 177).

Wellsian SF was quite congenial to European literary culture, since the normal output of even realist writers often included works of fantasy. The newness of the sci­entific perspective seemed to complement the literary tradition. Zamyatin praised Wells’ “mechanical, chemical fairy tales.” Wells’ special contribution was to use ostensibly scientific premises and reasoning to build extravagant speculations.

Almost all of Wells’ fairy tales are built upon brilliant and most unexpected scientific paradoxes. All of his myths are as logical as mathematical equations. And this is why we, modem men, we, skeptics, are conquered by these logical fantasies, this is why they command our attention and win our belief. (Zamyatin 1970: 261)

For the first half of the twentieth century, Wells’ scientific romances were admitted to a canon of fantastic fiction because they were considered inherently philosophical, inducing readers to ponder the metaphysical core of scientific ideas. Science Fiction, on the other hand, was associated with the vulgar style of the pulps, and treated as sub­literary, nor worthy of notice by critics of taste. A main function of literary criticism has been to regulate the canon of exemplary works that every educated member of the culture is supposed to know. Only works of borderline literary SF written by authors who had already established reputations in more serious forms — such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Capek’s R.U.R. — were considered candidates for canonizarion. After the Second World War, SF’s reputation rose as that of elite literarure declined. Significant critical essays occa­sionally appeared in literary journals, like C.S. Lewis’ “On Science Fiction” (1955), but these became increasingly rare.

Popular SF criticism emerged from the vibrant discussions conducted in the pulps, the popular SF magazines that were the main vehicles for SF publishing in the USA from the 1920s to the 1950s. Its participants were primarily fans, avid readers — many of whom were also active writers – who were encouraged by the influential editors of the period, Hugo Gernsback and John Campbell, to voice their opinions about the genre and to extend discussions of ideas raised in the magazines’ editorials. They approached SF nor as an interesting minor branch of literature, but as a new sort of writing altogether, a challenge to the conservatism of the cultural establishment, which looked down on practical science and engineering. Popular SF criticism has often been fervently polemical, taking as indisputable the premise that SF is the apt artistic expression of the modern age of discovery and invention, and, by the same token, the most moral one, since it inculcates in its often young readers respect for technology and scientific reasoning. In the popular view, SF should be judged by dif­ferent standards than traditional literature, since its values are different. Popular SF critics have tended also to be more practical than their literary counterparts. Viewing SF as an ideal kind of mass entertainment, whose natural form is the commercial commodity, popular criticism has often taken the form of pragmatic advice to SF writers on how to write and be published in the genre. This tradition has gradually expanded from magazine publishing to the introductions of anthologies, internet fan sites, even mutating into sophisticated theories of discourse.

The popular conception of SF can be traced back to the futuristic utopianism of postrevolutionary writers in France, like Sebastien Mercier and Felix Bodin. Breaking with the traditional humanistic conception of literature’s role as the preserver of the best of the past, they proclaimed that a new sort of fiction could transform the world by giving readers a romantic vision of hope in the future to which they could aspire. Bodin captures this missionary enthusiasm in the intrduction to his Roman de l’Avenir (1834):

If ever anyone succeeds in creating the novel, the epic of the future, he will have tapped a vast source of the marvelous, and of a marvelous entirely in accord with verisimilitude … which will dignify reason instead of shocking or deprecating it as all the marvelous epic machinery conventionally employed up to now has done. In suggesting per­fectibility through a narrative and dramatic picturesque form, he will have found a method of seizing, of moving the imagination, and of hastening the progress of humanity in a manner very much more effective than the best expositions of systems presented with even the highest eloquence. (Evans 1999: 20)

The international success of Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires a generation later derived from this project of synthesizing the myth of progress whir scientific educa­tion. Verne’s work was intended, and openly marketed, to combine romantic adventure with scientific didacticism.

In this indirect way, the Voyages were polemical, written to be vehicles of Verne’s editor’s, Hetzel’s, visionary educational program to instruct French youth in science when the reactionary national curriculum removed it from the schools. Admiring critics immediately recognized the innovation. But Verne’s pedagogical use of science was already at the time a somewhat conservative synthesis, since it limited its horizon to technical developments so plausible and near that they seemed to occur barely a few days in the future.

Hugo Gernsback and John Campbell

Popular SF criticism emerged as an institution as popular SF became a cultural move­ment in the USA of the late 1920s and 1930s. Wells and Verne were respected in the USA of the 1920s, and their fiction was often reprinted in the pulps. But the American conditions for writing fiction were dramatically different than in the UK and Europe. A rapid democratization of culture attended the even more rapid industrialization of American society and the assimilation of millions of immigrants whose education in the language and whose reading tastes were not connected with the literary language of English elite education. For these — and out of these — hopeful new readers, in a new culture where social advancement had much more to do with technical skills than classical learning, and where great feats of engineering and invention had created an American sublime unimaginable in the rest of the world, the model for SF was not the writer Wells, but the inventor-entrepreneur Thomas Edison. It was under these conditions that Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories, and the insti­tution of the SF pulps.

Over the course of the late 1920s, Gernsback laid out the defining qualities of commercial SF in language that combined manifesto and commercial how-to manual. In a society where Edison had the role of culture-hero, the engineer was the model pro­tagonist, and SF became concerned primarily with machine power as a manifestation of individual freedom. Gernsback elaborated the language of earlier proponents of futuristic fiction, claiming that SF was a revolutionary new form of writing, destined to replace the nonscientific, unimaginative, conservative Literature of the elite. In his editorial pronouncements Gernsback repeatedly insisted that the science of SF should be so exact chat the fiction would become a stage for invention, thus making the genre “a world-force of unparalleled magnitude.” (The dream was not far fetched; Leo Szilard claimed his design for a nuclear fission device was inspired by one of Wells’ stories, surely one of the most positive critical notices of a work of SF.)

Gernsback’s magazines were enthusiastically capitalistic, democratic, and techno­cratic. He provided explicit definitions of what he meant by “scientifiction” — a definition that was as often ignored as respected, but which had a living authority, guiding future professional writers of the magazines. For Gernsback, as one scholar puts it, scientifiction

had three functions: the narrative could provide “entertainment,” the scientific information could furnish a scientific “education,” and the accounts of new inventions could offer “inspiration” to inventors, who might proceed to actually build the proposed invention or something similar to it. Correspondingly, there were three natural audiences for SF: the general public, seeking to be entertained; younger readers. yearning to be educated about science; and woking scientists and inventors, anxious to find some stimulating new ideas. (Westfahl 1999: 189-90)

Gernsback’s successor as the dominant editor of the pulp culture, John Campbell, the powerful editor of Astounding and Unknown, moved SF writing toward the status of an established profession. He cultivated a stable of exemplary writers and shaped the aesthetic contours of the genre with the same single-mindedness and editorial power as André Breton used to promote Surrealism and Tristan Tzara used for Dadaism. Campbell created the conditions for a professional SF subculture out of the fan tradition. He argued in editorials, and in voluminous private correspondence with writers, through which he shaped many of the most important stories of the era, that SF was the quintessential modern form because it was the literature of the technologically literate, inventive minds creating the machines and ideas that were trans­ forming the world. Campbell was insistent on the formative power of scientific thinking (as with Gernsback, this was respected as often in the breach, and indeed Campbell was never rigid in distinguishing between real science and pseudoscience). He exhorted his favorite writers — Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Lester Del Ray, among others — to build their stories around the technologies that were most important for, and, indeed, required by, his concepcion of human evolution: nuclear power, space travel, and mind control. These were to be described with scientific plausibility; but once this was accomplished, the writers were to focus on the social possibilities and consequences of their use. (He was so successful in this, that he and several of his writers were investigated by the US Army Counter-Intelligence Corps in 1944, on suspicion that in one story he had published secret information about the devel­opment of the nuclear bomb.)

Campbell, even more than Gernsback, conceived of SF as a social practice, and of SF writers as having professional affinities with the engineers and scientists that he considered the true target audience of their writing. The Campbellian aesthetic required that stories’ milieux should strike readers as neatly mundane in their con­creteness and realism, to show that technoscientific wonders are destined to become everyday experiences — that science is “the magic that works.”

Science is rapidly — so rapidly we can scarcely realize those dreams are coming true — ruling out one after another of the mighty wonders to be accomplished by Sf heroes. They aren’t mighty wonders any more; they’ve become the worlds daily work. (Berger 1993: 53).

Postwar Professionals and the Rebel Critics

By the end of the Second World War, SF had acquired a reputation for correctly proph­esying technological innovations (well earned) and social transformations (much less so). Respect for the once denigrated genre inspired many SF writers to aspire to more respectable status writing for mass-market magazines. Only a few SF writers, like Heinlein and Ray Bradbury, achieved mainstream success in the “slicks,” but in the early 1950s SF as a genre attained a wider audience in the USA through B-list films and television series. As the entertainment industry warmed to the genre, however, professionalized science took a path that was inimical to the Campbellian vision of the free social development of technoscience. The Cold War and the control of large­ scale scientific projects by the security state deprived science of its human connection with everyday life. As science was contained by Cold War ideology, so professional SF was contained by the enforced ennui of 1950s America.

Despite these pressures, many SF writers insisted on developing what they believed to be SF’s inherent cantankerousness against conformism. The genre would remain, until the late 1960s, an insider game, the famous SF ghetto, yet immanent criticism of complacent writing and unimaginative science was voiced in essays by James Blish (writing as William Atheling) and Damon Knight, as were critiques of the profession’s ideological conformism and ghetto mentality by Frederick Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, and Robert Bloch, who excoriated his colleagues and fans for thinking “that every mushroom cloud has a silver lining.” By the mid-1960s, as paperback publishing began to dominate the marketplace, SF had an established niche in popular culture (though it continued to be ignored by the library and academic establishments). Many SF writers identified with outsider groups more than with the main­stream. Viewing SF as a critical subculture inspired by the desire to break taboos, they initiated a contestatory revival of SF that was openly hostile to an establishment based on Cold War politics of science, mass-destruction technology, and simplistic morality. A new generation of SF-magazine editors, foremost among them Horace Gold of Galaxy and Anthony Boucher of Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, encouraged satirical and mildly transgressive provocations. In as much as official science, including the space program, became identified with weaponry, the militarization and expansion of police powers, and enforced consumption, many rebellious SF writers rejected the romance of science, wholesale.

The most prominent of these rebellions was also the most self-consciously theo­rized and propagandized, the British New Wave associated with the magazine New Worlds under the editorship of Michael Moorcock from 1964 to 1973. The New Wave represents the first serious mutation of SF magazine culrure away from the popular tradition, openly supporting writing with affinities to contemporary literary styles and repudiating the middle-brow Literary values that dominated 1950s SF. New Worlds’ star writer-theorist, J.G. Ballard, proposed that SF be re-envisioned as a genre exploring psychological “inner space,” in overt opposition to the scientistic power­ fantasies of establishment SF.

I think SF should turn its back on space, on interstellar travel, extraterrestrial life forms, galactic wars and the ovelap of these ideas that spreads across the margins of nine-tenths of the magazines of s-f….  It is these, whether they realize it or nor, that s-f readers are so bored with now, and which are beginning to look increasingly out-dared. (qtd. in Greenland 1983: 44).

The genteel Wellsian tradition of scientific romance was etiolating; the literary establishment in the UK was heading for a similar fate. New Worlds proposed to resus­itate SF by infusing it with contemporary Literary techniques, drawn from Surrealism and the cthen fashionable French nouveau woman. The New Wave theorists argued that SF’s thought-experiments had more in common with the visionary concerns of artistically ambitious, experimental writing than with the projects of technoscience. Moorcock and Ballard claimed for the British popular SF tradition, which had allied itself with the US pulp style for a generation, a kinship with literature, in effect producing sophisticated literary criticism of SF from within the popular tradition.

Io the USA, a similar attempt to redefine SF as an experimental, antiestablishment medium was presented in the introductions of two influential sets of anthologies, Damon Knight’s Orbit collections, and Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, (1972) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1976). Where the British New Wave conceived of itself in terms of a European literary movement, complete with manifestos and aesthetic battle lines, the US version of the New Wave viewed itself primarily as a reform movement within the SF profession, and showed little interest in literary movements and works of what had come to be known as “mainstream,” and indeed “mundane,” literature.

The  Counterculture and the Academy

In the 1960s, the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movement in the USA, and the antinuclear and anticolonial movements in Europe, gradually opened up new spaces for cultural contestation, energy, and diversity. The rapid postwar reconstruction of Europe and the hyper-modernization of the USA had created enormous wealth, which was attended by expectations of increased social freedom. An unprecedented number of students entered universities, virtually forcing education to democratize its subject matter, if not its organization. Popular culture could no longer be excluded from the classroom, and its introduction raised questions about why it had been excluded in the past. “Subversive” theories entered the academe, led at first by Freudianism, Existentialism, and Libertarianism, followed in short order by New Left Marxism and second-wave feminism.

With the convergence of liberation movements, antimilitarism, and radical criti­cal theory from both the New Left and the libertarian Right, a utopian drive became manifest in youth culture throughout the world. SF, as the repository of utopian themes and satirical fantasy about technoscientific development, attained widespread popularity among students and young professionals. Works like Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), Kurt Voonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) and Slaughterhouse Five (1969), and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings (1954/1968) (technically not SF, burt treated as such by readers at the time) became cult favorites, in large part because they articulated critiques of the myth of progress and the ethnocentrism of Western technical culture. This popularity, in turn, inspired other writers to write iconoclastic SF that challenged not only the academic estab­lishment, but the professional SF establishment as well. Writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, and Joanna Russ, broke new ground by combining sophisricaced social critique with adventurous stylistic experimentation. University teachers, inspired by the student-driven demand for relevance in the curriculum and their own interest in the breakdown of the barriers between popular and elite art, increasingly included such texts in their courses, and addressed them in their scholarship.

Literary critics and scholars had been slow to accept SF. The first serious scholarly study of the genre, J.O. Bailey’s Pilgrims Through Space and Time (1947), was ignored. Marjorie Nicholson, the foremost scholar of the important precursor genre, the lunar voyage, repudiated association with SF. But the process of canon-critique opened the way to previously excluded voices and forms, and SF was one of them. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a few prestigious literary figures proposed that SF had a special role in revealing the social unconscious of the postwar world. Foremost among these were Kingsley Amis, whose New Maps of Hell (1960) offered SF as the quintessential genre of literary dystopia, and Susan Sontag, whose “The Imagination of Disaster” (1966) was the first Western essay to take Japanese popular monster films seriously, albeit with considerable condescension. Most influential of all was Leslie Fiedler’s “The New Mutants” (1965). Fiedler, a bold revisionist of American Studies, argued that US literature was energized by the conscious disavowal, and unconscious affirmation, of the stigmatized Other. Inspired by the psychoanalytic critique of American conformism of the 1950s, Fiedler submitted the American canon to Freudian analysis, detecting repression of racial and sexual fears throughout. Using the work of William S. Burroughs (who would later become the tutelary genius of the cyberpunks) as his model, Fiedler believed recent fiction signaled that the denied Others of American society were freeing themselves. For Fiedler, SF was a genre quintessentially expressing the consciousness of the “freaks,” marginalized bohemians, hippies, Jews and Blacks (significantly, not women) that SF writers characteristically displaced into superheroes, mutants, and aliens.

The Institutionalization of Academic SF criticism

Not all of the new academic critics were drawn to SF by political critique. In 1970, Thomas Clareson helped to found the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA), and in 1971 published SF: The Other Side of Realism, an essay-anthology displaying the international and interdisciplinary range of recent criticism of SF. Because the genre was not yet an acceptable academic specialty, the members of the SFRA approached SF through the lenses of other periods and genres, establishing literary genealogies that justified careful scholarly attention. The first major academic pedi­gree was in American Studies (Clareson’s own field); significant monographs began to appear, ranging from David Ketterer’s New World for Old (1974), which argued that SF was the direct heir of American literary apocalypticism, to H. Bruce Franklin’s Marxist critical biography of Robert Heinlein (1980), which accused Campbellian SF of complicity with US imperialism.

The academic study of SF benefited from the general exuberance of intellectual culture in the West in the 1960s and 1970s. Disciplinary boundaries were weakened by the appearance of metatheoretical schools of thought, each of which seemed to aspire to a Grand Unified Theory of human culture on its own terms. Many varieties of structuralism, neo-Marxism, psychoanalysis, critical anarchism, proto-Green eco­criticism, feminism, structural functionalism, along with other schools, claimed to explain general principles of cognitive and social behavior more comprehensively than the established academic disciplines. Ambitious studies of the cognitive and sociological preconditions of the genre appeared in quick succession: in Structural Fabulation (1975) Robert Scholes, a scholar of modernism and early postmodern experimentation, mixed structuralism and psychoanalysis to argue char SF is cognate with the contemporary literary movements of fabulation; Eric Rabkin, in The Fantastic in Literature (1976), argued for reading SE as the successor of the mythological and mythopoeic traditions; Darko Suvin, in Metamorpboses of Science Fiction (1979), combined aesthetic ideas of the Marxist playwright Berthold Brecht and philosopher Ernst Bloch, to argue that SF is an epistemological genre inherently critical of bourgeois ideology, and an inciter of social enlightenment; Mark Rose, adapting Northrop Frye’s notion that SF is a modern incarnation of the mythos of romance, laid out the dominant archetypes of the genre in Alien Encounters (1981); and Gary K. Wolfe, in The Known and the Unknown (1979), perhaps the only major work of academic SF schol­arship of this period that did not use a metacritical apparatus, identified the iconic elements through which SF mediates the oscillation between the known and the unknown. (A related study in genre-theory, The Fantastic (1973), a translation of the Bulgarian theorist Tzvetan Todorov’s De la littérature fantastique (1970), enjoyed great influence, despite the fact that its subject was a very different genre — the marvelous tale – and had little to offer regarding SF.)

The most sustained applications of generic metatheory were by Neo-Marxist critics loosely associated with Science Fiction Studies and Utopian Studies, and by feminist SF critics. The foremost Marxist theorist was Suvin, who introduced the notion that SF’s basic operation is cognitive estrangement –– inducing a perspective of critical displace­ment from the distorted ideological perception of social reality — and that SF’s basic mechanism is the introduction of a novum, a scientifically plausible innovation that catalyzes an imaginary historical transformation. Other important Neo-Marxist con­cepts — such as the critical utopia (proposed by Tom Moylan), the collapsed future (Fredric Jameson), the absent paradigm (Marc Angenot), and the cognition effect (Carl Freedman) — have remained important tools even for non-Marxist theoretical analyses. On a parallel path, feminist critics were producing the mos-rt varied body of Libera­tionist SF theory, based on the recognition that the genre’s hospitableness to outsiders had long given voice to marginalized women. Influential feminist studies ranged from criticism of SF’s historical and institutional androcentrism and appreciations of women’s countercultural SF tradition by Marleen Barr, Robin Roberts, Jane Donawerth, and Sarah Lefanu, to explications of SF’s diverse deconstructions of gender by Constance Penley, Jenny Wolmark, and Veronica Hollinger. After some lag, in the 1980s many of the strategies of Marxist and feminist SF critics inspired queer theoretical and race-critical analyses of the genre as well.

The explosion of scholarly interest supported — and was supported by — the establishment of academic journals devoted to SF scholarship. In 1959, Clareson began editing a stenciled newsletter, Extrapolation, that was physically barely distinguishable from a fanzine. A few years lacter, it was followed by the British Foundation and the Montreal-based Science Fiction Studies. Each journal established its own distinct critical tone. Gradually, SF was granted standing by the academic establishment, albeit on the periphery. Library collections were housed; annual academic meetings were funded, as well as occasional international conferences devoted to special topics, where SF scholars met to exchange ideas; scholarly presses were founded, and several major academic publishers became hospitable to monographs on SF and its history.

Convergence

Important SF commentary and scholarship continued to be produced by nonacade­mics, many of them practicing writers These works reflected the convergence of the literary and popular traditions of SF in the US and British New Wave, now directed also to the new university audience. In Billion Year Spree (1973) (later to be revised, in collaboration with David Wingrove, as Trillion Year Spree [1986]), Brian Aldiss countered the American Studies and hard SF-centered genealogy of US SF-scholars, by tracing the genre’s origins to Mary Shelley and the Gothic tradition. Some years later, Brian Stableford’s Scientific Romance in Britain, 1830-1950 (1985) defined the distinctive national literary tradition of UK SF, the British scientific romance. Perhaps most influential among these writer-critics was Samuel R. Delany. A successful expo­nent of the American New Wave, Delany set out to provide a sophisticated justifica­tion of SF from within, writing as a self-identified genre writer, but using some of the tools of contemporary schools of literary theory. Arguing that SF was a form of discourse that had its own conditions of intelligibility, Delany provided a new vo­cabulary for discussing SF as a way of using language to embody new thought that has proved highly influential on later scholars of SF.

By the end of the 1970s, we can speak of a convergence of the major streams of SF criticism. The ethical concerns of canon-construction, the cultural policies of democ­ratic popular culture, the academic project of analyzing and categorizing cultural and social life, flowed together. Practitioners of different disciplines adopted each other’s vocabularies. Writers took teaching positions in universities; critics tried their hands at fiction. The fiction itself, in the meantime, began to separate into two tiers, one that assumed an educated and critically sophisticated audience, and the ocher res­olutely commercial and anti-intellectual, devoted to its niche status and its fan audiences. The mediator of this convergence and drift was SF film (and later, television), which gradually became the dominant vehicle for SF.

At first, academic film scholars treated SF film much as SF had been treated by literature faculties, as a curiosity of mainly sociological interest. Major film artists’ forays into the genre — Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and A Clockwork Orange (1971), Andrei Tarkovsky’s (1971) —elicited some interest, but not as examples of genre. Television was for many years nor an acceptable object of study. Even professional SF magazines’ reviewers treated popular SF films as a debased form, when compared with written SF. And yet, popular enthusiasm for television SF and popular SF films — especially Star Trek and Star Wars — inspired a new kind of fan culture that would, in the 1980s, transform che terms of commentary and criticism of SF. Mainstream film reviewers discussed SF movies no differently than other commercial releases; as a result, popular commentary on SF film was much more widely distributed than reviews of SF writing. Original theoretical approaches to SF film based on the premise that cinema is a distinct medium with its own history appeared first in Vivian Sobchack’s The Edge of Infinity (1980) (later revised as Screening Space [1987]). Expanding from Sobchack’s work, a number of theorists argued that SF was nor merely a minor subgenre of film, but one intimately connected to the medium, since films (and related arts of the spectacle) are experiments in the technological mediation of collec­tive fantasies, and thereby embody the subject of SF itself. In recent years, academic study of SF films has produced important work on the relationship of film technology and Sf themes, notably Brooks Landon’s The Aesthetics of Ambivalence (1992) and Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity (1993). Film has also been particularly favored by femi­nist critics; arguably, feminist psychoanalytic critique of SF film has replaced critical utopian theory as the main venue for feminist SF scholarship.

Cyberpunk, Posthumanism, Metacriticism

Resembling in some ways the transformation of SF from a ghetto of genre­ professionals to a major form of cultural production, SF underwent an even greater expansion of influence in the 19S0s with the introduction of video games and desk computers, and the emergence of genetic engineering as the dominant popular model of techno-science. These developments also gave rise to cyberpunk. This new style of SF captured the ambivalence felt in the West about the convergence of revolutionary technologies (genetic recombination, computer analysis and synthesis, bionics, infor­mation grids, etc.) and the collapse of the collective desire for social progress into global manipulation by rapacious corporations — embodied in US popular consciousness by the momentary global ascent of Japanese industrial culture. The cyberpunks cultivated an image of semicriminal, heterotopian subcultures as mediating agents, who subvert the dominance of financial elites, but refuse to offer principles for col­ective political action. To a greater degree even than the New Wave, cyberpunk was conceived in both critical and creative terms. Its ideas were put forth in manifestos, often pronounced with playful irony in the movement’s main zine, Cheap Truth, edited by Bruce Sterling, and in Sterling’s introduction to the influential cyberpunk anthology, Mirrorshades (1986), to be further elaborated in independent critical magazines, like SF EYE. Cyberpunk’s propagandists avowed kinship with SF’s generic roots in the pulps, and with the esoteric anti-elitist subcultures of the American avant-garde as well. They praised as models writers who used SF more extragenerically, like Burroughs and Ballard. Their critical project resembled that of the New Wave; both argued that SF should emphasize the symbolic dimensions and psychological dys­functions of technology-saturated social life. But cyberpunks went further, inspired by developments in computerization and brain studies that dissolved the boundary between artificially manipulated and natural inner states, and by the unregulated appropriations of consumer technology by remix subcultures.

Cyberpunk’s popularity was enormous, instantaneous, and global. It elicited criti­cal commentary from the wide range of academic SF critics. This was primarily negative from feminists and Marxists, who saw unconscious androcentric and fatalistic myth-making in it. But it also elicited powerful positive responses from a direction that had barely existed just years before, namely posthumanism. Posthumanist critics shared the cyberpunks’ fascination with digital technology’s power to transform nature by coding all matter as information, and re-engineering it at will. Posthumanists viewed this power as a force of evolution, capable of liberating human beings from scarcity, corruptible bodies, and mortality itself. Shocked by the successes of cyber­netics and bionic sciences, popular and academic institutions seemed to concede that the ethical axioms of the literary intelligentsia are no longer valid, once the world is redefined in terms of flows, control systems, and degrees of virtuality. Imagining the deletion of organic bodies and historical burdens, cyberpunk also intersected with the new philosophical currents that had displaced the metatheories of the 1960s and 1970s — post-structuralist schools, especially of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze­ & Félix Guattari, as well as “extropians,” who trusted in the capacities of computer based artificial intelligence to assume the functions of identity and consciousness, and of nanotechnology to provide the body whir perpetual upgrades.

At the same moment, some influential social theorists adopted science-fictional tropes to explain contemporary social conditions. Donna Haraway, in her influential “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1985), refitted the oft-used SF figure of cthe cyborg into a feminist political myth of posthuman network-beings who reject the oppressive Western ontology of technoscience. In his Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1990), Fredric Jameson drew heavily on the SF of J.G Ballard and Phillip K. Dick to describe postmodernism’s demolition of history in favor of spatialized, discontinuous time. Jean Baudrillard, like Jameson influenced by Ballard and Dick, became best known for his concepts of simulation and simulacra, genuinely science-fictional ideas applied to social theory. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, enthusiasts of the dra­matic breakthroughs in computing and communications technologies in the 1980s spoke of transcending the human condition through technoevolution, in a sublime technological discourse that had been reserved for SF in the past. George Gilder envisioned a utopian “telecosm,” Howard Bloom a global brain, Ray Kurzweil an age of “spiritual machines,” Hans Marovec of “mind children,” downloaded units of consciousness. Posthumanist theorists agreed without reservation with Haraway’s dictum: “the boundary between SF and social reality is an optical illusion” (Haraway 1991: 66).

Poststructuralist theories took unrelenting aim at all notions of objectivity and naive reference, including those of science, by rejecting the notion of a unitary, stable subject capable of integrating information in a situationally transcendent form. Postmod­ernism emerged at the same time, as an aesthetic that repudiated historical meta­narratives, while embracing untrammeled stylistic juxtaposition. It derived from the explosive growth of communications and transportation technologies, the effect of which was to make great domains of experience, unmoored from their historical con­texts, accessible to travelers (physical and virtual, both) within the new context of glob­aalizing high-technology. For a number of critics, SF — especially cyberpunk — came to represent the quintessential commentary on postmodernism, if not its actual embodiment. Larry McCaffery, who had controversially elevated SF to the rank of leading-edge contemporary fiction in The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988), published an influential anthology that combined cyberpunk fiction with postmodernist criticism, Storming the Reality Studio (1991). Brian McHale, in Postmodernist Fiction (1987) and Constructing Postmodernism (1992), argued that SF was the genre that best embodied postmodernism’s principle of ontological uncertainty, which McHale opposed to epistemological uncertainty of modernism, exemplified by detective fiction. In Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (1993), Scott Bukartman dis­cussed a wide range of recent SF — fiction, films, and comics — as creative responses to the role of digital technologies in the postmodern discentering of subjectivity.

Cultural studies-based criticism of SF also took shape in this environment. The postmodernism concern with the centerless subject converged with the claims of social constructionist theorists that all meaning is created situationally, by social groups. In recent years, cultural critics of SF have studied the sociology of groups engaged in science-fictional performance, such as fan collectives, “textual poachers” (communi­ties of amateur writers who write heterodox variations on the stories and characters of favorite television series), and artificial cultures. Like anthropologists who observe scientific communities as if they were contemporary tribes, some scholars have begun to examine the thriving institutions of SF fan culture — conventions, internet net­works, and role-playing communities — as not only reflective of social transformations in hyper-technologized societies, but also producers of them.

A central, and yet perhaps paradoxically anomalous, event in the recent history of SF criticism was the publication of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction in 1993. The nearly 1400-page reference work included over 4360 entries, collecting the genre’s history and thesaurus of themes within a scholarly compendium. Tellingly, the editors John Clute and Peter Nicholls were neither professional academics nor fans, but respected independent critics and reviewers. By drawing on literary, academic, and popular traditions of the genre for its data, the Encyclopedia has provided an overview of the genre for SF’s many audiences. Although it is periodically updated on the internet, the Ency­clopedia is very much a monument to book culture; in it film and television are judged by literary standards, and icons of SF folk-beliefs like UFOs are disdained. Ir may be that the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction prefigures the closure of the literary/academic experiment with the genre.

Away from the book, the diffusion of the internet has given new life to fans’ com­munities of commentary. The ease with which websites and discussion groups can be established on the Net has amplified the exchanges fan communities once maintained through stenciled newsletters and zines. Fans have long practiced a form of creative criticism, writing alternative and supplementary stories in the fictive universes of favorite films and television shows — even developing subversive variants (such as the so-called K/S, or “slash,” phenomenon of depicting Star Trek’s Kirk and Spock as gay lovers). Websites now abound with imaginary sequels to popular films, original scripts, and even freelance critical reflection. Members of far-flung internet commu­nities often become familiar with commentary — to which they have ready net access — long before they see the film, game, or tv series that is commented on.

Such developments have produced a critical community that owes little to tradi­tional models of culture. Linked with real affective bonds via consumer artifacts, and openly accepting the ambivalence this entails, these groups have sometimes formed their own immanent institutions of radical cultural criticism. A prime example is the way the depiction of the warrior-alien Klingons in Star Trek has inspired the con­struction of an artificial culture, complete with an artificial language, that is lived and spoken sincerely in the hospitable confines of SF conventions. The project has inspired the establishment of a de facto Klingon Academy, the Klingon Language Institute, official arbiter of the synthetic customs and grammar. Among the Institute’s projects has been the translation of the New Testament, a task that has generated disputes about how to convey concepts of mercy and self-sacrifice, for which video-Klingons have (as yet) no terms. Despite obvious silliness, the progress of role-playing SF subcultures has some striking similarities to that of more established self-isolating subcultures in the real world, thus embodying a living critique of the world in its appropriation of mass culture’s “cargo.”

The concept of SF has also expanded to include approaches far from the mainstream of SF culture. A striking case is Afro-futurism. Afro-futurist artists have adapted SF ideas and icons as ludic symbols of cultural power — of both the hegemony of white domination and the subversive play of black art. Afro-futurism is most identified with music — Sun Ra’s jazz, George Clinton’s funk, and electronic dance subcultures — and Afro-futurist criticism has itself favored a performative style. The commendatory of Mark Dery, Greg Tate, and Kodwe Eshun, among others, also differs from academic critique of the representation of race in SF, by focusing on the spontaneously mutating relationships between music machines and performance.

The Future

It is not possible to describe the character of this free floating, anarchic process of exchange. For the moment, it appears to construct a discursive space constrained only by the technologies of communication and the rate at which SF is introduced onto the market. In the past, critical institutions were expected to govern selection of arti­facts that a society should value; internet communities of commentary have reversed the relation — facilitating as many voices as possible, and suppressing norms of selection. At the moment, the great historical conversation about one particular branch of literature appears to be converging in the infinite, virtual temporary autonomous zone of cyberspace.

References and Further Reading
Aldiss, Brian (1973) Billion Year Spree. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Alkon, Paul (1987) Origins of Futuristic Fiction. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Amis, Kingsley (1960) New Maps of Hell. A Survey of Science Fiction.New York: Harcourt.

Angenot, Marc (1979) “The Absent Paradigm: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 6.1 (March): 9-19.

Bacon-Smith, Camille (1999) Science Fiction Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva­nia Press.

Bailey, JO. (1947) Pilgrims Through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction. New York: Argus.

Barr, Marleen S. (1987) Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and FeministTheory. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.  

Baudrillard, Jean (1991) “‘Two Essays”: “Simulacra and Science Ficrion and “Ballard”s Crash.” Science Fiction Studies, 18.3 (November): 309-20.

Berger, Albert I. (1993) The Magic That Works: John W. Campbell and the American Response to Technology. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

Bernardi, Daniel Leonard (1998) Star Trek and History: Race-ing Toward a White Future. Piscataway. NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Blish, James [as William Atheling, Jr.] (1964) The Issue at Hand.Chicago: Advent.

_____. (1970) More Issues at Hand. Chicago: Advent.

Bukatman, Scott (1993) Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Clareson, Thomas D. (ed.) (1971) SF: The Other Side of Realism. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press.

Clute, John and Peter Nicholls (eds) (1993) The Encydopedia of Science Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press; and London: Orbit.

Delany, Samuel R. (1977) The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Eliza­bethtown, NY: Dragon.

_____. (1984) Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Pleasantville, NY: Dragon.

Dery, Mark (1994) “Black to the Future: lnterviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Trish Rose,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, (ed.) Mark Dery. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 179-222.

Donawerth, Jane L. (1997) Frankenstein’s Daughter: Women Writing Science Fiction. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Eshun, Kodwo (1999) More Brilliant Than the Sun. London: Interlink.

Evans, Arthur B. (1999) ”The Origins of Science Fiction Criticism: From Kepler to Wells.” Science Fiction Studies 26:2 (July): 163-86.

Fiedler, Leslie (1965) “The New Mutants.” Parti­san Revieu 32.iv: 505-25.

Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction (2002) Special issue: “Gay and Lesbian Science Fiction.” No. 86 (Autumn).

Franklin, H. Bruce (1980) Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Freedman, Carl (2000) Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.

Greenland, Colin (1983) The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British “New Wave” in Science Fiction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Haraway, Donna J. (1991) “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 149-81.

Hollinger, Veronica (1999) “Contemporary Trends in Science Fiction Criticism, 1980-1999.” Science Fiction Studies, 26:2 (July): 232-62.

Jameson, Fredric (1982) “Progress Versus Urnpia, or Can We Imagine rhe Future?” Science Fiction Studies 9.2 (July): 147-58.

Ketterer, David (1974) New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Knight, Damon (1967) ln Search of Wonder (1956), rev. edn. Chicago: Advent.

Kuhn, Annette (ed.) (1990) Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. New York: Verso.

_____. (1999) Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema. New York: Verso.

Landon, Brooks (1992) The Aesthetics of Ambivalence: Rethinking Science Fiction Film in the Age of Electronic (Re)Production. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Lefanu, Sarah (1988) In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction. London: The Women’s Press.

Lewis, C.S. (1966) “On Science Fiction,” in Of Other Worlds, Walter Hooper (ed.). NY: Harcourt Brace and World, 59-73.

McCaffery, Larry, (ed.) (1991) Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

McHale, Brian (1992) Constructing Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge.

_____. (1987) Postmodernist Fiction. London and New York: Methuen.

Moylan, Tom (1986) Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. London and New York: Merhuen.

Parrinder, Patrick (ed.) (1972) H.G. Wells: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Penley, Constance et al. (eds.) (1991) Close Encounters: Film, Feminism and Science Fiction. Min­neapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Rabkin, Eric S. (1976) The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Roberts, Robin (1993) A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Rose, Mark (1981) Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni­versity Press.

Science Fiction Studies, (1999) Special issue: “Science Fiction and Queer Theory.” 26:1 (March).

Sobchack, Vivian (1987) Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. New York: Ungar.

Sontag, Susan (1966) “The lmagination of Disas­ter,” Against Interpretation, New York: Farrar, 209-25.

Stableford, Brian (1985) Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Sterling, Bruce (ed.) (1986) Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, New York: Arbor.

Suvin, Darko (1979) Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Tate, Greg (1994) Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary American Culture. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Westfahl, Gary 0998) The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

_____. (1999) “The Popular Tradition in Science Fiction Criticism, 1926-1980.” Science Fiction Studies 26:2 (July): 187-212.

Wolfe, Gary K. (1979) The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.

Wolmark, Jenny (1994) Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism, and Postmodernism. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Zamyatin, Yevgeny (1970) “H.G. Wells,” in A Soviet Heretic. Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, (ed.) Mirra Ginsburg. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 259-90.