Review - Landon - Cultural History

SF-TH Inc
A Cultural History of a Hybrid Genre

Science Fiction. Cultural History of Literature by Roger Luckhurst
Review by: Brooks Landon
Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1, Technoculture and Science Fiction (Mar., 2006), pp. 161-
173
Published by: SF-TH Inc
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CULTURAL HISTORY OF A HYBRID GENRE 161
Brooks Landon
A Cultural History of a Hybrid Genre
Roger Luckhurst. Science Fiction. CULTURAL HISTORY OF LITERATURE.
Cambridge: Polity, 2005. vii + 305 pp. $24.95 pbk.
Hybridity is a concept that has steadily gained purchase in a wide
range of
critical discourses over the past twenty-five years, adding
cultural and aesthetic
dimensions to its initially largely biological meanings. In
postcolonial studies,
sociology, political science, art, and numerous other areas of critical
inquiry,
hybridity has been accorded more and more positive connotations as a
transgressive or resistant phenomenon; the term itself has become one of those
ubiquitous buzzwords whose time has come. "Hybrids" now also refers to
mixed-technology automobiles and the term has even become prominent
in car
advertising-both sure signs of its near-meme status and its appropriation by
some of the hegemonic sources to which it previously signaled resistance. So it
should come as no surprise that a new study of sf should be organized arnund
this concept, as is Roger Luckhurst's Science Fiction. Indeed, Luckhurst's quiet
but insistent argument is not only that science fiction is an inherently hybrid
enterprise, but also that this has been the case since the meaningful codification
of sf in the 1880s. And, while hybridity sightings have become something of a
critical commonplace, Luckhurst's discussion of the importance of the concept
to our understanding of sf as a cultural force is as welcome as it seems overdue.
Science Fiction offers sf readers and scholars a valuable culturally oriented
context in which to test and rethink our numerous narratives of the genre. This
book is not-nor was it intended to be-the definitive cultural history sf, but it
is a fine cornerstone on which much future scholarship should and will be built.
Science Fiction continues the move toward a cultural history of sf suggested
by a large number of critical works published in the past fifteen or twenty years,
each of which explored reciprocal relationships between the body of texts that
comprises sf and the cultural concerns shaping and frequently shaped by those
texts. Luckhurst centers his focus on the cultural debates attending technological
modernity-as differently articulated in Great Britain and the US-using the
antique but capacious umbrella term "Mechanism" to subsume the impact of
technology on cultural life. Casting sf as "a literature of technologically
saturated societies," he offers his study as a cultural history rather than the
cultural history of sf, specifying:
A cultural history of science fiction will situate texts, therefore, as part of a
constantly shifting network that ties together science, technology, social history
and cultural expression with different emphases at different times. SF will not
conform to a particular literary typology or formalist definition: rather, it will
be marked by a sensitivity to the ways in which Mechanism is connected into
different historical contexts. (6)
162 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)
Accordingly, Luckhurst sets himself the task of charting sfs "own kind of
surrogate public history" (2) from 1880 through the 1990s. As he tracks the
unfolding of this surrogate public history, he attempts to investigate the factors
that have repeatedly relegated sf to low culture and marginal status. He unpacks
and refutes the notion of some aesthetic given that inexorably judged sf so
harshly. Instead, he offers an analysis of the misturns and missed opportunities
by sf's advocates, including the adoption of legitimizing strategies, from Wells
through Suvin and beyond, that actually worked to the genre's disadvantage.
Luckhurst offers no brief for overlooked or misjudged aesthetic quality in
sf-and even reminds us that the New Wave, frequently claimed as an aesthetic
high point, contains some really bad writing. However, one of the many
important arguments Luckhurst makes is that sf's early and long-continuing
relegation to low status has little to do with actual aesthetic quality and much to
do with the genre's positions in cultural debates over the implications of
Mechanism.
At each period in his cultural history of the genre, Luckhurst situates sf texts
that "speak to the concerns of their specific moment in history" in "a broad
network of contexts and disciplinary knowledges" (2) ranging from
evolutionary/devolutionary theory and British literary debates through the
American engineer paradigm and the technological sublime. He surveys the
various exhaustions of British imperial melancholy, nuclear malaise, the dead
ends tied to genre forms rejected by the New Wave in England, and the
patriarchal assumptions rejected by women and feminist sf writers in America.
The larger concern of this tracking is always on ways in which sf might be seen
as contributing "in a new and significant way to the history of the constitution
of the modern subject" (3) with specific reference to responses to and
implications of Mechanism-the central aspect of modernity-as it is shunned
by high culture and engaged in complicated and ambivalent ways by sf. If there
is a persistent sub-theme or thesis in Luckhurst's efforts to chart the impact of
sf's metaphors and allegories on larger cultural formations, it is that sf is more
a voice of the melancholy and trauma of technological modernity than a
celebration of technological liberation or transcendence. In the significant strand
of sf texts "in which the human subject is pierced or wounded by invasive
technologies that subvert, enslave, or ultimately destroy," Luckhurst shows sf
persistently shading "into horror or Gothic writing" (5). This is one of the signs
of sf's hybridity and an important sign of its ambivalence toward Mechanism.
Acknowledging the limitations of his analysis (little attention to media, no
global perspective, no engagement with the discourses of fandom, and no real
attention to Gothic or fantasy), Luckhurst offers his study not as a new
normative attempt to carve out a respectable canon but as a descriptive effort to
record some of the complications and contractions of the relationship between
sf and culture:
Historians of SF need, in my view, to be less judgmental and prescriptive. We
need to be just as interested in how fantasies about Mechanism can, for instance,
prompt eugenic and proto-fascist scenarios in the 1910s and 1920s (fantasies that
periodically return), or idolize a fundamentally anti-democratic Technocratic elite
as a solution to the crisis of liberal democracies in the 1930s and 1940s. Cultural
history needs to understand the appeal of breathlessly paced interstellar pulp
fictions as much as the self-consciously Modernist prose adopted by counter-
cultural SF in the 1960s. (9)
Of course Luckhurst must single out some texts as he goes about this ambitious
task while ignoring most others, but his general approach is not to "lift" an sf
text or a writer out of received or ignored historical accounts of the genre as it
is to "resubmerge" a text or writer in richly textured cultural and literary
discourses, characteristically complicating our understanding of the relations
between text and culture. In this rhetorical strategy, frequently (but not always)
dialectical, Luckhurst would seem to be following the originary guide he
attributes to H.G. Wells in his writing before 1900 in which, as John
Huntington
has observed and Luckhurst underscores, "a carefully constructed architecture
of ambivalence ensures that every force has a counter-force, every assertion a
negation, with Wells delighting in 'the irony of contradiction itself" (39).
Luckhurst consistently complicates received associations and oppositions alike,
as when he points to affinities in the work of C. S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke
or suggests a counter to cyberpunk erasure of embodiment in the body horror
fictions of Clive Barker and Octavia Butler. I found this one of the book's
primary delights and an important source of its value-although it is precisely
what makes the book difficult to describe and almost impossible to summarize.
While the book loosely presents a chronological overview of sf from 1880
through 2000, this chronology is complicated by Luckhurst's need to switch
focus between English and American sf, and his double focus is further
complicated by his insistent refusal of both ruptural histories and narratives of
genre "progress" or "maturation." His own apparent delight in "the irony of
contradiction itself" (or at least of complication) leads every chapter through
twists, turns, and reversals that inexorably undercut the notion of strict
chronology: the Luckhurst time machine is always on the move. At each turn in
this cultural history that feels more like a hypertext, it seems to me that
Luckhurst is interested in constructing a cultural history that can map five broad
concerns, although this is my identification and not his.
1. He wants to compare the codification and characteristic concerns of English
and American sf as variously shaped by evolutionary, engineering, and what
might be called nuclear/cybernetic paradigms.
2. He wants to locate efforts to valorize or to attack the genre within larger
cultural discussions and debates, usually recasting aesthetic or literary judgments
as consequent to broader philosophical or ideological concerns.
3. He wants to chart the genre's responses-usually ambivalent, if not
contradictory-to the ever-expanding and deepening implications of Mechanism.
4. He wants to resituate the genre's critical/theoretical standing as the nature of
cultural critique/theory changes, so that the cultural value of sf is never
monolithic or intrinsic, but contingent on extra-literary factors.
5. He wants to complicate rigid definitions of genre and
normative/prescriptive
judgments based on well-rehearsed binaries such as English/American,
sf/fantasy, Left/Right, Modern/Postmodern, etc.
This makes Science Fiction a very busy, very ambitious book that deserves
and rewards very careful reading. In the context of the above concerns,
Luckhurst's selection of authors and works for extended analysis is not meant
to valorize, much less canonize, as much as it is to identify useful touchstones
for exploring the reciprocal relations between sf literature and cultural
discussions. There is little effort on Luckhurst's part to posit a literary history
or to make qualitative assessments of sf writers and texts. Not surprisingly,
however, many of the writers and texts he selects as touchstones for cultural
connections turn out to be the same writers and texts frequently singled out for
literary histories of sf, yet his principle of selection does not necessarily imply
that a writer or text represents the genre or should be used to establish or extend
genre boundaries. His selections do favor formal and ideational hybridity, and
the complications Luckhurst invariably introduces in his analyses of writers and
texts argue for a new understanding of sf that embraces rather than attempts to
erase its essential hybridity; his cultural history may be the main point of his
scholarship, but it also makes points.
Part I of Science Fiction consists of three chapters devoted to the origins of
sf, focusing respectively on the social and technological conditions necessary for
its emergence, the importance of the evolutionary paradigm to the nineteenth-
century British codification of the scientific romance, and the importance of the
engineer paradigm to the development of pulp fiction in America. The purpose
of this section is to suggest the paradigms that both guided the development of
sf in England and in America and positioned that literature in larger cultural
debates occasioned by Mechanism, or technological modernity. The conditions
making possible late nineteenth-century scientific fiction are "mass literacy; new
print vectors; a coherent ideology and emergent profession of science" and,
most important for this study, "everyday experience transformed by machines
and mechanical processes" (29). For Luckhurst, Wells is the "embodiment" of
these conditions rather than the inventor of British sf. Somewhat paradoxically,
he is at once a source of the emerging genre's messianic commitment to its
ideational content (starting with the evolutionary paradigm), and a source of
what will emerge again and again as the genre's self-loathing over its poor
artistry. Luckhurst focuses on Wells's disastrous misreading of and relation to
an emerging literary establishment, on the separatist consequences of his
commitment to evolutionism, and on the ambiguity, contradictions, and formal
hybridity of his writing. Luckhurst suggests how these aspects of Wells's writing
led to his setting many of the agendas for British sf and for its critical reception
before 1945; he even played a role in structuring the claims of a "fall from
grace" that insist on a qualitative rupture between British and American sf.
Rather than concentrate on Wells's "use of science" in his fiction, Luckhurst
details ways in which Wells was as influential in setting the cultural context for
the devaluing of sf as he was for its growth-by initiating its impure or hybrid
nature. In his third chapter, Luckhurst traces the rise of the boy inventor and
engineer paradigms that were as crucial in the formation of American sf as the
evolutionary paradigm was in England.
Once again, the success and influence of an embodying writer and
editor-this time Hugo Gernsback-are shown to create the conditions for the
aesthetic devaluation of sf as well as for its codification. Wells and Gernsback,
Luckhurst suggests, are as much responsible for the critical ghettoization of sf
as they are for the codification of the genre. And, once again, that codification
is represented in terms of hybridity rather than "purity," as "Gernsbackian
technocratic advocacy is in intimate dialectical relation with Lovecraftian
'cosmic horror,'" with both deriving from "the same engineer paradigm in
America in the 1910s and 1920s" (64-65). Gernsback's advocacy of technocracy
came at the expense of aesthetic validation, but Luckhurst shows how
Campbellian sf strove to "elide technocratic elitism with SF as an elite mode of
writing," a more self-flattering attempt to validate sf as a means to technocratic
rather than aesthetic ideals (72). Thus, Luckhurst argues, the American engineer
paradigm actually can be seen to merge with the British evolutionary paradigm,
and the engineer (or the sf readership that closely identified with the engineer)
is reconstructed in some American sf-particularly by A.E. Van Vogt-as an
evolutionary advance, the next stage in human development. This evolution of
the engineer paradigm transcends issues of literary merit by aligning itself with
the extra-literary assumptions and beliefs in Korzybski's General Semantics and
Hubbard's Dianetics, establishing ties between sf and culture that had little or
nothing to do with literary value.'
Part II follows the elaboration of the initially artifactual concerns of
Mechanism into the cybernetic control systems developed in conjunction with
the nuclear age and its attendant technocratic networking. This section, again in
three chapters, follows the coterminous rise of technoculture and decline of the
British Empire as American and British sf took quite different postwar turns.
Roughly covering the years from 1939 through 1959, this second section shows
sf as it is reorganized around technologies related to atomic power, whether
emblemized by the Bomb or by networks of associations famously identified by
President Eisenhower as the Military Industrial Complex. One significant
offshoot of this network of military, academic, bureaucratic, and economic
associations-a significant stage in the extension of Mechanism into every aspect
of modern life-is cybernetics, and as Mechanism enters what might be called
its nuclear/cybernetic stage, it becomes fertile ground for the writing of
technologically inflected paranoid fiction and for philosophical critique.
Luckhurst sees this period as one of "complex conjuncture" that "attests to the
radical redefinition of the relation between the human and the technological that
stretches from vast military-industrial projects to the intricacies of German
philosophy and culture critique" (90). Both the military-industrial and
philosophical developments of the period afford opportunities to sf for important
cultural commentary and implicate it in new formations of mechanic mass
culture-opening the genre to new condemnation from critiques of mass culture.
In responding to this nuclear/cybernetic paradigm, American sf breaks into
competing schools, some celebrating the new technology and new technocrats
it requires, some criticizing and satirizing the new technoculture and its
economic implications. Against the technocratic boosterism of John Campbell
and "his" writers such as Heinlein and Asimov stands the criticism of Vonnegut,
Dick, Merril, Pohl, and Kombluth, and in these cultural divides-rather than in
subject matter-Luckhurst locates the beginning of the distinction between
"hard" and "soft" sf. In England, response to the nuclear/cybernetic paradigm
was much more melancholic, as American atomic ascendancy seemed paralleled
by British decline, occasioning a kind of double-hit on the valuation of sf: "For
British intellectuals across the spectrum it was not just that SF embodied mass
culture and crude investment in technological modernity, it was also that the
genre was American" (123). At least partly as a result of this guilt by
association of sf with American technologized modernity, Luckhurst suggests,
fantasy became the most notable form of writing in postwar England. But
Luckhurst immediately complicates this binary, suggesting ways in which the
fantasy of Lewis and Tolkien and particularly of Mervyn Peake should not be
understood in rigid opposition to the concerns and protocols of sf, arguing that
the writing of Arthur C. Clarke is in fact "not so distant" from that of C.S.
Lewis. Once again, the key to understanding British writing of this period is
hybridity, as it "fused fantasy, Gothic and SF elements, offering refracted
meditations on their historical moment" (124), with both fantasists such as Lewis
and sf writers such as John Wyndham echoing Wells. He concludes of British
and American sf: "The period between 1945 and 1960 is the most complex and
multi-stranded period in science fiction history, the epoch in which the Golden
Age was both consolidated and contested, when SF claimed scientific, political
and social-critical relevance yet was also condemned as an examplar of
detestable mass culture" (136). And the contradictory thematics of this period,
Luckhurst claims, are important because they will "recur and modulate" during
the next four decades.
Part III somewhat drops the alternating focus on British and American sf to
organize cultural concerns around "Decade Studies," with chapters devoted to
the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s. This schema predictably
organizes the 1960s around the New Wave and the 1970s around the playing out
of the British New Wave and the diverse paths taken by the development of
feminist sf. Luckhurst's analysis of the 1980s, again predictably, looks at
postmodernism and cyberpunk, much less predictably calls attention to the
cultural impact of New Right sf during the decade, and closes with the
unexpected pairing of the body horror of splatterpunk with the body horror of
Octavia Butler. Luckhurst then closes his study with a construction of the 1990s
"as a consolidation and rejuvenation of the unique focus of SF: speculation on
the diverse results of the conjuncture of technology with subjectivity" (222). He
locates this consolidation and rejuvenation in the reappearance of space opera,
in the rearticulation of apocalyptic concerns in abduction narratives, and in the
genre-morphing hybridity of the New Weird and "post-fantastic" writers such
as M. John Harrison, China Mieville, and Jonathan Lethem. Possibly because
the decade chapters are more clearly organized around delimited literary
"movements" such as cyberpunk and feminist sf, these chapters do not feel as
richly or as deeply textured in their cultural connections as do those in the first
two parts of the book, although they continue Luckhurst's valuable insistence on
complicating received binaries, whether of agreement or opposition.
As would be expected, the chapter on the 1960s centers on the New Wave,
although Luckhurst strongly challenges the idea that the American New Wave
shared the ambitions or the cohesion of the British. In fact, Luckhurst's
approach to the 1960s focuses more on what the New Wave was not than on it
was, as he details ways how the New Worlds project was not an attempt to raise
the status of sf to that of "serious" literature, but "was one manifestation of a
wider move to question the very categories and values of 'high' and 'low'
culture" (146). Nor, according to Luckhurst, was either the British or the
American New Wave the ruptural moment claimed in so many accounts of sf.
While the New Wave did change the course of genre history, it did not mark a
clear break with genre concerns. "This is an explicit juvenilization of SF by the
blanket abjection of the genre before it reached 'maturity' about 1960. It
sanctions ignorance and produces a skewed, largely ahistorical conception of the
New Wave, because it is only able to read for discontinuity, not the substantial
continuities within the genre" (160).
Luckhurst readily acknowledges that "decade studies" can't be rigidly
calendric, as is suggested by period studies that actually see the 1960s as
stretching from 1959 to 1973, and, as he moves on to the 1970s, his initial focus
remains on the New Wave. Depending on how we view it, he suggests, the New
Wave by the early 1970s could be seen as having occasioned either a powerful
rebirth of sf or as having signaled its imminent disappearance. "It feels
impossible to make an assertion about 1970s SF," he notes, "without thinking
of an immediate counter-example," and he sees this contradictory situation as
"symptomatic of a wider set of confusions over precisely what took place in the
decade" (169). In cultural terms, the issue was not whether or not sf had reached
some kind of an end, but that it became imbricated in a much broader societal
experience of limits. "Science fiction did not simply reflect on this," Luckhurst
explains, but "often provided the very means by which the consequences of this
moment could be envisaged, in forms of utopian or dystopian projection into the
future" (171). The British New Wave read the end of British power with degrees
of "post-imperial melancholy," and feminist sf read the end of "a certain (social,
economic, political and technological) formation of the 'patriarchal' West at the
end of the 1960s" (181).
Luckhurst does not consistently track race through his cultural history of sf,
but he does discuss the importance of race in his overview of American Pulp
Fictions in Chapter 3, and his analysis of the New Wave in the 1970s returns to
a consideration of this issue as part of the post-imperial refiguring of Englishness
in terms of race rather than of place. Luckhurst uses Christopher Priest and M.
John Harrison to situate the British New Wave of the 1970s in the larger
melancholic "structure of feeling" attending the end of British power. The
appropriation in the 1970s of sf tropes used to articulate feminist concerns by
British women writers more associated with the literary mainstream-Doris
Lessing, Emma Tennant, Zoe Fairbairns, and Angela Carter-affords Luckhurst
a cultural transition from the New Wave's preoccupation with national limits to
feminist sf's preoccupation with genre limits:
Questions of sex and gender did not suddenly appear within the genre with the
New Wave or by feminist intervention. What the feminist intervention in the
1970s did effect, though, was a new reflexivity about the conventions of SF,
exposing how a genre that praised itself for its limitless imagination and its
power to refuse norms had largely reproduced 'patriarchal attitudes' without
question for much of its existence. The New Wave had reached the exhausted
end of the form, but the rubble of that tradition could be recombined in new
structures. (182)
And the consequences of this "dying into new being" were not confined to
feminist issues:
Mega-textual SF elements that had consciously or not reproduced patriarchal or
heterosexist norms could be recomposed and redirected for new political ends-even
if those ends were explicitly anti-scientific or anti-technological, striking at the heart
of historic definitions of SF. Out of the seeming 'end' of technological modernity and
the ruins of
genre,
feminist writers
recomposed generic narratives.
(182)
Within this larger framework of agendas, Luckhurst is careful to delineate
the diversity of 'types' of feminist sf in the 1970s, organizing them along the
waves suggested by Julia Kristeva in her 1979 essay "Women's Time" -with the
understanding that these "waves" can be understood as simultaneous, rather than
only linear. These coterminous feminisms address equality, difference, and the
deconstruction of the man/woman binary. Accordingly, Luckhurst locates Le
Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) as a first-wave text focused on
questions of equality (later reread by Le Guin to emphasize gender difference,
thus moving it toward the second wave). Sally Miller Gearhart's Wanderground
(1979) offers an example of a second-wave text placing technology at the center
of male/female difference, as do Suzy McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the
World (1974) and Motherlines (1978), and as does Marge Piercy's Woman on
the Edge of Time (1976). Luckhurst's readings of these texts remind us that,
apart from their sharing gender concerns, these writers construct and critique
technology differently, with very different visions of its social uses. Joanna Russ
is then identified as an exemplar of Kristeva's third wave, and also as a writer
whose work explores all three feminisms, with The Female Man (1975)
incorporating "all of these strands of feminism into a collage of competing
voices from parallel worlds" (193). Similarly Angela Carter's The Passion of
New Eve (1977) represents third-wave critique, particularly in the ways it
"lampoons myths of gender fixity" (194). In Carter's brilliantly unsettling
fiction Luckhurst finds not only an instructive bridge between the New Wave
and feminist sf but also another exemplar of the generic hybridity of sf in her
"finding leverage for critique by disarticulating and reorienting the matrix of the
genre-whether SF, Gothic, fairy tale or fantasy" (184-85).
CULTURAL HISTORY OF A HYBRID GENRE
169
I began Luckhurst's chapter on the 1980s with
something approaching
dread-or at least anticipatory fatigue, since this decade has
already lent its most
celebrated movement, cyberpunk, to endless cultural studies of postmodernism.
If there's one thing sf criticism probably does not need, I thought, it's yet
another cultural history of the 1980s. After the inevitable but
mercifully concise
overview of postmodernism, however, Luckhurst
goes delightfully
offroad from
the high-traffic critical highway to discuss 1980s sf and the New
Right.
Somewhat impishly, he suggests that-instead of the
cyberpunks-the sf writers
associated with the Right in general and with the Star Wars
(SDI)-friendly
Citizen's Advisory Panel on National Space Policy in particular might have
provided the most representative sf of the 1980s. Against the well-known roster
of cyberpunks, Luckhurst wants us to remember the quite different agendas of
Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, Gregory Benford, Robert Heinlein, and Ben
Bova. Reminding us that "SF was as ideologically riven as any other field of
cultural production in the 1980s" (202), Luckhurst not only uses this chapter to
relocate cyberpunk in "the shadow of the New Right," but also complicates
cyberpunk's emblematic association with virtual disembodiment by reading it
dialectically with "body horror" fiction, as represented by the splatterpunk of
Clive Barker and by the more oblique body horror writing of Octavia Butler.
And, in a by-now-familiar and increasingly persuasive refrain for this study,
Luckhurst observes that this "hybrid of sf and horror was not at all new, but part
of a long tradition that stretches back to Verne and Wells of what has been
called 'the science-fiction grotesque"' (214).
For obvious reasons, the chapter on the 1990s seems to be the most
provisional of Luckhurst's decade studies. Homi Bhabha and Manuel Castells
provide theoretical overviews of this period, focusing respectively on accelerated
globalization and the technological production of "Informational Capitalism."
In Luckhurst's view, what characterizes sf in the 1990s is that "it responds to
the intensification and global extension of technological modernity not with new
forms, but rather with ones lifted from the genre's venerable past" (221). He
then organizes his discussion of 1990s sf around the New Space Opera, the
revival of apocalyptic visions under the prospect of the Vingean Singularity, and
the New Weird, which Luckhurst sees as a kind of apotheosis of the hybridity
that has always characterized sf-"a final instance of uncanny return: to the
conditions of writing that dominated the emergence of SF in the late nineteenth
century" (243). Dan Simmons's Hyperion (1989) and Ken MacLeod's FALL
REVOLUTION quartet (The Star Fraction [1995], The Stone Canal [1996], The
Cassini Division [1998], and The Sky Road [1999]) limn the ironizing and
subverting reflections of globalization that make the New Space Opera new, but
Luckhurst also suggests an experiential agenda for the form, as its characteristic
heft of pages "carves out a large chunk of narrative time that acts as a bulwark
against the depredations of identity in the late modern world" (230). While
frequently positing in its semblances erosions of the idea of progressive
developmentalism and of monolithic empire, New Space Opera occupies such
a complexly structured chunk of its reader's time that it actually serves as a kind
of "narrative salve," offering the reader a stand against the erosion of literary
subjectivity.
A bit jarringly, Luckhurst then switches from sf literature to sf on tv,
specifically 7he X-Files (1993-2002), to make his case for a 1990s revival of
apocalypticism. Luckhurst does not smoothly negotiate the movement of the
discussion of this new apocalypticism from the threat of runaway "singularity"
breakthroughs in genetic research, nanotechnology, and robotics (as strikingly
suggested in Greg Bear's Blood Music [1985], a book Luckhurst mentions only
in passing) to the paranoid narratives of The X-Files. While few would disagree
with Luckhurst's construction of this series as an apocalyptic narrative informed
by the alien abduction phenomenon or his observation that it "leaked outside
mere televisual form into a strangely blurred cultural space between science
fiction, political conspiracy theory and apocalyptic counter-history," the claim
that abduction accounts "are perfect examples of science-fictional narratives that
negotiate the traumatic encounter of subjectivity and technology" (233) strikes
me as less compelling. Luckhurst's analysis of this phenomenon has previously
appeared at greater length in one of the several noteworthy and influential essays
he has published over the years in Science Fiction Studies. But, for all the
incisiveness and cultural insight of his analysis of the technological trauma on
which abduction narratives feed, The X-Files seems to me more like Apocalypse-
lite than like the New Apocalypse. I don't question the cultural importance of
this phenomenon or its importance for our understanding of sf, but I'm not
convinced it is the best representative of 1990s apocalyptic thinking. Luckhurst
closes his book with a brief consideration of the New Weird, represented by
China Mieville's "genre-morphing" Perdido Street Station (2000), and best
understood in terms of Gary Wolfe's description of "the postgenre fantastic" or
"recombinant genre fiction.
"
The appearance of a kind of literature that can only
be described in terms of its "evaporation," "liquefaction," decomposing,
fuzzying, recombining, blending, or morphing of genre forms and boundaries
is exactly the point at which Luckhurst should end a study that has persuasively
insisted at every turn that sf "has always been a mixed, hybrid, bastard form,
in a process of constant change" (243).
It must be abundantly clear by now that I do not share Farah Mendlesohn's
dismissive opinion of Luckhurst's Science Fiction, expressed in her peevish
review in the September 2005 issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction.
And I mention this because the reviews in the NYRSF generally command our
attention and respect, serving sf scholars, writers, and readers equally well. But
not this one. Indeed, I find myself wondering whether Mendlesohn and I read
the same book. Certainly, Mendlesohn was not much interested in what
Luckhurst argues in Science Fiction, as she never even mentions his construction
of sf in terms of its hybridity. Nor does she engage any of Luckhurst's
significant propositions about the cultural place and value of sf. Depending on
which part of Mendlesohn's scattershot criticisms we read, this book is either
not enough of a cultural study, a cultural study that chooses the wrong cultural
issues to study, too much of a cultural study that values cultural critics over sf
writers, too much of a literary history, not enough of a literary history since it
doesn't mention enough sf texts-particularly not enough by writers of interest
to Mendlesohn, and so on. Mendlesohn seems more interested in
labeling,
as she
charges that Luckhurst's study is not a "real" cultural history (or at least not the
one she wanted) and that it is a "sexist book" (16). I think she's quite wrong on
both counts, but hope that readers will decide for
themselves, on the basis of
reading Science Fiction itself rather than accepting either Mendlesohn's low or
my high opinion of the book.
To Mendlesohn's credit she acknowledges that hers is an "angry" review,
and even goes so far as to admit that her reading made her "too angry to be
fair," immediately offering the justification: "but then this isn't a fair book"
(18). I'm not sure where such a convenient scruple takes us, but I'm pretty sure
it's not someplace sf scholarship should go. Nor should rigorous scholarship
make the kinds of factual mistakes that pepper Mendlesohn's review. Most are
small, but telling. For instance, one superficial example of hasty reading is her
claim in her discussion of Chapter 6 that "Tolkien is referred to as sword and
sorcery, a tradition of which he is not a part and that he overwhelms" (18).
What Luckhurst actually writes is that Suvinian sf scholarship has charged
Tolkien "not only with abandoning critical cognition for conservative myth-
creation, but with doing so to such annoyingly influential effect. The true path
of SF has been perverted since The Lord of the Rings became a mass-market
success in the mid- 1960s, resulting in a stream of imitative sword-and-sorcery
sub-creations drained of critical effect" (128) (emphasis mine). If anyone is
guilty of imprecision here, it is not Luckhurst.
A much more significant misreading or misrepresentation underlies
Mendlesohn's claimed anger at Luckhurst's failure to live up to his own stated
aims, "particularly his desire to 'think harder about the way certain agents of
history (for example the masses, women, colonized, marginal or subaltern
peoples) had been erased or rendered anonymous in history-writing"' (16). The
problem here is that this quotation is not one of Luckhurst's "stated aims.
"
It is
instead Mark Poster's detailing of some of the characteristics of cultural history,
and this is presented by Luckhurst as part of a broad summary of suggestions,
offered by several different critics, of the things cultural history can do:
Mark Poster agreed that cultural history challenged the older social history by
questioning narrative in History, but also by forcing it to deal with "low" as well
as "high" cultural sources and, in a related way, to think harder about the way
certain agents of history (for example the masses, women, colonized, marginal
or subaltern peoples) had been erased or rendered anonymous in history-writing.
(1-2)
While I agree with Mendlesohn's apparent belief that these are indeed worthy
goals of cultural history, I must note that this was Poster's list of desiderata and
not advanced by Luckhurst as his stated aims, and certainly not as a kind of
contract by which he intended his book to be judged. Nor is it reasonable, much
less fair, to expect that Luckhurst's book-or any other cultural history-could
do all of the admirable things suggested by these critics.
As it happens, however, I share a number of Mendlesohn's local reactions
to this book, just not her global conclusions. Luckhurst could have used more
sociological evidence to strengthen his cultural analysis and he could have used
different sf writers to support his cultural analysis. The more culturally focused
Cecilia Tichi strikes me as a better guide to constructions of American
technology than does the more literary oriented Leo Marx, and consideration of
technocultural phenomena such as Worlds Fairs and Coney Island-even
advertising-would strengthen Luckhurst's discussion of the American Engineer
paradigm. Like Mendlesohn, I found the absence of sustained discussion of
Gwyneth Jones curious, and I think Joanna Russ should figure much more
prominently in a cultural history of sf, but, unlike Mendlesohn, I don't see the
choice of discussing Le Guin over Russ as a sure sign of sexism. In fact, I think
what Luckhurst does say about Russ argues much more persuasively against
Mendlesohn's charge that the book is sexist than her page-counting and author-
counting calculus argues for it. Consider what Mendlesohn terms pushing Russ's
Female Man to one side or abandoning its discussion in the following passage
from Science Fiction:
The Female Man has proved so difficult to read because it incorporates all of
these strands of feminism into a collage of competing voices from parallel
worlds. Russ's four women protagonists, Janet, Jeanine, Joanna and Jael, are
elements of the same personality, constituted according to the social reality in
which they are imagined, whether this is two versions of America in 1969, the
feminist utopia Whileaway or a future of perpetual gender war. The inter-cutting
is brutal and refuses the reader any comfort in identification, as Russ insists on
the simultaneity of these temporal and generational signifying spaces. The
Female Man resembles the French feminist statements being written
contemporaneously. Helene Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa," for instance,
embraces both a thoroughgoing essentialism ("Woman must write woman. And
man, man"), and yet advocates an ecriture feminine. This can never be reduced
to "women's writing," but aims to subvert the mythical category of Woman.
Cixous's tactic of contradictory assertions is deliberate, the text enacting the
subversive potential of the "feminine," which becomes a deconstructive lever
that worms its way inside all systems of binary thought. In a similar way, when
Russ writes "You cannot unite woman and human any more than you can unite
matter and anti-matter; they are designed not to be stable together," it can be
read simultaneously as both a despairing cry of exclusion and a recognition of the
chance, as Amanda Boulter puts it, to "transcend the category of Woman
altogether." Because The Female Man overdetermines meanings like this and is
a compendium of feminist strategy in the mid-1970s, it is still one of the central
texts of feminist SF. (193-94)
That's the way things go in this "sexist" book.
Speaking as one who has hazarded a literary history of twentieth-century sf,
I see Luckhurst's Science Fiction as an incredibly valuable complementary-and
not competitive-effort. His cultural history makes me realize how much I got
wrong on my own or some of the errors of others I blithely passed along. It also
makes me realize how much more effective any parts I may have gotten right
might have been had they been written with the benefit of the many insights and
specifications of this fme book. There will be other and undoubtedly more
thorough cultural histories of sf in general and of its specific cultural moments
in particular, but many of those works may be inspired by this pioneering book
and all will be informed by it.
NOTES
1. Were it not for S.I. Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action (1941), sf might
be seen as the most effective advertising arm for Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics,
a totalizing system of belief and theory of human behavior that based its assumptions and
program on interrogating and understanding the distinction between map and territory.
By understanding and rigorously maintaining map/territory distinctions in language and
in action, Korzybski believed that most human problems could be avoided. Korzybski's
best-known book, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and
General Semantics (1933), was the obvious source for A.E. van Vogt's concept of "null-
A thinking," and Korzybski was championed by Heinlein and Campbell. While L. Ron
Hubbard claimed that his Dianetics was inspired by General Semantics, proponents of
Korzybski's program argued that Dianetics was pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. In recent
years, Korzybski's thinking has been invoked by proponents of the whole systems
approach championed by Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly and explicitly or implicitly
drawn from by numerous sf writers. The Institute of General Semantics, founded by
Korzybski in 1938, remains active (<http://www.general-semantics.org/>) and
describes the General Semantics language-based epistemology "as the study of how we
perceive, construct, evaluate, and communicate our life experiences."
WORKS CITED
Kristeva, Julia. "Women's Time." T7he Kristeva Reader. Trans. Seain Hand and Leon S.
Roudiez. Ed. Toril Moi. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. 187-213.
Mendlesohn, Farah. "Science Fiction by Roger Luckhurst.
"
New York Review of Science
Fiction 18.1 (Sept. 2005): 16-19.
Wolfe, Gary K. "Malebolge, or the Ordnance of Genre." Conjunctions 39 (2002): 405-
19.

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A Cultural History of a Hybrid Genre

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