A Companion to Science Fiction
Edited by David Seed
Paperback (edition published in 2008) , 632 pages, £24.99, WileyBlackwell
*
Reviewed by Karen Burnham
The paperback edition of A Companion to Science Fiction (henceforth: Companion) is a good time to examine this volume and also its closest relative, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (henceforth: Cambridge). They were both published a few years ago, Cambridge winning the race of the swiftest, coming out in 2004, while Companion won on heft, coming out in 2005 but with 566 pages of content compared to 275 in Cambridge. At the time Cambridge garnered more attention, winning the “Best Related Book” Hugo Award in 2005 whereas Companion was overlooked for even a nomination in its year. Another point of direct comparison is their contributors: Cambridge has 22 total contributors to Companion's 43, they share Mark Bould, Andrew Butler, John Clute, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Veronica Hollinger, Brian Stableford, Gary Westfahl, and both editors of Cambridge, Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn.
One has to ask, what are these books for, exactly? What does a “companion” text mean? Companion does not have a strong mission statement; Cambridge starts right out with the assertion “The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction is intended to provide readers with an introduction to the genre and to its study…it assumes that you, the reader, know what sf is…” If one assumes that the books are pitched at people who have heard about SF only on a “well it’s all talking squids in space, innit?” level, then both these books must count as failures. They assume much more knowledge on the part of the reader. In discussing specific texts, many of the sub-sentence-length story summaries are useless if you do not have at least a basic grasp of the text being talked about. Likewise, at least two essays in Companion mention fans and fandom as if you know what they are and the text overall makes no attempt to define this rather important aspect of the SF community; Cambridge at least makes gestures towards explaining fandom, but only in the context of 1930s magazine letters and the Hugo Award. If anyone were actually to write a professionally published “Science Fiction for Dummies” introductory book, it would look entirely different from these two volumes.
Given than these books are not aimed at the person who had to read Fahrenheit 451 in school and is now curious about what science fiction might be, what is their audience? My best approximation is that they are aimed at proto-critics, people who have read widely in the field and are now making the jump to a more academic or systematic way of approaching the genre. Both these volumes, and particularly Companion, give the reader added context and background concerning things they have already read and point the way to numerous other texts to turn to for more information, both in terms of fiction dealing with the same themes as well as reference books and articles that will have more specific information for the researcher. In this respect Cambridge spends its limited space focused closely on the broad thematic concerns of science fiction, while Companion with its vast page count can go in-depth into genres, specific authors, and even specific texts.
Having now spent some of my own digital real estate putting Companion into its historical context, I will get down to the book itself and its content. The editor divided Companion into seven sections. The first consists of overviews of SF’s history and the critical approaches associated with it. A section of major thematic concerns of SF, e.g. Utopia, religion, ecology, etc., comes next. Then a section on different sub-genres of SF; Hard SF, New Wave, Cyberpunk, etc. Next come three chapters on science fiction film and three chapters on international SF: Canada, Japan and Australia. The sixth section involves overviews of “Key Writers” and I will list them here since this may be a reason to seek out the book: H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, John Wyndham, Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gwyneth Jones, Arthur C. Clarke, and Greg Egan. I would say the only completely surprising thing here is the absence of Robert Heinlein — they cover Clarke and Asimov but not Heinlein? An odd omission, but I'm glad to see figures like Delany and Egan, so I will let it pass. Finally Companion gets down to chapters that present in-depth readings of specific texts, and again I’ll list them: Frankenstein, Herland (Charlotte Perkins Gilman), Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, The Female Man, Crash, The Handmaid’s Tale, Neuromancer, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars Trilogy, and Iain M. Bank’s Excession. There is no overlap between important authors and important texts, which makes sense given space constraints. However, the complete omission of Heinlein again surprises. In all fairness, this may be more shocking in 2008 than in 2005, given all the attention lavished on Heinlein on the occasion of his centenary in 2007.
With so much content and so many contributors, it is very difficult to summarize anything about a book like this. In general the early chapters are fairly standard for their type. I have identified the archetypal sentence of the first 8 or so chapters to be:
Statement-followed-by-three-or-four-examples is fairly typical for these broad overview chapters. While these should be the easiest chapters for the novice, one still finds assumptions about common information that may be lacking, e.g. fandom and gothic novels. Of course there is a wide variation in quality, both of analysis and references. I thought Stableford’s chapter on ecology was particularly good, whereas Frank Botting’s chapter “‘Monsters of the Imagination’: Gothic, Science, Fiction” was not as coherent as I might have liked; perhaps I lacked some of the knowledge he was assuming. Likewise I could not help but notice that the Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.’s chapter on SF Criticism made no mention of magazines such as Locus or the New York Review of Science Fiction, not even in the further reading lists. Still, having more pages available means that authors can add much more detail, and I learned more about the history of the magazines, for instance, that I had not seen covered in the other introductory texts I have read.
The later chapters are stronger, especially since they are exactly the sort of thing slimmer books have to leave out. The chapters on Japanese and Australian SF are particularly good, examining the thematic emphases that binds the literature of those countries together and giving more history of their early indigenous SF than I have seen elsewhere. The Canadian chapter has a bit more trouble making the case that Canadian SF is clearly distinct in its concerns from American and British SF; the only substantive difference I could discern was that Canadian SF is less likely to feature successfully galaxy-spanning empires. One thing that I was a bit sad to see—no chapter on French, Russian, or European SF. I understand the desire and need to focus on anglophone SF, but if you have a chapter on Japan, why not Europe? I understand space constraints, but that one would have been on my wish-list.
Finally, the chapters on the individual authors and books are really wonderful. There is an extent to which the close readings are more valuable if you have already read the work, but the authors seem to be aware of which books are more and less popular. Brian Baker, covering Fahrenheit 451, doesn’t feel as much need to give a detailed plot summary as Jill Rudd does covering Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, which is probably the right way to bet. Each of these essays provided me with at least some piece of information or new way of looking at an author and their work that I had not considered before or seen in other places, which honestly makes the whole book worthwhile. Also, the selection of authors and works gives a good feel for what has been important and influential in the field over the last century or so; while one can quibble with their choices as I did above, it is wonderful to see Crash and The Female Man and Gwenyth Jones and Greg Egan getting this level of attention. It exemplifies a field that is broad and diverse and much, much more than talking squids in space.
Throughout the author and book chapters there is a repeated emphasis on science fiction as Utopian literature. Although none of the chapters try to paint all SF as Utopian, the books and authors chosen highlighted how often SF literature is applied in this way. I found it to be an interesting theme running through the different commentaries. Although obviously it would not apply to large swathes of the SF landscape, it is an important human impulse currently being given voice by science fiction. In that way, one can see by implication a historical context going back to Plato’s Republic—at the very least Companion inspired me to finally sit down and read Thomas More’s original Utopia to see where it all began. Obviously this thread is not new or ground-breaking, but seeing so many entries on important SF mentioning it serves to show the Utopian impulse operating in SF “out in the wild.”
In a book this large, one would expect to find some quirky entries and two chapters do stand out. “Feminist Fabulation” by Marleen S. Barr appears to be a 14-page long rant about her work on an anthology titled Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction (1992) having been ignored by subsequent scholars. Specifically, Andrew Butler’s chapter in Cambridge, titled “Postmodernism and Science Fiction” fails to mention Barr’s collection (or apparently almost any other work by women in postmodern SF; “mere crumbs” as Barr would have it). (This did not stop the editors of Companion from having Butler contribute to this volume, he pens the close reading of Neuromancer.) Barr spends a considerable amount of time quoting people who have lavished praise on herself, including quotes from the cover blurbs of Feminist Fabulation. There may be a serious problem here if good work done by women is being ignored, but I am afraid Barr rather undermines the argument by making it so clearly about herself. She also makes a number of unsupported assertions and never gets around to defining just what “fabulation” actually is. Luckily this chapter is followed by “Time and Identity in Feminist Science Fiction” by Jenny Wolmark, which gives a much more conventional and useful overview of feminism and SF.
While on the whole the chapters on specific authors are as wonderful as I have previously stated, “John Wyndham: The Facts of Life Sextet” by David Ketterer stands out as bizarre on many levels. He gives a good biography of Wyndham, and usefully separates his major books into pairs covering similar thematic ground. However, Ketterer is obsessed with the sexual symbolism supposedly present in Wyndham’s books; apparently Wyndham had some significant issues with women throughout his life. The trail of clues that Ketterer follows reminds one of the path followed by the heroes in The DaVinci Code: trivia and coincidence filtered through obsession. One of the first bits that struck me as odd: “It seems reasonable to identify the narrator of Triffids with JBH [the initials Ketterer uses to refer to Wyndham]. For one thing the ‘WM’ reversed form (world turned upside down?) initials of the narrator’s name, William Masen, were probably suggested by the first and last letters of ‘WyndhaM.’” (p. 377) And, just for fun, let me quote in its entirety this paragraph regarding sexual symbolism in Triffids:
And here I thought dentata referred to teeth, not tentacles. As I felt with The DaVinci Code, by the end of it one must admit that the letter V is a fundamental symbol of the female, thus anyone who writes using the letter V (or, heaven forbid, W!) is commenting on female sexuality in some way. Ketterer is obviously obsessed with Wyndham, and perhaps other things as well. Still, it is chapters such as these that act as Easter Eggs in a book of this length; they certainly keep things lively and give the reader plenty to argue with.
One thing I can recommend, based on painful personal experience: Do not try to read this straight through, cover to cover. It will not drive you insane (this is not the Necronomicon), it is simply not the way to get the most out of it. The better way to use it is to think to yourself, “I am reading some Greg Egan and would like to know more about him, his work, and his context”. Then you would turn to the Companion and read the chapters on Egan himself, on Australian SF, and perhaps the chapter on Hard SF as well. From the chapters themselves you will gain a broader overview of Egan and his work. Then, between the titles mentioned in the text and the “References and Further Reading” lists at the end of each chapter you will know where else to look to get even more in-depth information about any aspect that tickles your fancy. It is on this level, as a guide for the beginning researcher, that this book will stand the test of time (at least for authors and works current up to about 2000).
Karen Burnham has a blog; Spiral Galaxy Reviews. More respectably, she is a scholar with the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts and an Editorial Assistant and Reviewer at Strange Horizons. She is a good engineer for a literary critic and a good literary critic for an engineer.
One has to ask, what are these books for, exactly? What does a “companion” text mean? Companion does not have a strong mission statement; Cambridge starts right out with the assertion “The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction is intended to provide readers with an introduction to the genre and to its study…it assumes that you, the reader, know what sf is…” If one assumes that the books are pitched at people who have heard about SF only on a “well it’s all talking squids in space, innit?” level, then both these books must count as failures. They assume much more knowledge on the part of the reader. In discussing specific texts, many of the sub-sentence-length story summaries are useless if you do not have at least a basic grasp of the text being talked about. Likewise, at least two essays in Companion mention fans and fandom as if you know what they are and the text overall makes no attempt to define this rather important aspect of the SF community; Cambridge at least makes gestures towards explaining fandom, but only in the context of 1930s magazine letters and the Hugo Award. If anyone were actually to write a professionally published “Science Fiction for Dummies” introductory book, it would look entirely different from these two volumes.
Given than these books are not aimed at the person who had to read Fahrenheit 451 in school and is now curious about what science fiction might be, what is their audience? My best approximation is that they are aimed at proto-critics, people who have read widely in the field and are now making the jump to a more academic or systematic way of approaching the genre. Both these volumes, and particularly Companion, give the reader added context and background concerning things they have already read and point the way to numerous other texts to turn to for more information, both in terms of fiction dealing with the same themes as well as reference books and articles that will have more specific information for the researcher. In this respect Cambridge spends its limited space focused closely on the broad thematic concerns of science fiction, while Companion with its vast page count can go in-depth into genres, specific authors, and even specific texts.
Having now spent some of my own digital real estate putting Companion into its historical context, I will get down to the book itself and its content. The editor divided Companion into seven sections. The first consists of overviews of SF’s history and the critical approaches associated with it. A section of major thematic concerns of SF, e.g. Utopia, religion, ecology, etc., comes next. Then a section on different sub-genres of SF; Hard SF, New Wave, Cyberpunk, etc. Next come three chapters on science fiction film and three chapters on international SF: Canada, Japan and Australia. The sixth section involves overviews of “Key Writers” and I will list them here since this may be a reason to seek out the book: H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, John Wyndham, Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gwyneth Jones, Arthur C. Clarke, and Greg Egan. I would say the only completely surprising thing here is the absence of Robert Heinlein — they cover Clarke and Asimov but not Heinlein? An odd omission, but I'm glad to see figures like Delany and Egan, so I will let it pass. Finally Companion gets down to chapters that present in-depth readings of specific texts, and again I’ll list them: Frankenstein, Herland (Charlotte Perkins Gilman), Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, The Female Man, Crash, The Handmaid’s Tale, Neuromancer, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars Trilogy, and Iain M. Bank’s Excession. There is no overlap between important authors and important texts, which makes sense given space constraints. However, the complete omission of Heinlein again surprises. In all fairness, this may be more shocking in 2008 than in 2005, given all the attention lavished on Heinlein on the occasion of his centenary in 2007.
With so much content and so many contributors, it is very difficult to summarize anything about a book like this. In general the early chapters are fairly standard for their type. I have identified the archetypal sentence of the first 8 or so chapters to be:
“As the standard size of paperback novels grew, so did the ambitions of this kind of story, as exemplified by Brian Aldiss’ Helliconia trilogy (1982-5), Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite (1982), Paul J. McAuley’s Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988), and Sheri S. Tepper’s Grass (1989).” (Chapter 8, “Science Fiction and Ecology,” Brian Stableford)
Statement-followed-by-three-or-four-examples is fairly typical for these broad overview chapters. While these should be the easiest chapters for the novice, one still finds assumptions about common information that may be lacking, e.g. fandom and gothic novels. Of course there is a wide variation in quality, both of analysis and references. I thought Stableford’s chapter on ecology was particularly good, whereas Frank Botting’s chapter “‘Monsters of the Imagination’: Gothic, Science, Fiction” was not as coherent as I might have liked; perhaps I lacked some of the knowledge he was assuming. Likewise I could not help but notice that the Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.’s chapter on SF Criticism made no mention of magazines such as Locus or the New York Review of Science Fiction, not even in the further reading lists. Still, having more pages available means that authors can add much more detail, and I learned more about the history of the magazines, for instance, that I had not seen covered in the other introductory texts I have read.
The later chapters are stronger, especially since they are exactly the sort of thing slimmer books have to leave out. The chapters on Japanese and Australian SF are particularly good, examining the thematic emphases that binds the literature of those countries together and giving more history of their early indigenous SF than I have seen elsewhere. The Canadian chapter has a bit more trouble making the case that Canadian SF is clearly distinct in its concerns from American and British SF; the only substantive difference I could discern was that Canadian SF is less likely to feature successfully galaxy-spanning empires. One thing that I was a bit sad to see—no chapter on French, Russian, or European SF. I understand the desire and need to focus on anglophone SF, but if you have a chapter on Japan, why not Europe? I understand space constraints, but that one would have been on my wish-list.
Finally, the chapters on the individual authors and books are really wonderful. There is an extent to which the close readings are more valuable if you have already read the work, but the authors seem to be aware of which books are more and less popular. Brian Baker, covering Fahrenheit 451, doesn’t feel as much need to give a detailed plot summary as Jill Rudd does covering Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, which is probably the right way to bet. Each of these essays provided me with at least some piece of information or new way of looking at an author and their work that I had not considered before or seen in other places, which honestly makes the whole book worthwhile. Also, the selection of authors and works gives a good feel for what has been important and influential in the field over the last century or so; while one can quibble with their choices as I did above, it is wonderful to see Crash and The Female Man and Gwenyth Jones and Greg Egan getting this level of attention. It exemplifies a field that is broad and diverse and much, much more than talking squids in space.
Throughout the author and book chapters there is a repeated emphasis on science fiction as Utopian literature. Although none of the chapters try to paint all SF as Utopian, the books and authors chosen highlighted how often SF literature is applied in this way. I found it to be an interesting theme running through the different commentaries. Although obviously it would not apply to large swathes of the SF landscape, it is an important human impulse currently being given voice by science fiction. In that way, one can see by implication a historical context going back to Plato’s Republic—at the very least Companion inspired me to finally sit down and read Thomas More’s original Utopia to see where it all began. Obviously this thread is not new or ground-breaking, but seeing so many entries on important SF mentioning it serves to show the Utopian impulse operating in SF “out in the wild.”
In a book this large, one would expect to find some quirky entries and two chapters do stand out. “Feminist Fabulation” by Marleen S. Barr appears to be a 14-page long rant about her work on an anthology titled Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction (1992) having been ignored by subsequent scholars. Specifically, Andrew Butler’s chapter in Cambridge, titled “Postmodernism and Science Fiction” fails to mention Barr’s collection (or apparently almost any other work by women in postmodern SF; “mere crumbs” as Barr would have it). (This did not stop the editors of Companion from having Butler contribute to this volume, he pens the close reading of Neuromancer.) Barr spends a considerable amount of time quoting people who have lavished praise on herself, including quotes from the cover blurbs of Feminist Fabulation. There may be a serious problem here if good work done by women is being ignored, but I am afraid Barr rather undermines the argument by making it so clearly about herself. She also makes a number of unsupported assertions and never gets around to defining just what “fabulation” actually is. Luckily this chapter is followed by “Time and Identity in Feminist Science Fiction” by Jenny Wolmark, which gives a much more conventional and useful overview of feminism and SF.
While on the whole the chapters on specific authors are as wonderful as I have previously stated, “John Wyndham: The Facts of Life Sextet” by David Ketterer stands out as bizarre on many levels. He gives a good biography of Wyndham, and usefully separates his major books into pairs covering similar thematic ground. However, Ketterer is obsessed with the sexual symbolism supposedly present in Wyndham’s books; apparently Wyndham had some significant issues with women throughout his life. The trail of clues that Ketterer follows reminds one of the path followed by the heroes in The DaVinci Code: trivia and coincidence filtered through obsession. One of the first bits that struck me as odd: “It seems reasonable to identify the narrator of Triffids with JBH [the initials Ketterer uses to refer to Wyndham]. For one thing the ‘WM’ reversed form (world turned upside down?) initials of the narrator’s name, William Masen, were probably suggested by the first and last letters of ‘WyndhaM.’” (p. 377) And, just for fun, let me quote in its entirety this paragraph regarding sexual symbolism in Triffids:
“It is clear that the natural force in Triffids is female sexuality when Bill recalls his seeing, for the first time, ‘the curious, funnel-like formation at the top of the [triffid’s] stem’ and ‘the tightly-wrapped whorl writhing’ when, as a young boy, his father lifted him ‘to look inside’ (Wyndham 1954: 38). The primal scene here is of two males, the one engendered by the other, looking into an image of the vagina dentata. That whorl can unfurl and lash out, becoming ‘a slender stinging weapon ten feet long’ (Wyndham 1954: 42). It is, of course, pretty much inevitable that a good many of the details that make up JBH’s description of a triffid would suggest both female and male sexual organs. For example, it ejaculates: its ‘white seeds shot into the air like steam’ (Wyndham 1954: 50). Could the case I am making for the dominance of female sexuality be accidental? The build up of evidence suggests not. The monster in the film Alien and its successors is similarly ambisexual but there also it is the threat of female sexuality that dominates. The sticky mess from which the triffid whorl emerges traps insects like a spider’s web and so the deadly sexuality of the female spider is linked to the triffid threat.”
And here I thought dentata referred to teeth, not tentacles. As I felt with The DaVinci Code, by the end of it one must admit that the letter V is a fundamental symbol of the female, thus anyone who writes using the letter V (or, heaven forbid, W!) is commenting on female sexuality in some way. Ketterer is obviously obsessed with Wyndham, and perhaps other things as well. Still, it is chapters such as these that act as Easter Eggs in a book of this length; they certainly keep things lively and give the reader plenty to argue with.
One thing I can recommend, based on painful personal experience: Do not try to read this straight through, cover to cover. It will not drive you insane (this is not the Necronomicon), it is simply not the way to get the most out of it. The better way to use it is to think to yourself, “I am reading some Greg Egan and would like to know more about him, his work, and his context”. Then you would turn to the Companion and read the chapters on Egan himself, on Australian SF, and perhaps the chapter on Hard SF as well. From the chapters themselves you will gain a broader overview of Egan and his work. Then, between the titles mentioned in the text and the “References and Further Reading” lists at the end of each chapter you will know where else to look to get even more in-depth information about any aspect that tickles your fancy. It is on this level, as a guide for the beginning researcher, that this book will stand the test of time (at least for authors and works current up to about 2000).
____________________
Karen Burnham has a blog; Spiral Galaxy Reviews. More respectably, she is a scholar with the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts and an Editorial Assistant and Reviewer at Strange Horizons. She is a good engineer for a literary critic and a good literary critic for an engineer.
Just a suggestion, but if you replace _Companion_ with _Blackwell's_ you will have a better match for _Cambridge_ with regard to the working titles. Most people I know refer to the Seed collection as the Blackwell Companion.
Posted by: Farah Mendlesohn | December 08, 2008 at 06:58 PM