REVIEW - Reading Science Fiction by Gunn, Barr and Candelaria (2008)

Reading Science Fiction
Edited by James Gunn, Marleen S. Barr and Matthew Candelaria

Paperback, 256 pages, £16.99 Palgrave MacMillan

*
reviewed by Paul Graham Raven

In the last few pages of the final essay in Reading Science Fiction, Bruce Sterling makes a throwaway observation which I think highlights one of the tensions between sf fandom and criticism, and in doing so suggests that the book, while successful in its core purpose, represents somewhat of a missed opportunity.

“The Internet is especially like fandom in its clannish, grabby, chatty, never mind the money, we're all-in-this together methods of cultural production.
    The Internet is certainly much more like science fiction fandom than it has ever been like a cyberspace. [...] Gibsonian cyberspace, as depicted in his novels, was intensely class-based and exclusive: a gated military/corporate construction of immersive, neural, consensus hallucination. Today's Internet is almost precisely the opposite: sprawling, promiscuous, louche, quotidian and seething with “console cowboys”.” [page 242]

Fandom was bound to end up like the Internet; it was one of the first non-computing-based subcultures to colonise it, after all. But I'd like to posit that, by comparison, criticism is a Gibsonian cyberspace: an idealised representation of the field of play, with the critic as the lone hero, cyberdeck maxed out with the code and cantrips of established critical methodologies and metanarratives and bolstered by their own personal variations and subroutines, ready to cut through the corporate ice of the uncritical reading and shatter the cool geometric walls of the text before plundering it for hidden meaning. To use the vernacular, it's a St George and the dragon gig.

Academia is, of course, a networked discussion – but perforce a discussion that takes place at a glacial pace by comparison to the rapid-fire interchange of globally networked fandom. Papers and essays are published and presented, passed around the network of conventions and symposiums, absorbed and responded to, debunked or valorised... but that network has a high cost to participation, whether it be the temporal demands of an academic career, the difficulty of accessing the central and most recent texts that form the foundations to the rolling debate, or simply the idiom in which it is coded. The Internet lowers all of these barriers to participation, and I'd be a fool (not to mention a liar) to claim this didn't bring difficulties of its own, but the principle benefit is that it enables the neophyte to be caught by the very edge of the critical gravity well during a chance encounter with a topic of interest – caught, and steadily drawn in to the maelstrom.

The latter is my own experience (just to state my biases clearly); I'm not an academic. I may not even be a critic – the definition of critic seems as impossible to pin down as the definition of science fiction itself. As such, while the topics of critical academia fascinate me, the medium in which they take place frustrates me immensely. Reading Science Fiction makes an effort to bridge that very gap, but it's clear that the blog component included near the end is an afterthought, or at best an adjunct.

In a collection of essays like this, by necessity, each topic and/or critical approach is handled separately; while there are respectful nods and references to other contributors in the essays themselves, each has been written in the standard monolithic mode. In her introduction, Marlene S Barr says that literary criticism “is a community dialogue about reading” [page 5], and this is true of the field considered as an amorphous (and capacious) whole; the isolated essay-on-paper, however, is necessarily a dialogue between critic and text that draws on external discussion in a non-dynamic manner. An printed essay cannot respond differently over time or as a result of new data; an essay can only effectively articulate the voices and viewpoints of its authors.

This is not to disrespect the editors and contributors to Reading Science Fiction, in case that's not abundantly clear already. Indeed, it's a solid book that covers all the basic approaches to sf criticism, and while it may not be as intimate and (dare I say it) fannish as the Cambridge Companion (which is probably the title I'd recommend to an established enthusiast or fan looking to test the waters of criticism), that probably makes it a superior text for teaching in a classroom where fandom – or even great familiarity with the genre -  is not a default assumption. The tone of the essays varies from Sterling's historical pop-culture narrative (with added digressional hand-waving) to Gregory Benford's almost conspiratorial air as he shares the sneaky secrets of encouraging disinterested students to engage with sf using the scientific mindset; from the dry and wordy academia of  Davis and Yaszek's introduction to sf's conversation with science and technology studies to Donawerth's simple yet non-patronising explanation of gender theory in the genre. High points for this reader included Zebrowski's discussion of the way cinema absorbs sf tropes and makes them household ideas, forcing the core of the genre to evolve new ideas and themes, and Miller's highlighting of the paucity of sf dealing with cutting edge neuroscience. Points of low irony are few, besides Orson Scott Card's discussion of computer games as teaching grounds for correct moral behaviour.

So, a book full of critics in dialogue with the genre; all well and good. What Reading Science Fiction is lacking is dialogue between the critics and theoretical approaches they espouse. I suppose I stand open to accusations of postmodernist sympathies when I say that I want to see these metanarratives wrestle each other, form alliances and battlefronts, exchange ideas and tools, argue and party and tear the pages a bit. What can I say – I'm a product of my cultural epoch, and today's students will surely be even more so than I. We see criticism in action every day on the web: texts are linked to, examined, quoted, debunked, attacked, discussed, lauded, trashed, twisted, inflated and built upon. The idea of two discreet things – the critic and the body of work – having dialogue in isolation feels... well, archaic, like hand-transcribing a telephone conversation by sitting next to one of the participants and extrapolating the responses of the other. I want to be able to see how critic [x] has responded to critic [y] or text [z]; see how consensus and opposition has coalesced around a topic or theme; see who supports or attacks a certain reading, and what their approaches were to other texts or criticisms with which I may already be familiar (or not). The written monologue is not the ideal medium for this sort of comprehension; hypertext, by contrast, seems ideal.

I'd like to point out that I'm not operating under the illusion that these ideas are in any way original to me. Indeed, the editors of Reading Science Fiction have evidently thought similar things; hence the inclusion of a transcribed set of blog entries (which do not appear to exist at the URL quoted before them, and are almost certainly not the first appearance of blog entries in a textbook as the introductory paragraphs claims) showing some back-and-forth between the editors and contributors. But these nuggets of discussion engage more in generalities than specifics, and taking blog posts out of their hypertext medium and putting them on paper effectively relieves them of their potential.

So allow me a little bit of Sterling-esque blue-sky thinking here. Imagine that Reading Science Fiction were developed online, initially in a closed site wherein the contributors could post their essays and respond to each other's work, engendering some nice long threaded discussions and debates and (one would assume) some revisions and expansions. Being hypertextual, the essays could reach out to quoted and referenced works with direct connections where possible, and the depth of contextual referencing could become an order of magnitude greater because of the way hypertext can embed such links without cluttering the flow of the original material. The result? More material, more correlation, more context, more discussion. After a while, the book is printed and the site goes public, enabling students to cite the essays, respond to them and compare them in a format that is not only more familiar to them for the discursive mode but intrinsically more suited to it.

Of course, to maintain any coherence at all you'd need to have enough barriers to participation to discourage the opportunist OMG WTF LOL contingent; the downside of the rhizomatic debate is that the signal-to-noise ratio drops in direct proportion to the lowering of barriers to entry. But the upside is that this sort of mass discussion in the public eye achieves what I feel to be the ultimate aim of criticism – namely Barr's “community discussion around reading”. Look at the fansites of smash hit genre novels like Meyers' Twilight or the Harry Potter series; it doesn't take years of academic study to foster the desire to deconstruct a text and debate its meanings. What takes training is to realise which approaches get results worth discussing, which have been tried and found wanting, which ones tap into your own outlooks, experiences and interests beyond the field; this sort of training is best gained by easy exposure to those ideas and techniques in a format with which one is comfortable and confident. For better or for worse, the essay-on-paper does not meet that criteria for most people of undergraduate age or younger.

But to reiterate my earlier point: none of this is to discredit the material contained within Reading Science Fiction, nor the contributors and editors who wrote and collated them. The selection of voices is commendable (though personally I'd have liked to have seen more contributions from writers of sf, if only because in my experience they tend to highlight the use of more holistic and wide-reaching readings by comparison to the theorists), the topics are well chosen, and it will doubtless serve well as the academic jump-off point it is intended to be. But still, I can't help but feel that to have a hope of staying relevant and interesting to the outlook of new readers, sf criticism needs to leap headlong into the waters that the broader church of fandom has already found to be so hospitable. Better a packed classroom with a few wise-cracking trolls on the back row than an empty one, no?

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Paul Graham Raven is a freelance writer, editor, publicist and web-presence manager to busy independent creatives, and PR guy for PS Publishing, the UK's foremost boutique genre press. He's also ed-in-chief of near-future sf webzine Futurismic, a learning fictioneer and poet, a reviewer of books, music and concerts, a cack-handed third guitarist for a fuzz-rock band, and in need of a proper haircut.