Science Fiction (Cultural History of Literature)
by Roger Luckhurst
Paperback (2005), 224 pages, £17.99, Polity Press
*
reviewed by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro
At the end of his cultural history of SF, Roger Luckhurst expresses the hope that, though “inevitably partial,” his account at least provides “a matrix in which SF writings can come historically alive” [Page 144]. That it does, especially in the earlier sections which deal with the origins and development of SF.
Luckhurst explains in his Introduction that rather than defining a historical canon of SF works based on specific a posteriori criteria, he wishes instead to follow the path of cultural historians and explore how SF works might embody or reject cultural values. In short, Luckhurst sets out to construct a socio-historical account that includes precisely the consideration of forces identified as being lacking by Paul Kincaid in Mike Ashley’s Gateways to Forever (2007).
He summarizes some limitations to his endeavor in the Introduction. His history will be “a conservative focus on literature, with some passing comment on SF film and TV in the post-1945 era,” and there will be little discussion of fandom, or of SF’s “adjacent” genres, fantasy and Gothic [Pages 10-11]. The first of these is perhaps the most hampering. As has been proven by critical works that more fully encompass other forms of media (see, for example, Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction), much cultural historical insight may be gleaned from studying films, comic books, graphic novels, video games, etc. This absence becomes most restrictive in Luckhurt’s survey the closer he gets to the present. But it’s a limit of which he is aware, and shouldn’t tilt our judgment too heavily.
The Introduction captures SF’s fundamentally contradictory relationship with Mechanism (the historical term Luckhurst prefers for technology). On the one hand, SF has been an uncritical advocate of technological progress, depicting Mechanism as liberation. On the other, it has warned of the “sense of trauma” that may be induced by Mechanism.
Perhaps Luckhurt’s greatest success lies in his continued emphasis on ambivalence towards technologies as the “presiding spirit of engagement.” The general reader may come away from this book feeling like Luckhurst could take more of a stand on specific ideas or declare his favor more wholeheartedly towards deliberate interpretations of key works. Remembering his pursuit of the above ambivalence is useful in understanding--and appreciating--why he doesn’t.
The book is divided into three parts: Emergence (1880-1945), Elaboration (1945-1959), and Decade Studies (1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s). The periods covered in the first two parts are farther from us, more studied and “historicized.” They are also the ones most engagingly discussed.
The sections on ‘Emergence’ and ‘Elaboration’ comprise over half of the book’s bulk, so there is an objective component to the statement that they are weighty. I can only recommend reading them to realize that they are also meaty.
The study of SF’s emergence is launched by a theoretical nucleus of four facilitating conditions, occurring in the 1880s, each of which is expounded upon in detail. These are, broadly, a rise in mass literacy, new means of print distribution, “a coherent ideology and profession of science,” and the founding age of technological media, including new book formats, gramophones, cinematographs and all sorts of electrical apparati. Luckhurt’s treatment of the cultural significance of scientific enterprising between 1850 and 1900 as a factor of SF’s formation is detailed. His evaluation, more concretely, of forces such as social Darwinism is insightful.
H. G. Wells lies at the birth of modern SF, and as Luckhurst demonstrates, he proves to be a terminus of change as much in the negative as in the positive--an insight I’ve never seen explicated as clearly as here. I was unaware, for instance, of the heavy borrowing by Wells of the fusion of biology and male romance established by the writer Grant Allen. Wells’ legacy may be summarized by observing that the marginalization of his scientific romances by the nascent literary establishment was accelerated by his own tasteless reactions to said marginalization. Also, as a result of the way Wells was used as a “negative foil in aesthetics” [Page 46] unusual conditions of “marginality and insularity” arose, in turn producing “an extraordinary cohesion” [Page 46]. Both effects are, as one might suspect, intertwined, and Luckhurst explores each thoroughly without ignoring the overlap.
Luckhursts concurs with Brian Stableford in his assessment that the evolution of the scientific romance in Britain during this time saw little interplay with the birth of American SF. The latter was largely made possible, he shows, by the elevation of the engineer and inventor to the “level of cultural hero.” [Page 51] The importance of Thomas Edison and the resulting mythification of the artisan-inventor figure cannot be overstated (Clute’s term ‘Edisonade’ for fictions inspired by this construct remains apt).
Luckhurst’s treatment of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars series (starting in 1912) argues that its appeal might “initially be understood as a celebration of primitive violence in direct opposition to the control and containment of American life by encroaching technical systems” [Page 58]. And yet, the popularity of these works also makes sense if one remembers what preceded them. As Luckhurst recounts earlier, the American culture in the 1890s essentially hungered for an affirmation of Masculinity [Page 21].
Luckhurst examines nineteenth century boy-inventor tales, the growth of US pulp magazines that led to 1920s ‘scientifiction’ under Hugo Gernsback, and the formation of recognizable genre during 1928-1938. Following this, his post-war analysis invests the Manhattan Project with cultural meaning beyond the practical development of atomic bombs.
The growth of American SF from a fiction of “atomjocks” to a sophisticated form of cultural critique between 1939 and 1959 is treated with a plethora of examples and acute observations. For instance, Theodore Sturgeon’s story “Memorial,” which includes an explicit passage on the status of SF writers in the “atomic age,” makes for a cogent illustration of how writing SF was advantageous over “the idealism of the Scientists’ Movement” [Pages 98-99]. The tone of Robert Heinlein’s 1951 The Puppet Masters is similar to J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit, making the former an anti-Communist yet thoroughly contextually technocratic response to the latter. This is a typical example of Luckhurst’s ability to read SF works in an explicitly socio-political dimension. Another: Philip K. Dick’s vast body of 1950s stories may be viewed as a “rolling critique” of the perpetual war and war economy. Worth noting is the repeated reminder that critics such as Carl Freedman have imposed “over-coherence on a chaotic body of work” [Page 108] when it comes to Dick. As I mentioned before, this kind of reigning in of the interpretative pattern-seeking apparatus is one of Luckhurst’s strengths.
Dick proves an interesting exemplar of the evolution of SF magazines as a vehicle for social criticism. His “pessimism,” as reflected in at least one significant essay, demonstrates a rift within the SF field and a rupture with Edisonian models. This is the very transition that would enable Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth’s satire The Space Merchants, a dramatization of Vance Packard’s critique of the use of psychoanalysis by advertisers in The Hidden Persuaders. In the context of these and other SF satires, Luckhurst reasonably points out that it is in the 1950s that the distinction between hard and soft SF can begin to be made. This is a valuable point often overlooked.
Further, he observes that it is a “trademark of both Pohl’s stories and his collaborations with Cyril Kornbluth to turn capitalist systems against themselves” [Page 113]. This is a concise assessment, made only more elegant by the ensuing realization that this process paralleled the 1950s intellectual effort to denounce the standardization of American culture, but from within the confines of American capitalism.
Robert Bloch, in partial response to Kornbluth’s explicit declamation of the SF novel’s failure as social criticism, hit on a line of reasoning that has been repeated often since (see, for example, Paul McAuley in Fast Forward 2). We might call it the Holy Fool argument:
Luckhurst could address the validity of the above more deeply than he does. Nonetheless, he concludes his excellent study of American SF during this period with a return to the crucial question of many intellectual’s dismissal of SF due to their unwillingness to apprehend differences within “mass culture.”
The British post-1945 SF scene is characterized as largely reactive to American developments, a very different story from the previous non-communication. This British postwar idiom saw the flourishing of “pulp regressions” [Page 122] as well as the revival of the Wellsian disaster tale. Luckhurst asks what cultural role these disaster fictions play, and his general response is the “compulsion to return to some traumatic event, in order to master its devastating effects.” [Page 130] He particularizes this for the British context, in the end making a strong case. In the process he draws unsurprising connections between John Wyndham’s work and Wells’, as well as more revealing ones between certain aspects of Arthur C. Clarke’s fiction and C. S. Lewis’.
Lewis was one of perhaps the most characteristic and influential cadre of three English writers during this time, the others being J. R. R. Tolkien and Mervin Peake. Lewis and Tolkien produced Christian fictions of anti-Modernism that continue to gain in popularity to this day. Peake’s Gormenghast comprises a more conflicted expression of the tensions between modernism and tradition. Once again, Luckhurst moves between theory and example deftly. This British account, like the former American one, investigates its subject matter probingly.
Throughout these sections on ‘Emergence’ and ‘Elaboration’ Luckhurst illuminates the trends in early SF not only in sociological terms, but in the broader context of non-genre literature and philosophy. Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan and others help penetrate the complexities of SF’s history. For example, Heidegger’s Being and Time and “The Question Concerning Technology,” as well as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment are paramount to tracing the roots of the elitism associated with Modernist art and its contempt for “mass culture.” This divide lies at the core of SF’s often maligned status by the mainstream literary establishment.
Each of Luckhurt’s succeeding Decade Studies is rich in information and, in the words of China Mieville, “exciting, argumentative” notions. He chooses writers whose works exemplify his theses and discusses these in-depth. In the process, he provides valuable syntheses of opposing viewpoints and alternate interpretations, as well as responses to established ones. This strategy certainly gives a sense of the possibilities of full academic analysis as applied to SF; it’s a triumph of syncretism. What is missing is perhaps more innovation. Luckhurst’s analyses at times could benefit from being more adventurous (for an example of this, see Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.’s The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction). Still, there is a ton to be enjoyed here.
A detailed response to each of his arguments would require a book at least as long as his, so I’ll limit my thoughts on his Decade Studies to a few illustrative examples.
In discussing the 1960s, Luckhurst makes the connection between generational dissent and rebellion (drugs, rock music, counter-cultural lifestyles, the “Summer of Love,” the Prague Spring, the student uprising in Paris, protests against the Vietnam War, opposition to the Tet offensive, etc. etc.) and the experiments in “speculative fantasy” initiated by, primarily, Michael Moorcock that led to a new kind of revolutionary SF.
Luckhurst makes the valid and often overlooked point that the New Wave cultural context did not set out “to elevate SF from a ghetto, to plea bargain for its status as a ‘serious’ literature.” [Page 146] Rather, it was a time where experimental and popular art blended, in fact “a manifestation of a wider move to question the very categories and values of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.” This modulation of intent helps make sense of the works of non-category writers such as William Burroughs, John Barth and Kurt Vonnegut, and those more typically identified with the British New Wave, J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock and Pamela Zoline. In particular, Luckhurst concludes an excellent discussion of the recently deceased Ballard with the evaluation that he occupies a “weirdly undecidable location […], never fully inside or outside of the SF world.” [Page 153] However, part of Luckhurst’s effect is to illustrate that the “union of speculative fiction and the literary avant-garde” [Page 150] was at least partially achieved, so the above undecideability regarding Ballard should be reconsidered in light of this fuzzier division of worlds.
Luckhurst explores the British New Wave in detail, and asks whether there really was a New Wave in America that can be equated with the British phenomenon. In critiquing how historians have used the British New Wave as a “moment of absolute rupture within SF history,” he appeals to the “substantial continuities within the genre.” [Pages 159-160] Though he argues that Philip K. Dick’s “vision remained absolutely continuous with the satirical and psychological fictions typically associated with the works of Pohl, Kornbluth and Sheckley in the 1950s,” [Page 163] I would have liked to have seen more elaboration and exemplification of the alleged continuities. The lack of mention of writers such as John Brunner and Philip Jose Farmer, and only a few references to Norman Spinrad, make me suspicious that the entire story is not being told.
As mentioned, the “revolutions of the 1960s” produced an iconography of subversion replete with stylistic experimentation (sometimes at cross-purposes with itself). As such, this epoch has left us an inheritance of complex, challenging work, as much an embodiment of Modernism as it was a sublimation of the cultural uprisings that produced it.
In discussing the 1970s, Luckhurst warns from the outset that “two diametrically opposed accounts have circulated”: according to one, it is the decade in which SF comes into its own, achieving new legitimacy and widespread appeal, and according to another, it marks the collapse of the New Wave and the rise of genre fantasy and mass produced “sci-fi,” obliterating “all the hopes which had been entertained for science fiction” (Brian Stableford) [Pages 167-168]. Luckhurst astutely observes that “these contradictory accounts of SF are symptomatic of a wider set of confusions over precisely what took place in the decade” [Page 169].
These confusions range from the sense of technological crisis captured in Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock to Michel Foucault’s critique of social institutions and practices, and include the birth of the ecology movement and the Women’s Movement. Luckhurst’s exploration of these constituents of the “moment of crisis” (Raymond Williams) is lively and compelling. The two sub-sections of this decade study, dealing with the British New Wave of the 1970s and Feminism and Science Fiction, are equally fascinating.
Luckhurst makes a convincing case for the sense of pervasive Melancholia, per Freud’s conception of the condition, in British works of the period, both in mainstream literature and the remnants of the SF avant-garde. He casts light on the connection between this Melancholia and imperial collapse and decolonization, locating novels by Moorcock, Christopher Priest, Keith Roberts and M. John Harrison in this milieu. He places them also within the literary tradition of “cultural pessimism” (John Fletcher). The realization that much of the New Wave’s preoccupation with fragmentation--on the level of subject matter, not merely narrative technique--gains new meaning if “we read the entropic as allegorizing post-imperial melancholy” is a telling one.
Not being much familiar with critical works on Feminist SF, I found myself learning much from Luckhurst’s treatment. His examination of British versus US movements was engaging and instructive. What I found most helpful and enlightening was his use of Julia Kristeva’s theoretical triad of feminist generations as a tool to analyze works by Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr. and Angela Carter.
Once again, the omission of others writers such as Margaret Atwood reminds us of the limitations of these Decade Studies, but by no means invalidates their usefulness.
As much as I enjoyed Luckhurst’s disquisitions on the 1960s and 1970s, I was less stimulated by his analysis of the 1980s. This may be partly due to the fact I am less interested in the SF produced during this time, and partly to the theoretical web that surrounds it. Analysis tends toward the homological: the point of departure is the merging of Frederic Jameson’s at-large postmodernism with the rise of cyberpunk. Luckhurst admits that it is “possible for a cultural history to offer an account of SF in the 1980s that places cyberpunk within a more complex historical context” [Page 199]. He attempts just that. Though he considers other elements, such as the subgenre of splatterpunk and Octavia Butler’s body of work, I’m not sure he entirely succeeds.
The scope of the discussion, once underway, is more limited to the world of SF (rather than being in dialogue with the wider world) than in previous chapters. Luckhurst identifies four key elements of the postmodern 1980s. These are: 1) a minimally extrapolated hypercapitalist near-future, 2) plots that identify computers as the technology of the time, 3) a crammed, pastiche style, and 4) the contradiction of a techno-scientific depiction that renders the trauma of technology change through a “severely compromised pastoral” [Page 211].
Though additional texts by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and a few others are mentioned, these four characteristics are presented primarily in relation to Gibson’s Neuromancer. This text is inarguably a canonical one, and illustrative of Luckhurst’s claims, but relying so heavily on it is troublesome.
For one, it forces the reader to infer the validity of his arguments for other contemporaneous fictions. It also implies a proximity between cyberpunk texts that may not be inherently manifest in the stories themselves.
The fourth characteristic serves as a springboard to mention the sub-genre of steampunk. Given the growth of steampunk over the last decade (with at least two dedicated anthologies of note, Steampunk by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer and Extraordinary Engines: The Definitive Steampunk Anthology by Nick Gevers), if a new edition of Luckhurst’s book is printed it would do well to expand on its one-paragraph treatment. When thinking of other recent sub-genre themed anthologies that might reflect wider trends and could lead to further elaboration in this chapter, another that comes to mind is Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel.
Luckhurst concurs with Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.’s notion that the displacement of cyberpunk corresponds in some sense to the post-national globalization that emerged in the 90s. He captures three movements that proved foundational for the decade: 1) the revival of space opera, 2) a preponderance of “narratives of apocalypse” and 3) “the hybridization of genre form” [Page 222]. His treatment of the New Space Opera is particularly hardy, including US and British authors.
What of the claim that New Space Opera, with its dense world-building and sprawling scales, might be seen as a harkening back to the earlier planetary romances? That it might be a yearning for less critical narratives, nostalgia in disguise? Luckhurst argues eloquently why this is not so. In addition to embodying the flux of globalization by weaving together “spatially and temporally dislocated” threads, New Space Opera yarns also constitute a kind of “narrative salve” [Page 229]. These narratives, which can compromise megatextual forms, demand large tracts of reading time, and this “time of reading” can be seen to act “as a bulwark against the depredations of identity in the late modern world” [Page 230].
Luckhurst’s next section regards Singularitarian fiction as distinctly apocalyptic. In retrospect, and in accordance with Vernor Vinge’s original description of the “acceleration of technological progress,” we can argue that it is first transformative, and only secondly apocalyptic. Abduction-related fiction may be culturally significant, but Luckhurst spends too much time on it.
For a text that soberly makes just fleeting mentions of huge media phenomena like Star Trek and Star Wars, Luckhurst inexplicably dedicates three pages to the X-Files. I happen to enjoy the show and was entertained by the discussion, but it seems at odds with the rest of the book’s sparse attention to TV series. It also leaves less room for his brief but solid take on cross-genre fusion, which references the New Weird and includes comments on diverse writers such as Douglas Coupland, China Miéville, Jonathan Carroll, Neil Gaiman, John Crowley and Jonathan Lethem. Luckhurst smartly recapitulates Gary Wolfe’s comment that “writers who contribute to the evaporation of genre … are those same writers who continually revitalize genre” [Page 240].
In a final act of historical linkage, Luckhurst connects the hybridization of genre with the “conditions of writing that dominated the emergence of SF in the late nineteenth century” [Page 243]. If we follow his analogy, we might presume that just as the fiction of the 1880s and 1890s eventually condensed into separate genres (including spy fiction, horror, etc.), so too might the speculative fiction of recent years result in new distinct modes of dealing with technological change.
Luckhurst’s cultural history of SF is an energetic and impressively researched account. It mostly succeeds in its goal of offering a non-prescriptive, culturally encompassing perspective. At times this broader angle comes at the cost of academic opinions more de-personalized and derivative than one would like.
Science Fiction (Cultural History of Literature Series) is listed on Science Fiction Studies's online bibliography of science fiction criticism, as well it should be. It is a valuable reference tool, and a worthwhile addition to the growing body of SF histories.
Luckhurst explains in his Introduction that rather than defining a historical canon of SF works based on specific a posteriori criteria, he wishes instead to follow the path of cultural historians and explore how SF works might embody or reject cultural values. In short, Luckhurst sets out to construct a socio-historical account that includes precisely the consideration of forces identified as being lacking by Paul Kincaid in Mike Ashley’s Gateways to Forever (2007).
He summarizes some limitations to his endeavor in the Introduction. His history will be “a conservative focus on literature, with some passing comment on SF film and TV in the post-1945 era,” and there will be little discussion of fandom, or of SF’s “adjacent” genres, fantasy and Gothic [Pages 10-11]. The first of these is perhaps the most hampering. As has been proven by critical works that more fully encompass other forms of media (see, for example, Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction), much cultural historical insight may be gleaned from studying films, comic books, graphic novels, video games, etc. This absence becomes most restrictive in Luckhurt’s survey the closer he gets to the present. But it’s a limit of which he is aware, and shouldn’t tilt our judgment too heavily.
The Introduction captures SF’s fundamentally contradictory relationship with Mechanism (the historical term Luckhurst prefers for technology). On the one hand, SF has been an uncritical advocate of technological progress, depicting Mechanism as liberation. On the other, it has warned of the “sense of trauma” that may be induced by Mechanism.
Perhaps Luckhurt’s greatest success lies in his continued emphasis on ambivalence towards technologies as the “presiding spirit of engagement.” The general reader may come away from this book feeling like Luckhurst could take more of a stand on specific ideas or declare his favor more wholeheartedly towards deliberate interpretations of key works. Remembering his pursuit of the above ambivalence is useful in understanding--and appreciating--why he doesn’t.
#
The book is divided into three parts: Emergence (1880-1945), Elaboration (1945-1959), and Decade Studies (1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s). The periods covered in the first two parts are farther from us, more studied and “historicized.” They are also the ones most engagingly discussed.
The sections on ‘Emergence’ and ‘Elaboration’ comprise over half of the book’s bulk, so there is an objective component to the statement that they are weighty. I can only recommend reading them to realize that they are also meaty.
The study of SF’s emergence is launched by a theoretical nucleus of four facilitating conditions, occurring in the 1880s, each of which is expounded upon in detail. These are, broadly, a rise in mass literacy, new means of print distribution, “a coherent ideology and profession of science,” and the founding age of technological media, including new book formats, gramophones, cinematographs and all sorts of electrical apparati. Luckhurt’s treatment of the cultural significance of scientific enterprising between 1850 and 1900 as a factor of SF’s formation is detailed. His evaluation, more concretely, of forces such as social Darwinism is insightful.
H. G. Wells lies at the birth of modern SF, and as Luckhurst demonstrates, he proves to be a terminus of change as much in the negative as in the positive--an insight I’ve never seen explicated as clearly as here. I was unaware, for instance, of the heavy borrowing by Wells of the fusion of biology and male romance established by the writer Grant Allen. Wells’ legacy may be summarized by observing that the marginalization of his scientific romances by the nascent literary establishment was accelerated by his own tasteless reactions to said marginalization. Also, as a result of the way Wells was used as a “negative foil in aesthetics” [Page 46] unusual conditions of “marginality and insularity” arose, in turn producing “an extraordinary cohesion” [Page 46]. Both effects are, as one might suspect, intertwined, and Luckhurst explores each thoroughly without ignoring the overlap.
Luckhursts concurs with Brian Stableford in his assessment that the evolution of the scientific romance in Britain during this time saw little interplay with the birth of American SF. The latter was largely made possible, he shows, by the elevation of the engineer and inventor to the “level of cultural hero.” [Page 51] The importance of Thomas Edison and the resulting mythification of the artisan-inventor figure cannot be overstated (Clute’s term ‘Edisonade’ for fictions inspired by this construct remains apt).
Luckhurst’s treatment of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars series (starting in 1912) argues that its appeal might “initially be understood as a celebration of primitive violence in direct opposition to the control and containment of American life by encroaching technical systems” [Page 58]. And yet, the popularity of these works also makes sense if one remembers what preceded them. As Luckhurst recounts earlier, the American culture in the 1890s essentially hungered for an affirmation of Masculinity [Page 21].
Luckhurst examines nineteenth century boy-inventor tales, the growth of US pulp magazines that led to 1920s ‘scientifiction’ under Hugo Gernsback, and the formation of recognizable genre during 1928-1938. Following this, his post-war analysis invests the Manhattan Project with cultural meaning beyond the practical development of atomic bombs.
The growth of American SF from a fiction of “atomjocks” to a sophisticated form of cultural critique between 1939 and 1959 is treated with a plethora of examples and acute observations. For instance, Theodore Sturgeon’s story “Memorial,” which includes an explicit passage on the status of SF writers in the “atomic age,” makes for a cogent illustration of how writing SF was advantageous over “the idealism of the Scientists’ Movement” [Pages 98-99]. The tone of Robert Heinlein’s 1951 The Puppet Masters is similar to J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit, making the former an anti-Communist yet thoroughly contextually technocratic response to the latter. This is a typical example of Luckhurst’s ability to read SF works in an explicitly socio-political dimension. Another: Philip K. Dick’s vast body of 1950s stories may be viewed as a “rolling critique” of the perpetual war and war economy. Worth noting is the repeated reminder that critics such as Carl Freedman have imposed “over-coherence on a chaotic body of work” [Page 108] when it comes to Dick. As I mentioned before, this kind of reigning in of the interpretative pattern-seeking apparatus is one of Luckhurst’s strengths.
Dick proves an interesting exemplar of the evolution of SF magazines as a vehicle for social criticism. His “pessimism,” as reflected in at least one significant essay, demonstrates a rift within the SF field and a rupture with Edisonian models. This is the very transition that would enable Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth’s satire The Space Merchants, a dramatization of Vance Packard’s critique of the use of psychoanalysis by advertisers in The Hidden Persuaders. In the context of these and other SF satires, Luckhurst reasonably points out that it is in the 1950s that the distinction between hard and soft SF can begin to be made. This is a valuable point often overlooked.
Further, he observes that it is a “trademark of both Pohl’s stories and his collaborations with Cyril Kornbluth to turn capitalist systems against themselves” [Page 113]. This is a concise assessment, made only more elegant by the ensuing realization that this process paralleled the 1950s intellectual effort to denounce the standardization of American culture, but from within the confines of American capitalism.
Robert Bloch, in partial response to Kornbluth’s explicit declamation of the SF novel’s failure as social criticism, hit on a line of reasoning that has been repeated often since (see, for example, Paul McAuley in Fast Forward 2). We might call it the Holy Fool argument:
“This proposal, that SF gained advantage from being a genre, a minor literature that could prosper precisely because it was considered marginal …” [Pages 114-115]
Luckhurst could address the validity of the above more deeply than he does. Nonetheless, he concludes his excellent study of American SF during this period with a return to the crucial question of many intellectual’s dismissal of SF due to their unwillingness to apprehend differences within “mass culture.”
The British post-1945 SF scene is characterized as largely reactive to American developments, a very different story from the previous non-communication. This British postwar idiom saw the flourishing of “pulp regressions” [Page 122] as well as the revival of the Wellsian disaster tale. Luckhurst asks what cultural role these disaster fictions play, and his general response is the “compulsion to return to some traumatic event, in order to master its devastating effects.” [Page 130] He particularizes this for the British context, in the end making a strong case. In the process he draws unsurprising connections between John Wyndham’s work and Wells’, as well as more revealing ones between certain aspects of Arthur C. Clarke’s fiction and C. S. Lewis’.
Lewis was one of perhaps the most characteristic and influential cadre of three English writers during this time, the others being J. R. R. Tolkien and Mervin Peake. Lewis and Tolkien produced Christian fictions of anti-Modernism that continue to gain in popularity to this day. Peake’s Gormenghast comprises a more conflicted expression of the tensions between modernism and tradition. Once again, Luckhurst moves between theory and example deftly. This British account, like the former American one, investigates its subject matter probingly.
Throughout these sections on ‘Emergence’ and ‘Elaboration’ Luckhurst illuminates the trends in early SF not only in sociological terms, but in the broader context of non-genre literature and philosophy. Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan and others help penetrate the complexities of SF’s history. For example, Heidegger’s Being and Time and “The Question Concerning Technology,” as well as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment are paramount to tracing the roots of the elitism associated with Modernist art and its contempt for “mass culture.” This divide lies at the core of SF’s often maligned status by the mainstream literary establishment.
#
Each of Luckhurt’s succeeding Decade Studies is rich in information and, in the words of China Mieville, “exciting, argumentative” notions. He chooses writers whose works exemplify his theses and discusses these in-depth. In the process, he provides valuable syntheses of opposing viewpoints and alternate interpretations, as well as responses to established ones. This strategy certainly gives a sense of the possibilities of full academic analysis as applied to SF; it’s a triumph of syncretism. What is missing is perhaps more innovation. Luckhurst’s analyses at times could benefit from being more adventurous (for an example of this, see Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.’s The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction). Still, there is a ton to be enjoyed here.
A detailed response to each of his arguments would require a book at least as long as his, so I’ll limit my thoughts on his Decade Studies to a few illustrative examples.
#
In discussing the 1960s, Luckhurst makes the connection between generational dissent and rebellion (drugs, rock music, counter-cultural lifestyles, the “Summer of Love,” the Prague Spring, the student uprising in Paris, protests against the Vietnam War, opposition to the Tet offensive, etc. etc.) and the experiments in “speculative fantasy” initiated by, primarily, Michael Moorcock that led to a new kind of revolutionary SF.
Luckhurst makes the valid and often overlooked point that the New Wave cultural context did not set out “to elevate SF from a ghetto, to plea bargain for its status as a ‘serious’ literature.” [Page 146] Rather, it was a time where experimental and popular art blended, in fact “a manifestation of a wider move to question the very categories and values of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.” This modulation of intent helps make sense of the works of non-category writers such as William Burroughs, John Barth and Kurt Vonnegut, and those more typically identified with the British New Wave, J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock and Pamela Zoline. In particular, Luckhurst concludes an excellent discussion of the recently deceased Ballard with the evaluation that he occupies a “weirdly undecidable location […], never fully inside or outside of the SF world.” [Page 153] However, part of Luckhurst’s effect is to illustrate that the “union of speculative fiction and the literary avant-garde” [Page 150] was at least partially achieved, so the above undecideability regarding Ballard should be reconsidered in light of this fuzzier division of worlds.
Luckhurst explores the British New Wave in detail, and asks whether there really was a New Wave in America that can be equated with the British phenomenon. In critiquing how historians have used the British New Wave as a “moment of absolute rupture within SF history,” he appeals to the “substantial continuities within the genre.” [Pages 159-160] Though he argues that Philip K. Dick’s “vision remained absolutely continuous with the satirical and psychological fictions typically associated with the works of Pohl, Kornbluth and Sheckley in the 1950s,” [Page 163] I would have liked to have seen more elaboration and exemplification of the alleged continuities. The lack of mention of writers such as John Brunner and Philip Jose Farmer, and only a few references to Norman Spinrad, make me suspicious that the entire story is not being told.
As mentioned, the “revolutions of the 1960s” produced an iconography of subversion replete with stylistic experimentation (sometimes at cross-purposes with itself). As such, this epoch has left us an inheritance of complex, challenging work, as much an embodiment of Modernism as it was a sublimation of the cultural uprisings that produced it.
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In discussing the 1970s, Luckhurst warns from the outset that “two diametrically opposed accounts have circulated”: according to one, it is the decade in which SF comes into its own, achieving new legitimacy and widespread appeal, and according to another, it marks the collapse of the New Wave and the rise of genre fantasy and mass produced “sci-fi,” obliterating “all the hopes which had been entertained for science fiction” (Brian Stableford) [Pages 167-168]. Luckhurst astutely observes that “these contradictory accounts of SF are symptomatic of a wider set of confusions over precisely what took place in the decade” [Page 169].
These confusions range from the sense of technological crisis captured in Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock to Michel Foucault’s critique of social institutions and practices, and include the birth of the ecology movement and the Women’s Movement. Luckhurst’s exploration of these constituents of the “moment of crisis” (Raymond Williams) is lively and compelling. The two sub-sections of this decade study, dealing with the British New Wave of the 1970s and Feminism and Science Fiction, are equally fascinating.
Luckhurst makes a convincing case for the sense of pervasive Melancholia, per Freud’s conception of the condition, in British works of the period, both in mainstream literature and the remnants of the SF avant-garde. He casts light on the connection between this Melancholia and imperial collapse and decolonization, locating novels by Moorcock, Christopher Priest, Keith Roberts and M. John Harrison in this milieu. He places them also within the literary tradition of “cultural pessimism” (John Fletcher). The realization that much of the New Wave’s preoccupation with fragmentation--on the level of subject matter, not merely narrative technique--gains new meaning if “we read the entropic as allegorizing post-imperial melancholy” is a telling one.
Not being much familiar with critical works on Feminist SF, I found myself learning much from Luckhurst’s treatment. His examination of British versus US movements was engaging and instructive. What I found most helpful and enlightening was his use of Julia Kristeva’s theoretical triad of feminist generations as a tool to analyze works by Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr. and Angela Carter.
Once again, the omission of others writers such as Margaret Atwood reminds us of the limitations of these Decade Studies, but by no means invalidates their usefulness.
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As much as I enjoyed Luckhurst’s disquisitions on the 1960s and 1970s, I was less stimulated by his analysis of the 1980s. This may be partly due to the fact I am less interested in the SF produced during this time, and partly to the theoretical web that surrounds it. Analysis tends toward the homological: the point of departure is the merging of Frederic Jameson’s at-large postmodernism with the rise of cyberpunk. Luckhurst admits that it is “possible for a cultural history to offer an account of SF in the 1980s that places cyberpunk within a more complex historical context” [Page 199]. He attempts just that. Though he considers other elements, such as the subgenre of splatterpunk and Octavia Butler’s body of work, I’m not sure he entirely succeeds.
The scope of the discussion, once underway, is more limited to the world of SF (rather than being in dialogue with the wider world) than in previous chapters. Luckhurst identifies four key elements of the postmodern 1980s. These are: 1) a minimally extrapolated hypercapitalist near-future, 2) plots that identify computers as the technology of the time, 3) a crammed, pastiche style, and 4) the contradiction of a techno-scientific depiction that renders the trauma of technology change through a “severely compromised pastoral” [Page 211].
Though additional texts by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and a few others are mentioned, these four characteristics are presented primarily in relation to Gibson’s Neuromancer. This text is inarguably a canonical one, and illustrative of Luckhurst’s claims, but relying so heavily on it is troublesome.
For one, it forces the reader to infer the validity of his arguments for other contemporaneous fictions. It also implies a proximity between cyberpunk texts that may not be inherently manifest in the stories themselves.
The fourth characteristic serves as a springboard to mention the sub-genre of steampunk. Given the growth of steampunk over the last decade (with at least two dedicated anthologies of note, Steampunk by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer and Extraordinary Engines: The Definitive Steampunk Anthology by Nick Gevers), if a new edition of Luckhurst’s book is printed it would do well to expand on its one-paragraph treatment. When thinking of other recent sub-genre themed anthologies that might reflect wider trends and could lead to further elaboration in this chapter, another that comes to mind is Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel.
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Luckhurst concurs with Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.’s notion that the displacement of cyberpunk corresponds in some sense to the post-national globalization that emerged in the 90s. He captures three movements that proved foundational for the decade: 1) the revival of space opera, 2) a preponderance of “narratives of apocalypse” and 3) “the hybridization of genre form” [Page 222]. His treatment of the New Space Opera is particularly hardy, including US and British authors.
What of the claim that New Space Opera, with its dense world-building and sprawling scales, might be seen as a harkening back to the earlier planetary romances? That it might be a yearning for less critical narratives, nostalgia in disguise? Luckhurst argues eloquently why this is not so. In addition to embodying the flux of globalization by weaving together “spatially and temporally dislocated” threads, New Space Opera yarns also constitute a kind of “narrative salve” [Page 229]. These narratives, which can compromise megatextual forms, demand large tracts of reading time, and this “time of reading” can be seen to act “as a bulwark against the depredations of identity in the late modern world” [Page 230].
Luckhurst’s next section regards Singularitarian fiction as distinctly apocalyptic. In retrospect, and in accordance with Vernor Vinge’s original description of the “acceleration of technological progress,” we can argue that it is first transformative, and only secondly apocalyptic. Abduction-related fiction may be culturally significant, but Luckhurst spends too much time on it.
For a text that soberly makes just fleeting mentions of huge media phenomena like Star Trek and Star Wars, Luckhurst inexplicably dedicates three pages to the X-Files. I happen to enjoy the show and was entertained by the discussion, but it seems at odds with the rest of the book’s sparse attention to TV series. It also leaves less room for his brief but solid take on cross-genre fusion, which references the New Weird and includes comments on diverse writers such as Douglas Coupland, China Miéville, Jonathan Carroll, Neil Gaiman, John Crowley and Jonathan Lethem. Luckhurst smartly recapitulates Gary Wolfe’s comment that “writers who contribute to the evaporation of genre … are those same writers who continually revitalize genre” [Page 240].
In a final act of historical linkage, Luckhurst connects the hybridization of genre with the “conditions of writing that dominated the emergence of SF in the late nineteenth century” [Page 243]. If we follow his analogy, we might presume that just as the fiction of the 1880s and 1890s eventually condensed into separate genres (including spy fiction, horror, etc.), so too might the speculative fiction of recent years result in new distinct modes of dealing with technological change.
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Luckhurst’s cultural history of SF is an energetic and impressively researched account. It mostly succeeds in its goal of offering a non-prescriptive, culturally encompassing perspective. At times this broader angle comes at the cost of academic opinions more de-personalized and derivative than one would like.
Science Fiction (Cultural History of Literature Series) is listed on Science Fiction Studies's online bibliography of science fiction criticism, as well it should be. It is a valuable reference tool, and a worthwhile addition to the growing body of SF histories.
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Alvaro Zinos-Amaro grew up in Europe, mostly, and despite the advice of
his betters earned a BS in Theoretical Physics and studied creative
writing. His fiction has appeared in Farrago's Wainscot, Neon Literary Magazine, Atomjack Magazine, and Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine. Alvaro's reviews of speculative fiction and poetry have been published at IRoSF, The Fix, Foundation, and Fruitless Recursion. Visit him at his blog, Waiting for My Aineko.
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