R.J. Ellis

Despite the fact that its title implies it will focus on the development and evolution of science fiction, Science Fiction Roots and Branches is actually a very loosely organized collection of articles on a wide variety of topics, the title seemingly only an excuse to break the book into three incredibly broad sections: "Some Roots: Victorian Science Fiction and Fantasy," "Some Branches: Postwar Science Fiction" (way to narrow it down, guys), and "Some Branches: Contemporary Feminist Responses" (because contemporary feminists aren't postwar?).

Of course, it is this first section that was of most interest to me.  Darko Suvin and Stanislaw Lem each have an article here, but they're both kind of off.  Suvin's "Counter-Projects: William Morris and the Science Fiction of the 1880s" is mostly about noticing something neat rather than doing something with it, though he freely admits that himself, while Lem's "H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds" is more a personal response to The War of the Worlds than a scholarly article (as indicated by the vaguest of titles, perhaps), though given that it's Lem, it's a very intelligent and insightful personal response.  Perhaps the strongest article in this batch, though, is co-editor Rhys Garnett's "Dracula and The Beetle: Imperial and Sexual Guilt and Fear in Late Victorian Fantasy," a discussion of the various anxieties at play in Dracula and a book called The Beetle that I had not read, but now really want to.

The most interesting article of the entire book, however, was the venerable Patrick Parrinder's "Scientists in Science Fiction: Enlightenment and After," which argues that science fiction is rarely every fully engaged with either of what he refers to as the "conservative" and "radical" critiques. The conservative view is that sf should further both scientific knowledge and appreciation of science more than it does, whereas the radical approach is that is already advances "scientism" (and hence capitalism) and needs to dial back its unthinking adulation of this ideology (64). Parrinder's argument, however, is that both of these contradictory viewpoints are true, trading on the idea that scientific knowledge is both dangerous and alluring-- or rather, alluring because of its ostensible danger. Even though "real" scientists know that they are unlikely to discover any, the appeal of science is often power.  It's a useful set of ways to look at the fascinating figure of the scientist.

Most of the other essays deal with either ecological or feminist sf, and I had not read the primary texts under discussion. (Nor did the articles really make me want to, but that doesn't mean they were bad.) The two articles about novels I had read, Jerzy Jarzębski's "The World as Code and Labyrinth: Stanislaw Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub" and Robert M. Philmus's "Ursula Le Guin and Time's Disposession," seemed very obvious readings of both texts; I felt like I was being told what Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and The Dispossessed were about.  But I know what they're about, since I read them, and these articles did little to complicate that experience.… (más)