review - landon - cultural history

8/11/2019 Review - Landon - Cultural History

1/14


2/14

CULTURAL

HISTORY

OF A HYBRIDGENRE

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

dimensionsto its initially largely biological meanings. In postcolonialstudies,

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;

he

term itself

has become one of

those

ubiquitous buzzwords whose time has come.

Hybrids

now

also

refers

to

mixed-technology

automobilesand the term has even

become

prominent

n

car

advertising-both

sure

signs

of its

near-meme status and its

appropriationby

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

thisconcept,as is RogerLuckhurst'sScience Fiction. Indeed,Luckhurst'squiet

but

insistent

argument

s 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

hybriditysightings

have

become

something

of

a

critical

commonplace,

Luckhurst's

discussion of the

importance

of

the

concept

to

our

understanding

f sf as a

cultural

orce 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

narrativesof

the

genre.

This

book is

not-nor

was it

intendedto

be-the

definitive

cultural

history sf, but

it

is a fine cornerstoneon whichmuchfuturescholarship houldand will be built.

Science Fiction

continues

the

move

toward a

cultural

history of

sf

suggested

by

a

large

numberof

critical

works

published n the

pastfifteen or

twentyyears,

each of

which

explored

reciprocal

relationships

between

the body

of texts

that

comprises

sf and

the cultural

concerns

shaping and

frequently

shapedby those

texts.

Luckhurst

enters his

focus on

the

cultural

debates

attending

echnological

modernity-as

differently

articulated

n

Great

Britain and

the

US-using the

antique

but

capacious

umbrella term

Mechanism

o

subsume the

impact of

technology

on

cultural life.

Casting sf

as a

literature of

technologically

saturatedsocieties, he offers his study as a culturalhistory ratherthan the

cultural

history

of

sf,

specifying:

A

culturalhistory

of

science fiction

will

situatetexts,

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

iterary

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)

This content downloaded from 83.111.36.170 on Mon, 5 May 2014 11:01:49 AMAll use subject toJSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


3/14

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

unfoldingof this surrogatepublic history, he attempts o investigatethe factors

thathave repeatedly

relegated

sf to low cultureand

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 misturnsand 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 remindsus that the New

Wave, frequently

claimed as an aesthetic

high point, contains some

really

bad

writing. However,

one of

the

many

importantargumentsLuckhurstmakes is that sf's early and long-continuing

relegation

to low statushas 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 ituatessf 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 heory

and British

literary

debates

through

the

American

engineer paradigm

and the

technological

sublime. He

surveys

the

various exhaustionsof 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 s

always

on

ways

in

which sf

might

be seen

as

contributing

in

a new and

significantway

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-themeor thesis in Luckhurst's fforts to chart the impact of

sf's

metaphors

and

allegories

on

larger

cultural

ormations,

it is

that sf is more

a

voice of the

melancholy

and trauma of

technological

modernity

than a

celebrationof

technological

iberationor

transcendence. n 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 hows sf

persistentlyshading

intohorroror

Gothic

writing (5). This is one of the signs

of sf's

hybridity

and an

important ign

of its

ambivalence

toward Mechanism.

Acknowledging

the limitations of his

analysis (little

attention o media, no

global perspective,no engagementwith the discourses of fandom, and no real

attention to

Gothic or

fantasy), Luckhurst

offers his

study not as a new

normative

attempt

o

carve out a respectablecanon but as a

descriptiveeffort to

record

some of the

complicationsand

contractionsof the

relationshipbetween

sf

and culture:

Historiansof SF

need,

in

my view, to be less judgmentaland

prescriptive. We

need to be

just as interested n

how

fantasiesaboutMechanismcan, for instance,

prompteugenicand

proto-fascistscenarios n

the 1910s and 1920s (fantasies hat



4/14

CULTURAL

HISTORY

OF

A HYBRID GENRE

163

periodicallyreturn),or

idolizea

fundamentally

nti-democratic

Technocratic lite

as a solutionto the crisis of liberal democracies

n the 1930s and 1940s.

Cultural

history

needs

to

understand

he

appeal

of

breathlessly paced

interstellar

pulp

fictions as much as the self-consciously Modernistprose 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

s not to lift an

sf

text

or a

writer

out

of

received or

ignored

historical accountsof 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, Luckhurstwould seem to be following the originary guide he

attributes o

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

onsistently

complicates

received associationsand

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

n the

body

horror

fictions

of

Clive Barker and Octavia Butler.

I

found this one of the

book's

primarydelightsand an important ourceof 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

through2000,

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

rupturalhistories

and

narrativesof

genre progress or

maturation. His own

apparent

delight

in

the

irony

of

contradiction

tself

(or

at

least

of

complication)

leads

every chapterthrough

twists,

turns,

and

reversals that

inexorably undercut the

notion

of

strict

chronology: the Luckhurst imemachine s always on the move. At eachturn n

this

cultural

history

that

feels more like

a hypertext, it seems to

me that

Luckhurst

s

interested

n

constructinga culturalhistory

thatcan map

five broad

concerns, althoughthis is

my identification

and not his.

1.

He wants to compare

the codification

and characteristic oncerns 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

culturaldiscussionsanddebates, usuallyrecastingaestheticor literary udgments

as

consequent

to

broader

philosophicalor

ideological concerns.

3. He

wants

to

chart

the genre's

responses-usually ambivalent,

if not

contradictory-to the ever-expandingand

deepening

mplicationsof Mechanism.

4.

He wants

to

resituate he

genre's critical/theoretical

tandingas the

natureof

cultural

critique/theory

changes, so that the cultural

value of sf is

never

monolithic

or intrinsic, but contingenton

extra-literary

actors.



5/14

164

SCIENCE

ICTION

TUDIES,

VOLUME

3

(2006)

5.

He

wants to

complicate

rigid

definitionsof

genre

and

normative/prescriptive

judgments

based

on

well-rehearsed binaries such

as

English/American,

sf/fantasy,

Left/Right,

Modern/Postmodern,

tc.

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

authorsand 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 frequentlysingledout for

literary

histories

of

sf, yet

his

principle

of

selection does

not

necessarily

imply

that a writer

or text

represents he

genre

or

shouldbe

used

to establishor

extend

genre

boundaries.

His

selections do favor

formal and

ideational

hybridity,

and

the

complicationsLuckhurst

nvariably

ntroduces

n

his

analyses

of writers

and

texts

argue for a

new

understanding

f sf

that

embraces rather han

attempts

o

erase its

essential

hybridity;his cultural

history

may

be

the

main

point

of

his

scholarship, but

it

also

makespoints.

Part

I

of

Science

Fiction consists

of

three

chaptersdevoted

to

the

origins

of

sf, focusingrespectivelyon the social andtechnologicalconditionsnecessaryfor

its

emergence, the

importanceof the

evolutionary

paradigm

o

the

nineteenth-

century

British

codification

of

the

scientific

romance,

and

the

importance

of

the

engineer

paradigm

o

the

development

of

pulp

fiction

in

America. The

purpose

of

this

section is

to

suggest

the

paradigms

hatboth

guided

the

development

of

sf in

England and

in

America and

positioned that

literature

n

larger cultural

debates

occasioned

by

Mechanism,

or

technological

modernity.

The

conditions

makingpossible late

nineteenth-century

cientific fiction are

mass

iteracy;new

print

vectors; a

coherent

ideology

and

emergent

profession

of science and,

most

important or this

study,

everydayexperience

transformed

by

machines

and

mechanical

processes

(29).

For

Luckhurst,

Wells is

the

embodiment

f

these

conditionsrather

hanthe inventorof

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

ocuses

on

Wells's

disastrous

misreadingof

and

relation to

an

emerging

literary

establishment,

on

the

separatist

consequences of

his

commitment o evolutionism, andon the ambiguity,contradictions,andformal

hybridityof

his

writing.

Luckhurstuggests

how

theseaspects

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

he

claims of a

fall

from

grace

that

insist

on

a

qualitativerupture

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 n

setting

the cultural

context for

the

devaluing of

sf as he

was for

its

growth-by

initiating ts

impure

or hybrid



6/14


7/14

166 SCIENCE ICTION

TUDIES,VOLUME 3

(2006)

In

responding o this

nuclear/cybernetic

paradigm,

Americansf

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.Againstthe technocraticboosterism of John

Campbell

and his writers such

as Heinlein and Asimov

stands he criticism of

Vonnegut,

Dick,

Merril,Pohl, and

Kombluth,

and in

these culturaldivides-rather than

n

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

eemed

paralleled

by British

decline,

occasioning

a kind of

double-hiton the valuationof

sf: For

British

intellectualsacross the

spectrum

t was not

just

that SF embodied

mass

culture and crude investmentin technologicalmodernity, 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

uggests,

fantasy

became the

most notable

form of

writing

in

postwar

England.

But

Luckhurst

mmediately

complicates this

binary, suggesting

ways

in

which the

fantasy

of Lewis and

Tolkien and

particularly

of

Mervyn

Peake

should not be

understood n

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

understandingBritish

writing of this

period is

hybridity, as it fused fantasy, Gothic and SF elements, offering refracted

meditationson their

historical

moment

124), with both

fantasists uch

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

eriod

in

science

fiction

history,

the

epoch

in

which

the Golden

Age

was

both

consolidatedand

contested,

when

SF

claimed

scientific, political

and

social-critical

relevance

yet

was

also

condemned as an

examplar

of

detestablemass

culture

(136).

And the

contradictory hematicsof

this

period,

Luckhurst

laims, are

importantbecause

they will

recur

andmodulate

during

the next fourdecades.

Part

III

somewhatdrops

the

alternating

ocus 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 he New

Wave

and the

1970s

around he

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

unexpectedpairingof the body horrorof splatterpunkwith the body horror of

Octavia

Butler.

Luckhurst hen

closes

his

study

with a

construction

of the

1990s

as

a

consolidationand

rejuvenationof

the

unique focus

of SF:

speculationon

the

diverse

resultsof the

conjuncture f

technologywith

subjectivity 222).

He

locates

this

consolidation

and

rejuvenation n

the

reappearance f

space

opera,

in

the

rearticulation

f

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



8/14

CULTURAL ISTORY

OF

A HYBRID

GENRE 167

the decade

chapters

are more

clearly organized

around delimited

literary

movements such as cyberpunkand

feminist sf, these chapters

do not

feel as

richly or as

deeply

textured

n

their culturalconnections as do those

in

the first

twopartsof thebook, although heycontinueLuckhurst'svaluable nsistenceon

complicating

received

binaries,

whether of

agreement

or

opposition.

As would

be

expected, the

chapter

on the 1960s centers

on

the New

Wave,

although

Luckhurst

trongly

challenges

the idea that the American

New

Wave

shared the ambitions

or the

cohesion

of the British.

In

fact,

Luckhurst's

approach

o the 1960s focuses

more on what the New Wave was not than on

it

was, as

he details ways how the New Worldsproject was

not an

attempt

o raise

the status

of

sf

to

that of

serious

iterature,

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

genrehistory,

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

gnorance

and

produces

a

skewed, largely

ahistorical

onception

of

the

New

Wave, because

it is

only able

to

read

for

discontinuity,

not

the substantial

continuities

within

the

genre

(160).

Luckhurstreadily acknowledges that decade studies can't be rigidly

calendric,

as is

suggested by period

studies that

actually

see the 1960s as

stretching

rom 1959 to

1973,

and,

as he moves on to

the

1970s,

his

initial focus

remainson 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

hinking

of

an

immediate

counter-example,

and he

sees

this

contradictory

ituationas

symptomatic

f

a wider set of

confusions over

precisely

what took

place

in

the

decade (169). Incultural erms,theissue was not whetheror notsf had reached

some

kind of an

end,

but that it

became imbricated

n

a much

broadersocietal

experience

of

limits. Science fiction did not

simply

reflect

on

this,

Luckhurst

explains,

but

often

provided

the

very means by which the

consequencesof this

momentcould be

envisaged,

in

forms

of

utopian

or

dystopian

projection

nto the

future

171).

The British

New Wave readthe end

of British

powerwithdegrees

of

post-imperialmelancholy, andfeministsf

readthe end of a

certain social,

economic, political

and

technological)formation

of

the

'patriarchal'West at the

end of

the 1960s

(181).

Luckhurstdoes notconsistentlytrackrace throughhis culturalhistory of sf,

but he does

discuss the

importance

of race in

his overview of

American Pulp

Fictions in

Chapter3,

and his

analysis of the New Wave in the 1970s returns o

a

consideration f this

issue as

part

of

the post-imperial

efiguringof Englishness

in

terms of race rather han of

place. Luckhurstuses

ChristopherPriest 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

n

the 1970s of sf

tropes

used

to articulate

feminist concerns by



9/14

168

SCIENCEFICTION STUDIES,

VOLUME

33

(2006)

British women writers more associated

with

the

literary

mainstream-Doris

Lessing,

Emma

Tennant,

Zoe

Fairbairns,

and

Angela

Carter-affords Luckhurst

a cultural ransition romthe New Wave's preoccupationwith national imitsto

feminist

sf's

preoccupation

with

genre

limits:

Questions f sex and

gender

did not

suddenly ppear

within

he

genre

with

the

New

Wave or by feminist intervention. What

the feminist

intervention

n

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

questionfor 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 F

elements

hathad

consciously

r not

reproducedatriarchal

r

heterosexist

orms

ouldbe

recomposed

nd

redirected

ornew

political

nds-even

if those

endswere

explicitly

nti-scientific

r

anti-technological,triking

tthe

heart

of

historic

efinitions f

SF. Outof the

seeming

end'of

technological odernity

nd

the ruinsof

genre,

feminist

writers

recomposed

generic

narratives.

(182)

Within this

larger frameworkof

agendas,

Luckhurst s

careful to

delineate

the

diversity

of

'types'

of feminist sf

in

the

1970s,

organizing

them

along

the

waves

suggestedby

Julia

Kristeva

n

her

1979

essay Women'sTime -with

the

understanding

hat hese waves can be

understoodas

simultaneous,rather

han

only

linear.

These

coterminous eminisms

address

equality,difference,

and the

deconstructionof the

man/woman

binary.

Accordingly,

Luckhurst ocates

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 he

second

wave). Sally Miller

Gearhart'sWanderground

(1979) offers anexampleof a second-wave textplacingtechnology at the center

of

male/female

difference, as do

Suzy McKee Charnas's

Walk o 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.

JoannaRuss

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 parallelworlds (193). SimilarlyAngela Carter's ThePassion 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 inds

not

only an instructive

bridge

between the New Wave

and

feminist

sf but also

anotherexemplar

of the

generic hybridityof

sf in her

finding everage for

critique

by disarticulating nd

reorienting he matrixof the

genre-whether

SF,

Gothic,

fairy tale or fantasy

(184-85).



10/14

CULTURAL

HISTORYOF A

HYBRID

GENRE

169

I

began Luckhurst's

chapter

on the 1980s with

something

approaching

dread-or

at

least

anticipatory

atigue,

since this decade

has

already

ent its

most

celebrated

movement,

cyberpunk,

o

endless cultural

studiesof

postmodernism.

If

there's one

thing

sf

criticism

probably

does

not

need,

I

thought,

it's

yet

anothercultural

history

of the 1980s. After

the

inevitable

but

mercifully concise

overview

of

postmodernism,

however,

Luckhurst

oes

delightfully

offroad

from

the

high-traffic critical

highway

to

discuss 1980s sf

and the

New

Right.

Somewhat

mpishly,

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 f of the

1980s.

Against

the well-known

roster

of cyberpunks,Luckhurstwants us to rememberthe quitedifferentagendasof

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

n

the

1980s

(202),

Luckhurst

not

only

uses this

chapter

o

relocate

cyberpunkin

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

f

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 bserves thatthis hybridof sf andhorrorwas not atall new, butpart

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

respectivelyon

accelerated

globalization

and the

technological

productionof

Informational

Capitalism.

In

Luckhurst'sview,

what

characterizes

sf in the

1990s is that

it

responds

to

the

intensification

and global

extension of

technological

modernity

not

with new

forms, but ratherwith ones lifted from the genre's venerablepast (221). He

then

organizes

his

discussion

of

1990s sf

around the

New

Space

Opera,

the

revival of

apocalyptic

visions

under he

prospectof the

Vingean

Singularity,and

the

New

Weird,

which

Luckhurst

ees

as a kind

of

apotheosis

of

the

hybridity

that

has

always

characterized

sf- a

final

instance

of

uncanny

return:to

the

conditionsof

writing that

dominated he

emergence of

SF

in the late

nineteenth

century

(243). Dan

Simmons's

Hyperion

(1989) and

Ken

MacLeod's

FALL

REVOLUTION

uartet(The

Star

Fraction

[1995], The

Stone

Canal

[1996], The

Cassini

Division

[1998], and

The

Sky

Road [1999])

limn the

ironizing and

subvertingreflections of globalization hatmaketheNew SpaceOperanew, but

Luckhurst lso

suggests an

experiential

agendafor

the

form, as

its

characteristic

heft of

pages

carves

out a

large chunk

of

narrative

ime

that acts as

a

bulwark

against

the

depredationsof

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

hunkof

its

reader's

time

that t

actually

serves as

a

kind



11/14


12/14

CULTURAL

HISTORY

OF A

HYBRID

GENRE

171

doesn't mention

enough

sf

texts-particularly

not

enough

by

writers

of

interest

to

Mendlesohn,

and so on. Mendlesohn

eems more interested

n

labeling,

as

she

charges

that Luckhurst's

tudy

is not

a

real

culturalhistory(or atleast notthe

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 han

accepting

either

Mendlesohn's ow

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 scholarshipshouldgo. Nor shouldrigorous 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

s her

claim

in

her

discussion of

Chapter

6

that

Tolkien is

referred to as

sword and

sorcery,

a traditionof 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, resultingin a streamof imitativesword-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

ailure

to live up

to

his own

stated

aims,

particularly

is

desire to

'think

harder

about the

way certain

agentsof

history

(for

example

the

masses,

women,

colonized,

marginal or

subaltern

peoples)

had been

erased

or

rendered

anonymous

n

history-writing '

16).

The

problem

here is

that this

quotation

s not

one of

Luckhurst's stated

aims. It is

insteadMarkPoster'sdetailingof some of thecharacteristics f culturalhistory,

and

this is

presented

by Luckhurstas

part

of

a broad

summary

of

suggestions,

offered

by

several

different

critics, of the

things

culturalhistory

can

do:

Mark

Poster

agreed

that

culturalhistory

challengedthe

older

social history

by

questioningnarrative

n

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 n

history-writing.

(1-2)

While I

agree with

Mendlesohn's

apparentbelief

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

hings

suggested

by

these critics.



13/14

172

SCIENCE

FICTION

STUDIES,

VOLUME 33

(2006)

As it

happens,

however,

I

share a number

of Mendlesohn's

local

reactions

to this

book, just

not her

global

conclusions. Luckhurst ould

have used

more

sociological evidence to

strengthen

his

cultural

analysis

and

he could

have

used

differentsf writers to supporthis culturalanalysis.The more

culturally

ocused

Cecilia

Tichi strikes me as

a

better

guide

to constructions of

American

technologythandoes the more

literary

orientedLeo

Marx,

and consideration

of

technocultural

phenomena

such as Worlds

Fairs

and

Coney

Island-even

advertising-would

strengthen

Luckhurst'sdiscussionof the American

Engineer

paradigm.

Like

Mendlesohn,

I

found the absence

of sustaineddiscussion

of

Gwyneth Jones

curious,

and

I

think Joanna

Russ should

figure

much

more

prominently

n

a

cultural

history

of

sf, but,

unlike

Mendlesohn,

I

don't see

the

choice of discussingLe Guin over Russ as a suresign of sexism. Infact, I think

what

Luckhurstdoes

say

about Russ

argues

much more

persuasively

against

Mendlesohn's

charge

that the book is sexist than

her

page-counting

and author-

counting

calculus arguesfor it.

Considerwhat

Mendlesohn erms

pushing

Russ's

Female

Man

to

one side or

abandoning ts

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,constitutedaccordingto 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

perpetualgenderwar. 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

TheLaughof

the

Medusa, for

instance,

embracesboth a

thoroughgoingessentialism

( Womanmust

write woman.

And

man,

man ), andyet

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 contradictoryassertions is deliberate, the text enactingthe

subversive

potential

of

the

feminine,

which

becomes

a

deconstructive

ever

that worms

its

way

inside

all

systems

of

binarythought.

In a

similarway, when

Russ

writes

You cannot

unite woman

and humanany

more

than you can

unite

matter

and

anti-matter;

hey are

designed not to

be

stabletogether,

it can

be

read

simultaneouslyas both

a

despairingcry of

exclusion

and a

recognitionof

the

chance,

as

Amanda

Boulter

puts it, to

transcendthe

category of

Woman

altogether.

Because The

FemaleMan

overdetermines

meanings like

this andis

a

compendium

of

feminist

strategy

n

the

mid-1970s, it

is still one of

the

central

texts of feministSF. (193-94)

That's the way

things

go in

this sexist

book.

Speaking

as one

who has

hazarded

a literary

history of

twentieth-century f,

I

see

Luckhurst's

Science Fiction as

an

incredibly

valuable

complementary-and

not

competitive-effort. His

culturalhistory

makes

me realize how

much

I got

wrongon

my

own

or

some of

the

errors of

others I

blithelypassed

along. It

also

makes me

realize

how much

more

effective

any parts I may

have

gotten right

might

have

been

had they

been

writtenwith the

benefit

of the many

insights and



14/14

CULTURAL

HISTORY OF A HYBRID GENRE

173

specifications

of this

fme

book.

There

will be other and

undoubtedly

more

thorough

culturalhistories

of sf

in

general

and

of its

specific

cultural

moments

in particular,but manyof those works maybe inspiredby thispioneeringbook

and all will be informed by it.

NOTES

1. Were it not for S.I. Hayakawa's

Language

n

Thought

nd

Action

(1941),

sf

might

be seenas the most effective

advertising

arm

for Alfred

Korzybski's

General

Semantics,

a

totalizing system

of belief and

theory

of humanbehavior hatbased its

assumptions

and

programon interrogatingandunderstanding

he distinctionbetween

map

and

territory.

By understanding nd rigorously

maintainingmap/territory

distinctions

n

language

and

in

action, Korzybskibelieved that most humanproblemscould be avoided.

Korzybski's

best-knownbook, Science and Sanity:An Introduction o Non-AristotelianSystemsand

General Semantics 1933), was the obvious source for A.E. van

Vogt's concept

of null-

A

thinking, and Korzybski was championedby Heinlein and Campbell.

While L. Ron

Hubbardclaimed that his Dianetics was

inspired by General Semantics,

proponentsof

Korzybski'sprogramargued hatDianetics was pseudoscientificmumbo-jumbo.

n recent

years, Korzybski's thinking

has been invoked

by proponents of the whole

systems

approachchampionedby StewartBrand 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

() and

describes the General Semanticslanguage-based pistemology as the studyof how we

perceive, construct, evaluate, and communicateour

life experiences.

WORKS

CITED

Kristeva, Julia. Women's Time.

T7heKristevaReader. Trans.

Seain

Hand

and Leon S.

Roudiez.

Ed. Toril Moi. Oxford:

Blackwell, 1986. 187-213.

Mendlesohn, Farah. Science

Fiction by Roger Luckhurst. New YorkReview

of Science

Fiction 18.1

(Sept. 2005): 16-19.

Wolfe, Gary

K.

Malebolge, or the Ordnanceof Genre. Conjunctions39

(2002): 405-

19.

review - landon - cultural history

Documents