War and Science Fiction

This is the written version of my presentation at a panel on "Science Fiction and Futurism-Philosophy and Ethics for a Global Era". The panel was part of the Australian Defence College's Profession of Arms seminar, "Science Fiction as a Lens into Future War", held in Canberra on 3 October 2019. This written version contains considerably more detail than could be presented in the limited time available for the panel.

1998

NOTES AND MEMORIES ON SCIENCE FICTION GOODBYE TO EXTRAPOLATION (1995) SOME NOTES & MEMORIES ON DALE MULLEN'S MAIEUTICS (1998) D. Suvin, Parables of Freedom and Narrative Logics: Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction and Utopianism, 2 Vols. Ed. Eric D. Smith. Oxford: P. Lang, 2021. ch30

This introduction to a special issue of Thesis Eleven devoted to science fiction begins by exploring the way the genre has been handled by German and French critical theory and their Anglophone equivalents. It proceeds to a discussion of the historical sociology of the genre and, thence, to an account of what it terms the dialectic of science fiction endangerment. Finally, it concludes with a brief overview of the various contributions to the issue.

2003

Science Fiction Studies, 2019

If Isaac Asimov was right to assert that sf is principally concerned with our reactions to scientific and technological transformation, it is ironic that the genre has a long history of military entanglement. As Andrew May’s new book makes clear, militaries have historically been less concerned with reactions and consequences than with unrestricted technological innovation. As a result, they learned the wrong lesson from a literature that examines the impacts of war as often as it celebrates its tools. That misreading reached its crescendo during the Cold War, and May’s book details some of the ways that sf both influenced and was influenced by military projects, while also showcasing how the genre examined the effects of those projects during the conflict’s decades-long history.

2017

Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan, eds. The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction The Cambridge Companion Series. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. 254 ISBN: 978-1-107-05246-8. Christina Dokou National and Kapodistrian University of Athens This volume proclaims itself the successor of the earlier (2003) Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, and indeed adheres to the key virtues of the previous volume: it feat...

Arts in Context - Kunst, Forschung, Gesellschaft, 2020

2022

This four-part talk explores two questions. First, what does a study of science fiction (SF) tell us about how genres are constituted? And the second question, what "thought-tools" does SF make available

Critical Quarterly, 2009

The field of science fiction studies has emerged fully fledged from a struggle for academic legitimation that began about 1970. Like other marginalised fields, SF benefited from the challenges to the canon mounted by literary theorists and supporters of cultural studies. Forty years ago instructors of SF required a tenured position and a thick skin against the barbs of their colleagues to teach and write about the field, whereas now most scholars enjoy the full apparatus necessary for research, teaching, and publication-professional societies, newsletters and newsgroups, journals, conferences, library collections, academic degree programmes, online sites, blogs, and more. There still remain some unresolved issues for the field in relation to academic hierarchy and recognition-it is unlikely that there will soon be chaired professors of science fiction at the most prestigious European and American universities, say Oxbridge and the Ivy League, and it remains a chancy proposition to enter the academic job market on either side of the Atlantic prepared only to teach and write about science fiction. It would be a safer bet for anyone with a PhD in SF seeking top-market positions to present their credentials as a Victorianist, modernist, postmodernist, film or media specialist, or critical theorist with interests and publications in science fiction. However, as evidenced by the institutional affiliations of contributors and editors of The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, there are now many professional science fiction scholars in several disciplinary configurations within cultural studies and humanities departments in North America, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia. The editors of The Routledge Companion are notable members of this scholarly community: two of them, Andrew Butler and Sherryl Vint, are co-editors of the oldest scholarly journal of the field, Extrapolation, and scholars in SF literary and cultural studies, respectively. Mark Bould has written extensively on SF film and television. Adam Roberts, author of historical and critical studies of SF, is also a novelist. All four have academic positions, one in Canada and the other three in England.

1897

D. Suvin, Parables of Freedom and Narrative Logics: Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction and Utopianism, 2 Vols. Ed. Eric D. Smith. Oxford: P. Lang, 2021. ch24