Bok:978 0 230 30039 2

Teaching Science Fiction
Teaching the New English

Published in association with the English Subject Centre
Director: Ben Knights
Teaching the New English is an innovative series concerned with the teaching of
the English degree in universities in the UK and elsewhere. The series addresses
new and developing areas of the curriculum as well as more traditional areas that
are reforming in new contexts. Although the series is grounded in intellectual and
theoretical concepts of the curriculum, it is concerned with the practicalities of
classroom teaching. The volumes will be invaluable for new and more experienced
teachers alike.
Titles include:
Gail Ashton and Louise Sylvester (editors)
TEACHING CHAUCER
Richard Bradford (editor)
TEACHING THEORY
Charles Butler (editor)
TEACHING CHILDREN’S FICTION
Robert Eaglestone and Barry Langford (editors)
TEACHING HOLOCAUST LITERATURE AND FILM
Michael Hanrahan and Deborah L. Madsen (editors)
TEACHING, TECHNOLOGY, TEXTUALITY
Approaches to New Media and the New English
David Higgins and Sharon Ruston
TEACHING ROMANTICISM
Andrew Hiscock and Lisa Hopkins (editors)
TEACHING SHAKESPEARE AND EARLY MODERN DRAMATISTS
Peter Middleton and Nicky Marsh (editors)
TEACHING MODERNIST POETRY
Andrew Maunder and Jennifer Phegley (editors)
TEACHING NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
Anna Powell and Andrew Smith (editors)
TEACHING THE GOTHIC
Andy Sawyer and Peter Wright (editors)
TEACHING SCIENCE FICTION
Gina Wisker (editor)
TEACHING AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S WRITING
Teaching the New English

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Teaching Science Fiction
Edited by
Andy Sawyer
and
Peter Wright
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Andy Sawyer and
Peter Wright 2011
Individual chapters © contributors 2011
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-22850-4
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
To James E. Gunn, writer, teacher, scholar and inspiration and
To the memory of Thomas D. Clareson, who lit the way.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
List of Tables ix
Series Preface x
Acknowledgements xii
Notes on Contributors xiii
A Chronology of Significant Works xvii
Introduction 1
Andy Sawyer and Peter Wright
1 Through Time and Space: A Brief History of Science Fiction 21
Paul Kincaid
2 Theorizing Science Fiction: The Question of Terminology 38
Gary K. Wolfe
3 Utopia, Anti-Utopia and Science Fiction 55
Chris Ferns
4 Teaching the Scientific Romance 72
Adam Roberts
5 Teaching Pulp Science Fiction 86
Gary Westfahl
6 Good SF: Teaching the Golden Age as Cultural History 102
Lisa Yaszek
7 Teaching the New Wave 116
Rob Latham
8 Postmodernism, Postmodernity and the Postmodern:
Telling Local Stories at the End of Time 129
Andrew M. Butler
9 Teaching Gender and Science Fiction 146
Brian Attebery
10 Teaching Postcolonial Science Fiction 162
Uppinder Mehan
11 Teaching Latin American Science Fiction and Fantasy in
English: A Case Study 179
M. Elizabeth Ginway
vii
viii Contents
12 Teaching Science and Science Fiction: A Case Study 202

Mark Brake and Neil Hook
13 Design, Delivery and Evaluation 219
References, Resources and Further Reading 247
Index 256
List of Tables
12.1 Award structure and cognate strands 210

13.1 Proposal for a 12-week semester sf course 224
13.2 Contrasting ‘mainstream’ and science fiction 234
ix
Series Preface
One of many exciting achievements of the early years of the English

Subject Centre was the agreement with Palgrave Macmillan to initi-
ate the series ‘Teaching the New English’. The intention of the then
Director, Professor Philip Martin, was to create a series of short and
accessible books which would take widely-taught curriculum fields (or,
as in the case of learning technologies, approaches to the whole cur-
riculum) and articulate the connections between scholarly knowledge
and the demands of teaching.
Since its inception, ‘English’ has been committed to what we know
by the portmanteau phrase ‘learning and teaching’. Yet, by and large,
university teachers of English – in Britain at all events – find it hard
to make their tacit pedagogic knowledge conscious, or to raise it to a
level where it might be critiqued, shared or developed. In the experi-
ence of the English Subject Centre, colleagues find it relatively easy to
talk about curriculum and resources, but far harder to talk about the
success or failure of seminars, how to vary forms of assessment, or to
make imaginative use of virtual learning environments. Too often this
reticence means falling back on received assumptions about student
learning, about teaching, or about forms of assessment. At the same
time, colleagues are often suspicious of the insights and methods arising
from generic educational research. The challenge for the English group
of disciplines is therefore to articulate ways in which our own subject
knowledge and ways of talking might themselves refresh debates about
pedagogy. The implicit invitation of this series is to take fields of knowl-
edge and survey them through a pedagogic lens. Research and scholar-
ship, and teaching and learning are part of the same process, not two
separate domains.
‘Teachers’, people used to say, ‘are born not made’. There may, after
all, be some tenuous truth in this: there may be generosities of spirit
(or, alternatively, drives for didactic control) laid down in earliest child-
hood. But why should we assume that even ‘born’ teachers (or novel-
ists, or nurses, or veterinary surgeons) do not need to learn the skills
of their trade? Amateurishness about teaching has far more to do with
university claims to status than with evidence about how people learn.
There is a craft to shaping and promoting learning. This series of books
x
Series Preface xi
is dedicated to the development of the craft of teaching within English

Studies.
Ben Knights
Teaching the New English Series Editor
Director, English Subject Centre
Higher Education Academy
The English Subject Centre
Founded in 2000, the English Subject Centre (which is based at Royal

Holloway University of London) is part of the subject network of the
Higher Education Academy. Its purpose is to develop learning and
teaching across the English disciplines in UK Higher Education. To this
end it engages in research and publication (web and print), hosts events
and conferences, sponsors projects, and engages in day-to-day dialogue
with its subject communities.
http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Professor Ben Knights and Jane Gawthrope

at the English Subject Centre for their encouragement and support of
this project. We would also like to thank Paula Kennedy, Steven Hall
and Benjamin Doyle at Palgrave Macmillan for their commitment to
Teaching Science Fiction. Our thanks also go to our contributors for their
enthusiasm and professionalism in shaping this book. Finally, we would
like to thank Mary Sawyer and Jenni Woodward for their patience and
support.
xii
Notes on Contributors
Brian Attebery, editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, is the
author of Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002) and co-editor with
Ursula K. Le Guin of The Norton Book of Science Fiction (1998). His award-
winning book Strategies of Fantasy (1992) has recently come back into
print from Indiana University Press. He is both Professor of English and
Instructor in Cello at Idaho State University, which is located some-
where between Western Civilization and the Mythic West. His current
projects include a study of family stories as a genre, forthcoming in
Children’s Literature, and an examination of fantasy’s ways of confront-
ing traditional religious narratives.
Mark Brake is an author, broadcaster and professor in the communication

of science, who has engaged the public with science on five continents.
The UK’s first chair in science communication, he has been professor in
the subject at the University of Glamorgan since 2002. He is a Fellow
of the Institute of Physics and Director of the Science Communication
Research Unit at the University of Glamorgan. He was a founding mem-
ber of the NASA Astrobiology Institute science communication group
between 2003 and 2006, and is perhaps best known for his work in popu-
larizing the relationship between space, science and culture, much of
which he has done with his good friend and colleague, Neil Hook.
Andrew M. Butler is the author of Pocket Essentials on Philip K. Dick

(2007), Cyberpunk (2000), Terry Pratchett (2001), Film Studies (2005)
and (with Bob Ford) Postmodernism (2003). With Mark Bould, Adam
Roberts and Sherryl Vint he is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion
to Science Fiction (2009) and Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction (2009). His
article for Science Fiction Studies, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at the British
Boom’ (2003), won the Pioneer Award. He is an editor of Extrapolation
and is currently working on Solar Flares: A Cultural History of Science
Fiction in the 1970s.
Chris Ferns is a Professor of English at Mount Saint Vincent University

in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of Narrating Utopia: Ideology,
Gender, Form in Utopian Literature (1999) and Aldous Huxley: Novelist
(1980) as well as numerous articles on utopian literature and the histori-
cal novel.
xiii
xiv Notes on Contributors
M. Elizabeth Ginway is Associate Professor of Portuguese in the

Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Florida,
where she teaches Portuguese language and Brazilian literature and
culture. Her 2004 Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood
in the Land of the Future was placed on the ‘Recommended Reading List
for Non-Fiction’ by Locus: Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy
World in 2005, and was also nominated for MLA Katherine Singer
Kovacs Prize by Bucknell University Press. In July 2005 she travelled to
Brazil to launch the book in Portuguese translation. She organized and
hosted the symposium ‘Latin America Writes Back: Science Fiction in
the Global Era’ at the University of Florida in October 2005. Her other
research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century Brazilian
literature. She is currently working on organizing a collection of criti-
cal essays on Latin American SF with J. Andrew Brown of Washington
University, St Louis.
Neil Hook is a priest, scholar and author who divides his time between
his parochial duties and his work as a senior lecturer in science com-
munication at the University of Glamorgan. A member of the univer-
sity’s pioneering Science Communication Research Unit his particular
field of interest is in the use of science fiction as a tool for science
communication.
Paul Kincaid is a winner of the Thomas Clareson Award and is the

author of the Hugo nominated book What It Is We Do When We Read
Science Fiction (2008). He is a former administrator of the Arthur C.
Clarke Award and is currently on the jury for the John W. Campbell
Memorial Award. He reviews for a wide range of journals and has con-
tributed to numerous books on science fiction.
Rob Latham is Associate Professor of English at the University of

California, Riverside. A co-editor of Science Fiction Studies since 1997, he
is the author of Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of
Consumption (2002). He is currently working on a book on New Wave
science fiction.
Uppinder Mehan teaches at the University of Houston-Victoria in

Victoria, Texas where he also serves as Associate Director of the Society
for Critical Exchange. His articles on science fiction and postcolonial
literature have appeared in Foundation, Comparative Literature, American
Book Review and the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics
among others. He is the co-editor with Nalo Hopkinson of So Long
Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy. He is currently
Notes on Contributors xv
at work on a book-length introduction to postcolonial science fiction

and fantasy.
Adam Roberts is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at Royal

Holloway University of London. He has published widely on nineteenth-
century topics, and is also the author of The History of Science Fiction
(2006). His novels (all science fiction) include: Gradisil (2006), Land of the
Headless (2007), Swiftly (2008) and Yellow Blue Tibia (2009).
Andy Sawyer is librarian of the Science Fiction Foundation Collection

at the University of Liverpool Library, Course Director of the MA in
Science Fiction Studies offered by the School of English, and a widely-
published critic and reviewer. Recent essays include work on Gwyneth
Jones, Terry Pratchett, Ramsey Campbell, Christopher Priest and
Ursula K. Le Guin. He is Reviews Editor of Foundation: The International
Review of Science Fiction. He recently co-edited (with David Ketterer)
Plan for Chaos, a previously-unpublished novel by John Wyndham.
He is the 2008 recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association’s
Clareson Award for services to science fiction.
Gary Westfahl, who teaches at the University of California, Riverside,

is the author, editor, or co-editor of twenty-two books on science fic-
tion and fantasy, including the Hugo Award-nominated Science Fiction
Quotations: From the Inner Mind to the Outer Limits (2005) and The
Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (2005). He has also
published over three hundred articles and reviews in various journals,
magazines, scholarly anthologies, reference works and on websites.
His contributions to other media include two radio interviews, appear-
ances on the nationally televised documentaries New Visions of the
Future: Prophecies III (1996) and Visions from the Edge: The Art of Science
Fiction (2005), and voiceover commentary for the DVD release of the
film Jerome Bixby’s The Man from Earth (2007). In 2003, he received the
Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Award for lifetime contri-
butions to science fiction and fantasy scholarship.
Gary K. Wolfe, Professor of Humanities and English at Roosevelt

University and contributing editor and lead reviewer for Locus: The
Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field, is the author of critical
studies The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction
(1979), David Lindsay (2007), Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy
(1986) and Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen R. Weil) (2002).
His most recent book, Soundings: Reviews 1992–1996 (2005), received the
British Science Fiction Association Award for best nonfiction, and was
xvi Notes on Contributors
nominated for a Hugo Award by the World Science Fiction Convention.

Wolfe has received the Eaton Award, the Pilgrim Award from the Science
Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from
the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts and, in 2007,
a World Fantasy Award for criticism. A collection of essays, Evaporating
Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature, is forthcoming.
Peter Wright is Reader in Speculative Fictions at Edge Hill University

in the North West of England. He is author of Attending Daedalus: Gene
Wolfe, Artifice and the Reader (2003). He has written numerous articles
and has contributed to Blackwell’s A Companion to Science Fiction (2005),
The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009) and Fifty Key Figures
in Science Fiction (2009). In 2005, he co-edited British Science Fiction
Television with John Cook. His Shadows of the New Sun: Wolfe on Writing/
Writers on Wolfe (2007) was a finalist for the Locus Award for non-fiction
in 2008. He is currently working on When Worlds Collide: The Critical
Companion to Science Fiction Film Adaptations and a collection of essays
on the Star Wars ‘Expanded Universe’.
Lisa Yaszek is Associate Professor in the School of Literature,

Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology,
where she also curates the Bud Foote Science Fiction Collection. Her
research interests include science fiction, gender studies, technoscience
studies and cultural history. She was the 2005 recipient of the Pioneer
Award for Outstanding Science Fiction Scholarship and is current
President of the Science Fiction Research Association. Yaszek’s essays on
science, society, and science fiction appear in diverse journals includ-
ing Extrapolation, NWSA Journal, Socialism & Democracy, electronic book
review, and Rethinking History. Her most recent book is Galactic Suburbia:
Recovering Women’s Science Fiction (2008).
A Chronology of Significant Works
Events are in bold type. All given dates for novels indicate first publica-
tion in book form unless otherwise stated.
1516 Thomas More, Utopia

1543 Copernicus publishes his theory that the Earth
revolves around the Sun
1609 Galileo builds telescope
1634 Kepler, Somnium
1668 Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World
1640 John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, The Discovery of a New
World (3rd edn) in which he speculates about travel to
the moon
1667 Milton, after Giordano Bruno, speculates about life on
other worlds (Paradise Lost, Book VIII, 140–78)
1726 Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of
the World... by Lemuel Gulliver (aka Gulliver’s Travels)
published
1752 Voltaire, Micromegas in which an alien from a planet
orbiting Sirius visits Earth
1763 Anon., The Reign of George VI (the earliest future-war
story)
1818 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
1826 Mary Shelley, The Last Man (rev. 1831)
1827 Jane C. Louden, The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second
Century
1831 Mary Shelley, revised edition of Frankenstein
1859 Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace propose
the theory of evolution by natural selection
1864 Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth
1865 Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance, which form the
basis of the science of genetics
xvii
xviii A Chronology of Significant Works
1865 Jules Verne From the Earth to the Moon

1869 Dmitri Mendeleev formulates the first widely used
periodic table
Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
1871 George Chesney, The Battle of Dorking in Blackwood’s
Magazine
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race
1873 James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism
1888 Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward
1889 Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court
1890 William Morris, News from Nowhere
1893 Camille Flammarion, La Fin du Monde
1895 Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovers x-rays
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
1896 Henri Becquerel discovers radioactivity
H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau
1897 J. J. Thompson discovers the electron in cathode rays
H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man
1898 H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
1899–1902 Boer War
1899 H.G. Wells, The Sleeper Wakes
1900 Max Planck publishes his quantum theory
1901 M.P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud
H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon
1903 The Wright brothers first heavier than air flight
1905 Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity
Edwin Lester Arnold, Lt. Gulliver Jones: His Vacation
Rudyard Kipling, ‘With the Night Mail’
1907 Jack London, The Iron Heel
1908 H.G. Wells, The War in the Air
1909 E.M. Forster, ‘The Machine Stops’
1911 April 1911–March 1912: Hugo Gernsback, Ralph 124C
41⫹ serialized in Modern Electrics
1912 Feb–July: Edgar Rice Burroughs’s ‘Under the Moons of
Mars’ serialized in All-Story
A Chronology of Significant Works xix
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World

Rudyard Kipling, ‘As Easy as A.B.C.’
1913 Niels Bohr’s model of the atom
1914–18 First World War
1915 Albert Einstein publishes the general theory of
relativity
Karl Schwarzchild identifies the ‘Schwarzchild
radius’ which leads to the discovery of black holes
1917 Russian Revolution
Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (originally pub-
lished as ‘Under the Moons of Mars’ [1912]. See above)
1920 Karel Capek, R.U.R.
David Lindsay, Voyage to Arcturus
1922 Edgar Rice Burroughs, At the Earth’s Core
1923 J.J. Connington, Nordenholt’s Million
H.G. Wells, Men Like Gods
1924 Yevgeny Zemyatin, We
1925 Erwin Schrödinger formulates Schrödinger’s
equation (quantum mechanics)
Hugo Gernsback, Ralph 124C 41⫹
1926 Hugo Gernsback founds Amazing Stories
Fritz Lang (dir.), Metropolis
1927 Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (quantum
mechanics)
Georges Lemaître’s theory of the Big Bang
First public demonstration of television
Sidney Fowler Wright, Deluge
1928 E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, The Skylark of Space
1929 Edwin Hubble’s law of the expanding universe
Stock market crash
1930 Olaf Stapledon, The Last and First Men
1932 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
1933 Roosevelt’s New Deal
Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie, When Worlds Collide
C.L. Moore, Shambleau
H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come
xx A Chronology of Significant Works
1934 E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Triplanetary

Jack Williamson, The Legion of Space
1935 Olaf Stapledon, Odd John
1936 Karel Capek, War with the Newts
1937 Murray Constantine (Kathryn Burdekin), Swastika Night
John W. Campbell Jr. assumes editorship of Astounding
Science Fiction
Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker
1938 C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
1939–45 Second World War
1940 Olaf Stapledon, Sirius
1942 A.E. Van Vogt, ‘The Weapon Shop’
1943 Oswald Avery establishes that DNA is the genetic
component of the chromosome
C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
1944 C.L. Moore, ‘No Woman Born’
Clifford Simak, City
1945 US drops the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki
C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
1946 First meeting of UN General Assembly
A.E. Van Vogt, Slan
1947 Robert Heinlein, Rocketship Galileo
1948 John W. Campbell Jr, Who Goes There? (coll.)
Judith Merril, ‘That Only a Mother’
1949 Soviets test their first atom bomb
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
George R. Stewart, Earth Abides
1950–53 Korean War
1950 Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (coll.)
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (coll.)
Judith Merril, Shadow on the Hearth
1951 Isaac Asimov, Foundation
Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man
John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids
A Chronology of Significant Works xxi
1952 Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire

Judith Merril, Beyond Human Ken (anth.)
Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Player Piano
Bernard Wolfe, Limbo
1953 John Watson and Francis Crick discover the double
helical structure of DNA
Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End
Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee
Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants
John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes
1954 First kidney transplant
Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel
Hal Clement, Mission of Gravity
Richard Matheson, I Am Legend
1955 Leigh Brackett, The Long Tomorrow
Jack Finney, The Body Snatchers
John Wyndham, The Chrysalids
1956 First transatlantic telephone cable
Isaac Asimov, The Naked Sun
Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
John Christopher, The Death of Grass
Arthur C. Clarke, The City and the Stars
1957 The first satellite, Sputnik, is launched by the Soviet
Union; start of the Space Age
Fred Hoyle, The Black Cloud
Fritz Leiber, The Big Time
Nevil Shute, On the Beach
1959 William Burroughs, The Naked Lunch
Robert Henlein, Starship Troopers
Walter Miller Jr, A Canticle for Leibowitz
Mordecai Roshwald, Level 7
Kurt Vonnegut Jr, The Sirens of Titan
1960 Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell
Theodore Sturgeon, Venus Plus X
1961 Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Zenna Henderson, Pilgrimage: The Book of the People
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
xxii A Chronology of Significant Works
1962 Cuban Missile Crisis

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
Naomi Mitchison, Memoirs of a Spacewoman
H. Beam Piper, Little Fuzzy
1963 Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Cat’s Cradle
1964 China explodes first atom bomb
International Business Machines (IBM) introduces
the 360 computer
J.G. Ballard, The Drought
Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip
Michael Moorcock assumes editorship of New Worlds
1965–73 Vietnam War
1965 Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Thomas Disch, The Genocides
Frank Herbert, Dune
1966 J.G. Ballard, The Crystal World
Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17
Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
1967 Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Anthony Hewish discover
the first pulsar
First heart transplant performed by Christiaan
Barnard
Samuel Delany, The Einstein Intersection
Harlan Ellison (ed.), Dangerous Visions
Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light
Pamela Zoline, ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’
1968 John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar
Samuel R. Delany, Nova
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Keith Roberts, Pavane
Joanna Russ, Picnic on Paradise
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), 2001: A Space Odyssey
1969 Apollo 11 launched; Neil Armstrong is the first man
on the Moon
Prototype Concorde makes its maiden flight (it
enters commercial service in 1975)
A Chronology of Significant Works xxiii
John Brunner, The Jagged Orbit

Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron
Kurt Vonnegt Jr, Slaughterhouse Five
1970 Poul Anderson, Tau Zero
Larry Niven, Ringworld
1971 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
1972 John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up
Harlan Ellison, Again, Dangerous Visions (anth.)
Christopher Priest, Fugue for a Darkening Island
Norman Spinrad, The Iron Dream
Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head of Cerberus:
Three Novellas
1973 Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezous with Rama
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
1974 India explodes nuclear device
Suzy McKee Charnas, Walk to the End of the World
Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Thomas Disch, 334
Joe Haldeman, The Forever War
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Christopher Priest, Inverted World
1975 John Crowley, The Deep
Samuel Delany, Dhalgren
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (coll.)
Joanna Russ, The Female Man
1976 Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
Christopher Priest, The Space Machine: A Scientific
Romance
Kate Wilhelm, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
1977 Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
1978 Suzy McKee Charnas, Motherlines
C.J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun: Kesrith
Sally Miller Gearhart, The Wanderground: Tales of the Hill
Women
Vonda MacIntyre, Dreamsnake
James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon), Up the Walls of the World
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, False Dawn
xxiv A Chronology of Significant Works
1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident

Zoë Ann Fairbairns, Benefits
Doris Lessing, Shikasta
1980 Gregory Benford, Timescape
Doris Lessing, The Marriages Between Zones 3, 4, and 5
Joan Vinge, The Snow Queen
Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer
1981 Philip K. Dick, VALIS
Russell Hoban, Ridley Walker
Nancy Kress, Beggars in Spain
Doris Lessing, The Sirian Experiments (1981)
Gene Wolfe, The Claw of the Conciliator
1982 C.J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station
Doris Lessing, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
1983 Mary Gentle, Golden Witchbreed
Doris Lessing, Documents Relating to the Sentimental
Agents in the Volyen Empire
1984 AIDS virus reported isolated by French scientists
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Suzette Haden Elgin, Native Tongue
1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honor
Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Josephine Saxton, Queen of the States
Pamela Sargent, The Shore of Women
1987 Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas
Octavia Butler, Dawn
Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers
Storm Constantine, The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit
Lucius Shepard, Life During War Time
1988 Storm Constantine, The Bewitchments of Love and Hate
Candas Jane Dorsey, Machine Sex and Other Stories
Sheri Tepper, The Gate to Women’s Country
Octavia Butler, Adulthood Rites
1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall
Octavia Butler, Imago
A Chronology of Significant Works xxv
Storm Constantine, The Fulfilments of Fate

and Desire (1989)
Dan Simmons, Hyperion
1990 Ian M. Banks, The Player of Games
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling,
The Difference Engine
Kim Stanley Robinson, Pacific Edge
Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion
1991 The USSR comes formally to an end
Gwyneth Jones, White Queen
Vernor Vinge, A Fire upon the Deep
1992 Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars
1993 Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars
1994 Pat Cadigan, Fools
John Clute and Peter Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of
Science Fiction, 2nd edn (non-fiction)
Greg Egan, Permutation City
Nicola Griffith, Slow River
Gwyneth Jones, North Wind
Michael Marshall Smith, Only Forward
1995 Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz observe
the first planet orbiting around a main
sequence star
Stephen Baxter, The Time Ships
Ken MacLeod, The Star Fraction
Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars
Tricia Sullivan, Lethe
1996 Peter F. Hamilton, The Reality Dysfunction
Gwyneth Jones, Kairos
Elizabeth Moon, Remnant Population
Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
Michael Marshall Smith, Spares
1997 Mars Pathfinder lands
Greg Egan, Diaspora
Peter F. Hamilton, The Neutronium Alchemist
Tricia Sullivan, Someone to Watch Over Me
xxvi A Chronology of Significant Works
1998 Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagels (eds), Bending the
Landscape: Science Fiction (anth.)
Gwyneth Jones, Phoenix Café
Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring
1999 Greg Bear, Darwin’s Radio
Peter F. Hamilton, The Naked God
Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky
2000 Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber
China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space
Sheree R. Thomas (ed.), Dark Matters: A Century of
Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora
2001 The first draft of the human genome is completed
Terrorist attacks destroy the World Trade Center (9/11)
Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Pashazade: The First Arabesk
China Miéville, The Scar
2002 Steven Barnes, Lion’s Blood
Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life, and Others
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Effendi: The Second Arabesk
M. John Harrison, Light
Christopher Priest, The Separation
2003 Steven Barnes, Zulu Heart
Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Felaheen: The Third Arabesk
Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveller’s Wife
Justina Robson, Natural History
Charles Stross, Singularity Sky
2004 Uppinder Mehan and Nalo Hopkinson (eds), So Long
Been Dreaming
Margo Lanagan, Black Juice
Ian McDonald, River of Gods
China Miéville, Iron Council
Alastair Reynolds, Century Rain
Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain
2005 Andreas Eschbach, The Carpet Makers
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never let Me Go
Ken Macleod, Learning the World
A Chronology of Significant Works xxvii
Geoff Ryman, Air

Tricia Sullivan, Double Vision
2006 Jon Courtenay Grimwood, End of the World Blues
M. John Harrison, Nova Swing
Jo Walton, Farthing
Liz Williams, Darkland
2007 Brian W. Aldiss, Harm
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union
William Gibson, Spook Country
Ian McDonald, Brasyl
James and Kathryn Morrow (eds), The SFWA European
Hall of Fame
2008 Stephen Baxter, Flood
Ian M. Banks, Matter
Cory Doctorow, Little Brother
Neal Stephenson, Anathem
Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (eds), The New Weird
2009 Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl
Gwyneth Jones, Spirit
China Miéville, The City and the City
Cherie Priest, Boneshaker
Geoff Ryman (ed.), When It Changed
Lavie Tidhar (ed.), Apex Book of World sf
2010 Dr Craig Venter and his team develop a living cell
controlled by synthetic DNA
Alastair Reynolds, Terminal World
Introduction
The continuing contemporary growth in science fiction scholarship, the

expansion of undergraduate provision, and the interest shown in
the genre at postgraduate level firmly situate sf within the provinces of
the ‘New English’. It is, arguably, one of the most effective literary gen-
res for challenging the perspectives of a student body which, in Great
Britain at least, seems detached from social, political and cultural debate
and which sees the status quo as immutable. Its speculative nature, its
incessant philosophizing on ‘what if?’, invites a comparative specula-
tive response; it requires engagement with thought-experiments that
confront and often overturn passive acceptance of contemporary condi-
tions; it has the capacity to stimulate, to unsettle, to provoke the reader
into an intellectual response. Constantly reinventing itself to react
imaginatively to transformations in its cultural and ideological milieu,
it remains the most vibrant of the popular genres and affords consider-
able scholarly pleasure to those involved in its teaching and study.
The acceptance of science fiction as a literature worthy of discus-
sion and analysis was not easily won, and resulted from a number of
factors arising within the literature and the academy itself. Like many
‘popular’ forms, it suffered from its association with mass-market modes
of production such as pulp magazines and cheap paperbacks, its use
of stereotypical characters, melodramatic plots, and prose that often
veered between the colourless and the hyperbolic. Equally, it was the
victim of the sort of literary snobbery that refused to find value in any-
thing published under the label of ‘popular fiction’, or denied the label
to anything that was deemed to be of value: ‘But this looks good. Well,
then, it’s not sf!’ wrote an exasperated Robert Conquest in the epigraph
to one of the early 1960s Spectrum anthologies.1 Whilst some of the
criticism sf received was justified, many of sf’s faults in the first decades
1
2 Teaching Science Fiction
of its existence as a ‘named’ mode were a result of the fact that, apart
from the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, confident models for how
to engage with the exhilarating or terrifying future transformed by the
technological changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries were comparatively few. Science fiction was seen by its practitioners
and readers alike as a ‘new’ literature, with the naiveties and clumsiness
of novelty but with immense potential before it.
Throughout the late 1930s and the 1940s, science fiction’s speculations
became less concerned with ‘superscience’ and sensationalism and more
interested in sober considerations of possible futures. Similarly, a hesitant
but growing literary sensibility amongst genre writers in the 1940s and
1950s began to displace what Patrick Parrinder terms the ‘brash, com-
mercial mode of writing’ that characterized American pulp writing of the
1930s.2 This burgeoning stylistic awareness became more self-conscious
with the formal, narrative, linguistic and thematic experimentation
of the New Waves in Britain and the United States in the mid-1960s.
Writers such as Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Harlan Ellison and Samuel R.
Delany demonstrated the radical potential of the genre through widely
different though equally innovative means. Equally, the feminist writers
of the 1960s and 1970s, who were eager to exploit science fiction’s specu-
lative possibilities to challenge the monolithic structures of patriarchy,
helped develop the literariness of the genre. The oppositional politics of
writers such as Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon) and Suzy
McKee Charnas demonstrated more eloquently and more powerfully the
genre’s potential for radical speculation not only about technology and
the future but about the social construction of gender roles and gender
identities. In the 1980s, the information-saturated futures of cyberpunk
writers William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan and Rudy Rucker
explored the post-human landscapes of biotechnological interfacing and
virtual reality with a style and content that chimed with the concerns of
postmodernist and cyborg theory.
Although the brevity of such a summary suggests that the literariness
of science fiction has continued in one, smooth progressive line from
pulp excess to literary respectability, nothing could be further from the
truth. As with most popular genres, ‘brash, commercial’ writing remains
available, most obviously in the plethora of tie-in novels relating to Star
Wars and Star Trek and assorted game-related fiction. Again, generaliza-
tions are misleading. Not all tie-in novels are ill-conceived or poorly
written; their fans can often be discerning readers and their writers
accomplished novelists. Nevertheless, such fiction constitutes a new
pulp that can display many of the shortcomings of the old.
Introduction 3
Historically, however, science fiction’s growing literary self-awareness,

observable in refinements of style and in an increased attention to plot-
ting, characterization and psychological depth, all developed within
the genre’s formal speculative framework, meant that sf began to
attract attention from the academic community. In 1953, fan, historian
and critic Sam Moskowitz taught possibly the first college sf course at
City College of New York. Almost ten years later, when he delivered
a largely utopian/anti-utopian-based course at Colgate, Mark Hillegas
noted that ‘the English department was not wildly enthusiastic; but the
Administration was happy because the course attracted publicity in the
form of newspaper articles across the country, including The New York
Times and The National Review’.3 Hillegas was not, however, optimistic
for the growth of science fiction studies within the academy.
In his reflections on the development of sf courses in the United
States, R.D. Mullen recalls:
When my own course began in 1969 I received a visit from a reporter

that resulted in a full-page gee-whiz story in The Terre Haute Tribune,
and between 1962 and 1969 there had been similar stories in numer-
ous newspapers in various parts of the country. The fanfare arose
first from astonishment that colleges would teach pulp fiction and
then from the general acceptance of the argument that a number
of works in the literary canon (works included in the reading list
for the course) could be classified as science fiction and that much
present-day science fiction, even though originally published in
pulp-paper magazines, was much more serious than the generality of
popular fiction. The courses were seen by reporters and their readers
as making a kind of breakthrough, as breeching [sic] the walls of the
literary establishment so that worthwhile books different from those
students had been restricted to could be studied. In sum, this was
progress.4
The gradual, sometimes begrudging, recognition that ‘a number of

works in the literary canon … could be classified as science fiction’
(notably Huxley’s Brave New World [1932] and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-
Four [1949]) and that sf ‘was much more serious than the generality of
popular fiction’ led to a proliferation of university and college courses
in the following decade. In contrast to Hillegas’s pessimism regarding
the viability of science fiction studies, by 1976 there were approximately
2000 courses in the United States alone. As Parrinder points out, this
equated to ‘at least one course for every major college and university
in the country’ at that time.5 A comparable progress was not seen in

the more conservative halls of British academia, however. In 1993, the
journal Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction conducted
a survey of sf courses in British higher education, to report a little over
twenty modules. In the last fifteen years, this has changed, however,
with many new modules actively recruiting year on year, an MA in
Science Fiction Studies at the University of Liverpool and a number of
students undertaking sf research at doctoral level.
In America, most of the early sf courses were taught by academic
pioneers with an interest in science fiction rather than by science fic-
tion specialists. What they achieved – J.O. Bailey, Thomas D. Clareson,
Philip Babcock Gove and Marjorie Hope Nicholson among them – was
considerable, and certainly contributed to the consolidation of sci-
ence fiction studies and the development of a community for and of
sf academics. Clareson was undeniably instrumental in this, establish-
ing Extrapolation, the first academic journal concerned solely with the
analysis of sf and fantastic literature, in 1959. Novelist and instructor
James Gunn returned to the University of Kansas in 1970 to teach sci-
ence fiction courses including regular summer schools on the teach-
ing of science fiction, which are still offered by his Center for Science
Fiction Studies. In his account of the period, Gunn notes that ‘Frank
McConnell [at Northwestern University] taught SF courses to classes
enrolling hundreds of students’ while he himself ‘enrolled as many
students as the auditorium would hold’.6
The 1970s were the key years in the consolidation of sf studies. The
Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) was founded in 1971 and
two further journals appeared immediately thereafter: Foundation in
1972 and Science Fiction Studies in 1973. Collectively, these journals and
major theoretical studies, including Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970),
Robert Scholes’s Structural Fabulation: An Essay on the Fiction of the Future
(1975), Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) and Gary
K. Wolfe’s The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction
(1979) finally helped overcome the Leavisite-derived prejudice that
had dismissed science fiction as a ghetto literature unrewarding for
academics and students alike.7 Also published in 1979, The Encyclopedia
of Science Fiction, edited by Peter Nichols with John Clute and Brian
Stableford, marked a major, consolidated effort to address the genre as a
whole, and offered highly informative, if necessarily concise, entries on
authors, themes, concepts and periods. A second, massively expanded,
revised edition edited by Clute and Nichols appeared in 1993 and
quickly became the major reference work for scholars and students. The
Introduction 5
third edition is likely to be so extensive that it will be available exclu-

sively online.
It is, perhaps, a measure of sf’s acceptance by the academy, of its
movement from marginalized popular literature to being an integral
part of many English literature programmes, that the twenty-first cen-
tury has seen the publication by scholarly publishers of a number of
companions to the genre. Both Blackwell’s Companion to Science Fiction,
edited by David Seed, and the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction,
edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn appeared in 2003;
and The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould,
Andrew Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint, was published in 2009.
All are excellent resources for students and lecturers. Routledge’s Fifty
Key… series was also expanded to include Fifty Key Figures in Science
Fiction, edited by Bould, Butler, Roberts and Vint. Liverpool University
Press commenced its Science Fiction Texts and Studies Series in 1994; to
date, it has published thirty-eight volumes by sf writers and academics
including Joanna Russ, Gwyneth Jones and Brian Aldiss. Subject matter
has ranged from Charlotte Perkins Gilman to the history of science fic-
tion magazines, from queer science fiction to author studies of Ramsey
Campbell, Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft and Gene Wolfe.8
The expansion of academic interest in, and support for, the study of
science fiction has produced a fertile intellectual context for developing
courses and modules in sf, and there are important reasons for doing so.
Primarily, sf has engaged – often self-consciously – with the key social
and political movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
producing a multiplicity of science fictions that engage with feminism,
postcolonialism, postmodernism, queer theory, the interaction between
self and other, and the collapsing distinctions between the virtual and
the real and the human and the synthetic. Where it has avoided direct
engagement with such matters, it has often exaggerated the relation-
ships defining the status quo by accepting them as unalterable. In either
instance, it is open to contestation through, and analysis using, the
major critical theories available to undergraduates and postgraduates.
Indeed, its very amenability to such theoretical approaches, whether
through conscious dramatization of their oppositional politics or
through a conservative preservation of the status quo in varied fictional
futures, allows the lecturer or instructor to deploy critical theory in an
applied and invigorating context.
Clearly, the research and pedagogic potential of the genre is consider-
able. In addition to its usefulness for engaging with the major critical
and cultural theories common to humanities teaching, science fiction
facilitates close textual analysis (particularly through the work of the

New Wave writers and cyberpunks), historical and cultural approaches,
linguistics (Peter Stockwell’s The Poetics of Science Fiction [2000] is an
invaluable source text), single author studies (science fiction has its
lauded writers, including H.G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin,
Gene Wolfe, but many remain largely ignored or overlooked), textual
and intertextual considerations, and the problematizing of genre theory.
Students who take pleasure in science fiction’s speculative qualities, its
engendering of a sense of wonder or estrangement, its exploitation of
language’s rich possibilities and inherent tensions, can be introduced to
theoretical concepts and reading protocols specific to the genre which
will enhance both their learning experiences and their understanding
of literature’s diverse potential.
Given the contemporary context, the question central to teaching sci-
ence fiction is not whether to teach sf but what kind of sf to teach? Science
fiction can be considered the story of the twentieth century or, more
accurately (and more rewardingly for the student and scholar), a story of
the twentieth century, a story composed of many stories – a mega-text.9
John Clute’s concept of ‘First SF’ is proving useful for understanding
how these narratives, somewhere between 1926 and the present, began
to coalesce into one overarching metanarrative and eventually to col-
lapse.10 Graham Sleight’s essay, ‘Last and First SF’ in Polder: A Festschrift
for John Clute and Judith Clute (2006) defines this metanarrative, beyond
the technical effects and imagery of the fiction identified by editor Hugo
Gernsback in the first issue of Amazing Stories (April 1926), as a new
kind of literature. As Gernsback puts it in his editorial for Amazing: ‘the
Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story – a charming
romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision’.11 First
‘SF was a promise’, Sleight argues. ‘The promise was that, some distance
off, there was a place called the future, and that SF was both a map for
how to get to it and a manual for how to get by once you arrived there.’12
Gernsback encouraged his readers to engage with the future his magazine
celebrated, to revel in the paradox of ‘Extravagant Fiction Today – Cold
Fact Tomorrow’ and to invest emotionally in the way the scientists and
inventors of his time were creating a world of wonders. Whether First SF
was an identifiable ‘promise’, or an optical illusion caused by the fact that
a fandom enthused by this apparent agenda came together through the
niche-marketing examples of Gernsback’s magazines, is perhaps the first
of our challenges. Either way, it is a useful concept.
Clute’s First SF is certainly the story of the twentieth century. With
it, we could integrate all those movements and sub-movements that
Introduction 7
immediately formed it and that reacted against it: the last-gasp achieve-
ment of Wells-like ‘logical fantasy’ from the former pulp-writer John
Wyndham; the ‘speculative fiction’ of the British and American New
Waves; the kick-start of the feminist utopias/dystopias by writers such
as Le Guin and Russ who had been publishing in, but paying attention
to movements outside, the American magazines; the cyberpunks; and
the steady but regular use of science fiction tropes by writers such as
P.D. James, Doris Lessing, Gore Vidal, Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood,
Jeanette Winterson and Kazuo Ishiguro. Clute, however, suggests that
the launch of the first Russian sputnik satellite in 1957 – the first step
into making real the speculations of so many sf writers, which also
undermined the sense, encouraged by the sf magazines, that space was
an American domain – was a crucial turning point. This was the moment
when ‘the quasi-organic conversation of American SF – for the moment
considered as First SF – began to ramble, and to lose the thread of the
story; began to give off a sense that for all those years since 1926 it had
been telling the wrong story’.13 The ‘promise’ that the twentieth century
would segue into the future envisioned by the First SF mega-text was
one that could not be delivered by history. The recognition of this fact
provides an important historical perspective on science fiction which
can, and possibly should, inform curricula design, particularly when
courses are structured historically or thematically.
Sf, though, is more than the twentieth century storied. In his History
of Science Fiction (2007) Adam Roberts suggests that sf draws upon the
sensibilities of the Western Enlightenment and its crystallization of a
particularly secular concept of change and futurity, engineered by sci-
ence and technological developments.14 Darko Suvin, whose suggestion
that sf is the literature of cognitive estrangement was one of the most
influential developments of critical thinking in the 1970s, also enabled
scholars of sf to consider how the discussion of the modes could move
beyond the squabble about ‘priority’ favouring either the American
magazines of the early to mid-twentieth century, or the British scientific
romance mode of the late nineteenth century, to explore the ways in
which different cultures or time periods experience these effects.15 In
other words, while the mode we know as ‘science fiction’ has become
the natural way (for the Western Anglo-American culture of the twen-
tieth to twenty-first centuries) of dramatizing contemporary hopes and
fears centred around change, this may only be a local case of a much
more general phenomenon. Here, we may stand accused of attempt-
ing to expand the empire of science fiction. However, the recognition
that many cultures will respond to technological or social changes, or
to new theories about the universe, by speculating about their effects

allows us, say, to take a much more nuanced approach to Greek legends
involving the marvels of the inventor Daedalus or the god Hephaestus,
or the moon voyages of Lucian’s True History, than either calling them
anticipations of Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke or ignoring them alto-
gether as responses to technology and the physical universe.
Over the last decade or so, scholars have begun to explore the differ-
ent ‘voices’ of science fiction in Europe, Latin America and the Asian
and African diasporas, and to realize that what these voices are asking us
to do is to question our assumptions of Otherness and Futurity, and ask
ourselves what happens when these ideas are expressed by those who
were the subjects of earlier explorations of Otherness in science fiction.
We might also consider, as M. Elizabeth Ginway does in Chapter 11,
how sf may be increasingly a cultural ‘given’ which may be adapted
to local circumstances. The idea of dramatizing a problem in the ‘real
world’ in the guise of a science fiction B-movie assumes a sophisticated
response in film-maker and audience (and film-makers and audience in
the diegesis of the film by Jorge Furtado she describes) to what a pulp
sf scenario is and what it does. Both Basic Sanitation: The Movie (Jorge
Furtado, 2007) and the film-within-a-film which is its subject assume a
knowledge of science fiction as a cultural form which can be consumed
and, what is more important, appropriated outside the Anglo-Saxon
milieu with which it is so often associated.
Although Clute notes that we no longer see the future shaped through
American sf, he seems to suggest that our position in a world ‘shaped by
the futures that the sf story had failed to notice’16 is still illuminated by
examining our fantasies about it:
the literatures of the fantastic do model how the world works … they
do address how reality is addressed by us, at this cusp moment for
the human species, and for the world we increasingly own … Even
the crappiest SF novel or story has embedded within it the absolutely
terrifying knowledge that what we see – through the augmented
eyes we now habitually wear in the 21st century … is what we have
ourselves made. Our gaze upon the world is all that counts now. The
world is what we make it.17
What Clute seems to mean by this is complex, but includes the sense
that the theory and practice of sf as shaped by its progenitors in the
Gernsback/Campbell magazines ignored many of the possible futures
which could have arisen from their present. It is not the naive criticism
Introduction 9
that science fiction writers ‘got the future wrong’ by failing to predict
our world, but the more nuanced understanding that many sf writers
were more influenced by the fictional futures conceived by their pre-
decessors than by the context in which they were living and its implica-
tions for the future.
As Farah Mendlesohn explains in her editorial to Foundation 100,
which collected contemporary sf stories rather than the usual critical
essays and reviews, the anthology was compiled in response to John
Clute’s ‘argument that First SF was dead: that no one now wrote in the
belief that the future they depicted was both possible from where we
stand now, and desirable’.18 For many of the ‘default futures’ of twen-
tieth century sf, it is increasingly obvious that we can’t get there from
here.19 Another point Mendlesohn makes is that these ‘default futures’
are utterly monochrome; as she sarcastically puts it, ‘too much modern
SF is clearly descended from a past in which genocide had wiped out
most of the non-white population because they were so clearly not the
futures of the places that so many of us live in’.20 The challenge for
writers of modern science fiction, therefore, is to engage in speculation
without falling into the trap of simply imitating established models.
For tutors, the challenge is to ensure that historically and thematically
structured courses in particular acknowledge the dynamic between the
history (or rather, the multiple and often competing ‘histories’ of sf)
and the practice of those who draw upon its techniques and traditions
to represent the world in which they live.
Sf, however, offers further challenges. It confronts our conception of
modes of reading, for example. The idea of sf as a vehicle for ideas sug-
gests that the medium is less important than the message. Sf’s ambigu-
ous relationship with what we may consider to be ‘the real’ is both
underlined and undermined by its origins as a form which hybridizes
(among others) the popular adventure story, the literary utopia, the
naive sense of wonder, and the speculative essay. Its development as a
symbolic literature which uses ‘realistic’ techniques to manipulate our
readings of time and space, and as a literature in which paratextual
contexts such as the means of literary production and the extra-literary
discussions surround it, are important to understanding it. The Western
print culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is not automati-
cally destined to survive. If it does not, a science fiction response will
crystallize in other ways. If it does, the way sf manipulates language
may be among its most interesting achievements.21 By use of neologism
and sentences such as ‘The door dilated’ (doors, in our world, do not
usually ‘dilate’), science fiction draws our attention to what Suvin calls
the novum – the ‘new thing’22 – which tells us that we are estranged
from the world of mundane fiction and invites us to consider the nature
of this estrangement. In science fiction, metaphor becomes, for the pur-
pose of the story, reality: sf literalizes the metaphor. Our feeling that the
world we live in is in some way ‘unreal’ or ‘inauthentic’ is transposed
by Philip K. Dick in Time out of Joint (1959) into a story in which the
world really is unreal. The dismissive comment by the male narrator of
James Tiptree Jr’s story ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ (1973) – ‘Mrs Ruth
Parsons isn’t even living in the same world with me’ – is ironized by the
author when she reveals that ‘Mrs Ruth Parsons’ really does not want
to live in the same world as the narrator, or any other man, and would
rather take her chances with a couple of random ‘cultural-exchange
students’ who are real aliens. Two sentences after his comment, the
narrator, Fenton, uses the word ‘alienation’. But it takes the science
fiction element of the story to underline just how much this word is a
thoroughly accurate description of what Parsons feels.
Sf is celebrated for its neologistic innovation; some of its neolo-
gisms, such as ‘robot’ or ‘cyberspace’, have entered the language. The
word ‘robot’, for example (from Karel Capek’s play, R.U.R. [‘Rossum’s
Universal Robots’], first performed in Prague in 1921), entered the
English language in 1923. Almost immediately (the OED cites The
Times of 9 June and the Westminster Gazette of 22 June) it became meta-
phoric shorthand for the relationship between people and society. It
also became one of the icons of science fiction, capable of representing
Otherness in numerous contexts from industrial alienation to anxieties
about artificial intelligence.
Sf also confronts our ideas of ‘canon’ and ‘the academy’. Mendlesohn’s
introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction argues that
‘Science fiction is less a genre…than an ongoing discussion.’23 This dis-
cussion is held, as are many such conversations, in the pages of literary
journals and monographs. However, the debate also exists in fanzines,
at conventions and (increasingly) on the internet through interest
groups, e-lists, blogs and so on. Who is holding this conversation?
Obviously academics and critics are major voices, but to a greater extent
than almost any other literary group, writers, other professionals and
fans contribute to the discourse. Until the 1970s, for example, virtually
all the serious analysis and bibliographical work was conducted by fans
and collectors. As we have noted, the beginnings of American sf – the
mode that gave the form its name and shaped its generic tone – were
in magazines, and apart from a few mavericks – C.S. Lewis, J.O. Bailey
(whose Pilgrims Through Time and Space [1947] was possibly the earliest
Introduction 11
book about sf), Kingsley Amis (whose New Maps of Hell [1961] was the
first major British assessment of sf), and others – little academic atten-
tion was initially given to the field (although British scholarship has
always been kinder to that branch of SF that stems clearly from the
tradition of H.G. Wells).
Perhaps because of fan-based scholarship, knowledge of the field has
always been important, and the construction of a ‘canon’ has been
based upon different criteria from those used by formal literary scholars.
What does this mean in practice? First, that it is impossible to develop
a theory of appreciation of sf upon ‘representative’ texts. It may (the
italics are deliberate) be possible to pass oneself off as knowledge-
able about Elizabethan/Jacobean literature by considering the plays of
Marlowe, Shakespeare or Jonson, rather than those of Dekker, Chettle or
Heyward. No serious sf scholar, though, would, or should, admit to an
ignorance of Isaac Asimov or Robert A. Heinlein, even though by many
literary criteria (and by many of the extra-literary criteria sf fans bring
to their reading) Ursula K. Le Guin or John Crowley are better writers.
This is why it is possible to consider Ralph 124C 41⫹ (first published in
book form in 1925 but serialized in 1911–12) by Hugo Gernsback as ‘the
one essential text for all studies of science fiction’.24 (Although it is also
necessary to take into account Brian Aldiss’s comments on Gernsback –
‘one of the worst disasters ever to hit the science fiction field’ – in
Trillion Year Spree25 and the reactions by Aldiss, Stableford and others to
the essays in Foundation 47 and 48 that later became part of Westfahl’s
extended study of Gernsback, The Mechanics of Wonder [1999]).26
Indeed, our very ideas of who reads and writes science fiction need
to be examined in the context of this debate. Students may frequently
present essays in which the predominantly masculine nature of science
fiction is stated, sometimes citing authority, but at other times simply
assuming that this is something which is obvious. And it is indeed
obvious, but it is a stereotype, and stereotypes need examining, because
they are often true. It is the nature of that truth – and why other people
perceive that ‘truth’ – which is interesting. Recent scholarship by, for
example, Justine Larbalestier, Helen Merrick, Lisa Yaszek and Batya
Weinbaum, editor of Fem-Spec, not only argues for the existence of
women in the sf world but how they exist. Larbalestier, for example,
notes the female readership of the sf magazines and the arguments
within their letter columns. Yaszek, in Galactic Suburbia (2008), exam-
ines the female presence in the sf magazines of the 1950s and finds
it much more concrete than received wisdom assumes. She identifies
nearly three hundred women who began publishing in the sf magazines
after World War II and notes that the science column Amazing Stories ran
until 1953 regularly featured female contributors.27 Weinbaum, in her
work on the pulp writer Leslie F. Stone and her fellow-authors (‘Leslie F.
Stone as a Case of Author-Reader Responding’) suggests that there was a
‘close-down’ of female presence but, again, that the early sf magazines
were more open to women readers and writers than the stereotype sug-
gests.28 If science fiction is a mode which offers challenges, the assump-
tions of its readers, writers and scholars are among those areas which
are sometimes in greatest need of questioning.
Cognizant of these factors, the current volume unites an international
group of science fiction scholars, who have shaped sf’s critical discourse
and who have considerable experience in teaching and developing sf or
sf-related courses. Most have a reputation for questioning, at one point
or another, received wisdom and for taking sf criticism in new direc-
tions, for providing new insights into, or exposing counter discourses
to, First SF. This book is intended for tutors and scholars who wish to
develop their students’, or their own, engagement with science fiction
as an essentially speculative fiction operating at many levels, rather than
as a simple example of ‘popular literature’, an alternative to ‘high cul-
ture’, or a form to which we can easily apply the conventional tools of
literary response and analysis.
The collection opens with two contextualizing chapters which present
accessibly the fundamental knowledge required by any undergraduate
registered for an sf course. Paul Kincaid’s ‘Through Time and Space: A
Brief History of Science Fiction’ acknowledges the difficulties of defining
the genre whilst providing a concise overview of sf’s development and
its manifestation in various forms. Echoing Roberts’s History of Science
Fiction (2007), Kincaid situates sf’s origins within the Enlightenment
and the emergent utopian tradition. In so doing he identifies many
of the socio-cultural and rationalist impulses that remain influential:
the scientific method, logical speculation, secularism, satire and the
sublime. Importantly, Kincaid locates First SF in the broader, richer
generic ‘prehistory’ of the utopian and satiric modes and a wider, global
context which is only now beginning to attract critical attention from
Anglophone theorists.
In ‘Theorizing Science Fiction: The Question of Terminology’, Gary K.
Wolfe explores some of the difficulties facing the tutor or student con-
fronted by sf’s indeterminate origins, its ambiguous status as a genre,
and by the wealth of critical terms available. He notes that much of
this latter confusion arises from the collision of three ‘different tradi-
tions of discourse … the terminology of fandom, the terminology of
Introduction 13
professional writers and editors, and the terminology of scholars

and academics’. As a means of navigating such treacherous seman-
tic waters, Wolfe offers a lucid, concise taxonomy which resolves
confusion by differentiating between terms relating to definition,
classification, theme, context and technique. For those teaching
or studying science fiction for the first time, such distinctions are
invaluable both in themselves and as a source of further discussion,
additional reading or course development.
Organized historically, the following six chapters explore the
practicalities and possibilities of teaching the best-known forms of sf
or sf-related literature. In ‘Utopia, Anti-Utopia and Science Fiction’
Chris Ferns addresses the absorption of the utopian tradition into
science fiction, both in terms of teaching and scholarship. This
‘englobing’, he argues, has had a profound affect on how each form
is interpreted and written according to the characteristics of the
other. He questions the validity of such a methodology, exposing its
assumptions and problematizing arguments related to sf’s escapist
qualities, its capacity to provoke personal and social transforma-
tion, and the criteria by which its ‘value’ is judged. In this way, he
reclaims utopian writing from sf to ask pertinent pedagogical ques-
tions about how utopian works can be taught effectively in contexts
both outside and within science fiction. Through two case studies,
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The
Dispossessed (1974), he offers significant insights into how utopian
literature can be taught effectively in two different academic con-
texts.
Adam Roberts’s ‘Teaching the Scientific Romance’ discusses the
pedagogic appeal of engaging with a recognized British tradition in
sf separate from the Gernsbackian First SF described by Clute. He
not only notes the perennial popularity of a number of its authors,
Verne and Wells particularly, but also acknowledges the scientific
romance’s contemporary re-emergence in ‘steampunk’ literature,
design and graphic art. Here, Roberts emphasizes how teaching the
scientific romance enables the tutor and student to consider both
sf’s founding texts (notably those of Verne and Wells) and the grow-
ing interest in contemporary works indebted to those texts (Ronald
Wright’s A Scientific Romance [1998] is an obvious example). In addi-
tion, Roberts offers a range of possible literature for study, drawing
attention to recent developments in the digitization of hitherto less
accessible material. More importantly, perhaps, Roberts identifies
opportunities for students to contribute to the ‘clamorous critical
debate concerning the origins of sf’, pointing to the possibility for genu-
inely original research. He provides a number of considerations regard-
ing how such a course might be structured and the problems inherent
in teaching non-Anglophone literature in translation, a factor which
continues to oppose a more thorough interrogation of the assumptions
of First SF. He concludes with suggestions of how a number of primary
texts might be taught with sensitivity to their social and historic con-
texts and to their abiding contemporary relevance. For those tutors and
instructors unable to devote an entire course to the scientific romance,
Roberts’s chapter provides an invaluable guide to selecting pertinent
texts for inclusion in a broader programme of study.
In ‘Teaching Pulp Science Fiction’, Gary Westfahl looks enthusiasti-
cally to the origins of First SF in his consideration of science fiction
from the 1920s to the 1940s. Confronted by the wealth of primary
material available from the period, Westfahl selects six texts appropri-
ate for understanding pulp sf and includes suggestions for how these
could stimulate class discussion and possible student research projects.
Importantly, he also discusses pulp sf’s audience demographic and the
possible implications sf had for America’s technological development.
Although the texts he proposes for study may be unfamiliar to many
students, their themes, narrative structures and ideological assumptions
will resonate with undergraduates raised in a post-Star Wars, Star Trek-
informed culture. This in itself points to sf’s megatextual nature, allow-
ing for historicized debate regarding the long shadow cast by First SF.
Lisa Yaszek’s ‘Good SF: Teaching the Golden Age as Cultural History’
focuses on the period (roughly between 1937 and 1950) in American
sf when critics argue that the worst excesses of Gernsbackian sf were
countered by John W. Campbell Jr’s appointment as editor of Astounding
Science Fiction. Yaszek identifies both the formal and cultural aspects of
Golden Age sf, noting how its ‘authors use the formal characteristics of
sf to actively participate in the most pressing cultural debates of their
day’. Reflecting on her practice at Georgia Tech, she explores how con-
cepts of ‘good sf’ can be formulated, interrogated and tested through
their application to a range of primary sources both filmic and literary.
Yaszek’s focus on Campbell’s ‘rules’ for ‘good sf’ provides the tutor or
instructor with a useful methodology for contextualizing and analysing
Golden Age sf. This stress on exploring sf’s cultural context leads her to
emphasize the importance of addressing the issue of gender in sf of this
period in order to call student assumptions into question. Accordingly,
her chapter, and her earlier Galactic Suburbia, significantly enhance
the critical understanding of Golden Age sf and provide the tutor or
Introduction 15
instructor with lively possibilities for study alongside the more usual
representative figures of Asimov, Heinlein, Sturgeon and Clarke.
Where Yaszek focuses attention on the critical reclamation and teach-
ing of neglected aspects of Golden Age sf, Rob Latham draws attention
to science fiction’s self-revisionist period in his treatment of the New
Wave sf of the 1960s. Latham’s chapter prepares the tutor or instruc-
tor and the student for approaching what is hitherto sf’s most thema-
tically and stylistically experimental phase. Providing an overview
of the individual, historic and cultural forces influencing the New
Wave – iconoclastic young writers, wider countercultural and political
challenges to hegemonic norms, a growing sensitivity to the possi-
bilities afforded by the literary avant-garde – Latham notes the lack of
significant critical material available on the subject itself. Recognizing
this as an advantage for creative discussion and assessment, he proposes
‘Three Configurations’ for approaching the New Wave: as part of an sf
survey course, as an element in a survey of postmodern fiction, or as a
freestanding course focused entirely on the period. In each case, Latham
provides invaluable insights into how differently structured investiga-
tions of New Wave sf can richly enhance the student’s understanding of
science fiction or postmodernism. He concludes with a series of caveats,
of ‘lessons learned’ while teaching New Wave sf, which will undoubt-
edly assist the tutor or instructor in planning his or her own treatment
of the subject matter.
In a wide-ranging essay Andrew M. Butler explores sf’s relationship to
postmodernism and postmodernity in his assessment of science fiction
in the context of the postmodern theories of Lyotard, Baudrillard and
Jameson. Although such discussions often restrict themselves to consid-
ering cyberpunk, Butler takes this as a starting point for a broader con-
sideration of how theories of the postmodern are found in a wide range
of sf. Focusing initially on the pedagogic potential of William Gibson’s
Neuromancer (1984), Butler teases out sf’s deep metaphoric resonance
before identifying how the novel can be read productively through the
opening chapters of Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (1991). He then provides a number of additional literary and
cinematic texts which would facilitate the student’s broader understand-
ing of the subject matter in the context of Jameson’s approach. Turning
to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984), Butler explores the ways
in which postmodern science has been anticipated by, and reflected
speculatively in, science fiction’s alternate histories and counterfactu-
als. Lyotard’s critiques of rationality and the rational state, he argues,
are found in sf’s varied critiques of totalitarian authority. Similarly, he
notes how Baudrillard’s recognition of the collapse of the distinction

between the real and the artificial under the influence of the media is
dramatized, if not effectively questioned, in sf. As Butler points out, sf
‘is not radical enough to solve the problem’. Nevertheless, the works
of J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, and Baudrillard’s analysis, provide
stimulating topics for seminar discussions with students often oblivious
to the strategies of capitalist culture. Self-reflexively problematizing the
assumptions and implications of postmodern theory, Butler concludes
his chapter with several provocative observations which re-emphasize
the responsibilities of tutors and instructors everywhere.
In the next four chapters of the current volume, three specific areas
of investigation are presented as valuable areas of study in any science
fiction course. Brian Attebery’s ‘Teaching Gender and Science Fiction’
traces the emergence of a politically conscious feminist sf in the 1960s
and 1970s. He argues that this is a useful pedagogic starting point for
students of gender and sf, allowing a free movement back to the Golden
Age (where Yazsek’s work is of particular interest) and the pulp years.
The apparent contrasts and the new insights obtained, he argues, will
enhance the student’s understanding of gender assumptions, stereotyp-
ing and the need for political action, while exposing the value of sf’s
formal qualities to oppressed groups determined to challenge the patri-
archal status quo. Attebery’s concept of the term ‘parabola to represent
the use of a familiar but flexible scenario’ is valuable for tracing the
varied, often self-reflexive treatment of gender-related themes through
sf’s history and varied social context. (Incidentally, it is also useful for
introducing students to Clute’s idea of First SF.) Attebery points out how
the investigation of any particular parabola facilitates the introduction
of additional critical concepts pertinent to understanding sf. It thereby
provides the tutor or instructor with a coherent concept around which
to group key terms and approaches in a potentially supportive and pro-
ductive manner. The lucidity afforded by such an approach is likely to
be appreciated by students who are also familiarizing themselves with
the complexities of gender theory and the ways in which sf’s specula-
tive potential can dramatize or literalize various theoretical standpoints
or models. Attebery concludes with a discussion of various parabolas,
including suggested primary texts for each, providing fertile possibilities
for the development of gender-based courses or sessions.
Uppinder Mehan’s ‘Teaching Postcolonial Science Fiction’ is an excel-
lent introduction to the topic which establishes a clear context for study
before proposing three forms of related science fiction: postcolonial sci-
ence fiction, colonial science fiction and what Mehan terms ‘dissident
Introduction 17
science fiction’. In his discussion of the former, Mehan focuses on how

postcolonial sf writers, including Nalo Hopkinson and Archie Weller,
address issues of technology, history and the body. In his treatment
of colonial science fiction, a distinct element of First SF, he explores
the racist, colonialist and imperialist assumptions underpinning a
large proportion of Anglo-American science fiction, with an emphasis
on the work of H. Beam Piper. With dissident science fiction, on the
other hand, Mehan identifies the ways in which writers from former
and current colonial powers, including Kim Stanley Robinson and
C.J. Cherryh, have critiqued the processes of imperialism and colonial-
ism. His interpretations of such primary texts are extremely useful to
any tutor or instructor intent on developing a course or session explor-
ing science fiction’s relationship to colonial and postcolonial discourse
or to broader thematically based analysis of sf’s conception and repre-
sentation of the Other.
M. Elizabeth Ginway develops these ideas further in her case study
of Latin American science fiction film and literature as she documents
her experiences of teaching Spanish-American and Brazilian texts in
translation. Like Mehan, she draws attention to the ways in which
such courses are highly effective in challenging students’ ‘underlying
assumptions about First-World political and technological hegemony’
and, by extension, First SF. Her wide-ranging discussion provides brief,
insightful readings of a number of key filmic and literary texts and
considers how these represent different South American cultural experi-
ences and conditions, sometimes in relation to wider global contexts.
For any instructor or tutor intent on either developing a course on
Spanish-American and/or Brazilian sf or incorporating representative
material into a broader sf study, Ginway’s detailed assessment of Andrea
L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán’s anthology Cosmos Latinos: An
Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain (2003) and her
suggestions as to how its contents might be supplemented, are invalu-
able. As a counterpoint to the stories she analyses, Ginway examines
representative Anglo-American sf and fantasy texts set in Brazil to dis-
cuss the phenomenon of the ‘tropicalization’ of Latin America occur-
ring in literature by outsiders. She concludes by recommending Samuel
R. Delany’s ‘Driftglass’ (1967), Karen Tei Yamashita’s fantasy Through the
Arc of the Rainforest (1990) and – with some caveats – Ian McDonald’s
Brasyl (2007). Given the wealth of material Ginway identifies as appro-
priate, these texts are a useful starting point for a course or session pre-
paring students for an instructive juxtaposition of First World and Third
World perspectives through science fiction.
In the penultimate chapter, Mark Brake and Neil Hook describe their
unique work exploring the teaching of the relationship between science
and science fiction in a contemporary British higher education context.
They provide a detailed outline of their degree programme and reflect on
their experience of a decade teaching such an interdisciplinary study. As
they point out, although science fiction was recognized as developing
alongside the growth of rationalism and the preponderance of the sci-
entific method in both the hard and soft sciences, the subject had rarely
been studied in the context of the sciences it has drawn upon consist-
ently. Indeed, as Brake and Hook indicate, the ‘two cultures’ dialectic
of science versus art has often separated rather than united discussion.
Rejecting this antagonistic stance, they describe a degree course which
interrogates, in a critical and multidisciplinary manner, the relationship
between science and science fiction to ‘produce a unique, provocative
and compelling account of science fiction as a touchstone of the dialec-
tic of science and progress’. In describing their programme, they assess
the characteristics of both science and science fiction and the often
complex interaction that exists between them. While the opportunity
of teaching an entire degree programme focusing on science and sci-
ence fiction may not be possible for the majority of universities, their
observations regarding the nature of the connections between the two
are valuable to anyone planning or teaching a science fiction course as
part of a liberal arts or humanities degree.
Andy Sawyer and Peter Wright bring the collection to a close with a
chapter that provides practical advice on how a science fiction course
might be structured, delivered and assessed productively. Intended
largely for tutors and instructors who are considering developing an
undergraduate sf course for the first time, it nevertheless draws on the
experience of several contributors to offer any sf teacher opportunities
for considering possible variations to already well-developed courses,
particularly in the area of assessment.
Each of these chapters has been especially commissioned to support
scholars and students in developing their knowledge and understanding
of science fiction and the ways in which it might be taught, researched
and analysed. Sf is a pedagogically exciting, academically rewarding
subject that confronts us directly with the possible consequences of uni-
versal, planetary, cultural, political, social and personal transformation.
Its hybrid nature and the way it emphasizes connections and contrasts
between cultures, disciplines and ways of thinking, make it a fitting sub-
ject for any syllabus committed to assisting the social and intellectual
transformation of its students.
Introduction 19
Notes
1. Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest, eds, Spectrum 2 (London: Gollancz,
1962) 4. The couplet is often attributed to Kingsley Amis, but is reprinted
in Conquest’s The Abomination of Moab (London: Maurice Temple Smith,
1975).
2. Patrick Parrinder, Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching (London: Methuen,
1980) xiv.
3. Mark Hillegas, ‘The Course in Science Fiction: A Hope Deferred’, Extrapolation,
9:18 (1968): 18–21. Throughout his article, Hillegas notes the contemporary
antipathy many English departments felt towards the teaching of science
fiction.
4. R.D. Mullen, ‘Science Fiction in Academe’, Science Fiction Studies, 23:3 (1996):
371–4 at 372. An electronic copy is available at http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/
backissues/70/intro70.htm (accessed 25 June 2009).
5. Parrinder, Science Fiction, 131.
6. James Gunn, ‘Teaching Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Studies, 23:3 (1996):
377–84 at 378. An electronic copy is available at http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/
backissues/70/gunn70art.htm (accessed 23 July 2009).
7. For an account of early sf scholarship, see Donald M. Hassler, ‘The Academic
Pioneers of Science Fiction Criticism, 1940–1980’, Science Fiction Studies,
26:2 (1999): 213–31. An electronic copy is available at http://www.depauw.
edu/sfs/backissues/78/hassler78art.htm (accessed 25 June 2009). See also
Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970); Darko Suvin,
The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (Yale: Yale University Press, 1979).
8. The Liverpool University Press Science Fiction Texts and Studies series
can be viewed at http://www.liverpool-unipress.c.uk/html/categories.
asp?idCategory⫽51 (accessed 25 June 2009).
9. Borrowing the term from Christine Brooke-Rose, Damien Broderick explains
how science fiction exists as ‘a mega-text of imaginary worlds, tropes, tools, lex-
icons, even grammatical innovations borrowed from other textualities’ (Reading
by Starlight (London: Routledge, 1995) xiii. See 57–63 for a fuller discussion).
According to this model, sf texts are built up by means of interaction – deliberate
borrowings, unconscious plagiarism, and straightforward assumptions that
writing a science fiction story demands certain uses of language, setting and
image – with other sf texts. For example, there are similarities in the imagined
futures of certain kinds of science fiction: ‘galactic empires’, faster-than-light
travel, dystopian cityscapes. The ‘moving roadways’ of Wells’s When The Sleeper
Wakes (1899) are seen again in Heinlein’s ‘The Roads Must Roll’ (1940), which
mentions Wells, and The Caves of Steel (1954) by Isaac Asimov. The success
of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) resulted immediately in a torrent of
stories about grimy hi-tech futures in which drugs and artificial intelligences
played a large part and words like ‘cyberspace’, ’the Matrix’ and ‘The Net’ were
frequent. Neuromancer’s conceptual innovations were so influential that they
eventually informed that most British of cultural icons Doctor Who in Ben
Aaronovich’s ‘New Adventure’, Transit (London: Virgin Books, 1992).
10. The vagueness of dating is deliberate: like many overarching narratives,
there is no real sense that First SF has vanished, merely that it has outlived
its appropriateness.
11. Hugo Gernsback, ‘A New Sort of Magazine’, Amazing Stories, 1:1 (1926): 3.
12. Graham Sleight, ‘Last and First SF’, in Farah Mendlesohn, ed., Polder: A
Festschrift for John Clute and Judith Clute (Baltimore: Old Earth Books, 2006)
258–66 at 258.
13. John Clute, Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 1995) 9.
14. Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (Basigstoke: Palgrave, 2007)
64–87.
15. See Suvin, The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction.
16. John Clute, Look at the Evidence, 9.
17. John Clute interviewed by Nick Gevers, Interzone, 166 (April 2000): 29–34 at
30.
18. Farah Mendlesohn, ‘Editorial’, Foundation: The International Review of Science
Fiction, 100 (2007): 3–4 at 3.
19. These ‘default futures’ are a product of sf’s mega-textual appropriations and
borrowings.
20. Mendlesohn, ‘Editorial’, 3.
21. See, for example, the works cited by Broderick, Delany, and Stockwell, and
the ‘Companions’ issued by Cambridge University Press, Blackwell and
Routledge.
22. Suvin,, The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, 4.
23. Farah Mendlesohn, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Science
Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 1–12 at 1.
24. Gary Westfahl, The Mechanics of Wonder (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 1998) 93.
25. Brian Aldiss with David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree (London: Gollancz,
1982) 202.
26. See Gary Westfahl, ‘On the True History of Science Fiction’, Foundation
47 (1989/90): 5–25 and the comments by Brian Aldiss, Brian Stableford
and Edwards James: 28–33; and Gary Westfahl, ‘“An Idea of Scientific
Import”: Hugo Gernsback’s Theory of Science Fiction’, Foundation 48 (1990):
26–50, and the comments by Andy Sawyer, K.V. Bailey and Steve Carper in
Foundation 50 (1990): 77–80.
27. Lisa Yaszek, Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction (Columbus,
OH: Ohio State University Press, 2008) 3 and 23.
28. Batya Weinbaum, ‘Leslie F. Stone as a Case of Author-Reader Responding’,
Foundation 80 (2000): 40–51.
1
Through Time and Space: A Brief
History of Science Fiction
Paul Kincaid
Many undergraduates embarking on a course or module in science fic-

tion have little or no previous knowledge of the genre. Those who have
been casual or even habitual readers of the form usually lack historical
or theoretical perspectives and often benefit from a historically ordered
approach. Chronologically arranged courses provide a structure within
which students can more easily locate specific authors and their work,
historical events, and the major phases in sf’s formal, literary, thematic
and conceptual characteristics. Accordingly, this chapter sets out a brief
history of the genre which distinguishes a number of areas of potential
interest and focus for selection, especially for those tutors or instruc-
tors planning courses restricted typically to one semester and intent
on providing students with a broad understanding of the subject. In so
doing, it identifies a range of relevant authors and texts appropriate for
inclusion in both historically-oriented programmes of study and more
focused analyses of specific authors, themes or forms.
However, it must be noted that to write a history of science fiction is
to attempt to describe the course of something that remains vague and
ever shifting. If there is no clear agreement on how to define ‘science
fiction’ how can there be any agreement on where it starts and how it
develops? Indeed, most so-called histories of science fiction are little
more than genealogies that start with something arbitrary and not-
quite genre – ‘proto-science fiction’ is a popular term – and proceed by
a series of biblical begats: Wells begat Stapledon who begat Clarke who
begat Baxter.
For the purposes of this history, therefore, I intend to be as loose and
eclectic in my definition of the genre as possible. I will take sf as a form
of the literary fantastic employing any of a wide variety of commonly
recognized themes, techniques, tropes and approaches that have tended
21
to braid together over time into something to which we now give the
name science fiction.1 Some of those themes and tropes can be found in
the novels and narrative poems of the Hellenistic period, most notably
the voyage to the Moon recounted by Lucian of Samosata in his True
History (2nd century CE). But although some of the early pioneers of sf
were familiar with Lucian’s work, it would be wrong to characterize this
as anything other than a false start in the history of the genre.
The history of science fiction really begins with the Renaissance, or
more specifically with the exploration of the New World and the coinci-
dent spread of humanist learning through Europe at the beginning of the
sixteenth century. Out of this emerged Utopia by Thomas More (1516),
which set against the medieval wish-fulfilment fantasia of Cockaigne (or
Cokaygne) the notion that man might fashion through rational endeav-
our his own better world. Utopian ideas were widely and quickly taken
up, appearing for instance in I Mondi by Anton Francesco Doni (1552)
and more famously The City of the Sun by Thomas Campanella (1623).
One other outgrowth of humanism and the emphasis on education
that followed the Reformation, particularly in Protestant lands, was the
development of science based on observation and experiment. The most
significant consequences of this were the Copernican revolution, which
displaced the Earth from its position at the centre of the universe, and
Galileo’s observations of other planets, which gave them a landscape
not dissimilar to that of Earth. Such ideas were not always welcome:
Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600 for proposing
an infinite universe in which there might be worlds inhabited by races
never visited by Christ. Nevertheless, these ideas did begin to creep into
the fiction of the day.
In 1620, just ten years after the publication of Galileo’s map of the
moon, Ben Jonson wrote a masque for the court of James I called Newes
from the New World Discovered in the Moone, which fancifully imagined
moon people riding in clouds. It was perhaps the first British work to
imagine beings inhabiting a landscape on the moon. The astronomer
Johannes Kepler took this notion further in his posthumously-published
Somnium (1634), which recounted a dream journey to a moon described
according to the best scientific knowledge of the time. Another post-
humous work, The Man in the Moone (1638) by Francis Godwin, is a
picaresque adventure in which the antihero, Domingo Gonsales, visits
the moon in a carriage towed by gansas (geese). Incorporating the first
description of a technological conveyance to another world, the text
(which included a number of other then-radical scientific ideas rang-
ing from the Copernican system to weightlessness between worlds) was
Through Time and Space: A Brief History of Science Fiction 23
highly influential, inspiring, among many other works, a play by Aphra

Behn and later fictions by Cyrano de Bergerac. It would later be cited
by Jules Verne as one of his major influences. Not only that, but John
Wilkins rewrote his treatise, The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638),
to add a chapter about ways of travelling to the moon: so the idea of
interplanetary travel became a part of scientific thinking. Wilkins would
later also be instrumental in founding the Royal Society, inspired by
Francis Bacon’s scientific utopia, New Atlantis (1627).
More’s Utopia was widely reprinted in Britain in the years before the
Civil War, and utopian thought had a potent effect on the incendi-
ary combination of political and religious radicalism that marked the
period. Numerous utopias were published as the notion changed from
literary/philosophical idea to religio-political aspiration. Among these
works was Nova Solyma (1648) by ex-parliamentarian Samuel Gott,
which, inspired by millenarian ideas, was the first novel explicitly set
in the future.
Although religious radicalism still found expression following the
Restoration of Charles II in 1660 (John Milton’s Paradise Lost appeared
in 1667, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678), utopian writing as a
whole became considerably less radical. The completion of Bacon’s New
Atlantis by ‘R.H., Gent’ (1660) was more Royalist even than Bacon had
been, while works like The Isle of Pines by Henry Neville (1668), replaced
political liberation with sexual liberality. But there was one notable and
curious work, The Blazing World (1666) by Margaret Cavendish, which
posited another world joined to this one at the pole.
Within a few years, however, writers were beginning to imagine the
poles providing access not to an adjoining world but to the interior of
the Earth. In works such as Niels Klim in the Underworld (1741) by Ludvig
Holberg, and the extraordinary Icosameron (1788) by Jacques Casanova,
this notion enjoyed a curious vogue from the latter years of the sev-
enteenth century through to Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the
Earth (1864) and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar novels. Most of the
alien races encountered in early sf, such as the flying people in The Life
and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750) by Robert Paltock, were found in
such works, though there were still mysteries to be encountered in dis-
tant parts of the globe. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1727) is a case
in point. In keeping with the age of Enlightenment, Swift’s novel turned
its satiric gaze not on kings and churches but upon political parties and
the esoteric disputes of the Royal Society. The most remarkable beings
in eighteenth-century fiction, however, were the vast cosmic entities
that disputed with Earthly savants in Voltaire’s Micromegas (1752).
Despite the fact that its emergent secularism would eventually have a
profound effect on the character of science fiction, the Enlightenment
produced little groundbreaking work in the history of the genre. But as
the eighteenth century progressed the political ferment of the American
and French revolutions and the philosophical ferment represented by
the works of Immanuel Kant and by Edmund Burke’s notion of the
sublime led to renewed questioning of humanity’s position in the world
and, as it had been in the mid-seventeenth century, this was fertile
ground for science fiction.
The romantic notion of the sublime found perhaps its most extrava-
gant literary expression in the Gothic, that fantastical mode beginning
with works such as The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764)
which paid elaborate attention to wild landscapes, raging storms and
ruined towers. But it was the Gothic mode that Mary Shelley used for
what Brian Aldiss, and a number of later commentators, identified
as the first true science fiction novel, Frankenstein (1818).2 Grafting
contemporary scientific ideas, notably galvanism or animal electricity,
onto an archetypal Gothic landscape, Shelley’s tale of man creating life
was an immediate success. By 1823 it had been adapted for the stage
(the first of a wealth of dramatic adaptations); it entered the popular
imagination so thoroughly that even today genetically modified food is
commonly referred to as ‘Frankenstein food’; and it inspired an endless
stream of science fictions that explored in innumerable ways (robots,
cyborgs, genetic modification, cloning) the possibilities of artificial
life. Mary Shelley heavily revised the text for the third edition of 1831,
removing, amongst other things, a suggestion of incest.3 She continued
to write in the Gothic mode, producing, in The Last Man (1826), a vision
of humankind destroyed by plague which proved almost as influential
as Frankenstein in the history of science fiction. It inspired such works
as After London by Richard Jeffries (1885) and Deluge by S. Fowler Wright
(1927), and through them the whole subgenre of the British catastrophe
novel.
The Gothic mode also heavily influenced Edgar Allan Poe, who had a
significant impact on the history of sf through works including the hol-
low earth novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838).
A far greater influence on early American science fiction, however, and
one less in thrall to the Gothic, was probably ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’
by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1846) which established a number of themes,
particularly the malevolence of the experimenter and the ambiguous-
ness of the distinction between the real and the fictional, that would
re-emerge repeatedly in subsequent fiction. But even as the nineteenth
century progressed and the Gothic began to lose its influence, its
traces could still be found in relatively late works such as Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), which recast
Frankenstein as a tale of personal transformation in the new wild places
of the modern city.
The nineteenth century was a time of technological progress in an
increasingly urbanized society, and writers began to delight in the won-
drous new devices such continued progress might bring. In Russia there
were futuristic utopias like Plausible Fantasies by F.V. Bulgarin (1824)
and The Year 4338 by V.F. Odoevsky (1840). In America, excitement at
technological possibilities inspired a string of amazing stories, generally
published as dime novels, built around an inventor-hero. These have
been christened ‘Edisonades’ in honour of Thomas Edison, though the
novel generally considered the first of the type, The Huge Hunter, or the
Steam Man of the Prairies by Edward S. Ellis (1868), pre-dated Edison’s
fame by a decade. (Not coincidentally, Edison actually appeared as the
hero of Edison’s Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss, 1898 a sequel
of sorts to H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, 1898.) Such Edisonades
would feed directly into the ‘scientifictions’4 that, early in the twenti-
eth century, Hugo Gernsback would begin publishing in his popular
magazines (for example, Modern Electronics, 1908–13, which serialized
his own novel Ralph 124C 41⫹ in 1911, and The Electrical Experimenter,
1913–20) as a way of promoting science. Meanwhile in France techno-
logical progress found its most successful fictional expression in the
works of Jules Verne who, in novel after novel, would present spec-
tacular devices such as submarines (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the
Sea, 1869), airships (Robur the Conqueror, 1886) and spaceships (From the
Earth to the Moon, 1865).
But if the mid- to late nineteenth century was a time that celebrated
the scientific contribution to industrial (and therefore military and
political) might, as it did for instance at London’s Great Exhibition
of 1851, it was also a time when science was beginning to undermine
many old certainties. Geologists were pushing back the age of the Earth,
physicists were breaking down the very structure of reality, and in 1859
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which profoundly
affected the complacency of an age that saw English civilization as the
peak of historical development. Although Darwin’s ideas, then as now,
generated huge controversy, particularly from religious ideologues,
they soon began to have an effect on the literature of the day, begin-
ning almost immediately in novels such as The Water Babies by Charles
Kingsley (1862–63). In sf, their best and most important advocate was
H.G. Wells, who had studied with T.H. Huxley, popularly known as
‘Darwin’s bulldog’, and who continued to promote evolution by natural
selection throughout his long career.
Wells’s contribution to science fiction is difficult to overstate. Though
there had been earlier time travel stories (A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain, 1889, for example), The Time Machine
(1895) was the first work to propose a device for travelling through
time, turning time itself into a dimension that could be negotiated. A
measure of its importance can perhaps be gauged from the number of
works that have positioned themselves as sequels to The Time Machine,
including The Space Machine by Christopher Priest (1976), The Time Ships
by Stephen Baxter (1995) and A Scientific Romance by Ronald Wright
(1998). In another innovation Wells took the paranoid stories of German
invasion that had become popular in the wake of German reunification
and the Franco-Prussian War, such as George T. Chesney’s The Battle
of Dorking (1871), and turned them into the first significant novel of
alien invasion (The War of the Worlds, 1898). In his first six years as a
novelist, Wells also produced two variants on the Frankenstein model,
The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) and The Invisible Man (1897), the first of
his futuristic utopias, The Sleeper Awakes (1898), and a journey to the
moon, The First Men in the Moon (1901). Together, these six novels would
provide a vocabulary of images and devices that would set the tone for
Anglophone science fiction thereafter. Though Wells would continue to
write occasional science fictions throughout the rest of his career, noth-
ing that followed would have quite the impact of these early works.
The First World War marked a change in the course of science fiction.
In Europe, after the devastation of four years of fighting, economic col-
lapse exacerbated by the unequal terms at Versailles, and the division of
the continent into two powerful dictatorial camps (Communist in Soviet
Russia, Fascist in Italy, Germany and, after the Civil War, Spain), a bleak
mood fed into the fiction of the day. Following the Soviet Revolution
the utopian aspect of Russian sf had become dystopian, most signifi-
cantly with We by Yevgeny Zamiatin (or Zamyatin) (1920). Smuggled to
the West, this novel was reviewed by George Orwell who would then use
it as the structural and thematic model for the most famous dystopia of
the twentieth century, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Meanwhile the rise
of the Nazi Party in Germany provoked a number of dreadful visions
of the future, the most important of which was probably Swastika Night
by Katherine Burdekin (1937). After the war this mode would transform
effortlessly into a string of alternative histories imagining German
victory, including The Sound of his Horn by Sarban (1952), ‘The Fall of
Frenchy Steiner’ by Hilary Bailey (1964), ‘Weinachtsabend’ by Keith

Roberts (1972) and, more recently, The Separation by Christopher Priest
(2002) and Resistance by Owen Sheers (2007). But even if they did not
address such political issues directly, the common assumption through-
out the interwar years that another war was inevitable led to stories of
catastrophe (T.H. White’s Earth Stopped, 1934), of intrusive state control
(Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, 1932), of time as a circular trap (in
J.B. Priestley’s time plays such as I Have Been Here Before, 1937). Even
the most ambitious, far-reaching vision of the future, Olaf Stapledon’s
Last and First Men (1930), carries the message that all civilizations must
crumble and be forgotten.
America, by contrast, emerged from the war as the world’s leading eco-
nomic power, even though its optimism was dimmed by the stock mar-
ket crash of 1929 and the subsequent Depression. Coupled with a resolve
to stay out of future foreign wars, there was a sense that America saw
itself as shaping the future rather than being shaped by it, a sense that
was clear in the American science fiction of the period. In 1926, Hugo
Gernsback launched Amazing Stories, a magazine specifically devoted to
the ‘scientifiction’ he had already been publishing in his popular science
magazines. For most of the next half-century, American sf would be
predominantly magazine-based. Although at first Gernsback’s magazine
mostly published reprints of stories by Wells and Verne, the true model
for the new writers he encouraged was his own earlier novel, Ralph
124C 41⫹, a brash, stylistically and structurally crude work in which the
astonishments of technology take precedence over any literary qualities.
A presumed didactic purpose behind these stories of ‘super science’ (the
term that would soon become popular for stories featuring miraculous
future technology) quickly became lost as young writers struggled to
make a living churning out as many sensationalized and sensationalist
stories as possible for low-paying markets.
The characteristic American science fiction of this period was the
space opera (named ironically in reference to the ‘horse opera’ western
stories also then popular). Typified by such works as Edmond Hamilton’s
Captain Future series (beginning with ‘The Space Emperor’, 1940), and
E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s Skylark series (beginning with The Skylark of Space,
1928) and Lensman series (beginning with Galactic Patrol, 1937–385),
these were colourful, fast-paced, simplistic and heavily reliant on scale
to evoke wonder. However, they developed a devoted following whose
exchanges through the letter columns of the pulp magazines would
become the basis of science fiction fandom and from whose numbers
many of the leading writers in the genre would emerge.
Gernsback lost control of Amazing Stories in 1929, and during the

1930s other magazines vied for dominance in what was proving to be
a popular market. The one that became the most powerful, and almost
the defining voice of American science fiction for the next decade or
more, was Astounding Stories. In October 1937 John W. Campbell took
over editorship of the magazine and became very nearly as influential
a figure in the history of sf as H.G. Wells. Campbell promptly retitled
the magazine, Astounding Science Fiction (it has had numerous changes
of title since then and is published still, now under the title Analog
Science Fiction Science Fact), and set about changing the character of the
magazine and of the stories it published. Already a successful writer of
space operas (for example, ‘The Black Star Passes’, 1930), and of more
subtle science fictions under the pen name Don A. Stuart (‘Twilight’,
1934; ‘Night’, 1935), Campbell would take a very hands-on approach
to editing and revising stories and would often provide story ideas for
his writers to develop. Above all he discovered or matured a stable of
new young writers, many of whom would go on to become the lead-
ing names in what has been called the ‘Golden Age’ of science fiction,
including Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, A.E. Van Vogt, Theodore
Sturgeon, Lester Del Rey and L. Sprague de Camp.
Campbell demanded of his writers a rigorous logic, to such an extent
that Tom Godwin was required to rewrite ‘The Cold Equations’ (1954)
until he stopped trying to find ingenious ways to save the young female
stowaway and accepted that she had to die in accordance with the story
logic. Campbell expected an adherence to scientific laws, although cer-
tain devices such as faster than light travel and (a particular favourite
of his) psi powers were acceptable. And he urged far greater character
development than had been common in the space operas of the 1930s.
Although space operatic plots and settings continued to be used, par-
ticularly by Van Vogt in works such as The Voyage of the Space Beagle
(1950) and Weapon Shops of Isher (1951), the result was a new approach
to science fiction that came to be known as ‘hard sf’. These were works
that took the hard sciences, particularly physics and chemistry, as their
basis. For example, Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement (1954) describes
what life may be like on the surface of a planet with exceptionally high
gravity.
Isaac Asimov based his widely admired story, ‘Nightfall’ (1941), on a
suggestion by Campbell: a planet with many suns whose complex orbits
meant the inhabitants only saw the stars once in a millennium. His
most lasting contribution to sf, however, is probably his robot stories
(I, Robot, the first of several collections, appeared in 1950) in which he
promulgated the Three Laws of Robotics. ‘Robot’, a term coined by Karel

Capek in his play R.U.R. (Rossums Universal Robots, 1921) and based on
the Czech word for drudgery, was applied by Capek to an entity closer
to what is more commonly called an android, but was very quickly
appropriated to refer to what had previously been called automata.
With his Three Laws, Asimov brought an ethical dimension to the treat-
ment of robots, and over the course of later stories such as ‘Bicentennial
Man’ (1976) and ‘Robot Dreams’ (1986) traced the development of his
robots from mechanical creatures into humans. The Three Laws were
often implied or even cited by later authors.
Late in his career, Asimov began revisiting earlier works, including the
robot stories and his future history, The Foundation Trilogy (1951–53), in
a not altogether successful attempt to link them into a larger, coherent
narrative of the future. This was a concept more closely associated with
other writers of his generation, including Cordwainer Smith and Robert
Heinlein. All of Smith’s idiosyncratic and ethically complex stories,
such as ‘The Dead Lady of Clown Town’ (1964) and ‘The Ballad of Lost
C’Mell’ (1962) can be fitted into one timeline. Heinlein, considered by
some the most important of all hard sf writers, was more diverse, but
a number of his novels and stories, such as those collected in The Man
Who Sold the Moon (1950) and Revolt in 2100 (1953) did form a basic
future history. A consistent political outlook – libertarianism – underlies
practically all of Heinlein’s work. It is notable in stories such as ‘The
Roads Must Roll’ (1940) which speculates on a society based around a
network of moving walkways in which an individual’s material rewards
are determined by how much that individual has done for society.
Heinlein’s work, however, is perhaps even more significant as a repre-
sentative of one of the defining characteristics of hard sf, the competent
man as hero. In several novels, including The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
(1966), which sees a lunar colony revolting against a dictatorial Earth,
his work consistently celebrated the man (always a man) who simply
got on with the job, who solved problems rather than entered combat,
and who went out to new, otherworldy frontiers in search of oppor-
tunity. However, by the time of his most famous novel, Stranger in a
Strange Land (1961), the competent hero, Valentine Michael Smith, is
already starting to give way to the garrulous elder statesman (here Jubal
Harshaw but more often Lazarus Long) who would come to dominate
Heinlein’s increasingly self-indulgent later novels.
By the 1950s, new magazines – The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction (launched 1949), Galaxy (1950) and If (1952) – were encourag-
ing a new generation of writers who maintained much of hard sf’s
aesthetic but brought to it greater literary sensibility. In the stories

collected as The Martian Chronicles (1950) Ray Bradbury presented
the harsh landscape of Mars as an extension of small-town America
to explore and explode frontier myths; Alfred Bester’s Tiger Tiger (also
known as The Stars My Destination, 1956), turned The Count of Monte
Cristo (Alexandre Dumas, 1844–46) into a pyrotechnic novel of revenge
set in a future that would become a precursor of cyberpunk (and the
Dumas novel would also inspire Gwyneth Jones’s space opera, Spirit, or
the Princess of Bois Dormant, 2009); Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s
The Space Merchants (1953) remains one of the finest satires on consum-
erism in modern science fiction; Walter M. Miller’s ultimately elegiac
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) traced the survival of religious faith in a
post-apocalyptic wilderness; and Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), together
with its numerous sequels, provided a rich, socially and politically com-
plex planetary adventure laced with ecological awareness. These and
other writers who emerged in the 1950s, including Daniel Keyes, Algis
Budrys, Fritz Leiber, James Blish, Poul Anderson and Kurt Vonnegut, all
made a significant contribution to the history of the genre, though the
most important writer to appear at this time, perhaps paradoxically,
was Philip K. Dick. His spare novels, paranoid, often comic, doubting
reality and exploring other states of consciousness, seemed apposite in
the counterculture of the 1960s but it would take many years, and then
initially only among French critics, before he would be recognized as
one of the most important of modern sf writers. In novel after novel,
Dick’s questioning of all we take for granted – our conception of what
constitutes the human, of our perception of the nature of reality, of
our relationship to the concept of the Divine – estranges the reader at a
level to which sf has often aspired but which it has rarely attained. His
many notable works include The Man in the High Castle (1962) in which
Germany and Japan have partitioned America after victory in World
War II; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) in which people use
drugs to enter the virtual reality of Perky Pat dolls; and Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) in which a bounty hunter chases androids
across a despoiled San Francisco as his understanding of what separates
the artificial from real becomes increasingly compromised.
If the Second World War had surprisingly little impact on American
science fiction, the same could not be said of Britain. Before the war
many British writers were starting to emulate the space operatic mode
of imported American sf; afterwards, the dominant mood of postwar
pessimism was reflected in a growing preoccupation with the Wellsian
disaster narrative. Although there were many fine writers of what Brian
Aldiss somewhat dismissively termed the ‘cosy catastrophe’,6 the best

exemplar – John Wyndham – is also the most popular. In The Day of
the Triffids (1951) and The Chrysalids (1955) he presented a situation
in which normality is suddenly and disastrously disrupted and a small
group of survivors are forced to find a way of establishing stability in a
world unmade by events. These novels caught precisely the mood of a
colourless, impoverished and newly powerless Britain.
The other major writer of the period, Arthur C. Clarke, matched
his peers, Asimov and Heinlein, in his use of the bright machinery
of the future and the exotic settings of other worlds. However, he
combined the hard sf mode with the aesthetic of the catastrophe nar-
rative. Childhood’s End (1953) sees humankind transformed to join an
advanced spacefaring civilization, an apotheosis made tonally darker
by the fact that the aliens facilitating humanity’s ‘uplift’ appear as the
demons of Christian mythology. The climax remains one of the most
emotionally unsettling in science fiction. Clarke’s later novel, The City
and the Stars (1956), features an elegiac account of the last city on Earth
which anticipates the nature of his most famous work, 2001, A Space
Odyssey (1968), a further narrative of transcendence characterized by
themes of loss and loneliness.
The thematic and stylistic stability of Anglo-American sf was under
assault from May 1964 when the long-established British magazine
New Worlds acquired a new editor. Michael Moorcock was still only
in his mid-twenties when he accepted the post but he was already an
experienced editor and a prolific author. Moreover, he was in tune with
the pop culture movement that was then creating ‘Swinging London’.
Through New Worlds he would oversee a new mode of sf as revolution-
ary in its way as the counterculture of which it became a part. Although
presented as a counterblast to the ‘cosy catastrophe’, the best of the New
Wave (so called in reference to the French ‘nouvelle vague’ cinema)
writers continued to employ catastrophe as their central image; it was,
rather, a counterattack to the brash certainties and glittering futures of
contemporary American science fiction. Embracing contemporary anti-
establishment attitudes and the psychedelic possibilities of the emer-
gent drug culture, abandoning outer space for what they called ‘inner
space’,7 featuring characters more likely to be overwhelmed by events
in contrast to Heinlein’s ‘competent man’, and using techniques often
lifted wholesale from literary modernism that had, to this moment,
been largely ignored by sf, New Worlds became a home for experimental
fictions. In the way of such things, many, if not most of the experi-
ments failed. But a number of writers responded vigorously to the freer
atmosphere thus established, particularly Brian Aldiss and J.G. Ballard.

Aldiss’s Greybeard (1964) is a chill novel set in an emptying, childless
future and Barefoot in the Head (1969) provides a surreal, stylistically
innovative narrative set in the aftermath of a war using hallucinogens
(the ‘Acid Head War’) in which fractured language reflects the fractured
reality. In The Crystal World (1966), one of a series of physical and psy-
chological disaster novels, and The Atrocity Exhibition (1969), another
work in which fractured narrative is used to illustrate individual break-
down in the face of a media-dominated world, Ballard began to erode
the distinction between sf and mainstream or literary fiction. His com-
plex accounts of psychic disjuncture, alienation and self-destructiveness
introduced a modernist interiority rarely seen in subsequent sf.
If Aldiss and Ballard were the most literary writers of the New Wave
(and, indeed, they have continued to produce highly respected work,
though some of their most acclaimed fiction has been outside the
genre), the two works that perhaps best represent this period are John
Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), which reproduced the structure and
devices of John Dos Passos’s high modernist work USA (1938) in a story
of an overpopulated Earth, and ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’ by
Pamela Zoline (1967) which used entropy as a metaphor for the mental
disintegration of a housewife oppressed by the domesticity expected of
her under patriarchy. The continuing influence of the New Wave, par-
ticularly in more fluent use of literary techniques, is seen in the ongoing
fiction of Keith Roberts (Pavane, 1968; The Chalk Giants, 1974), M. John
Harrison (The Centauri Device, 1975; Light, 2002) and Christopher Priest
(Inverted World, 1974; The Affirmation, 1981).
Two editors, Judith Merril (England Swings SF, 1968) and Harlan
Ellison (Dangerous Visions, 1967) brought the literary ambitions and
practices of the New Wave to America. But the American New Wave was
distinctly different from that in Britain. Though there was still a sense
of literary experiment, the primary impulse seemed to be a breaking of
the taboos that had, often unconsciously, operated in American science
fiction since the 1920s, in particular concerning the portrayal of sex,
politics and religion. Some of the generation of writers who had begun
to emerge during the 1950s, such as Robert Silverberg (Son of Man, 1971;
Dying Inside, 1972) and Harlan Ellison (‘“Repent, Harlequin!” said the
Ticktockman’, 1965; ‘A Boy and His Dog’, 1969), embraced the new
freedoms; others reacted strongly against the New Wave. Unlike the
situation in Britain, where the New Wave was much less controversial
among writers, in the US controversy over the New Wave lasted for
much of the late 1960s.
The New Wave writers who made most impact were those who
emerged from the movement rather than those who simply adapted to
it. These included Samuel R. Delany, who brought poetic sensibilities
and the experience of being a black homosexual to novels that had a
powerful effect on the field, including Nova (1968) which grafted images
of the Grail Quest onto a space opera format, and Dhalgren (1975) which
took his literary experimentation even further in an account of a city
cut off from the world by an unknown disaster.
In many ways, however, the most important work to emerge from
American sf at this time was by writers who built on the freedoms
initiated by the New Wave without really being a part of it. Ursula K.
Le Guin, in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), forced her audience to
consider gender differences in a way that science fiction had never con-
templated before. In The Dispossessed (1974), she interrogated notions
of utopia in an equally uncompromising fashion. Joanna Russ’s The
Female Man (1975) examined attitudes to sex and the role of women in
four parallel worlds. And, in a series of extraordinary stories of which
the most notable is probably ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ (1973), James
Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon) completely overturned science fiction’s default
masculine perceptions of gender roles. The feminist science fiction that
flowed from these origins to exploit sf’s potential for social, sexual and
political estrangement, has had a lasting effect on the genre, encour-
aging more and more women to write sf and ensuring that writers as
varied as Josephine Saxton (Queen of the States, 1986), Karen Joy Fowler
(Sarah Canary, 1991), Sheri Tepper (Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, 1996) and
Kelly Link (Stranger Things Happen, 2001) remain powerful and highly
regarded voices in contemporary sf.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s traditional hard sf and even, to an
extent, space opera continued to play a significant part in American
science fiction, particularly through writers like Gregory Benford (In
the Ocean of Night, 1976; Timescape, 1980), David Brin (Sundiver, 1980)
and John Varley (The Ophiuchi Hotline, 1977), and through the com-
bination of military sf and romance typified by Lois McMaster Bujold
(The Warrior’s Apprentice, 1986). The popularity of this mode of sf was
boosted during the 1970s by the continuing support for Star Trek even
after it had been cancelled in 1969, and then again by the massive suc-
cess of Star Wars in 1977. It continues to be the basis for much science
fiction on film and television, especially when spectacle is privileged
over content.
At first, the new form of sf that emerged in the early 1980s seemed
like a continuation of hard sf, featuring as it did vivid portrayals of the
future and obsessive interest in new technologies. But in fact cyberpunk

owed as much to the British tradition of catastrophe story (Ballard and
Brunner were cited as influences) and to American noir crime thrill-
ers. This blending of styles, and the fact that certain of the cyberpunks
explicitly referenced the work of authors like Thomas Pynchon, who
would return the compliment in his own fictions, has helped identify
cyberpunk as postmodern science fiction.8 The archetypal cyberpunk
novel, Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984), was set in ‘the Sprawl’, a
near-future and rundown super city, a far more real presence than the
glittering digital world accessed by its characters through computers.
There is a similar sense of the world running down and the virtual and
digital realms offering at best not an answer but a means of avoidance
in Synners by Pat Cadigan (1991), Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992)
and Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling (1988), the leading ideologue for
cyberpunk and editor of the definitive anthology, Mirrorshades (1986).
At the time, much was made of a presumed clash between the cyber-
punks and the so-called humanists, though this quarrel was largely arti-
ficial. In fact, though the humanists tended to eschew the computer and
its associations, their views of the future and sense of a world at the end
of its tether, politically, socially, morally and ecologically, were remarkably
similar. The humanists probably draw their inspiration mostly from the
work of Gene Wolfe, whose tetralogy, The Book of the New Sun (1980–83),
is one of the finest works of postwar science fiction. Linguistically and
structurally complex, it is the story of a quest for spiritual renewal in a
distant and debased future. The writer most commonly associated with
the humanists is Kim Stanley Robinson, whose monumental Mars Trilogy
(1992–96) describes how humanity brings its foibles and disputes to Mars
even as it is remaking the planet into a pristine new home.
Cyberpunk, as a movement, lasted little more than a decade, human-
ism even less, yet their joint influence on science fiction still informs
contemporary sf. In particular, visions of a digital reality have fed into
a literature of posthumanity. In novels such as Diaspora by Greg Egan
(1997) and Accelerando by Charles Stross (2005) people are downloaded
into digital storage to be revived after death, transformed into other
shapes, transported as information across the heavens. Even in works
considerably less cavalier than these, contemporary science fiction is
full of transformed humanity. In Air by Geoff Ryman (2005), one of
the most sensitive and humane works of sf in recent years, a woman in
a remote central Asian village finds she has a direct mental link to the
World Wide Web, and the novel relates how, for good and ill, this intru-
sion of the modern overturns a traditional way of life.
Egan is Australian, Stross British and Ryman a Canadian resident

in the UK: recent years have seen a shift in focus away from America
(where sf seemed to undergo an apparent but brief stagnation around
the turn of the millennium) and towards Britain, apostrophized as the
‘British renaissance’. British sf had undergone its own stagnation during
the 1970s (the only writers of note to emerge in this decade were Ian
Watson, Robert Holdstock and, belatedly, Christopher Evans). A new
British magazine, Interzone (launched 1982), initially did little to change
this; early issues were too in thrall to the model of New Worlds or, after
1984, to the influence of American cyberpunk. But it did provide a
market for newer British writers; and a call for ‘radical hard sf’,9 though
ill-defined, seemed to presage a change of tone in British science fiction.
At first this took the form of a reclamation of the genre’s past. Take Back
Plenty by Colin Greenland (1990) reworks the planetary romance with
very modern sensibilities; the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks, begin-
ning with Consider Phlebas (1987), are space operas set in an energy-rich
and essentially left-wing utopian future; and the Fall Revolution quartet
by Ken MacLeod, beginning with The Star Fraction (1995), are loosely
linked near-future novels overlaid with different forms of socialist
philosophy.
By the mid-1990s there was clearly a new confidence in British science
fiction, often shown by an openness to new approaches. Postcolonial
ideas, for instance, have proved fertile ground as shown by the Aleutian
Trilogy by Gwyneth Jones, beginning with White Queen (1991); the
Arabesk Trilogy by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, beginning with Pashazade
(2001); and River of Gods by Ian McDonald (2004). More often, however,
this openness has manifested itself as an infusion of other generic styles
into sf. Paul McAuley, author of Fairyland (1995), an intriguing, vital
novel of genetic engineering, later turned to the thriller, eventually
combining it with sf to produce Cowboy Angels (2007). Stephen Baxter,
so clearly the natural heir of Arthur C. Clarke that the two have collabo-
rated on a number of novels, and whose novels have such a cosmic scale
that they often include the end of the human race, has also written
historical fiction, combining the two in Coalescent (2003). More usually
it is fantasy and horror that have combined with sf, notably in Perdido
Street Station by China Miéville (2000), resulting in a hybrid form that
has been christened ‘New Weird’.
Along with New Weird an unusual number of movements have
been started or identified within sf over the last decade, including new
hard sf, new space opera, mundane sf (proposed by Geoff Ryman and
involving a fusion of mainstream and science fiction sensibilities),
interstitial arts (the literature that, supposedly, occupies the interstices

between genres), and more. These have tended towards dubious expan-
sions of older forms (the new space opera appears to include a number
of works that are clearly not space operas), or fusions of sf with, for
instance, postmodernism. It is notable that among the new generation
of American writers now starting to emerge, the trend has been to fol-
low established forms, such as military sf (Old Man’s War by John Scalzi,
2005; Hammered by Elizabeth Bear, 2005), space opera (Ragamuffin by
Tobias Buckell, 2007), or steampunk (Mainspring by Jay Lake, 2007).
Nevertheless one cannot help feeling that this proliferation of move-
ments, this claimed renewal of the core of the genre, disguises a pro-
found unease and uncertainty about the role and position of science
fiction in the new century. Certainly the signs are ambiguous: magazine
sales are in free fall but new venues for short fiction, particularly on
the internet, are expanding; fantasy now takes up far more shelf space
in bookshops than sf, but new specialist small presses are appearing all
the time.
If this history has given the impression that science fiction in the
twentieth century has been an entirely Anglophone affair, that is far
from being the case. Stanislaw Lem from Poland, the Strugatski broth-
ers from Russia, and Pierre Boulle from France have all made significant
contributions to the genre, and probably the biggest selling series of all
has been that of Perry Rhodan from Germany. But generally sf writers
not working in English have been hampered by poor or nonexistent
translations. With the new century, however, there has been a revival
of interest in non-Anglophone writers, including Johanna Sinisalo from
Finland (Not Before Sundown, 2000), Stefan Brijs from Holland (The Angel
Maker, 2005), and others from Russia, France and Japan, so perhaps the
twenty-first century will see science fiction recognized as the world
literature it always was.
Notes
1. For a more thorough development of this approach to science fiction, see Paul
Kincaid, ‘On the Origins of Genre’, Extrapolation, 44:4 (2003): 409–19.
2. Defining science fiction as being characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-
Gothic mode, Aldiss argued that ‘science fiction was born in the heart and
crucible of the English Romantic movement in exile in Switzerland, when
the wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote Frankenstein: or, The Modern
Prometheus’ (see Aldiss, Billion Year Spree [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1973] 3). Many later commentators have accepted this proposed origin of
science fiction.
3. In the 1818 edition, Elizabeth and Frankenstein are cousins, in the later
edition they are strangers. For a discussion of this and other changes, see
Timothy Morton, ed., Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Sourcebook (London:
Routledge, 2002).
4. ‘Scientifiction’ was the term Hugo Gernsback coined for the sort of fiction
he published in Amazing Stories (1926 onwards), but it never enjoyed wide
popularity.
5. Smith later revised the unrelated Triplanetary (1934) to open the series.
6. Aldiss remarks, ‘It was then that [Wyndham] embarked on the course that
was to make him master of the cosy catastrophe’ (see Billion Year Spree, 335).
Privately, Aldiss has since insisted that he meant the term to apply only to
The Day of the Triffids, though the context of this quotation would imply
otherwise.
7. As J.G. Ballard put it, ‘The biggest developments of the immediate future will
take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not
outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth’ (see
Ballard, ‘Which Way to Inner Space’, New Worlds, 118 [1962]: 2–3 and 116–18;
reprinted in A User’s Guide to the Millennium [London: HarperCollins, 1996]
195–8 at 197). Italics in original.
8. See Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992)
225–42.
9. See David Pringle and Colin Greenland ‘Editorial’, Interzone, 7 (1984): 2.
2
Theorizing Science Fiction: The
Question of Terminology
Gary K. Wolfe
In a controversial review in the January 1983 Magazine of Fantasy and

Science Fiction, Algis Budrys, a noted science fiction writer who had
become one of the field’s most respected reviewers, claimed that ‘the
formal scholarship of speculative fiction is, taken in the whole, worth-
less’.1 Quoting a passage from the distinguished Yale University scholar
Harold Bloom in the volume under review, Budrys claimed it was
‘not directed at anyone outside a tight circle who all share the same
vocabulary and the same library’. The would-be literary scholar, Budrys
argued, is forced to read more criticism than actual literature, or would
be in danger of losing ‘his grip on the nomenclature’. Budrys wasn’t the
first professional science fiction writer to express scepticism toward the
sometimes arcane-sounding language of literary scholarship; such con-
cerns were expressed repeatedly during the 1970s not only by science
fiction fans, but by professional writers and editors including Lloyd
Biggle Jr, William Tenn, Ben Bova and Lester del Rey.2 And some of
the leading academic scholars of the field also seemed to acknowledge
that there was a problem; as early as 1976 R.D. Mullen, in the journal
Science-Fiction Studies, reviewed a new academic study under the title
‘Every Critic His Own Aristotle’ – suggesting that nearly every author
of a theoretical or critical study of the genre found it necessary to
invent terms or assign new definitions to old ones as a means of
staking a claim to originality3 – and in his acceptance address for the
1984 Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association
(the longest-standing award for scholarship in the field), editor
Everett F. Bleiler complained, ‘Our terms have become muddled,
imprecise, and heretical in the derivational sense of the word.’ Even
such ubiquitous terms as ‘science fiction’, ‘fantasy’, ‘Gothic’ and
‘utopia’ lack commonly accepted meanings, he argued, and anyone
38
Theorizing Science Fiction: The Question of Terminology 39
undertaking extended reading in this area of scholarship would even

today find much to support his complaint.4
In the university classroom this problem may be exacerbated in even
more fundamental ways. Students may arrive equipped with the notion
that science fiction encompasses an almost incoherent range of any
sort of non-realistic fiction, from Huxley’s Brave New World to Stephenie
Meyers’s teen vampire novels; or that it is principally a market category
for film and television and video games; or that it somehow involves
UFOs and pseudoscience; or that (in the case of the occasional serious
devotee who shows up) it should properly be limited to a handful of
favourite writers in the traditions of Heinlein, Asimov or Clarke. Adding
to the confusion is the vocabulary of traditional terminology they may
bring with them from earlier literature classes, which may incline them
to view all science fiction according to familiar categories such as alle-
gory or satire, or in terms of specific critical methodologies they may
have encountered, from structuralism to postcolonialism. Beginning
such a class by surveying the students’ various notions of what they
think it is that they will be reading can be a useful and often enlighten-
ing exercise, both by way of introducing a discussion of problems of
definition and as preparation for the students’ later encounters, in their
own research, with the sometimes idiosyncratic critical vocabulary that
has evolved in science fiction scholarship.
When one begins to explore how this critical and theoretical vocabu-
lary evolved, it’s not surprising that the 1970s and 1980s should have
become something of a boiling point. Far from being the ‘tight circle’ of
initiates that Budrys alluded to in his review, the scholarship of the fan-
tastic had by then begun more to resemble an intellectual flea market,
with various methodologies, values, definitions and even primary texts
competing for the attention of scholars from disparate backgrounds
who seemed unable even to agree upon what it is they were talking
about. In my own glossary, Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy
(1986), I tracked down some thirty-three separate definitions of ‘science
fiction’, often contradictory, often clearly at cross-purposes with one
another.5 In the little more than two decades since, it would almost
certainly be easy to track down another two or three dozen definitions,
adding to the confusion even further.6
Is science fiction a body of works with common characteristics and, if
so, what are those characteristics? Almost any we can name will likely
be greeted with lists of exceptions from knowledgeable readers. If we say
it involves the future, what do we do with the vast number of generally
accepted works set in the past, or the present, or in a secret history or
alternate reality? If we say it involves scientific inventions or develop-

ments, what do we do with the equally large number of texts that make
no specific reference to the sciences at all, or with stories not generally
accepted as science fiction but that nevertheless deal with science? And
if we do claim that it’s a body of specific works, when do we begin
counting – as far back as Plato (as some anthologists and historians have
done), or with eighteenth-century Swiftian satire, or with late Gothic-
era novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (famously cited by science
fiction novelist Brian Aldiss as the first real work of science fiction7),
or with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, or as late as the early twentieth
century, when it clearly became a self-aware tradition with its own pulp
magazines (as is claimed by science fiction historian Gary Westfahl8)?
Or do we claim it’s not really a specific set of texts at all, but rather an
attitude, a way of looking at the world, a set of reading protocols that
may have as much to do with how we read a text as with what the text
contains? The latter argument, advanced by author Samuel R. Delany,9
has become influential in postmodern discussions of the genre, and
in fact implies that science fiction isn’t really a genre at all. But other
critics have also offered approaches that try to define the field in terms
other than the material content of its stories; one of the most influential
is Darko Suvin’s ‘estrangement’ and ‘cognition’, both of which terms
could, individually, apply to a wide range of literature, but which joined
together serve to focus the discussion on works in which the estranged
world presented in the text can be understood or ‘explained’ through
cognitive processes. Suvin’s only specific requirement as to a work’s
content is that its ‘main formal device is an imaginative framework
alternative to the author’s empirical environment’.10
Part of the reason for this confusion is that the language we use to
discuss modern science fiction and fantasy derives from a number of
very different traditions of discourse, and from three in particular: the
terminology of fandom, the terminology of professional writers and
editors, and the terminology of scholars and academics. Fandom, which
may be defined as a very loosely organized subset of science fiction’s
readership, began critical discussions of science fiction in the letters to
the editor columns of the early pulp magazines, and soon moved on to
creating its own fanzines and even reference works. While much of its
terminology is coyly self-referential (describing the behaviour and atti-
tudes of fans themselves), it also gave us a number of terms which have
survived to describe specific traditions or themes within science fiction
(such as ‘space opera’ or ‘future war story’). The professional commu-
nity – which for much of science fiction’s history has overlapped the
fan community – developed its own shorthand for particular themes

and techniques, both within the fiction itself and in various reviews,
essays and workshops; many of these terms have also entered the
general vocabulary of sf criticism, such as ‘speculative fiction’ or ‘alter-
nate history’. Academia, which also overlaps to some degree with the
professional community, came into the discussion fairly late – the first
academic journals didn’t get underway until the 1960s and 1970s, and
the first university press studies of the genre began appearing about the
same time – bringing with it entirely new terms of critical discourse,
some imported from literary scholarship – ‘estrangement’, ‘fabulation’,
‘dialectic’, ‘postmodernism’; some invented in order to describe
a literary tradition that couldn’t fully be accommodated by a critical
vocabulary that had largely evolved to discuss the long-dominant tra-
dition of social realism in fiction; some imported from related fields
of the social sciences or from such interdisciplinary domains as myth
study, semiotics, popular culture, structuralism, feminism, queer theory,
postcolonialism and postmodernism.
This is the situation that had evolved when Budrys wrote his scathing
review in 1983; what some welcomed as the ‘academic awakening’ to
science fiction became in the view of others the ‘academic invasion’.
Scholars complained that terms from fandom, such as ‘extrapola-
tion’ or ‘sense of wonder’, were imprecise and faddish, while fans
and writers complained that academics wrote only for Budrys’s ‘tight
circle who all share the same vocabulary and the same library’. What
was originally a publishing term such as ‘pulp’ confusingly may refer
to a kind of cheap paper stock, the prose printed on it, the assump-
tions underlying that prose, or any authors (even of the modern era)
who partake of those assumptions. A term such as this may also carry
widely varying connotations: for a fan writer, ‘pulp’ may invoke a
‘Golden Age’ (another rubbery term), while to a traditional scholar,
it may refer to one of the genre’s worst embarrassments. ‘Myth’ may
mean a specific mechanism of cultural organization to one group of
scholars or a primitive story to another; for some fans it might be a
buzzword to invoke cultural legitimacy for a favourite genre (as in the
once-common claim that science fiction is a kind of contemporary
mythology). Each group, of course, claims to be speaking English
while the others are hopelessly mired in self-indulgent jargon. Each
group, to some extent, uses its language to create and maintain a com-
munity of initiates.
Even today, these multiple etymologies are reflected in dictionaries
and reference works in the field. Jeff Prucher’s Brave New Words: The
Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (2007) includes words and phrases

coined by science fiction writers in their own stories, fannish lingo
(some all but obsolescent), publishing terminology and the occasional
academic term. John Clute and Peter Nicholls’s magisterial Encyclopedia
of Science Fiction (1993) does the same, but adds many coinages that are
either original or were rarely used earlier (such as ‘fix-up’ or ‘conceptual
breakthrough’). Neil Barron’s library reference work Anatomy of Wonder
(5th edition, 2004) includes a ‘theme index’ which conflates terms
drawn from general literary scholarship (‘Absurdist SF’, ‘Pastoral’) with
terms likely known only to science fiction readers (‘Steampunk’, ‘Space
Opera’). It quickly begins to seem that anyone wanting to participate
in the critical discourse on science fiction must begin by mastering
multiple sets of codes and code-words, a problem further exacerbated
by the significant number of critical neologisms that emerge as critics
and scholars, finding little in the way of consensus terminology, simply
concoct their own. Some of these coinages, such as Suvin’s ‘cognitive
estrangement’, have gained wide currency, while others, such as ‘span
fiction’ (a term suggested by Peter Brigg for mainstream writers using
science fiction devices11) or ‘fabril’ (suggested by Tom Shippey for a
broad tradition of non-pastoral literature which includes science fic-
tion12) have barely survived beyond their original appearances.
How, then, is a student encountering this complex and some-
times thorny tradition of discourse supposed to learn the lingo? One
approach might be to begin by asking which particular aspects of sci-
ence fiction have, in the minds of critics and scholars, created the need
for a more specialized critical vocabulary in addition to that found in
more traditional glossaries and handbooks to literary study. We might
then be able to identify specific critical issues reflected in these emerg-
ing vocabularies. Broadly speaking, we can suggest five such issues or
domains: definition, or genre theory; classification, or taxonomies of the
literature and its subgenres; theme, or characteristic recurrent motifs
and topics treated within the genre; context, or the location of the genre
within larger historical or methodological approaches; and technique, or
the manner in which literary devices or mechanisms are used within
the genre. (This list does not include terms associated with fannish
activity, such as ‘filk’ or ‘gafiate’.)
Terms of definition
Perhaps the most widely cited ‘definition’ of science fiction is author

and critic Damon Knight’s ‘what we point to when we say it’ (1952),13
and the very tautology implicit in Knight’s deceptively offhand wise-

crack suggests that even in the early days of science fiction criticism it
was already apparent that the game of trying to pin down a universally
acceptable set of conditions for the genre was a treacherous one. Any
single definition seemed to imply an entire conceptual history of the
field, and as a result a number of scholars found themselves trying to
parse the term, arguing for example (as Roger Luckhurst and Adam
Roberts have recently done14) that at least some vaguely contemporary
notion of ‘science’ was a precondition for anything that could be called
science fiction. These same critics recognize that ‘science fiction’ itself
is a somewhat arbitrary label, however, and that the phrase evolved as
a term of convenience rather than as a manifesto. In fact, when one
looks at a great many of the definitions offered through the past century
or so, it becomes apparent that the nature of the definition depends
almost entirely on its purpose and its audience – some are purely func-
tional, some rhetorical and some theoretical– and that trying to adapt a
definition intended for one purpose to the service of another can lead
to misprision and confusion.
Functional definitions are entirely practical in nature. When, in 1926,
editor Hugo Gernsback described the characteristic story of his pioneer-
ing pulp magazine Amazing Stories as a ‘charming romance intermingled
with scientific fact and prophetic vision’,15 he was in all likelihood
merely trying to differentiate his magazine from other pulps for the
benefit of readers and potential contributors – in other words, he was
at least in part staking out his market. When a later editor, John W.
Campbell Jr, described the field as ‘the literature of speculation as to
what changes may come’,16 and argued that a good science fiction story
should read like a realistic tale to a hypothetical reader in its implied
setting, he was similarly differentiating his magazine, Astounding Science
Fiction, from earlier adventure-oriented pulps like Gernsback’s. Similarly,
when editor David Hartwell introduced his first Year’s Best Science Fiction
anthology in 1996 by describing its contents as stories ‘a chronic reader
would recognize as SF’,17 he was deliberately placing himself in opposi-
tion to earlier ‘best of’ annuals (notably those of Gardner Dozois) which
he felt had diluted the definition of the field excessively. In all these
cases, definitions served essentially as admissions criteria for books
and magazines – what should or should not, for practical purposes, be
counted as science fiction. Editors, publishers, booksellers, even film
and TV producers have tended to define the term in such a purely func-
tional, market-driven way, seldom pausing to consider if their use of the
term implied any sort of theoretical or philosophical consistency. To a
great extent, Knight’s ‘what we point to when we say it’ is this sort of
definition, as is author Norman Spinrad’s later variation, ‘Science fiction
is anything published as science fiction.’18
Rhetorical definitions more often come from practising writers in the
field, some with a particular axe to grind, and are meant to be persuasive
rather than scholarly. When Theodore Sturgeon, one of the most human-
istic of pulp-era science fiction writers, defined science fiction as ‘a story
built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solu-
tion, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content’
(1951),19 he was clearly arguing for the primacy of fiction over science,
of humanistic concerns over scientific ideas or pure pulp adventure.
(Sturgeon later commented that, although this had been widely quoted
as a general definition of the genre, he had intended it as the definition
of a good science fiction story.) But when Robert Heinlein, more often
associated with the ‘hard’ school of science fiction, described it as ‘real-
istic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate
knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough under-
standing of the nature and significance of the scientific method’ (1957),20
he was offering a kind of counter-argument to Sturgeon by demanding
‘adequate knowledge’ and understanding of the scientific method. Both
Sturgeon and Heinlein were essentially describing their own fiction, but
they were also trying to nudge the field in a certain direction: at the time
Sturgeon was writing, the sometimes sloppily written adventure pulps
were still dominant in the field, and by the time Heinlein was writing a
few years later, one of the most popular ‘science fiction’ writers to have
emerged in the 1950s was Ray Bradbury, who was notorious for his cava-
lier attitude toward science and the scientific method.
Theoretical definitions are more deliberately formal and academic in
nature, and are generally less prescriptive than functional or rhetorical
definitions. Even for a professional scholar, however, there is an ele-
ment of functionality in any such definition, a way of delimiting the
texts to be discussed. J.O. Bailey’s Pilgrims through Space and Time (1947),
widely regarded as the first academic study of science fiction (and
almost certainly the first to be based on a doctoral dissertation; Bailey’s
was originally written in 1934), described a science fiction story as ‘a
narrative of an imaginary invention or discovery in the natural sciences
and consequent adventures and experiences’.21 While this might have
seemed unnaturally restrictive even in the 1940s, it served to alert the
reader (and presumably Bailey’s doctoral committee) to his principle of
selecting the particular works to be discussed. Historical studies such as
Bailey’s (or later studies by such authors as Brian Aldiss, Edward James,
Roger Luckhurst and Adam Roberts) have all faced similar problems,
and have thus characteristically evaded the temptation to begin with
a formal definition. ‘I will certainly not make the mistake of trying to
begin, or conclude, with a simple definition’, writes Edward James,22
while Adam Roberts concedes that ‘This study has been unable to avoid
the often tedious debates concerning “definition”’, but goes on to say
that ‘my aim is to present a historically determined narrative of the
genre’s evolution rather than offering an apophthegmatic version of the
sentence “SF is such-and-such”’.23
By the late 1960s, however, science fiction had begun to come to the
attention of more formalist theoreticians from both inside and outside
the genre, and two of the most enduring such critical models were pre-
sented at the same convention of the Modern Language Association in
New York in 1968: author Samuel R. Delany’s argument that the genre
could be defined at the syntactical level and by means of its level of
‘subjunctivity’, and Darko Suvin’s definition as a literature of ‘cognitive
estrangement’ (later developed at book length in his 1979 Metamorphoses
of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre). There
followed decades of spirited debate on the formal characteristics of the
genre, drawing the participation of both ‘mainstream’ theorists like
Robert Scholes and Eric Rabkin and of practising writers such as Joanna
Russ and Damien Broderick. For the most part, these more formalist defi-
nitions fell into two broad camps: those which focused on the interac-
tions between text and reader that were peculiar to science fiction (such
as Delany’s or Suvin’s or Carl Malmgren’s narratological approach in his
1991 Worlds Apart: Narratology of Science Fiction) – a variation on reader-
response criticism – and those which focused on the differences between
science fiction and other kinds of texts (such as Rabkin’s locating science
fiction along a spectrum of works ranging from less to more fantastic,
in The Fantastic in Literature, 1976; or Brian Attebery’s adaptation of the
logicians’ notion of ‘fuzzy sets’, with groups of fantastic works defined
more by their centres than by rigid perimeters, in his Strategies of Fantasy,
199224). Both approaches can generate useful methodologies, even if
neither can quite claim to be definitive.
Terms of classification
Even the earliest readers of the pulp magazines quickly recognized

that their favourite stories were falling into discernible types – space
operas, time travel, marvellous inventions, ‘superscience’ – and by the
time science fiction stories began to be widely anthologized in the late
1940s, such categories proved convenient means of organizing the con-

tents. One of the very first such anthologies, Groff Conklin’s The Best
of Science Fiction (1946), clearly reflected both the dominant concerns
of its era and the types of stories which were available: the anthology
is divided into sections titled ‘The Atom’, ‘The Wonders of Earth and
Man’, ‘The Superscience of Man’, ‘Dangerous Inventions’, ‘Adventures
in Dimension’ and ‘From Outer Space’. Conklin later went on to edit
anthologies focused entirely on such common themes – invasions of
earth, mutations, different dimensions, ‘thinking machines’, giants or
supermen. Again, these were mostly terms of convenience rather than
theoretical constructs, but the work of Conklin and other anthologists
represented an early effort toward creating a typology of science fiction
stories based on theme and content, and such typologies still show up
occasionally in textbook anthologies and teaching guides. This almost
folkloristic approach to recurring motifs can be useful in approaching
large bodies of mostly undistinguished fiction, such as the early pulps,
and one of the most ambitious such motif-indexes appears in Everett F.
Bleiler and Richard Bleiler’s Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years, which
summarizes more than 1800 stories from pulp magazines between 1926
and 1936, offering a detailed theme index of more than 30,000 entries
and citations.
But such an approach can be confusing as a critical methodology,
since science fiction texts may be classified not only by theme, but by
form, by historical period, by specific historical movements, or even by
narrative strategy. The theme index to Neil Barron’s Anatomy of Wonder,
mentioned earlier, conflates (but does not define) terms adapted from
mainstream literary study (absurdist sf, dystopia, pastoral), terms
describing subgenres of science fiction (hard sf, space opera, science fan-
tasy), terms referring to broad universal themes (sex, ecology, coming
of age, crime and punishment), terms identifying specific movements
within science fiction (feminist sf, cyberpunk, steampunk, New Wave),
and themes characteristic of sf in particular (parallel worlds, robots,
space flight, clones). While the purpose of this index is merely to enable
the reader to track down certain works in the annotated bibliography
that constitutes the bulk of the book, and not to serve as a proposed tax-
onomy of the genre, it nevertheless illustrates the hazards of attempting
to create classifications within such a diffuse and evolving field.
Complicating the issue further is that terms often change their mean-
ing or connotation over time. ‘Space opera’, coined by Wilson Tucker
in 1941 to refer to the cliché-ridden ‘hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn
spaceship yarn’,25 later became a term of nostalgia in anthologies such
as Brian W. Aldiss’s Space Opera (1974), and still later, under the rubric
‘new space opera’, a term to describe a comparatively sophisticated liter-
ary movement in which authors used the basic template of the old form
for more complex and literary explorations of the possibilities of science
fiction. ‘New Wave’ originally referred mainly to a group of writers asso-
ciated with the British New Worlds magazine in the 1960s, but was soon
expanded to include writers on both sides of the Atlantic interested in
literary and thematic experimentation, and now is often used to refer
to an entire era in the history of science fiction. Similarly, ‘cyberpunk’
originally referred to a relatively short-lived movement among a limited
group of writers in the mid-1980s, but later expanded beyond science
fiction altogether to refer to a collective set of cultural attitudes regard-
ing information theory and biotechnology, and now is sometimes used
to refer to almost any reflection of these attitudes in fiction; what was
once a movement has become a mode.
Terms of theme
As should be evident from the Anatomy of Wonder theme index cited

above, terms used to refer to specific recurring themes in science fiction
may be closely related to terms of classification, and the resulting confu-
sion raises interesting questions about the nature of subgenres within
the field. Is ‘military science fiction’ an actual subgenre (even though
it’s often marketed that way), or does it simply refer to any science fic-
tion with military themes? Does ‘planetary romance’ simply refer to a
story’s setting, or does it describe a particular set of works with common
characteristics? Some themes in science fiction (robots, space travel,
genetic engineering, aliens, time travel) are so ubiquitous as to support
any variety of story-types, while others (future war, alternate history,
dystopia, disaster) may refer to specific traditions, often pre-dating
modern science fiction itself and including works not usually regarded
as science fiction in the contemporary sense. For example, I.F. Clarke’s
Voices Prophesying War (1966; rev. edn 1992) discusses future war narra-
tives dating back to 1763, while bibliographies of utopian and dystopian
literature disaster tales might be traced all the way back to Gilgamesh or
the biblical story of the flood. The question of when a theme becomes
coherent enough, and supports enough recurrent structures or tropes,
to become a subgenre, can be a fairly thorny one, and perhaps one more
easily recognized by the market than by the theorist.
Computers and artificial intelligence, for obvious examples, have
become such a fixture of science fiction that it would be useless to
attempt to identify a subgenre of ‘computer stories’, yet some aspects

of computers and information theory have indeed begun to generate
identifiable traditions. The concept of virtual reality, with its attend-
ant conceit of the possibility of uploading one’s entire personality,
has nearly led to a school of novels and stories dealing with a possible
posthuman condition, often following a kind of transformative ‘sin-
gularity’ (a term adapted by writer Vernor Vinge from physics); simi-
larly, worlds radically transformed by nanotechnology have become
almost common enough to suggest a type. Such concepts may remain
highly speculative in the real world, but they have long since become
common themes in science fiction. Conversely, some once-common
themes, such as ‘psionics’, telepathy, or mutants, have almost faded
into historical curiosities, reflecting the obsessions of the genre at
a specific period in its history (in this case, the 1940s and 1950s in
particular).
Another theme which has virtually become a subgenre unto itself is
alternate history, with authors such as Harry Turtledove, S.M. Stirling
and Robert Conroy writing what are essentially historical novels involv-
ing key changes in the historical record; to a great extent, such novels
have found a readership far beyond, and not entirely congruent with,
that of science fiction. At the same time, the theme remains popular
within science fiction, with authors frequently presenting multiple
alternate timelines within the same narrative (such as Paul McAuley’s
2007 Cowboy Angels) or positing artificial ‘pocket universes’, which can
have the effect of generating alternate universes. This in turn leads to
another tangle of confusing terms – ‘alternate history’, which is coming
increasingly to refer to stories which diverge from our own history at
a particular ‘jonbar point’ (a term borrowed from a 1938 story by Jack
Williamson), must be distinguished from ‘alternate universe’, which
refers to the possibility referred to in quantum theory of completely dif-
ferent universes existing alongside ours (including the pocket universes
mentioned above) and ‘alternate reality’, which permits a wide variety
of devices, including universes which exist entirely within the mind of a
character (as in Philip K. Dick’s 1955 novel Eye in the Sky) or even within
a text. All these, in turn, are different from ‘secret history’, a phrase
sometimes used to describe stories in which fantastic or science fictional
events are worked seamlessly (one hopes) into the actual historical
record (such as Jack Dann’s The Memory Cathedral, 1996, dealing with
missing years from the life of Leonardo da Vinci). Clearly, such terms
continue to evolve, and to spin off yet more specialized subthemes and
subgenres.
Terms of context
When, in their literary history Trillion Year Spree, Aldiss and Wingrove
described science fiction as ‘characteristically cast in the Gothic or
post-Gothic mode’,26 they were attempting to locate it in the context
of an earlier literary movement or genre, much as Sam Moskowitz and
Donald Wollheim had when they earlier described it (independently of
one another) as a ‘branch of fantasy’.27 Unlike terms that seek to anato-
mize science fiction based on its internal content or structures, such
approaches attempt to find a place for the genre in broader cultural
landscapes, though they almost inevitably lead to corollary problems of
definition (what is fantasy? What is Gothic?) Generally, such descrip-
tions fall into three categories: those which want to place science fiction
in specific traditions of literature (such as the examples above), those
which seek to place it in wider historical contexts (such as the argument
that it is essentially a post-Enlightenment literature or even a character-
istically American form), and those which work largely through analogy
or metaphor (such as the argument that it is essentially philosophy, or
a quest for transcendence, or a kind of mythology). When, for example,
the Science Fiction Research Association sponsored a reading anthology
in 1978 titled Science Fiction: Contemporary Mythology, The SFWA-SFRA
Anthology (edited by Patricia Warrick, Martin Harry Greenberg and
Joseph Olander), it’s unlikely that any of the editors meant literally to
claim the genre as representing a mythology in any sense that a clas-
sicist or anthropologist would accept as literal – rather, they sought
to associate it with a respected and ancient tradition of storytelling.
It is likely, though, that Alexei and Cory Panshin had a more or less
literal meaning in mind in describing science fiction as ‘a literature
of the mythic imagination’ in their The World Beyond the Hill: Science
Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (1989); here they seemed to view
‘mythic’ as a general kind of psychological and cultural construct rather
than as a received body of tales.28
Such associations can be useful in understanding the early and pre-
history of science fiction. Brian Stableford’s 1985 study The Scientific
Romance in Britain, 1890–1950 not only seeks to delineate a history
of the British ‘scientific romance’ as distinct from the American pulp-
adventure tradition, but implicitly contextualizes that genre in terms
of the ‘romance’ rather than the realistic novel, and cites a number of
earlier traditions which share some of its characteristics – imaginary
voyages, utopias, evolutionary fantasies, future war tales, eschatological
and metaphysical fantasies, even the speculative non-fiction of early
science writers. Similarly, in his history of early American science fiction

Some Kind of Paradise (1985), Thomas D. Clareson links elements of the
field to earlier Gothic novels, romances of reincarnation, lost-race tales,
scientific-detective tales, catastrophe stories, satires and utopias.
By the same token, many critics have examined specific aspects or sub-
genres of science fiction in terms of other popular genres – not only the
Gothic, but romances, historical fiction, westerns, detective and mystery
stories, horror stories, fantasy, military fiction, technothrillers, juvenile or
young adult fiction, even family sagas (John J. Pierce’s Odd Genre: A Study
in Imagination and Evolution, 1994, offers examples of a number of these
‘crossovers’). Moving even further afield, a fair proportion of recent schol-
arship has considered how science fictional ideas are expressed outside
the realm of prose fiction altogether – in film and television, graphic nov-
els and comic books, video and computer games, art, theatre, speculative
or futurist non-fiction, even photography and architecture. Each of these
linkages creates new issues of theory and terminology, and collectively
they raise the question of whether even so fundamental a term as ‘science
fiction’ – or even ‘fiction’ – can properly encompass the broad range of
cultural expression that has come to be associated with it.
Terms of technique
In a 1947 essay, Robert A. Heinlein described a science fiction story as

one in which ‘accepted science and established facts are extrapolated
to produce a new situation, a new framework for human action’,29 and
by 1955 critic Basil Davenport could report that ‘extrapolation’ was ‘a
word that is almost as great a favourite in discussions of science fiction
as “space-warp” is in science fiction itself; it may be defined as “plot-
ting the curve”’.30 The term, borrowed from statistics and mathematics,
even became the title of science fiction’s first academic journal. What
Heinlein likely intended to do, and what has been repeated endlessly
by science fiction writers ever since, was to identify the essential tech-
nique by which science fiction writers arrived at the conditions of
their imaginary society or world. While it can reasonably be argued, as
H. Bruce Franklin has done, that ‘in fact most science fiction does not
extrapolate seriously’,31 or that a rigorous definitional usage of the term
would eliminate a great many science fiction works from considera-
tion, the term was nevertheless an influential attempt to characterize a
specific fictional mechanism involved in the writing of science fiction,
and which was more characteristic of science fiction than of most other
types of literature.
The popularity of this term reflects an ongoing effort among sci-

ence fiction writers, editors and critics to identify techniques that may
be peculiar to the genre. While all the conventional terms of literary
art – plot, character, conflict, exposition, dramatic arc, style, figures of
speech and the like – are as relevant to science fiction as to any other
sort of fiction, there has long been a sense that more specialized tech-
niques may be involved in generating a successful science fiction tale.
Like ‘extrapolation’, some of these terms may be borrowed from other
fields of study. When Ursula K. Le Guin described her novel The Left
Hand of Darkness (1969) as a ‘thought-experiment’,32 she was borrow-
ing a term from German physicists, but was also identifying another
technique for creating imaginary societies, one which she regarded as
an alternative to extrapolation (‘This book is not extrapolative’, she also
wrote of her novel). Le Guin also has used the term ‘literalized meta-
phor’ (a concept borrowed from Samuel R. Delany and adapted from a
conventional literary term) to describes sentences which would be read
as purely metaphorical in realistic literature, but might be literally true
in the context of a science fiction tale (such as ‘her face lit up’). As with
extrapolation, though, one wonders how often science fiction writers
have actually made conscious use of such a technique.
If such terms seem better suited to describing the nature of sci-
ence fiction than to dealing with the actual process of composition,
there are others which have evolved to reflect specific issues faced by
writers in constructing a science fictional text. ‘World-building’, for
example – the detailed description of an imaginary setting – is com-
mon to many kinds of fiction, but has sometimes been elevated to a
principle of composition by science fiction and fantasy writers, some
of whom (Hal Clement is a famous early example) conscientiously
map out the history, politics, culture, architecture, geography, geology,
and sometimes even the astronomical environment of a story, even
though many of the details may not appear in the story itself, or may
be revealed only over a series of related tales. For some writers and
readers, world-building became as much an aesthetic value in science
fiction as characterization or style. In early 2007, the writer M. John
Harrison created a year-long debate by suggesting on his blog that
world-building had become so pervasive that it distracted from the
fundamental business of writing fiction.
Because science fiction often does involve world-building, however,
and often takes place in environments unfamiliar to the reader, specific
problems of exposition also arise – how is the reader to gain bearings
in this alienated environment? Several such techniques have evolved
in science fiction workshops over the years, and some workshop

terminology has begun to work its way back into critical discussions of
the genre. ‘Heinleining’, for example, refers to the technique pioneered
by Robert A. Heinlein of weaving the salient aspects of the setting seam-
lessly into the narrative, while the more awkward ‘infodump’ refers to
lumps of background exposition which interrupt the flow of the tale.
Other workshop terms (such as ‘As You Know Bob’, in which a character
recapitulates back story or setting ostensibly for the benefit of another
character) have been compiled by members of the Science Fiction
Writers of America in its ‘Turkey City Lexicon’; most refer to common
errors of beginning writers, but many are of equal relevance in discuss-
ing even well-known tales.33
All literary terminology, like all language, evolves and changes over
time – look at any literary handbook from fifty years ago compared to
one published today – but it seems reasonable to claim that few areas
of literary study have evolved out of so many active and often conten-
tious communities as has science fiction (or its allied genres of fantasy
and horror, sometimes collectively referred to as a ‘supergenre’34).
‘Maintaining a grip on the nomenclature’, as Budrys put it so long ago,
is no longer a problem faced solely by academics and scholars, but by
anthologists, teachers, editors, writers, and to some extent any informed
reader of the genre. It also seems reasonable to assert that the language
associated with science fiction evolves at a more rapid rate than that
associated with more traditional literary terms; words like ‘cyberpunk’
or ‘New Wave’, originally meant to refer to revolutionary, cutting-edge
fiction, can in the space of a couple of decades become historical terms,
almost as period-bound as ‘Beat’ or nouvelle roman are in mainstream
literary discourse. The last few years have seen a plethora of new terms
coined to describe fiction which evades, slips between, or overlaps
various genre categories but which still relates to the supergenre of
the fantastic – slipstream, interstitial, New Wave Fabulism, transreal-
ism – and it’s almost impossible to tell at this point which of these
terms might survive, which might grow quaint with age, and which
might disappear altogether. What they all have in common, though, is
that they seek to identify a perceived new development in a fluid and
dynamic arena of fiction. As long as such new developments continue
to arise, they will provide evidence of the genre’s ongoing vitality – and
while this may create a fair amount of confusion or frustration for the
dictionary-makers and teachers among us, it is also a major source of
the rewards that serious scholars, students and readers have always
found in this literature.
Notes
1. Algis Budrys, ‘Books’, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 64:1 (1983):
19.
2. Lloyd Biggle Jr, ‘Science Fiction Goes to College: Groves and Morasses of
Academe’, Riverside Quarterly, 6 (1974): 100–9, and ‘The Morasses of Academe
Revisited’, Analog, 98 (1978): 146–63; William Tenn, ‘Jazz Then, Musicology
Now’, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 42 (1972): 107–10; Ben Bova,
‘Teaching Science Fiction’, Analog, 93 (1974): 5–8; Lester del Rey, ‘The Siren
Song of Academe’, Galaxy, 36 (1975): 69–80.
3. R.D. Mullen, ‘Every Critic His Own Aristotle’, Science-Fiction Studies, 3:3
(1976): 311. The book under review was Eric S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in
Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976).
4. Everett F. Bleiler, ‘Pilgrim Award Acceptance Address’, SFRA Newsletter, 123
(1984): 12.
5. Gary K. Wolfe, Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1986).
6. By 1996, the Turkish fan and scholar Neyir Cenk Gökçe had amassed 52
definitions on his website, http://www.panix.com/~gokce/sf_defn.html.
7. Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science
Fiction (New York: Atheneum, 1986) 18.
Press, 1998) 8.
9. See Samuel R. Delany, ‘About Five Thousand One Hundred and Seventy-Five
Words’, in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (New York: Berkley, 1977), and several later
essays.
10. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics of a Literary Genre
(New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1979) 8.
11. Peter Brigg, The Span of Mainstream and Science Fiction (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2002) 13–14.
12. Tom Shippey, ‘Introduction’, in The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992) ix.
13. Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder, 2nd edn (Chicago: Advent, 1967) 1. The
observation first appeared in Knight’s review column for the pulp magazine
Science Fiction Adventures, November 1952.
14. See Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005) and Adam
Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
15. Hugo Gernsback, ‘A New Sort of Magazine’, Amazing Stories, 1:1 (1926) 3.
16. John W. Campbell Jr, quoted in Reginald Bretnor, Modern Science Fiction: Its
Meaning and Its Future (New York: Coward-McCann, 1953) 12.
17. David Hartwell, ‘Introduction’, The Year’s Best Science Fiction (New York:
Harper, 1996) xiii.
18. Norman Spinrad, ‘Introduction’, Modern Science Fiction (Garden City, NY:
Anchor, 1974) 1–2.
19. Theodore Sturgeon quoted in James Gunn, Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated
History of Science Fiction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975) 31.
20. Robert A. Heinlein, ‘Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults, and Virtues’, in
The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism (Chicago: Advent,
1959) 16.
21. J.O. Bailey, Pilgrims through Space and Time (1947; Westport, CT: Greenwood,
1972) 10.
22. Edward James, Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford
23. Roberts, The History of Science Fiction, 3.
24. See Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature; Brian Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992).
25. Wilson Tucker quoted in David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer,
‘Introduction’, in The Space Opera Renaissance (New York: Tor, 2006) 9–21
at 10. Hartwell and Cramer’s introduction provides an extensive and useful
overview of the history of this term.
26. Aldiss and Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree, 25.
27. See Sam Moskowitz, Explorers of the Infinite (Cleveland: World, 1963) and
Donald Wollheim, The Universe Makers (New York: Harper, 1971).
28. Alexei and Cory Panshin, The World beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the
Quest for Transcendence (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1989) 1.
29. Robert A. Heinlein, ‘On the Writing of Speculative Fiction’, in Lloyd Arthur
Eshbach, ed., Of Worlds Beyond (1947; London: Dobson, 1965) 17.
30. Basil Davenport, Inquiry into Science Fiction (New York: Longmans, 1955) 12.
31. H. Bruce Franklin quoted in ‘Definitions of Science Fiction’, 25 May 1996,
http://www.panix.com/~gokce/sf_defn.html (accessed 20 April 2008).
32. Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness’, in The
Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (New York:
HarperCollins, 1989) 151.
33. Turkey City Lexicon, http://www.sfwa.org/writing/turkeycity.html (accessed
21 September 2010).
34. R.D. Mullen, ‘Books in Review: Supernatural, Pseudonatural, and Sociocultural
Fantasy’, Science Fiction Studies, 5:2 (1978): 291–8; Rabkin, The Fantastic in
Literature.
3
Utopia, Anti-Utopia and Science
Fiction
Chris Ferns
The relationship between utopian literature and science fiction is a

complex and in some respects problematic one. While the two genres
have come to overlap to the extent that some argue they have effec-
tively merged, their origins are nevertheless quite distinct. For the
teacher of utopian literature (the fictional representation of a more
perfect society, as distinct from utopian political theory, which has an
even longer history) the obvious starting point is Thomas More’s Utopia
(1516), whereas in the case of science fiction, although its origins are
more open to debate, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is the most
commonly assumed foundational text.1 By most reckonings, then,
utopian literature pre-dates the emergence of what comes to be known
as science fiction by over three hundred years. And while some utopias
of the intervening period, such as Tomasso Campanella’s The City of the
Sun (1623) and Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1627), may envisage
scientific innovation as an important aspect of their imagined societies,
it would be hard to describe the result as science fiction, inasmuch as
nothing that actually happens in either narrative is in any way affected
by the fact.
Yet with the passage of time there is an increasing convergence
between what might seem at first sight to be two quite independ-
ent genres. As the age of exploration draws to a close, the traditional
utopian narrative – in which a traveller visits a geographically separate
society and returns to attest to its superiority – begins to seem increas-
ingly outdated; and from the late nineteenth century onward, there is
a growing tendency for writers of utopian literature to turn to narra-
tive devices characteristic of science fiction. Edward Bellamy’s Looking
Backward (1888) and William Morris’s utopian counterblast, News From
Nowhere (1890), both locate their more perfect societies in the future
55
(although that is about the only science fictional aspect of Morris’s

utopia). H.G. Wells, in A Modern Utopia (1905), imagines another Earth
with an alternative history; his Men Like Gods (1923) uses the equally sci-
ence fictional conceit of parallel universes; while Alexander Bogdanov’s
Red Star (1908) is one of a host of narratives where the site of utopia
is another planet. And in the case of utopia’s negative counterpart,
whether one terms this dystopia or anti-utopia,2 the convergence is still
more marked. Works such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1920), Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s
Tale (1985) can be and are taught in courses on both utopian literature
and science fiction.
Certainly, instances of the old, geographically separate utopia persist
well into the twentieth century, notable examples being Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s Herland (1915), B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948) and Aldous
Huxley’s Island (1962), but these have proved increasingly exceptions to
the rule. Virtually all the major developments in utopian literature since
the 1970s – the works of Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delany,
Marge Piercy and, more recently, Kim Stanley Robinson – utilize science
fiction as the most appropriate vehicle for the exploration of utopian pos-
sibilities. This being so, there has been an increasing tendency for critics
to argue that what has taken place is not simply the convergence of two
distinct genres, but their actual merger. As Darko Suvin puts it, what has
taken place is in effect an ‘englobing of utopia’ (itself a suggestively sci-
ence fictional metaphor) by the younger, broader genre of science fiction,
to the extent that utopia has become not so much a genre in its own right
as, in Suvin’s words, ‘the sociopolitical subgenre of science fiction’.3
Taking this position tends to lead, unsurprisingly, to readings of both
utopian literature and science fiction that stress their similarities. While
earlier utopias have often been criticized for their static, prescriptive
quality – their attempt to impose on the (often resistant) reader the view
that a more perfect society not only could, but should be as the author
imagines it – their science fictional successors are more in the business
of suggesting possibilities, providing glimpses (or what Angelika Bammer
terms ‘partial visions’4) of how things might be otherwise. Like science fic-
tion, utopian literature provides alternative scenarios that create an effect
of estrangement, defamiliarizing existing reality, and making the reader
aware of its provisional quality, its potential to be radically changed. What
emerges as a result might almost be seen as a new category, one which
Tom Moylan, in his influential study Demand the Impossible, refers to as
the ‘critical utopia’ – where ‘the imposed totality of the single utopian
text gives way to the contradictory and diverse multiplicity of a broad
Utopia, Anti-Utopia and Science Fiction 57
utopian dialogue’.5 For Bammer and Moylan such utopias also transcend
some of the aesthetic limitations of earlier utopian literature – its prone-
ness to ponderous didacticism, or the predictability of the narrative where
the visitor to utopia is given what amounts to a guided tour of the imag-
ined world, and is easily persuaded of its preferability to the society from
which he (it is most often a he) came. Yet while this might suggest that
the ‘englobing’ of utopia by science fiction has resulted in a radical break
with the past, others have argued that even some of the most apparently
prescriptive utopias may productively be read as having a similar disrup-
tive effect: that even their limitations, whether aesthetic or political, may
be seen as tracing the outer limits of the ideological framework of their
period, the boundary beyond which it is impossible to imagine.6 The ten-
dency that has become apparent in more recent utopian writing, in effect,
has always been latent, to the extent that even the earliest utopias may be
seen as part of the prehistory of science fiction.
But it is not only readings of utopian literature that are affected by
the presumption of its absorption by science fiction. If the alterna-
tive worlds envisaged by both utopia and science fiction highlight the
extent to which existing reality is only one possibility among many,
and as such susceptible to change, then it becomes possible to argue
that science fiction as a whole may also be read as conducive to the
promotion of such change. To pursue Suvin’s metaphor further, it is
as though the englobing of utopia has resulted in its infecting its host
with some of its own characteristics. Science fiction may then be seen
as part of what Moylan refers to as ‘the larger process of mobilizing the
cultural imagination’,7 its capacity to expose the contingent character
of contemporary society being in some respects comparable to that of
the historical novel in the nineteenth century.
In its most extreme form, this argument has led to claims for the
radicalizing potential of science fiction that border on the messianic.
Moylan himself, for example, answers the familiar charge that science
fiction is ‘escapist’ by posing the question whether it may not in fact
offer a possible escape velocity that can sweep readers out of their
spacetime continuum, warping their minds into a cognitive zone
from which they might look back at their own social moment, per-
haps with anxiety or better with anger, and then discover that such a
place might be known for what it is and changed for the better?8
And, if science fiction contains that utopian possibility, it might seem

only logical to argue not merely that it could have such an effect, but
that it should. Thus Moylan warns that the reader who treats science
fiction as merely escapist, and refuses
an engaged, cognitive reading process risks committing discursive

violence to the text and further risks the perpetuation, or at least
acceptance, of that ignorance and violence, injustice and domina-
tion, that rages in the world outside the text, in that everyday life
to which we all return upon turning the last page and closing the
book.9
If earlier utopias’ description of the more perfect society could be

criticized as prescriptive, here what is prescribed is the reading process
itself.
Nevertheless, this sanguine view of the radicalizing potential of
utopian science fiction is by no means universally shared. Rob Latham,
for example, argues that such readings pose ‘the interesting empiri-
cal question of how many people have actually had their conscious-
nesses raised in this way through their experience with sf’ (very few,
he suggests).10 And, in overestimating the political efficacy of science
fiction and utopia, such readings risk conflating ‘two aspects of criti-
cal evaluation, such that ideological commitment becomes the very
criterion of aesthetic worth’.11 Such readings also tend to de-emphasize
one crucial aspect that distinguishes the study of utopian literature
from that of science fiction, namely, the extent to which it overlaps
with other disciplinary approaches. Utopian studies involves not just
the study of utopian literature, but of utopian thought – whether from
the perspective of philosophy, political science or sociology – and of the
ways in which people have sought to create utopias or influence actual
political movements. Seen in this context, utopian literature becomes
less a subgenre of science fiction than the literary expression of political
ideals, likewise designed to influence reality. H.G. Wells, in fact, went
so far as to suggest that ‘the creation of Utopias – and their exhaustive
criticism – is the proper and distinctive method of sociology’.12
To see utopian literature in this light, of course, is to run the risk of
minimizing its literary aspects – to see the narrative as merely a vehicle
for the expression of political ideas, a sort of literary clothing, where
fashions change over time. Yet even where there is acceptance that
more recent utopian science fiction has succeeded in resolving the aes-
thetic problems that bedevil its precursors – that considered as literature,
works such as Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) or Delany’s Triton (1976)
are far more successful than, say, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, this is not
always viewed as an unmixed blessing. As Krishan Kumar points out,

whatever its literary merits, more recent utopian literature has failed to
stimulate anything like as much public debate as did Looking Backward
or A Modern Utopia, and that indeed its more limited appeal is in fact
a direct result of its use of a science fictional format, rendering it more
difficult for such work ‘to break out of its specialized literary ghetto’.13
Similarly, Ruth Levitas argues that the self-conscious, self-reflexive
ambiguity of much recent utopian writing, for all its artistic and intel-
lectual appeal
is not merely exploratory and open, it is also disillusioned and

unconfident… The presentation of alternative futures, multiple pos-
sibilities and fragmented images of time reflects a lack of confidence
about whether and how a better world can be reached.14
Without seeking to adjudicate between these contrasting views, there

can be little doubt that, whatever utopian literature may have become,
the context in which it is taught can have a decisive effect on how it
is read. To teach any given work of utopian literature in the context
of a course specifically devoted to utopia raises a rather different set
of questions to those that arise when it becomes part of a course more
broadly focused on science fiction; and this is not least because of one
of the features of utopian literature that distinguishes it most markedly
not only from science fiction, but from most other genres: namely, the
extent to which utopian narrative is explicitly and consciously designed
to engage with the tradition established by its precursors. As Fredric
Jameson remarks:
what uniquely characterizes this genre is its explicit intertextuality:

few other literary forms have so brazenly affirmed themselves as
argument and counterargument. Few others have so openly required
cross-reference and debate within each new variant: who can read
Morris without Bellamy? [O]r indeed Bellamy without Morris? So it
is that the individual text carries with it a whole tradition, recon-
structed and modified with each new addition…15
One could multiply examples: it might equally be asked who can

read The Dispossessed without reading Triton16 or vice-versa, or The
Handmaid’s Tale without reading We or George Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949) – for to read in isolation is to lose sight of the extent
to which utopian literature is, among other things, designed as an
intervention in an ongoing debate. To read any given work outside the

context of that debate, or with only passing reference to it, is to miss
much of what makes it distinctive – not to mention the ways in which
the reading of each work modifies the reading of all.
By way of illustration, let us consider in more detail the case of two
works which frequently feature in courses on both utopian litera-
ture and science fiction: Huxley’s Brave New World and Le Guin’s The
Dispossessed. Taught as science fiction, their relation to the utopian
tradition cannot be ignored; nevertheless, it may be argued that those
aspects of the text that such a context highlights are likely to produce
rather different readings than emerge from their consideration as
utopian literature per se.
The relationship of Brave New World to the utopian tradition is, of
course, antagonistic. Described by David Sisk as ‘the seminal dystopia
of the twentieth century’,17 it is also often referred to as an anti-utopia,
posing the question of whether there is any useful distinction to be
made between the terms. While they are often treated as synonymous,
more recently attempts have been made to distinguish between them –
although it is fair to say that general agreement has yet to be reached
on what the difference actually is.18 For some, ‘dystopia’ constitutes
specifically the parodic inversion of utopia (into which category Brave
New World clearly fits) – a representation of where the utopian impulse
would really lead – whereas others use the term to refer more broadly
to any depiction of an undesirable society, regardless of its provenance,
reserving ‘anti-utopia’ for those depictions that are actively hostile to
utopianism. Jameson, indeed, goes so far as to argue that utopia and
dystopia are ‘not opposites and in reality have nothing to do with each
other’.19 A dystopia, in other words, need not necessarily exclude the
possibility of utopian alternatives.
If one accepts this distinction, it is clear that taught in the context of
a course on utopian literature, it is the anti-utopian aspect of Brave New
World that will be foregrounded. Prefaced by an epigraph from Nicholas
Berdiaeff warning against the growing danger that utopia might become
a reality, it focuses its satiric attack on the centralized utopian visions
of writers such as Bellamy and Wells, and their assumption that strong,
centralized authority would in act in the best interests of the citizen. At
the same time, however, its line of attack differs quite markedly from
that, say, of Zamyatin’s We, whose representation of utopian ideals is by
no means as unambiguously hostile, not to mention Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four, so that the resultant debate becomes not merely about the
limitations of utopia, but also those of Huxley’s critique.
Taught as science fiction, by contrast – after the study, say, of

Frankenstein, or Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), many of whose gloomy
assumptions regarding the potential impact of technological progress
on human society it shares – its relation to the utopian tradition, while
still important, becomes less central. What emerges instead is as much
dystopia in the broader sense: a nightmare future which can as easily
be taken as an extrapolation from present trends (by no means all
of them utopian), the logical conclusion of where society might end
up if things continue going on the way they are now. Read alongside
Frankenstein, with its frightening prevision of the possible impact of
scientific discovery on human relationships, Huxley’s depiction of a
future where meaningful relationships have been literally engineered
out of existence becomes as much an indictment of scientific hubris
in general as of utopian imagining in particular. Indeed, there is con-
siderable evidence to suggest that Huxley’s satiric attack was directed
as much at the actual speculations of contemporary scientists such as
J.B.S. Haldane and J.D. Bernal regarding the potential transformation of
humanity as at the utopian visions of Wells and others.20 Wells himself,
in The Time Machine, likewise envisages the degeneration of humanity
once all its problems have been solved – in this case into the effete Eloi
and bestial Morlocks – which serves to highlight the extent to which
Brave New World is also an extrapolation of the class politics of the
period. While separated by over thirty years, both can be seen as imagi-
native responses to contemporary threats to the existing class system,
each providing a revealing compensatory fantasy. For Wells, ambitious
of success, yet haunted by the fear of downward social mobility, what
could be more reassuring than a scenario where a vigorous, middle-class
Time Traveller visits the future, secures a descendant of the upper class
as a sleeping companion, and is able to take out his aggression by beat-
ing to death several descendants of the proletariat? Likewise in Brave
New World, where the presence of characters such as Bernard Marx,
Lenina Crowne and Polly Trotsky clearly indicates what Huxley saw as
one of the principal dangers to the ‘cultivated classes’ who Berdiaeff
saw as most threatened by the possibility of utopia, the notion of a
world where class distinctions are both biologically and psychologically
reinforced to the point where they are immutable may be seen as at one
level no less appealing to its upper-middle-class author.21
Seen in this context, Brave New World’s cast list, which includes not
merely the characters cited above, but Benito Hoover, Joanna Diesel,
Helmholz Watson and Mustapha Mond, suggests less a critique of
utopianism than of modernity – of a world where communism, fascism,
capitalism, science are all engaged in the common project of erasing

individuality. And while the presiding deity of Huxley’s World State,
Our Ford, was not without his own utopian aspirations, what Brave New
World highlights is less those aspirations than the mindless consumerism
promoted by the process of self-sustaining economic growth that Ford
helped to pioneer – a process some might argue that has served to fore-
close rather than realize utopian possibility. In a world where ‘utopia’
has become a brand name for soft drinks and canned tomatoes, and
where advertisements mimic the utopian poster art of the Soviet Union
in the 1920s to promote the ‘freedom’ provided by a cell phone, it is
hard to resist the conclusion that Bertrand Russell’s prediction that ‘it is
all too likely to come true’22 has in large measure been proved correct.
Returned to its utopian context, juxtaposed with Utopia, Looking
Backward and the utopias of Wells, while its prescience is no less evi-
dent, it becomes far more clearly part of a debate within the tradition
of utopian literature, a debate that renders both its strengths and weak-
nesses more apparent. While the assumptions underlying the Wellsian
world state are certainly a valid target for attack, whether satiric or
otherwise, what emerges from setting Brave New World in its utopian
context is the extent of its hostility even to those elements of the uto-
pian vision with which one might sympathize. Here utopia (or rather,
its parodic inversion) is prompted by despair at the chaos arising from
the pursuit of competing utopian visions. Exhausted by the destruction,
humanity accepts the loss of its freedom as the price to be paid for peace
and order – and once that price has been paid, the only ones who bridle
at or are even aware of the cost are a few pesky intellectuals who pose so
little threat that they can be neutralized relatively humanely, by exile,
rather than death.
What is especially striking about Brave New World, in its utopian
context, is how much of its satire depends on Huxley’s representation
of what amounts to the fulfilment of the utopian programme of earlier
writers. His World State provides peace, prosperity, security; there is no
crime, no war: it is a world where happiness is almost universal – and
if that happiness is the product of brainwashing, mindless consumer-
ism and the consumption of stupefying drugs, it may be argued that its
strategies for achieving contentment do not differ that markedly from
those of modern consumer societies – or, if there is a difference, it lies
mainly in the fact that in Brave New World the strategies are more effec-
tive, and are available to all, rather than only those wealthy enough to
employ them. In addition, Huxley posits a society where the state’s use
of overt coercive power, which renders the dystopias of Zamyatin and
Orwell more obviously unappealing, is rarely necessary: where its citi-

zens are successfully diverted from ever considering other possibilities,
why would force be needed? And in this regard it might also be argued
that Huxley correctly intuits one of the mechanisms that has enabled
Western societies to manage dissent more successfully than the authori-
tarian regimes of the former Eastern bloc.
What Brave New World misses, however (in a way Zamyatin’s We does
not) is an important part of the appeal of utopia – and in doing so it may
be argued that it reproduces some of the weaknesses of its satiric targets.
While Bellamy and Wells imagine societies which provide peace, secu-
rity, plenty, and also far greater efficiency than their own, the much
greater degree of comfort this affords to its citizens is by no means all
utopia is about. Indeed, it was that very aspect of Bellamy’s utopia that
prompted William Morris to declare that he ‘wouldn’t care to live in
such a cockney paradise’23 and to provide his own contrasting utopian
vision in News From Nowhere. Yet, as Morris’s utopia makes clear, the
dream of a better world is also motivated by a desire to change the one
that exists, as well as a preparedness to embrace the challenge (and
accompanying dangers) of seeking to do so. While the Marx satirized by
Huxley may have promoted the ideal of ‘From each according to their
ability, to each according to their needs’,24 he was far from imagining
the result would be the bourgeois paradise imagined by Bellamy, still
less that it could be achieved painlessly and with absolutely no opposi-
tion. So too with Huxley’s other imagined precursors of utopia. The sci-
entists after whom his characters are named were concerned with more
than just the promotion of mindless enjoyment, while even fascism, as
Ernst Bloch acknowledges, has its utopian aspect, its appeal to strenu-
ousness and ‘the dangerous life’25 – if Mussolini made the trains run on
time, that was hardly the main source of his popular appeal. In Huxley’s
case, however, those who defy the status quo are no less objects of sat-
ire than those who accept it. Bernard Marx and the Savage are merely
under a different set of illusions, while Helmholz Watson – perhaps the
most sympathetic character in the book– is merely concerned with the
possibility of individual fulfilment, rather than promoting the good of
others.
Not the least impressive aspect of We, by contrast, is the extent to
which it conveys not only the horror and cruelty of Zamyatin’s future
society, but also something of the terrible appeal of the dream under-
lying it – the appeal of sensing oneself part of a whole far greater than
the mere sum of its parts. Moreover, while Huxley satirizes both utopia
and those who rebel against it, Zamyatin makes it clear that rebellion is
not merely an attempt to return to the supposedly more ‘natural’ world

of our own day, but that it may represent an attempt to realize other,
better utopian alternatives. Yet at the same time, a comparison with
Brave New World does highlight some of We’s more problematic aspects.
Like Nineteen Eighty-Four (which in this respect resembles it closely) We
makes the central character’s defiance of the sexual norms of his society
a major aspect of his rebellion. D-503 departs from the regulated sexual
practices of the One State both by engaging in sexual activity outside
the designated private sexual hours, and refraining from it during them.
Yet it would appear that the main appeal of his partner in sexual irregu-
larity, E-330, is not so much her disregard for the state’s rules on when
sex should take place, as her penchant for wearing clothing associated
with the stereotypes of female desirability in Zamyatin’s own time:
She was in a saffron-yellow dress of an ancient cut. This was a thou-

sandfold more wicked than if she had had absolutely nothing on.
Two sharp points, glowing roseately through the thin tissue: two
embers smouldering among ashes. Two tenderly round knees… 26
D-503’s excitement at the prospect is mirrored by that of Winston

Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, who is rendered just as breathless when
his lover, Julia, puts on old-fashioned make-up. What Huxley poses,
however, is the question of just how subversive a reversion to the sexual
mores of one’s own age actually is. Whereas Winston Smith sees his defi-
ance of the sexual puritanism of Airstrip One as ‘a political act’ – ‘Their
embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck
against the Party’27 – Huxley shows an awareness that the sexual norms
of our society are no less socially constructed than those of the world of
the future. While both Bernard Marx and the Savage are repelled by the
compulsory promiscuity of the World State, their romantic idealization
of the vacuous Lenina is represented not as a contrasting positive, but
rather a mere fantasy projection, no less ludicrous than the mindless
sexual indulgence to which it is opposed. Although Huxley himself
claimed never to have read Zamyatin, the juxtaposition of the two
texts becomes part of a larger dialogue concerning the sexual politics
of utopia, where the imagination of even the most radical changes to
existing society are often accompanied by a reinscription of its sexual
norms – a dialogue further extended by consideration of Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale, which consciously parodies Zamyatin’s and Orwell’s
fetishization of conventional stereotypes of what constitutes female
sexual attraction.
Nor is this the only debate which consideration of Brave New World in
a specifically utopian context encourages. For all its overtly anti-utopian
thrust, Huxley later came to question many of its assumptions, notably
in his later preface to the work, published in 1946, in Brave New World
Revisited (1959), and in his final novel, the utopian Island – all of which
raises questions concerning both Huxley’s analysis of what he saw as
Brave New World’s shortcomings, and the extent to which his proposed
alternatives resolve or reproduce its more problematic aspects.
Brave New World also poses the important question of who utopia is
actually for. Following Berdiaeff’s warning of the danger posed by uto-
pia to the ‘cultivated classes’, Huxley’s imagined future makes it clear
his real concern is not so much with the dehumanization of the lower
orders – the mass-produced Deltas and Epsilons – but rather the hard-
ships imposed on their intellectual superiors. And here it may be argued
that Huxley reproduces, uncritically rather than satirically, precisely
those assumptions of Looking Backward that so repelled William Morris,
namely its almost exclusive concern with the interests of the middle
class. What Bellamy imagines is a future where middle-class values are
universal, where the cultivated classes are no longer ‘surrounded by a
population of ignorant, boorish, coarse, wholly uncultivated men and
women’ – as opposed to the plight of the ‘cultured man’ in the late
nineteenth century, which is described as ‘like one up to the neck in
a nauseous bog solacing himself with a smelling bottle’.28 As Morris
remarks:
The only ideal of life which such a man can see is that of the industri-
ous professional middle-class men of today purified from their crime
of complicity with the monopolist class, and become independent
instead of being, as they now are, parasitical.29
Utopia becomes a world where the middle class no longer have to feel
guilty. And while Brave New World satirizes utopias such as Bellamy’s,
it clearly shares the assumption that the real problems are not those
of society as a whole, but rather those of the middle class who have to
endure their consequences.
Yet if this results in the conclusion that the realization of utopia would
be a nightmare, it remains to be asked for whom, and on what basis any
given utopia would be unappealing. Clearly for the modern reader, at
least if s/he happens to be one of the more prosperous inhabitants of a
Western democracy, the prospect of life in More’s Utopia, or Campanella’s
City of the Sun is far from alluring – but there remains the question, in
which neither Bellamy nor Huxley seem to be much interested: what

about the rest of the world? If a strong, centralized, albeit authoritarian
government could actually deliver on the promise of a six- or four-hour
working day, peace, security, plenty and the likelihood of a significantly
greater life expectancy for everyone, how many might see the sacrifice
of some of their freedoms as a price worth paying – especially given that
the amount of individual freedom in many utopias, even the authoritar-
ian ones, is considerably greater than that enjoyed by millions of the
citizens of our world? Even a dystopian vision such as Brave New World
prompts the same question: granting the considerable imaginative
premise that such a society were possible, would it be more desirable,
at least for the Deltas and Epsilons, genetically engineered to perform
mindless labour with reasonable hours and adequate pay, than for the
millions of child labourers employed in sweatshops to produce luxuries
for the citizens of Western democracies? In my own experience an inter-
esting (some might say alarming) aspect of such debates, where they
have occurred in class, is the consistency with which the proponents of
Brave New World out-argue their opponents.
In the case of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, the effect of context is no
less pronounced. While forming part of the so-called ‘Hainish cycle’ –
a group of science fiction novels and short stories sharing a common
narrative regarding the spread of humanoid races across the galaxy – it
too becomes a rather different work when considered first and foremost
as utopian literature. Set against earlier, centralized utopian visions
from Utopia on, an important concern that emerges is clearly the extent
of the political challenge it represents. The anarchist society created on
the planet of Anarres differs markedly from such visions, yet at the same
time its increasing drift towards the stasis and conformity so often seen
as characteristic of utopia poses the question whether such characteris-
tics are inescapable. What The Dispossessed proposes is that they are not,
or at least, not necessarily; rather, stasis and conformity result from the
rigid separation between our world and its utopian alternative which so
many narratives maintain.
What distinguishes The Dispossessed from so many of its utopian
precursors, in fact, is its attempt to address problematic features of the
genre that are both political and narrative. Le Guin reverses the tra-
ditional narrative pattern whereby a visitor from our world travels to
utopia and returns, converted. Here the central character, Shevek, is a
scientist from Anarres, who travels to its parent world (a clear analogue
of our own), and in doing so begins to re-establish the political con-
nections between the two that had been severed. On Urras, the glaring
political inequities that gave birth to the anarchist society of Anarres

still persist, and renewed contact between the worlds offers at least the
prospect that the ossification resulting from Anarres’s attempt to main-
tain its utopian purity may be overcome once it becomes part of a larger
political struggle. It is an argument for the necessity for permanent
revolution not dissimilar to that advanced by Leon Trotsky.
The device whereby someone comes to our world (or its analogue)
bringing with them a radically different set of assumptions is a stand-
ard satiric device – in some respects Shevek might be seen as a science
fictional variant of the ‘noble savage’ who comes to Europe and starts
asking all kinds of inconvenient questions about why things are done
the way they are. Yet while Le Guin takes full advantage of the satiric
possibilities (Shevek’s puzzlement at the Urrasti exam system is a satiric
tour de force with which any student is likely to sympathize), what her
‘ambiguous utopia’ chiefly highlights is the extent to which utopia and
dystopia are inseparable one from the other. Indeed, taken on their
own, the chapters devoted to life on Anarres read almost like a classic
dystopia, with freedom-seeking rebels defying a conformist society. It is
only when they are placed in the context of the corresponding narrative
on Urras that it becomes clear that Shevek’s strengths, his ability suc-
cessfully to challenge the assumptions of our world, are the product of
his upbringing in utopia, a society with which he is also in conflict.
Yet Le Guin’s is only one of a number of attempts to address the polit-
ical and narrative limitations of the traditional utopia, and its considera-
tion in the context of utopian literature will clearly invite comparison
with other ‘critical utopias’ of the period: works such as Triton, Russ’s The
Female Man (1975) or Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) – the
last of which employs a not dissimilar narrative strategy. Set alongside
these, a major issue that emerges is the issue of sexual politics, on which
grounds The Dispossessed has often been criticized, not least for its choice
of a heterosexual, monogamous male as its protagonist30 – a privileging
of traditional sex roles and familial structures that is seen as re-inscribing
rather than challenging prevailing gender norms.
Here The Dispossessed might be seen as only too utopian in the
traditional sense, since for most of its history the aspects of existing
social relations that utopia has most consistently failed to re-imagine
are those to do with gender.31 Yet while there is some validity to this
critique, what is troubling about it is its prescriptive quality. While the
sexual politics of the other ‘critical utopias’ referred to are undoubtedly
more progressive, it is also true that Le Guin is interested in a rather
different area of utopian inquiry, to which the issue of sexual politics is
marginal. Equally, it might be argued that the omissions of works like

The Female Man or Triton, in both of which the focus on sexual politics
is enabled by the convenient fiction that virtually all economic prob-
lems have been resolved by the application of technology, are no less
striking. What emerges from some of the attacks on Le Guin by writers
and critics in the field is a new orthodoxy concerning what utopias
ought to be like – ones where ‘the more collective heroes of social trans-
formation are presented off-centre and usually as characters who are
not dominant, white heterosexual, chauvinist males but female, gay,
non-white, and generally operating collectively’.32 The prescription as
to how utopias are to be read referred to earlier is here accompanied by
a prescription as to how they are to be written.
Considered first and foremost as science fiction, The Dispossessed
presents a rather different aspect. Among the thematic links that such
a context is likely to foreground is the whole issue of scientific respon-
sibility, first adumbrated in Frankenstein – with Shevek’s concern that
his discovery be shared with all contrasting with the privatization of
discovery by Victor Frankenstein. Its concern with the possibility of
transcending time likewise takes on a different resonance when set
alongside The Time Machine, as opposed to Looking Backward or News
From Nowhere, where the act of imagining the future is far more overtly
political. Yet what does stand out in such a context is how far Le Guin’s
progressivist narrative is in contrast to that proposed by Wells (or
indeed Shelley). Ultimately, providing it is made universally available,
Shevek’s discovery of the principle that will make possible instantane-
ous communication across the galaxy is seen as a Good Thing – which
highlights the anthropocentric premise of the whole Hainish cycle,
which imagines a galaxy colonized by humanoid life forms with whom
such communication is possible. Yet if one sets The Dispossessed along-
side, say, Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961), that optimistic assumption
becomes more questionable. What Lem poses is the question of whether
such communication is even possible, let alone desirable, given that if
there are other, non-human life-forms their life-experience and cogni-
tive processes may prove literally untranslatable, while the impulse to
such communication may actually reflect an unwillingness to confront
some of the more unpalatable aspects of our own inner life – questions
which The Dispossessed largely ignores.
A comparison with Solaris also highlights just how much further
Lem goes in challenging the often reactionary sexual politics of a good
deal of earlier science fiction (including, it should be said, those of The
Time Machine). Whereas a debate regarding sexual politics in a utopian
context poses the question of whether the ‘critical utopia’ runs the risk
of prescribing a particular kind of sexual politics as de rigueur, setting Le
Guin’s novel alongside those of Wells (or William Gibson, or Michael
Crichton – one might multiply examples) perhaps poses more forcibly
the question of why The Dispossessed does not do more to challenge
their assumptions.
Equally, in a science fictional context, the narrative aspects of the
novel, which constitute such a distinctive resolution of some of the
problems inherent in the traditional utopian narrative paradigm, seem
less remarkable. While science fiction is by no means free of its own nar-
rative challenges – not least a tendency for the imagination of new sci-
entific possibilities to go hand-in-hand with the deployment of the most
hackneyed and conventional plots (George Lucas’s Star Wars movies
being a conspicuous example) – it has always lent itself more readily to
narrative experiment. While the ‘critical utopia’, perhaps by virtue of its
merger with science fiction, may have succeeded in escaping from the
narrative constraints of the traditional utopia, the contrast between the
imaginative freedom of Wells’s early ‘scientific romances’ and the awk-
wardness of some of his attempts to wrestle with the narrative problems
of utopia shows that such an escape is no easy matter.
Yet while the context in which utopian literature is taught may result
in significantly different readings of the works in question, the relation-
ship between utopia and science fiction poses an important question.
While the study of utopia from the perspective of sociology or political
science is likely to foreground the issue of content (how viable and/or
desirable is the society proposed?), and its consideration from a literary
perspective that of form (how does the work overcome the narrative
challenges involved?), there is also the question of function. What is
the function of utopian literature? To persuade – as often seems to be
the case with utopias written prior to the twentieth century? To make us
aware of alternative possibilities – to ‘educate desire’, as Ernst Bloch puts
it?33 And what is its efficacy in fulfilling its function? Has the effective
merger of utopian literature with science fiction in recent years made
it possible to overcome utopia’s long-standing narrative challenges,
but only at the cost of sacrificing some of its political effectiveness? To
(very loosely) paraphrase Marx, one might suggest that, while writers
of utopias have imagined alternatives to this world in various ways, the
point is to change it. The question that needs to be asked is how far,
and in what ways, the two tasks are related. That they are related is a
fundamental premise of utopia and anti-utopia alike; where they differ
is in their view of the desirability of such change. Taught in the context
of a science fiction course, however, utopias and anti-utopias pose the

broader question of how far the debate between them is an integral
aspect of science fiction as a whole.
Notes
1. See Science Fiction Studies 23.3 (1996) for a representative sample of over 400
syllabi for university courses on science fiction and utopian literature.
2. For a helpful discussion of the ways in which the two terms have been used
see Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia
(Boulder: Westview, 2000) 147–82. See also Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘The Three
Faces of Utopianism Revisited’, Utopian Studies, 5:1 (1994): 1–37.
3. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1979) 61 (emphasis in original).
4. See Angelika Bammer, Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s
(London: Routledge, 1991).
5. Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian
Imagination (London: Methuen, 1986) 210.
6. Philip E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial
Histories of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) 23.
7. Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky, 29.
8. Ibid., 30.
9. Ibid., 25.
10. Rob Latham, ‘A Tendentious Tendency in SF Criticism’, Science Fiction Studies,
29:1 (2002): 100–10.
11. Ibid., 109.
12. H.G. Wells, An Englishman Looks at the World (London: Cassell, 1914) 204.
13. Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Blackwell,
1987) 420.
14. Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
1990) 196.
15. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other
Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005) 2.
16. While Delany states that he did not write Triton as a conscious response to
The Dispossessed, he makes it clear that his choice of subtitle (‘An Ambiguous
Heterotopia’) was designed to emphasize the dialogue he sees as implicit
with Le Guin’s ‘Ambiguous Utopia’. See Robert M. Philmus, ‘On Triton and
Other Matters: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany’, Science Fiction Studies,
17:3 (1990): 295–324.
17. David W. Sisk. Transformations of Language in Modern Dystopias (Westport:
Greenwood, 1997) 18.
18. See note 2 above.
19. Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994) 55.
20. For an illuminating discussion of the relation of Wells’s utopias to contem-
porary scientific speculation, see Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia, 230–42.
21. Another of Wells’s ‘scientific romances’, The First Men in the Moon, provides
a further parallel, given that the modification of the physiology of the
Selenites to suit them for the industrial tasks they are intended to perform is
clearly an inspiration for Huxley’s description of a similar process.
22. Bertrand Russell, review of Brave New World, in New Leader, 11 March 1932
quoted in Donald Watt, ed., Aldous Huxley: The Critical Heritage (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) 212.
23. William Morris quoted in J. Bruce Glasier, William Morris and the Early Days
of the Socialist Movement (London: Longmans, 1921) 198.
24. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme. Karl Marx: Later Political Writings,
ed. and trans. Terrell Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
215.
25. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and
Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986) 935.
26. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, trans. Bernard Guilbert Guerney (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1983) 65. In a number of other translations the female character’s
name is transliterated as I-330.
27. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) 112.
28. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000–1887 (New York: Bantam, 1983)
122.
29. William Morris, review of Looking Backward in The Commonweal, 22 June
1889.
30. See for example Sarah Lefanu, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism
and Science Fiction (London: Women’s Press, 1988) 130–46. See also Moylan,
Demand the Impossible, 91–120.
31. For a more extensive discussion of this aspect of utopian narrative, see Chris
Ferns, Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 1999).
32. Moylan, Demand the Impossible, 45.
33. See E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (London:
Merlin, 1977) 791.
4
Teaching the Scientific Romance
Adam Roberts
In his influential study of sf between 1890 and 1950 Brian Stableford

defends the ‘decision to use the old-fashioned and rather quaint term
“scientific romance” as a description’ on the grounds that the phrase
‘make[s] the point that the British tradition of speculative fiction devel-
oped during the period under consideration quite separately from the
American tradition of science fiction, and can be contrasted with it in
certain important ways’.1 That is to say, he sets out to trace the ways
in which the development of sf was fed by a specifically British tradi-
tion of sf writing, led by the ‘inspiration and example of H.G. Wells’,
through the first half of the twentieth century. For Stableford this tradi-
tion was separate from but acted antithetically upon the tradition of
Gernsbackian, American pulp sf; and the synthesis of these two deter-
mined later twentieth-century science fiction. Stableford concentrates
his critical attention upon twelve authors, most of them not widely
known: George Griffith, Wells, M.P. Shiel, Arthur Conan Doyle, William
Hope Hodgson, J.D. Beresford, S. Fowler Wright, Olaf Stapledon, Neil
Bell, John Gloag, C.S. Lewis and Gerald Heard.
This is a list of names that, in terms of thinking through how we
might want to teach scientific romance, might be described as chal-
lenging. Whilst it would, of course, be possible to construct a course
that took students through the specifics of Stableford’s thesis, pedagogic
practicality dictates a more inclusive definition of scientific romance,
one that more usefully spreads its net widely enough to encompass
a broader spectrum of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-
century science fiction. This means covering works informed by the
technical developments associated with the industrial revolution, by
the impact of Darwin’s ideas and the social and political contexts of
imperialism and increasing democratization.
72
Teaching the Scientific Romance 73
Perhaps more importantly, the decision to teach ‘scientific romance’

rather than ‘science fiction’ more generally conceived is a decision to
look at sf – a genre widely taken to be future-oriented – precisely as old-
fashioned. A large part of the appeal of scientific romance involves read-
ing quondam futurity styled as retro-Edwardian baroque. Something
along these lines, I think, explains the enduring popularity not only of
many of the authors Stableford identifies (Wells most prominently) but
also the present-day vigour of ‘steampunk’ and those other subgenres
of sf that continue to trade on ‘scientific romantic’ tropes. In other
words, teaching scientific romance enables a double focus: both reading
and contextualizing the core and (many would argue) founding texts
of the tradition of sf, from Jules Verne and Wells through to the end of
the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, and cover-
ing the reflorescence of interest in versions of sf styled in homage to
those works. Scientific romance is a mode of cultural expression that is
of more than merely antiquarian interest. Precisely because it is a form
connected with the origins of the modern form of the genre, it contin-
ues to hold our attention today.
To take the earlier group of texts first, and to consider which authors
a teacher may wish to cover when teaching: no course on scientific
romance can afford to ignore Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, the two most
influential practitioners of scientific romance. There are a number
of other significant Victorian and Edwardian scientific romances:
Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871), Percy Greg’s Across the Zodiac
(1880), Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) and Stapledon’s Last and
First Men (1930). In addition to this, and depending on the level and
length of time available to the teacher, there are a number of much
less-well-known titles that can be useful in contextualizing the genre
as a whole. Recent technology has come to the aid of pedagogy in this
regard; for while Wells and Verne have always been available in a vari-
ety of useful student editions it used to be the case that other scientific
romances were hard to come by, published if at all only in expensive
academic editions. The internet has changed that. Indeed, one of the
specific advantages of teaching the literature of the later nineteenth
century is that, since most of its authors died more than seventy years
ago, they are no longer in copyright (Wells will come out of copyright
in 2011). What this means is that it is possible to direct students to
scans of hitherto elusive scientific romance on – for instance – project
Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org) or Google Books (www.google/books.
com). Pragmatically this permits an unprecedented freedom to the
designer of courses on nineteenth-century literature. To revert for a
moment to the list of titles Stableford covers in depth in his mono-

graph: most of those twelve authors are now out of print, but all (save
only Bell) has at least one significant text, and in most cases several,
available to be read for free on either Project Gutenberg or Google
Books (in the case of Beresford and Heard this is only short fiction, with
‘limited previews’ of other work; but certainly enough to give students
a flavour of their writing). Sydney Fowler Wright’s works have been
digitized at http://www.sfw.org/.
Students with access to the varieties of nineteenth-century scientific
romance can add their voice to the clamorous critical debate concern-
ing the origins of sf: do the works of Wells and Verne, as many critics
have argued, constitute a new sort of literature? Or do they continue
older traditions of fantastic writing – the Gothic, for instance (it is a
simple matter in the classroom to take students through Brian Aldiss’s
celebrated argument that sf begins with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,
1818) – or an even older tradition of fantastic tales? A brief classroom
survey will establish which examples students have already encoun-
tered, from Homer’s Odyssey, through fairy and folk tales, Beowulf,
medieval Romance, to early utopian writing, or eighteenth-century
satire such as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726; corrected 1735) or Voltaire’s
Contes. This can then lead to discussion as to which elements of this
tradition might be called ‘science fiction’ and which would not be hos-
pitable to such identification.
It is important, of course, that students have some appropriate his-
torical and cultural context in which to read scientific romances. My
experience of teaching the Victorian period at both undergraduate
and MA level is of encountering students who think they understand
what ‘Victorianism’ means because they have internalized a number of
prevailing caricatured stereotypes: empire, sexual repression, industrial
revolution, young children sent up chimneys, pea-souper fogs, Jack
the Ripper and so on. Addressing the implicit cultural logic of this
cartoonish Victorianism can be a fruitful business for students, most of
whom are very ready to accept that their readings are better served by a
more nuanced and fleshed out sense of period. But it can also be time-
consuming. Imperialism, Victorian sexuality, industrialization: these are
each large topics in their own right, and although they can all be impor-
tant for a fuller understanding of what is going on in scientific romance
the course leader may of course need to balance the pressures of time.
Courses can be structured around authors, or themes; and teachers
may wish to group texts that respond (for instance) to the new dis-
courses of evolution and degeneration of the late nineteenth century, or
to the mechanistic innovations of industrialization, or – as many critics

do – to the burgeoning actualities of imperial expansion and the way
writers of the fantastic reverted this aggressive global expansion back
upon Western nations. Alternatively it is possible to teach by author,
starting (for instance) with Verne and Wells and moving through
whichever selection of other scientific romances is deemed most appro-
priate to the particular pedagogic situation.
Teaching Jules Verne has its own particular problems – beyond, that is
to say, the difficulty of finding space for a Francophone author in what
still remains an overwhelmingly Anglophone canon of texts taught in
English departments. It is very much worth overcoming this latter awk-
wardness, for no course on scientific romance will be complete without
some sense of his voyages extraordinaires, and Verne (by some metrics the
most widely translated author the world has seen) is hardly a parochial
writer. All his titles were published in English language versions, almost
all of them near-simultaneously with the French publication, and his
influence on other writers of scientific romance and on literary culture
more broadly was pervasive and important. But it is a sorrowful refrain
of English-language Verne criticism that he has been, by and large,
served very poorly by his translators.
I offer a personal anecdote to illustrate this point: in 2006 I wrote a
novel called Splinter, a postmodern re-imagining of Verne’s 1877 novel
Hector Servadac. In the original novel a comet collides with the earth and
carries away a chunk of North Africa, upon which survive a mixed group
of people: they journey on a trajectory away from the sun and then back
towards it, eventually returning to the Earth in hot-air balloons. At my
publisher’s behest I agreed to prepare an edition of Verne’s original novel
to be issued along with my re-imagining, writing a new introduction and
checking the original (anonymous) 1877 English translation for accuracy.
(My updated translation is available for free download here: http://www.
solarisbooks.com/downloads.asp.) I don’t believe that I found a single
page in the translation that represented an accurate rendering of the
French. Dialogue was half the time condensed into a prose summary, or
simply omitted. Sentences, or whole paragraphs, were cut. Verne’s lengthy
chapter 30 was removed in its entirety. The precise technical, engineering
and physical science elements of the novel were often treated in an illogi-
cal manner (for instance translating ‘metres’ as ‘yards’ and ‘centimetres’
as ‘inches’ without altering the numerical measurements). The English
translator was evidently much more anti-Semitic than Verne – what are
in the original French neutral phrases such as ‘…said Isaac Hakkabut’
were replaced in English with phrases such as ‘…said the repulsive old
Jew’. Finally, the original title Hector Servadac was discarded in favour of
the breathless Off on a Comet – one might as well retitle À la recherche du
temps perdu as ‘Off on a Teacake’. (An American translation by Edward
Roth had the even less appealing title: To the Sun? Off on a Comet! I thank
providence that this approach to naming the novels didn’t catch on, or
we might have had To the Centre of the Earth? Off down a Tunnel! )
The ‘Englishing’ of Hector Servadac is only one of many examples of the
mangling of Verne by nineteenth-century translators. Arthur Evans has
traced the extent to which Verne’s lucid and effective French has been
distorted in translation; from the omission of large chunks of the origi-
nal, the addition of non-Vernean material, the bowdlerization of senti-
ments hostile towards or injurious to the dignity of Great Britain (such as
might be uttered by Captain Nemo, an Indian nobleman who had dedi-
cated himself to an anti-imperialist cause), and many other things. As
Arthur Evans concludes: ‘readers who read Verne exclusively in English
translation are not reading the real Jules Verne. Measured by any standard
of completeness, accuracy, and style, these translations have committed
to Verne’s oeuvre what can only be described as a massacre.’2
What this means is that any teacher of Verne needs to ensure that s/he
is putting reasonably accurate renderings on the syllabus. Several univer-
sity presses (Oxford University Press in the UK and Wesleyan in the USA)
have issued some of Verne’s eighty-title output in clean new translations:
William Butcher’s 2009 translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the
Sea (1869–70) is especially good. That novel, though fairly long, makes
in my experience a good classroom text. Many of the students who have
not read it will nonetheless have a sense of what it is about from the
innumerable cinematic adaptations: Captain Nemo and his high-tech
submarine The Nautilus. Reading the source novel in such circumstances
(something similar happens with Frankenstein and Dracula) is inevitably
to be struck by how the original emphases and iconography of the text
has mutated under the pressure of other media, something that can be
explored in class discussion. Much of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the
Sea is given over to Verne’s synthesis of up-to-date (in the 1860s) oceano-
graphic science; and this scientific and technically didactic function is a
much larger part of the effectiveness of the whole than its many adapta-
tions imply. One cultural dynamic of scientific romance was precisely
as a conduit by which new discoveries in science and new potentials in
technology were communicated to a larger public.
For students who assume that the late nineteenth-century logic of
imperialism was ideologically monolithic, it can be salutary to read a
novel in which the hero is an Indian prince devoted to fighting the
forces of Empire through the medium of high technology. Teaching

can situate the novel in terms of European self-consciousness about
the negative as well as positive consequences of imperial expansion,
and the ambiguous relationship to advances in technology. Twenty
Thousand Leagues is also representative of a key Vernean textual logic:
it is about motion, literalized as a machine that moves ceaselessly all
about the world carrying the protagonists with it (its motto is Latin:
‘mobile in mobilum’, ‘mobile in the mobile element’). The self-conscious
fluidity of this is part of a larger Vernean textual fascination: his narra-
tives are always kinetic, always on the move, always taking the reader
to yet another colourful or interesting location – this is part of the rea-
son for his global success with readers – in ways that mirror a cultural
restlessness, but also anticipate the rise in tourism as a cultural phe-
nomenon. Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), another work rather
over-familiar from multiple cinematic adaptation, sweeps Phileas Fogg
breathlessly round the whole globe like a proto gap-year student. Here
the apprehension of cultural and racial otherness is more stereotypi-
cal: Fogg’s passage through India, during which he picks up a beautiful
Indian widow called Aouda as love-interest, is an orientalist mishmash
of violent thuggee cults, opium and incipient sensuality. But what is
new is the implicit logic of the text, namely that all these various and
previously far-flung nations and cultures are now directly apprehensi-
ble by any westerner with the necessary technology. Verne portrays a
shrinking globe.
Given Verne’s reputation as a founding figure in sf it sometimes
surprises students to discover that of more than eighty published titles
only two concern space travel. I have already mentioned one of these
(1877’s Hector Servadac). The other is the two-part From the Earth to the
Moon (1865) and Around the Moon (1870) – but even here, the lunar
spacecraft only leaves Earth, fired from a huge cannon, at the very
end of the first novel; and the second novel does not land its explorers
on the moon, but only sweeps them around and back to Earth. Verne
was interested in exploring the known, not in speculating about the
unknown, and in this he was closer to the typical scientific romance
than the more imaginatively freewheeling Wells, for all that Wells (in
Stableford’s thesis as in more general usage) is the cornerstone figure for
scientific romance.
Wells is in many ways an ideal author, pedagogically speaking. His
books are always thought-provoking and readable, and his scientific
romances in particular are mercifully short. I don’t mean to sound cyni-
cal in noting this, although it has been my experience as a teacher that
this is a pedagogic salient, in that some if not all students demonstrate a

remarkably deep-seated disinclination when it comes to reading longer
books. Moreover, in his half-dozen most famous scientific romances
from the 1890s Wells touches on all the key topics a course on scientific
romance needs to address.
The Time Machine (1895) not only effectively invented ‘time travel’ as
a sub-genre, it is also one of the most lucid late-century engagements
with the scientific and sociological discourses of the age. By moving his
(unnamed) protagonist first hundreds of thousands of years, and then
millions of years into the future, Wells was able literally to dramatize
Darwinian theory (Wells briefly studied in London under ‘Darwin’s
bulldog’, T.H. Huxley) as well as articulating the then-modish theory of
degeneration associated in particular with Max Nordau. Excerpts from
both Darwin and Nordau’s Degeneration can make excellent contexts for
classroom readings of the novel, as can a survey of that critique of the
dehumanizing facets of industrialization associated with Marx, Engels
or William Morris – something satirically extrapolated into the exist-
ences of Wells’s Morlocks. More to the point, The Time Machine remains
one of the most eloquent articulations of our new apprehension of the
dizzyingly enormous scales of the cosmos. Long time, as here, correlates
to the topographical widening of global horizons entailed by imperial-
ism. This produced both a sense of opportunity and a more deeply
rooted anxiety; the very particularity and sense of unique purpose (as
‘chosen’ by Providence, or God) that motivated Western nations to
expand across the globe was threatened by the scale of the world into
which they expanded. It is, after all, easy for a person to feel important
in a village, and very hard to feel significant as one among a crowd of
billions. Sf repeatedly returns to representations of the overwhelming,
swamping scale of the cosmos, and explores the status of the individual
against these new orders of magnitude. It is, perhaps, neither oversight
nor coincidence that Wells’s time traveller is nameless.
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) similarly intervenes in the debates
about evolutionary narrative and ‘deep time’ that occupied thinkers
in the later nineteenth century. In common with much of the broader
discourse, Wells’s fictive meditation reads the scientific in terms of
the religious. Wells’s scientist Moreau, upon his tropical island, has
accelerated the evolution of animals into humanoids. They act as his
servants, and have developed their own rudimentary religion, with
Moreau himself as a God of combined Mercy and Pain (‘His is the Hand
that wounds’, they chant: ‘His is the Hand that heals’). The novel’s
quasi-scientific Eden also includes a version of the biblical command
not to eat from the ‘Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil’ in that
Moreau has decreed that his beast-men not taste blood. His command
is, of course, transgressed, and the creatures revert to their bestial ori-
gins; the impetus towards devolution overwhelming the evolutionary.
One way of teaching The War of the Worlds (1896) is to set it as read-
ing alongside Chesney’s Battle of Dorking (1871) – neither work being
lengthy, it is a doubling of reading that most students could manage
easily enough. This has the benefit of defamiliarizing what is perhaps
an over-familiar story (very often adapted, of course, for the screen) and
pinpointing the extent to which Wells was working within a popular
contemporary sub-genre rather than inventing a new sort of novel out
of whole cloth. Chesney’s narrative – in effect a long short-story rather
than a novel – relates how very easily an imagined Prussian invasion
of Britain might be achieved. It was designed to argue that the coun-
try was both militarily and socially unprepared for inevitable conflict.
I.F. Clarke notes that The Battle of Dorking ‘was the beginning of a great
flood of future war stories that continued right up to the summer of
1914’.3 More than sixty titles could be listed as examples of this sub-
genre, and Clarke usefully distinguishes between different versions of
the core narrative. Those published in the 1870s and early 1880s (which
is to say, in the aftermath of the Prussian military success of the 1870
Franco-Prussian War) tended to articulate a sense of national fear and
paranoia. By the 1890s and 1900s such stories generally acquired a more
triumphalist flavour, which played its part in creating the culture of
enthusiasm with which Britons anticipated actual war against Germany
in the run-up to 1914.
To read War of the Worlds in the light of Chesney’s work is to be
struck not only by the similarities (it is a particularly liberating touch,
imaginatively and ideologically speaking, to replace actual Prussians
with notional Martians) but by the much greater sophistication of
Wells’s treatment over The Battle of Dorking. Chesney’s slim story is one-
dimensional, and even strident, in its ideological thrust; but Wells’s
novel symbolically distils a more dialectical understanding of the con-
cerns of his age. His Martians establish an interplanetary beachhead
near Woking and make war upon humanity from towering mechanical
tripods before eventually succumbing to the Earthly bacteria against
which they have no natural defence. It is a point made by many critics
that the Martians and their mechanized brutalities function as eloquent
symbolic articulations of the necessary violence of empire-building and
of the anxieties of otherness and the encounter with otherness that
Empire imposes on the imperialist. John Rieder makes a good point
with respect to this relationship, one that can emerge from, or at least
be elaborated within, classroom discussion:
The antithetical relation of colonial or imperial triumphalism to

science-fictional catastrophes is in some instances a straightforward
matter of the fiction’s reversing the positions of colonizer and colo-
nized, master and slave, core and periphery. This relatively simple
procedure yields complex results in the three influential texts with
which we will begin: George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871),
Richard Jefferies’ After London; or, Wild England (1885) and H G Wells’
The War of the Worlds (1898) … fantasies of appropriation and con-
quest sometimes project a set of internal contradictions onto an exte-
rior where they, or their surrogates, can be violently eliminated … [a]
pattern of purification and violence [that] alludes to the mounting
imperial competition of the pre-World War I and interwar decades.4
Scientific romance – and science fiction more generally – provide partic-

ularly good opportunities for students to read beyond simply the level
of ‘content’, and to explore the formal, cultural and ideological vectors
of literary signification. The ‘pattern of purification and violence’ Rieder
identifies here – a symbolic and ideological determinant of a great many
narratives from the 1890s to the 1930s – finds emblematic expression
in the high-tech ‘heat ray’ (what a later generation would call ‘the
white heat of technological revolution’) with which the Martians sear
southern England. Jefferies’s After London (available in full on Project
Gutenberg) describes a future England purged of most of its technol-
ogy – and population – by some unspecified catastrophe; survivors have
reverted to a medievalized and pastoral existence. In the twenty-third
chapter the young hero, Sir Felix Aquila, treks to the foul and poison-
ous black swamp that lies where London once was: a landscape littered
with skeletons and the blackened relics of the age of technology. In
the countryside, though, life has achieved a natural balance that if not
quite utopian is nevertheless more idyllic than otherwise. In The War
of the Worlds, mankind is saved not by its technology of warfare, but
by Nature herself, whose microbes can destroy the same Martians that
human cannon shells have proved incapable of harming. In Jefferies’s
tale Nature is less discriminating but just as powerful.
This revulsion from the technological and the desire to return to
uncorrupted ‘nature’ is also behind the many ‘lost world’ adventure
stories that followed in the wake of the enormous success of H. Rider
Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887). These sorts of
High Imperial romances of exotic travel in Africa and the discovery of

mysterious, ancient and forgotten people are, perhaps, only obliquely
‘science fictional’; although they and their many imitators are neverthe-
less amongst the purest forms of global romance in the canon, and they
can work very well on a scientific romance syllabus. In such stories, the
violence of conflict becomes magnified to encompass battles, the deaths
of immortals and the destruction of whole races; and purification is
found in a return to the natural state: ‘When the heart is stricken,’
Haggard’s hero Quatermain announces, ‘and the head is humbled in
the dust, civilization fails us utterly. Back, back we creep, and lay us like
children on the great breast of Nature.’5
One of the most enduring of these ‘lost world’ tales is the story
that gives the sub-genre its name: Conan Doyle’s The Lost World
(1912). Doyle’s imperial traveller is, bullishly enough, called ‘Professor
Challenger’ (a name calculated to imply the ideal balance of the intel-
lectual and the man of action), and he expresses his dilemma laconi-
cally at the beginning of the story: ‘The big blank spaces in the map are
all being filled in, and there’s no room for romance anywhere. Wait a bit
though!’6 Challenger and his friends are able to find one as-yet unsul-
lied blank space in amongst the mountains of South America, and here
they encounter not only primitive ape-men fighting a constant war, but
living dinosaurs. But the ‘romance’ element in ‘scientific romance’ was
indeed diminished, to the extent that it depended, as Challenger sug-
gests, upon empty spaces on the map in which explorers can encoun-
ter adventure, by the continually increasing actual knowledge of the
globe.
The pressure to find new places to explore is one of the things that
shifts the primary logic of science fiction from the Earth into Space. But
this transition was relatively slow. As I mentioned earlier, of all Verne’s
eighty-odd titles, only two (Around the Moon, 1870, and Hector Servadac,
1877) are set off our world; and even Wells only very rarely leaves the
ground: space travel is obliquely a part of War of the Worlds, and is more
centrally present in Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1901), but barely
occurs in his approximately one hundred other titles. But if space travel
is not centrally a feature of late nineteenth-century scientific romance,
it is present nevertheless; and since it was fated to become, of course,
one of the central tropes of twentieth-century science fiction, it is worth
covering the subject when teaching the mode.
For example, it can add depth to students’ appreciation of scientific
romance to have them read Percy Greg’s (out of print but, once again,
available unabridged on both Google Books and Project Gutenberg)
Across the Zodiac: The Story of a Wrecked Record (1880). A veteran of the
American Civil War sees a UFO crash (‘it had a very perceptible disc …
I came upon fragments of shining pale yellow metal … [and a] remark-
ably hard impenetrable cement’). From its wreckage he extracts a Latin
manuscript which tells how its anonymous human inventor discovered
the mysterious power source ‘apergy’ and used it to power an 1820 expe-
dition to Mars in a spaceship called ‘the Astronaut’ (the first recorded
use of this term). Greg correctly anticipated the weightlessness of space
travel, and fills the earlier chapters of his book with carefully recorded
scientific data, including detailed linguistic tables and declensions of a
Martian language. The middle portion of the tale is occupied by some
rather dry and certainly lengthy accounts of the society and Utilitarian
morals of the natives of Mars, and the narrator’s rather listless love for
a Martian maid Eveena. But it ends in more adventurous and exciting
mode, with political intrigue and attempted assassination. One of the
most interesting features of this book is the way it anticipates precisely
the quasi-anthropological focus and spurious exoticism of lost world
narratives. Mars becomes another place to be apprehended by deter-
mined, technologically inventive Western culture.
More far-reaching cosmic voyages are to be found in the works of
British writer Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950), a crucial figure in the non-
US traditions by which scientific romance came to influence postwar
global sf. One of the things that Stapledon brings to the genre is a
hitherto unprecedented chronological scale – unprecedented even by
Wells. ‘Long time’ is the least of it: his novel Last and First Men (1930)
disposes of the whole future history of Homo sapiens in a few pages
before replacing us with a new species, whose manner of living on the
planet he describes. Indeed, Stapledon traces eighteen distinct varieties
of continually evolving humanoids, the last being a solar-system span-
ning set of telepaths who are nonetheless ultimately to be wiped out by
a cosmic collision. The narrative stretches across several billion years;
but Stapledon’s later Star Maker (1937) dwarfs even that timescale in its
chronological spread, taking in our whole universe, and then myriad
other universes as well, all described with unflagging energy and inven-
tion, and ultimately revealed to be the work of a chillily impersonal
entity the ‘star maker’ of the book’s title.
I have in my time taught both these Stapledonian titles, and have
found it more difficult to do well than teaching other, more conven-
tional sf titles. This is not, of course, to say that it cannot be a reward-
ing pedagogic experience; but it is worth facing the difficulty – namely
that they will probably be quite unlike other novels students have
encountered before; and that many students, when faced with some-
thing radically new, are as likely to retreat into incomprehension as
engagement. The way to address this, I think, is to make the very dif-
ference of scale, and novelistic conception, the focus of teaching: to
discuss what happens to conventional concepts like ‘character’ and
‘narrative’ over such mind-boggling lengths of time and space. Giving
students some sense of the conceptual history of ‘the sublime’ as a
category (along with its materialist sf equivalent ‘sense of wonder’) is
one way into this question; and it can broaden into a discussion of the
endurance of sf’s appeal.
As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, it seems to me worth mak-
ing space in any course about scientific romance to touch on the con-
tinuing presence of the mode in current sf. One way of doing this is to
introduce such students to the modern sub-genre known as ‘Steampunk’.
This was a term formed by analogy with ‘Cyberpunk’, the sub-genre
inaugurated especially by William Gibson’s high-tech futuristic-noir
Neuromancer (1984). The first steampunk novel was The Difference Engine
(1990) co-authored by Gibson and his friend Bruce Sterling, and based
on the alternate-history notion that Charles Babbage’s early-model com-
puter was successfully produced instead of remaining only a prototype.
The invention of computing a century before it was actually developed
(the assumption goes) would have produced a nineteenth century in
which rapidly accelerated technological advances went hand-in-hand
with sometimes quaintly rendered Victorian mores, manners and dress.
The items of technological advance need not be literally steam-powered
(although many are), but it is one of the conventions of this rapidly
burgeoning form of sf that not only the dress and setting but the fictive
form of steampunk novels apes late nineteenth-century originals.
In fact steampunk as a cultural phenomenon pre-dates Gibson
and Sterling’s book by decades, even though that is the text that has
given the sub-genre its name. The phenomenon’s roots reach at least
to the 1960s, when (as with the Beatles dressing up as multicoloured
Edwardian band musicians for the cover of Sgt Pepper) a flamboyantly
re-imagined late Victorian or Edwardian style became the vogue. Large
audiences were drawn to neo-scientific romance time travel adven-
tures on the large or small screen (George Pal’s cinematic version of
Wells’s The Time Machine, 1960, or the TV serials Adam Adamant Lives!
1966–67, and Doctor Who, 1963–89, particularly in its Jon Pertwee
phase, 1970–74). Michael Moorcock published a trilogy of pastiche
Edwardian adventures: The Warlord of the Air (1971), The Land Leviathan
(1973, tellingly subtitled ‘A New Scientific Romance’) and The Steel Tsar
(1981) – later reissued in one volume as A Nomad of the Time Streams:

A Scientific Romance (1993). In part this was designed to connect with
the success of The Difference Engine, but it also acknowledges a longer-
standing appeal of the form.
It may not be practical to teach any of these texts in detail (although
it would certainly be possible, and potentially interesting, to do so). But
in a course that balances actual Victorian and Edwardian examples of
scientific romance against late twentieth-century pastiches of the form,
it may be worthwhile to canvass students for their experience of exam-
ples of this mode. Among the most influential recent examples is Alan
Moore’s ongoing graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
(3 vols: 2002; 2003; 2008) (not, however, the risible cinematic adapta-
tion of the same, which Moore himself has disowned). Also noteworthy
is so-called New Weird fiction (China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station,
2000, Ian MacLeod’s The Light Ages, 2003), works that deftly capture
the style and feel of late Victorian worlds and put them at the service of
canny, postmodern apprehensions of the fractured social and cultural
logic of the contemporary.
Steampunk, in fact, has rapidly become a ubiquitous cultural style
rather than a category: not only do writers produce many stories and
novels that are in effect modern-day scientific romances, but sf fans
dress in frock coats and wear kid gloves, and companies produce ‘steam-
punk’ artefacts for sale: computer keyboards modelled on 1890s type-
writer fascias, CD players gleaming with mahogany, brass, clockwork
and valves. The popularity of these sorts of props speaks to a continuing
fascination with – precisely – scientific romance; and this in itself can
make a good ground for student discussion. Students unfamiliar with
steampunk as a literary genre might find it useful to read a collection of
short fiction rather than whole novels: two recent edited anthologies of
interest are Nick Gevers’s Extraordinary Engines: The Definitive Steampunk
Anthology (2008) and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s Steampunk (2008).
To explore the multifarious manifestations of steampunk as a cultural
commodity or style, students could do worse than go to the website
Boing Boing (www.boingboing.com), which amongst other things logs
interesting new examples of these latter (type ‘steampunk’ in the site’s
search engine for examples of what I mean).
Part of the appeal, here, is evidently nostalgia, compounded by a
sense that though ornate (or perhaps precisely because of such ornate-
ness) this cultural logic is more elegant and attractive than more
modern aesthetics of sf. But, to return to the point I was making at
the beginning, it can be worthwhile in a teaching situation discussing
the extent to which there is something more significant going on. For
instance, it is worth interrogating the widespread but inchoate sense
that sf is somehow ‘about the future’. To what extent is it more accurate
to talk about sf’s notional futures as ways of parsing the present and the
past – a logic contemporary scientific romances make manifest – by way
of metaphorically unlocking the key discursive dynamics that inform
our lives. This is to speak to the continuing relevance of a mode – sf –
sometimes denigrated as merely escapist; but it is also to explore the
extent to which such apparently Victorian fascinations (evolution and
‘devolution’/degeneration; imperialism; the potentials and dangers of
technological innovation; imperialism and the encounter with other-
ness) are actually core to present-day existence.
Notes
1. Brian Stableford, Scientific Romance in Britain 1890–1950 (New York: St Martin’s
Press, 1985) 3.
2. Arthur Evans, ‘Jules Verne’s English Translators’, Science Fiction Studies, 33:1
(2005): 80–104.
3. I.F. Clarke, ed., The Tale of the Next Great War 1871–1914 (Liverpool: Liverpool
4. John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2008) 124.
5. Haggard quoted in Rieder, Colonialism, 39.
6. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World and Other Thrilling Tales (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Classics, 2001) 15.
5
Teaching Pulp Science Fiction
Gary Westfahl
One might derive a working definition of ‘pulp science fiction’ from a

well-known fact, and a well-known opinion. As a matter of fact, science
fiction magazines from the 1920s to the early 1950s (wherein science
fiction emerged as a recognized genre) were generally printed on cheap
yellow paper, ‘pulp’, and hence termed pulp magazines. As a matter of
opinion, Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery, assembling The Norton
Book of Science Fiction (1993), included only stories from the 1960s and
thereafter because to them that represented, as stated in Le Guin’s intro-
duction, the era of science fiction’s ‘maturity’.1 One could define pulp
science fiction, then, as genre science fiction which is not ‘mature’.
To be sure, this definition’s time frame must be adjusted, in part
because pulp science fiction magazines (as noted) disappeared in the
early 1950s, almost universally supplanted by the now-standard digest
format. Furthermore, most commentators, including myself, would say
the genre matured in the 1950s, not the 1960s, as shown by the appear-
ance of new magazines, Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction, which explicitly sought and addressed adult readers, and by
the publication of many esteemed stories and novels. After all, several
works from this decade – including Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles
(1950), Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953), Theodore Sturgeon’s
More Than Human (1953), Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959)
and Walter M. Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) – are routinely
assigned in college science fiction classes, testifying to their literary qual-
ity and, one might say, their maturity. And one naturally recoils, I think,
from describing such novels as ‘pulp science fiction’, even though por-
tions of four of them originally appeared in science fiction magazines.
For that reason, I address as ‘pulp science fiction’ only works that
appeared in the science fiction magazines of the 1920s, 1930s and
86
Teaching Pulp Science Fiction 87
1940s, since these are usually excluded from the college curriculum,
except for a few stories in retrospective anthologies, and since I argue
that these works, even if deemed immature, do merit consideration
as texts for science fiction classes. I will focus on six works from this
era, including ideas for class discussions and suggestions for research
projects.
One must approach the magazine science fiction of the 1920s and
1930s with an awareness of their typical readers: young Anglo males,
brighter than their peers, particularly fascinated by science, and socially
inept loners. Frustrated by a society that lacked their interests and failed
to value them as people, unable to find and bond with like-minded
others in their immediate vicinity, these adolescents happily turned to
the fabulous world of science fiction magazines, wherein they found
stories about men like themselves who made amazing discoveries in the
future, conquered the universe, earned humanity’s acclaim, and won
the hands of beautiful women – heartening affirmations of their own
true worth and glorious future. Through letters and announcements in
these magazines, they also learned about a growing national network
of people devoted to such fiction, which they eagerly connected to,
finally able to feel a sense of community. For portraits of these indi-
viduals, one might examine memoirs written by science fiction authors
who grew up reading pulp science fiction – such as Frederik Pohl’s The
Way the Future Was (1978), Jack Williamson’s Wonder’s Child (1984) or
Clarke’s Astounding Days (1990) – but the best choice might be Isaac
Asimov’s anthology Before the Golden Age (1974), offering both a rich
selection of science fiction stories of the 1930s and lengthy commentar-
ies on Asimov’s youthful reactions to them, effectively making the book
Asimov’s first autobiography.
In our enlightened, multicultural age, does a population of largely
male, largely white, and largely American people from 1920 to 1950
really deserve special attention? First, one must avoid stereotyping
these readers: they were not, for example, virulent sexists who excluded
women from their all-male world of science and adventure; rather,
they were desperately eager to welcome those occasional women who
came to science fiction conventions or wrote science fiction stories, as
documented in Eric Leif Davin’s Partners in Wonder (2006). In addition,
many of these young men later became the scientists and engineers
who helped to build the atomic bomb and launch the American space
programme, meaning that, for better or worse, these were people who,
as they once dreamed, eventually had a major impact on their society.
(It is a matter of record, for example, that John W. Campbell Jr, editor of
Astounding Science-Fiction in the 1940s, first sensed that some sort of spe-
cial scientific project was going on when he noticed a huge increase in
subscriptions from a small town in New Mexico named Los Alamos; and
there are numerous testimonials from participants in the Manhattan
Project and America’s space programme of their early interest in science
fiction. How, one wonders, did the extravagant space operas read by
these long-time science fiction readers affect their work?)
As a text to shed light on these readers, I personally cherish
Williamson’s After Worlds End (1938) – a particularly hallucinogenic
vision of a present-day man whose identity blurs with that of an identi-
cal far-future descendant battling an implacable robot adversary intent
upon destroying humanity – but Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night (1953)
is more accessible. Though first published in magazine form in 1948,
Clarke began writing the book in the 1930s, and its story reflects the
style and concerns of that decade. Alvin is a young man in a fantastic
future city, Diaspar, which effectively imprisons its immortal residents
while benevolently providing for their every need. While everyone else
is content within this protective cocoon, the restlessly curious Alvin
seeks to escape and learn about the outside world. With the help of an
eccentric mentor, he becomes the first person in eons to leave Diaspar
and begins a journey which takes him first to another, very different
city on Earth and then into space, where he learns that everything
Diaspar’s citizens had been taught about their history is incorrect.
What sort of person would find this story appealing? Clearly, it would
be a young man who feels he is surrounded by boring people inexpli-
cably unexcited about the prospects of futuristic inventions and space
travel; a youth anxious to discover that the dull world around him is
not as it seems, or will soon be irreversibly transformed; a youth who
enjoys daydreaming about becoming the one special person who awak-
ens the world from complacent slumber and leads it to a new, grander
destiny. Against the Fall of Night is not a literary masterpiece, or even
Clarke’s best work, but it exudes undeniable energy as it speeds Alvin
from revelation to revelation against the backdrop of a vast, empty uni-
verse filled with unanswered questions.
Against the Fall of Night might inspire some stimulating research
projects. First, after becoming prominent in the 1950s, Clarke was
embarrassed by this piece of juvenilia and extensively revised the
novel to add depth and polish, publishing the result in 1956 as The
City and the Stars. However, while one appreciates that novel’s better
developed scientific ideas and more thoughtful aura, it proved, overall,
a lesser work, as its virtues did not compensate for a conspicuous lack
of youthful vigour, and over the years Against the Fall of Night has been
embraced as the definitive version of the story. Students might also
ponder Clarke’s novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to explore
similarities between Alvin and two other figures who embark upon
lonely quests for cosmic wisdom, the prehistoric Moon-Watcher (bet-
ter characterized in the novel) and astronaut Dave Bowman. Students
might examine Gregory Benford’s 1989 sequel to Against the Fall of
Night, Beyond the Fall of Night (originally published in tandem with
Clarke’s novel as a purported collaboration and later republished in a
separate, expanded version, with references to Clarke’s novel removed,
as Beyond Infinity, 2004) to observe how abysmally Benford fails to
recapture the magic of Clarke’s novel with a tiresome, politically-correct
continuation of the story focusing on a hapless female protagonist
assisted by several strange beings while stumbling through an incon-
gruously crowded reinvention of Clarke’s stark and lonely future, now
cluttered with aliens and new inventions – all of which represents a
betrayal of Clarke’s original vision. (Benford is a productive scientist
and talented author, but perhaps he has spent too much time working
on a college campus to be comfortable with a tale of a solitary young
white man single-handedly conquering the universe, explaining his
odd take on Clarke’s novel.)
Another novel written in the 1930s provides insight into the psychol-
ogy of its readers not so much through its protagonist as through the
character that is central to his concerns. In Williamson’s The Legion of
Time (1938, 1952),2 the entire future of the universe hinges upon one
action to be taken by a bright youngster in our present: if he picks up
a magnet and begins playing with it, he will grow up to become a bril-
liant scientist whose inventions will lead to a benign future utopia; if
he does not pick up the magnet, he never becomes a scientist and the
future will be a dark dystopia. Both futures now exist in quasi-real, ten-
tative states, and combatants from each universe travel through time in
efforts to ensure that the boy will either pick up or ignore the magnet
and thus firmly establish the reality of their own universe and erase its
rival. Here, while nerdish readers could identify with Williamson’s hero
from the utopian future which ultimately triumphs, they were surely
more inclined to imagine themselves as the novel’s child, viewed by
contemporaries as insignificant but actually destined to determine the
destiny of the universe. And yes, in the 1930s, magnets were common
toys for science-minded youth.
Along with sociological analyses, pulp science fiction of the 1930s
invites examination as the origin of the sort of science fiction – most
prominently represented by the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises – now
dominating popular culture. One place to begin such a study is E.E.
‘Doc’ Smith’s Galactic Patrol (1937–38, 1950), first published as a serial
in Astounding Stories and originally the first of four novels constituting
the Lensman series (though Smith later revised a previously unrelated
novel, Triplanetary, 1948, to serve as the series’ first instalment and wrote
First Lensman, 1950, to bridge the gap between Triplanetary and Galactic
Patrol, creating the six-novel series now familiar to science fiction read-
ers). This novel introduced Smith’s main hero, Kimball Kinnison, who
leads an alliance of humans and aliens (backed by a benevolent ancient
race called the Arisians) in a galactic war against sinister pirates control-
led by an implacable enemy named ‘Helmuth, speaking for Boskone’3
(although, as later novels reveal, he actually works for another ancient,
but evil, race, the Eddorians). Relying upon the mysterious Lens given
to him and other Lensmen by the Arisians, which provides psychic
powers, as well as his own scientific know-how and resourcefulness,
Kinnison succeeds in a risky mission to gain information about his foes
and eventually kills Helmuth by means of a one-man assault on his
hidden base.
Students will have a field day critiquing the clunky prose, egregious
sexism and childish heroics of Galactic Patrol; but despite its inadequa-
cies, they will also discern in the novel a template for the stories they
have grown up watching in cinemas and on television: humans allied
with colourful aliens opposing evil empires; space battles involving
immense starships assailing each other with amazing rays; fierce, hand-
to-hand combat on starship decks and planetary surfaces with adver-
saries wielding futuristic variations of ancient weapons. A question
for social historians would be: why were these fantastic narratives so
under-appreciated in the 1930s and so popular in the 1970s and there-
after? It is not simply that advances in special effects technology were
needed to make such sagas work on film, since films like Die Frau im
Mond (Fritz Lang, 1929) and Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies,
1936) demonstrate that, even in the 1930s, filmmakers who invested
time and resources in their efforts could provide persuasive renderings
of space travel. Rather, there must be other reasons why cowboys and
detectives have largely been supplanted by space-faring adventurers as
our larger-than-life heroes of choice.
One cannot entirely dismiss Star Trek, Star Wars and similar works
as mere adaptations of the space operas written by Smith and others
in the 1930s, since these franchises depart from Smith’s pattern in
ways worth discussing. First, though he often uses the almost magical
powers of the Lens – an arguable anticipation of George Lucas’s mysti-

cal ‘Force’ – Kinnison also understands the superscience of his day and
employs his knowledge to solve problems; for example, stranded on an
alien planet and needing energy to recharge their batteries, Kinnison
and a cohort visit an alien power plant and ingeniously use ‘pliers,
screwdrivers, and other tools of the electrician’ to extract its power.4 In
contrast, the original Star Trek offered an appealing protagonist without
such capabilities, James Kirk, who relied upon subordinates Mr Spock
and Mr Scott for technological fixes, while the Star Wars series almost
entirely dispenses with scientifically knowledgeable characters to focus
on heroes who simply make clever use of off-the-shelf technology they
may not fully understand. Perhaps any story seeking a mass audience
must foreground likeable, ordinary characters instead of scientific gen-
iuses like Kinnison.
Also, while Star Wars and its sequels follow Smith more closely in
emphasizing armed conflict against irredeemable foes, the Star Trek
universe prefers diplomatic intrigue and a narrative arc tending toward
eventual reconciliation between bitter adversaries; thus, the chief
enemies of the first series, the Klingons, later become allies, and epi-
sodes often depict efforts to peacefully resolve conflicts with other foes
like the Romulans. So, fittingly enough for a series that emerged in the
Swinging Sixties, Star Trek visibly seeks viewers who prefer to make love,
not war. Finally, as further material for comparison-contrast papers,
students may watch the Japanese anime adaptation of Smith’s series,
Lensman (1984), and there are plans for an American live-action film.
In the 1940s, Campbell, who officially became editor of Astounding
Science-Fiction in 1938, attracted and nurtured a new generation of
writers who, in some cases, appealed to the readers of science fiction
in a new way: instead of presenting incredibly talented heroes who
mirrored their juvenile, even nerdish, fantasies, these writers offered
more plausible, yet attractive visions of the mature adults their readers
might some day become. A key transitional work is Heinlein’s ‘If This
Goes On –’ (1940), later revised and published along with two further
stories as Revolt in 2100 (1953). Protagonist and narrator John Lyle is
an intelligent young man in a dystopian future America controlled by
a religious dictatorship. Initially, he accepts the official religion and its
government, but he begins to doubt the benevolence and desirability
of the regime when he falls in love with an innocent young woman
recruited to become the Prophet’s latest mistress, and he soon joins a
vast underground movement dedicated to replacing the tyranny with a
secular, democratic government. While early chapters give Lyle exciting
things to do – nocturnal derring-do in the Prophet’s Palace and a cross-

country mission to deliver an important message – he settles into the
role of a minor functionary in the revolutionary movement and is only
an observer of their daring and successful coup d’état (though he acci-
dentally plays a key role in a final assault on the Prophet’s palace).
To some critics, this represents a flaw in the novel, a sign of Heinlein’s
immaturity as a writer; wouldn’t it have been better, they say, to make
the leader of the revolution the story’s hero? Yet I would invite students
to detect a subtle agenda in Heinlein’s approach. Essentially, he takes a
typical science fiction protagonist from the 1930s – young, smart and
energetic – and argues that such individuals, by themselves, can never
achieve significant social change; rather, unlike Kinnison – who single-
handedly overcomes a cosmic despot – Lyle must join with many others
who share his goals, help them build a large, complex organization, and
ultimately serve as one of innumerable compatriots each performing
small but significant tasks which have a cumulative impact. Heinlein’s
readers, along with his protagonist, thus receive an education in the real-
ities of advanced civilization, wherein plucky youngsters, even equipped
with great intelligence and amazing inventions, can never conquer the
universe unaided. The contrast between Against the Fall of Night and
‘If This Goes On –’ is illuminating: Alvin becomes the sole saviour of
humanity, while Lyle becomes a foot soldier in a revolutionary army.
As one research project, students might consider ‘If This Goes On –’
as a bracing comeuppance to the individualistic heroes of the 1930s
by examining another Heinlein novel, Sixth Column (1941, 1949),
which though written after ‘If This Goes On –’ actually offers a story
constructed well before it. In the 1930s, Campbell wrote a novella, ‘All’
(which eventually appeared in the 1976 collection The Space Beyond),
but deemed it unpublishable; however, to make use of his labours,
he hired Heinlein to write a novel based on its story. Campbell had
crafted a classic 1930s saga of astounding victory against daunting odds
achieved by remarkable men: after an Asian nation conquers America,
six geniuses hole up in an isolated fortress, whip up some superscience
that specifically targets people of Asian descent, and overthrow the
invaders essentially all by themselves. It represents, then, how ‘If This
Goes On –’ might have proceeded if Heinlein had implausibly presented
Lyle as a brilliant scientist who single-handedly defeats America’s dic-
tatorship. In adapting ‘All’, Heinlein did his best to make this racist,
unrealistic story palatable, but the result was unquestionably one of his
lesser works. One could both understand and convey to others, then,
how science fiction changed from the 1930s to the 1940s with some
slightly-out-of-chronological-order reading: first, ‘All’, to sample the

wish-fulfilment fantasies of 1930s science fiction; then, Sixth Column,
to observe a reasonable man of the 1940s vainly striving to make these
fantasies seem sensible; and finally, ‘If This Goes On –’, to observe that
same reasonable man abandoning the fantasies and instead undertak-
ing to describe how a successful revolution might actually be achieved.
Students particularly interested in Heinlein – one of the field’s semi-
nal figures – might read the original magazine version of ‘If This Goes
On –’ and compare it to the revised, expanded version. Some changes
are inconsequential: Heinlein adds a mildly salacious skinny-dipping
scene for adult readers and reworks one of Lyle’s thrilling escapes to
make it more realistic. But one change is telling: in the original version,
the rebels decide, after their revolution succeeds, to launch a propa-
ganda campaign to persuade citizens to accept their new government,
and no one objects. In the revision, upon hearing of this plan, an eld-
erly man stands up to vociferously complain:
‘Free men aren’t “conditioned”! Free men are free because they are
ornery and cussed and prefer to arrive at their own prejudices in
their own way – not have them spoon-fed by a self-appointed mind
tinkerer! We haven’t fought, our brethren haven’t bled and died, just
to change bosses, no matter how sweet their motives.’5
Shamed by his passionate opposition, rebel leaders abandon their plan.

This shift in attitude defined Heinlein’s later career: originally com-
mitted to the importance of working within groups to achieve social
change (and once seeking a career in politics), his stories featured
individuals who, while brilliant and capable, were willing to work with
others within intricate organizations to accomplish worthwhile goals.
As such, he would have no quarrel with benign efforts to convince
people to accept a new government. Later, disillusioned with society,
Heinlein increasingly insisted that brilliant, capable individuals should
rather abandon civilization and its annoying restrictions and instead
seek unlimited freedom outside society – the recurring message of Time
Enough for Love (1973). That speech, then, is an early sign of a burgeon-
ing inclination to reject socialization and embrace individualism –
although, unlike the heroes of 1930s science fiction, Heinlein’s later
protagonists did not leave their communities to conquer the universe
but rather only sought to fulfil their own personal desires.
The other two stories in Revolt in 2100, however, only reinforce
Heinlein’s original message: ‘Misfit’ (1939), identified by Sam Moskowitz
as Heinlein’s first juvenile story,6 anticipates the pattern of his juvenile

novels by describing a troubled young man, Andrew Jackson Libby, who
joins a team turning an asteroid into a space station, reveals and uses
his amazing calculating abilities to save the day, and then is content-
edly integrated into his society. (The character reappears in later novels
Methuselah’s Children, 1941, 1958, Time Enough for Love, and The Number
of the Beast, 1980.) In ‘Coventry’ (1940), a man unwilling to comply
with the reasonable rules of his enlightened, post-revolutionary society
must go where all such people are sent – a special zone where no rules
are enforced – and in that lawless realm learns the desirability of abid-
ing by social norms. (Heinlein introduced the concept of ‘Coventry’ in
his long-unpublished first novel, For Us the Living: A Comedy of Customs,
2004, which ‘If This Goes On –’ also borrows from in minor ways.)
If Heinlein in the 1940s was striving to train young readers to
function as members of society, other authors, such as Asimov, had
embarked upon another sort of training, writing stories that effectively
showed young readers how to think like scientists. Like the archetypal
Heinlein hero, Asimov’s protagonists were more sociable than those of
the 1930s; they particularly loved engaging in conversations, leading
to stories driven more by dialogue than by derring-do. But rather than
seeking power, fame or political change, Asimov’s heroes primarily
needed to solve puzzles – albeit puzzles linked to broader concerns.
Still, in describing thoughtful individuals who carefully gathered infor-
mation, considered alternatives, reasoned everything out, and finally
achieved correct solutions, Asimov (then studying to become a chemist
and later employed as a chemistry professor) was arguably presenting
the first realistic portrayals of working scientists in genre science fiction,
even if that was not always their official profession.
One useful collection displaying Asimov’s approach is I, Robot (1940–50,
1950), offering nine stories about humanoid robots supposedly rendered
harmless by the rigid programming of the Three Laws – which famously
prevent robots from harming humans or disobeying their orders while
otherwise allowing them to protect themselves. Yet crises invariably
arise – usually, robots representing a threat to humans – so their mas-
ters must deduce the source of the problems and devise solutions. Some
stories feature space explorers Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan, who
grapple with malfunctioning robots during missions on the frontiers of
the solar system, but others foreground the more memorable Dr Susan
Calvin, a robot psychologist who works in laboratories to figure out
why certain robots are perilously misbehaving. Asimov revised these
stories in minor ways to make them consistent with each other – I have
elsewhere explored how, throughout the original stories, Asimov kept

rephrasing and tinkering with the Three Laws until achieving a final,
definitive text, then incorporated into the revisions7 – but there is little
material here for a textual study. More interesting are the texts which
emerged from these stories – not only a trilogy featuring detective Lije
Baley and robot partner R. Daneel Olivaw, but a fourth novel, Robots
and Empire (1985), which linked the robot stories to Asimov’s far-future
Foundation saga, also launched during the 1940s, creating a vast, multi-
volume future history of which I, Robot is the first instalment. And in
almost every work in the series, the focus of attention is a mystery, and
protagonists discuss the puzzle, think things through, and finally reach
a satisfactory solution.
Students studying I, Robot might compare Asimov’s book to its pur-
ported film adaptation, I, Robot (Proyas, 2004) – although the film’s
script originally had nothing to do with Asimov; instead, the producers
owning the script bought the rights to Asimov’s title and added a few
Asimovian touches to a final revision. Of course, Asimov’s emphasis
on thoughtful conversation and deduction could not be replicated in
a money-making action film, resulting in a production that seems not
only divorced from Asimov’s stories but antithetical to them. A revela-
tory scene, discussed in my review of the film, recalls the I, Robot story
‘Little Lost Robot’ (1947) in that a dangerous robot has concealed him-
self amidst scores of innocuous duplicates, but story and film immedi-
ately diverge dramatically:
In Asimov’s story, as one might expect, the problem sets the stage for
a series of ingenious tests devised by Calvin which eventually force
the robot to reveal himself. In this film, destroying any hopes for a
truly Asimovian story, Spooner [Will Smith] just pulls out his gun
and starts blasting robots in the head, figuring that the frightened
culprit will soon run away.8
An intriguing analysis might also involve comparing Asimov’s book

to Harlan Ellison’s unproduced, and reasonably faithful, adaptation,
published as I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay (1994). One question
to ponder: if science fiction in fact matured and improved during the
1940s, why did it also, it seems, become less attractive as material for
film adaptations? (Along with I, Robot, the sorry history of Heinlein film
adaptations might be brought into the discussion.)
Even while Heinlein and Asimov established themselves as different
sorts of alternatives to the extravagances of the 1930s, another new
writer in Campbell’s stable – A.E. van Vogt – carried the youthful exu-
berance of the 1930s to new extremes. In the manner of the previous
decade, van Vogt’s stories often featured childlike loners with amaz-
ing abilities who travelled great distances, battled daunting foes, and
emerged as all-powerful saviours of humanity. What he added to the
pattern, first, was an abundance of ideas – one tossed out every eight
hundred words, following a formula he learned from a guide to writers –
that made his works seem more profound than previous space operas.
Second, in keeping with this constant, dizzying assault of new concepts
and perspectives, van Vogt transcended the traditional rationality of
science fiction to instead generate stories that resisted logical explana-
tion. Esteemed in his day, van Vogt is no longer well known or highly
regarded, but the model of science fiction that he created – dynamic,
breathless and wildly imaginative – powerfully influenced later writers
like Philip K. Dick.
To appreciate van Vogt’s unique power, students might read his first
novel Slan (1940, 1946), featuring young Jommy Cross, persecuted
member of the tendrilled, telepathic race of mutants called slans. With
mesmerizing energy, van Vogt rushes his hero from one death-trap to
another as he grows to adulthood, masters his late father’s superscientific
discoveries, and constructs weapons to wield against two relentless foes:
normal humans, who hunt down and kill slans, and newly discovered
‘tendrilless slans’, who maintain an undercover society while despising
and assailing regular slans as much as, if not more than, the humans.
In a final confrontation with Kier Gray, the dictator who postures as a
fierce opponent of slans, Cross learns that Gray is actually a disguised
slan himself, one of many actually controlling the government.
A talented writer who polished his skills in other pulp genres before
tackling science fiction, van Vogt will effortlessly enthral students who
were unimpressed by Smith’s clumsy prose; but they will understand
why van Vogt’s kaleidoscopic approach to science fiction faded away
while Heinlein’s and Asimov’s more subdued styles became dominant.
For no matter how relentlessly van Vogt maintains his frenetic pace
and keeps shocking readers with new ideas, they eventually realize that
his stories fundamentally do not make sense. In contrast to Heinlein
and Asimov’s meticulously planned futures, van Vogt’s worlds are cha-
otic mixtures of mind-boggling scientific advances and anachronistic
remnants of present-day life. As enemies become friends and victims
become victimizers, these reversals inevitably seem implausible, even as
van Vogt shouts out quick explanations before lurching in yet another
new direction. There is no aura of reality, no sense of conviction, to
van Vogt’s visions; instead, they have the atmosphere, and logic, of a
dream. A scene in Slan is revelatory: Kathleen Layton, the young female
slan inexplicably sheltered by the apparently slan-hating Gray, wakes
in the middle of the night to witness a startling confrontation between
Gray and ten chief lieutenants, whose loyalties (as Layton’s telepathy
reveals) gradually shift away from Gray and toward a rebellious sub-
ordinate until Gray abruptly summons these men’s assistants into the
room; somehow, he anticipated this development and had previously
recruited the assistants to enter at this precise moment and kill their
bosses, ending the revolt. The timing of this scene gives the game away:
impossible to accept as a reasonable series of events, the sequence seems
more like Kathleen’s dream, reflecting subconscious fears that Gray’s
associates will contrive to kill her and faith that Gray will always pro-
tect her. Even Dick, who as noted emulated van Vogt in some respects,
learned enough from Heinlein and Asimov to make his future worlds
passably believable, and his strange narrative twists ostensibly plausible.
Van Vogt’s imaginings, carefully examined, inexorably fall apart.
Slan also suggests several research projects. First, while van Vogt’s mul-
tiple revisions of The World of Null-A (1945, 1948) are better known, van
Vogt also revised Slan on two occasions, for book publication in 1946
and for republication in 1951, striving always to improve the narrative’s
logic while retaining its hypnotic appeal. For efforts to build upon and
improve van Vogt’s story, one might consider Heinlein’s Methuselah’s
Children, which has an opening sequence often said to borrow from
Slan, as citizens of a future society try to locate and capture a despised
minority of unusually long-lived people; but rather than developing
more and more scientific powers, Heinlein’s heroes, more realistically,
escape their adversaries without overcoming them, embarking upon a
sedate interstellar journey before returning to rejoin humanity as equals
(since their former pursuers discover their own method to achieve
comparable longevity). Much later, Kevin J. Anderson employed van
Vogt’s outline and unfinished draft of a sequel to Slan to produce the
posthumous collaboration Slan Hunter (2007), endeavouring to replicate
van Vogt’s distinctive style while bringing the saga up to the standards
of recent science fiction.
Finally, Heinlein, Asimov and van Vogt were all regarded as Campbell’s
discoveries and mostly published during the 1940s in his Astounding
Science-Fiction, universally accepted as the decade’s leading magazine.
Yet surveys of this era’s science fiction cannot focus exclusively on
Campbell, since other writers outside his circle were producing sig-
nificant work and developing their own distinctive approaches. In
particular, the magazine Planet Stories attracted skilful writers who

specialized in the subgenre of planetary romance – stories which took
place on alien worlds and featured genre tropes like aliens, robots and
amazing inventions, but otherwise had the style and ambience of fan-
tasy. Since Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars (1912, 1917) first
popularized the form and established its conventions, one good exam-
ple of planetary romance would be its final sequel Llana of Gathol (1941,
1948), first published as four novelettes in Amazing Stories, a rousing
adventure featuring the series’ original hero, John Carter, returning to
action one more time to assist his impetuous granddaughter. Yet newer
writers in the tradition, like Leigh Brackett, were outdoing Burroughs
in their prose and atmosphere, and an anthology of her 1940s works,
Lorelei of the Red Mist (1943–50, 2007), would introduce students to this
unique talent, widely cherished within the genre.
Her stories, one realizes, are animated by an entirely different sensi-
bility than previously discussed works, which focus on the future, with
capable protagonists dedicated to further advancing humanity with new
scientific and social achievements; even Against the Fall of Night, which
begins with a decadent far-future civilization, concludes with reawak-
ened ambitions and a renewed drive for progress. Brackett’s narratives,
like fantasies, primarily look toward the past; their protagonists are usu-
ally ordinary people, seeking to survive in alien worlds haunted by the
glorious accomplishments of long-vanished civilizations and struggling
to unravel their ancient mysteries. Further, rather than savouring the
power to shape their own destinies, Brackett’s heroes seem governed by
a sort of cosmic karma that in the end rewards the virtuous and pun-
ishes the wicked. While Clarke, Heinlein and Asimov emphasize expla-
nations, Brackett is primarily devoted to descriptions, ignoring inner
workings to illustrate surface wonders in lush, evocative prose. Consider
her excellent ‘The Jewel of Bas’ (1944) – the saga of a husband-and-wife
team of thieves who fall into the clutches of aliens and robots brought
by an ancient immortal who came to their world long ago but now only
longs for endless sleep and pleasant dreams – and contrast her stunning
description of a robot to Asimov’s more prosaic efforts:
The eyes in that face were what set Ciaran’s guts to knotting like a
nest of cold snakes. They were not even remotely human. They were
like pools of oil under the lashless lids – black, impenetrable, without
heart or soul or warmth. … It was a voice speaking out of a place
where no emotion, as humanity knew the word, had ever existed.
It came from a brain as alien and incomprehensible as darkness in a
world of eternal light; a brain no human could ever touch or under-

stand, except to feel the cold weight of its strength and cower as a
beast cowers before the terrible mystery of fire.
‘Sleep,’ said the android. ‘Sleep, and listen to my voice.’9
This passage also shows that students starved for memorable prose –
rarely a hallmark of pulp science fiction – will appreciate having a writer
like Brackett in the syllabus.
Lorelei of the Red Mist also usefully illustrates the fact that 1930s
and 1940s science fiction had both low points and high points. Few
will admire stories like ‘The Blue Behemoth’ (1943), a farcical tale of
a tawdry space circus and its misadventures with a mammoth alien;
Brackett’s disappointing collaboration with Bradbury, ‘Lorelei of the Red
Mist’ (1946), a fairly lifeless exercise in planetary romance that Brackett
wisely abandoned to concentrate on film work and asked young
Bradbury to complete; and ‘Quest of the Starhope’ (1949), the predict-
able saga of a selfish exploiter of captured aliens who receives his just
rewards when he is killed by two beings he mistreated. But other stories
powerfully linger in one’s mind, such as ‘Thralls of the Endless Night’
(1943), describing the descendants of a spaceship crew and the pirates
that attacked it who uncomprehendingly continue their ancient quarrel
on the barren world where their ancestors were marooned; ‘The Veil of
Astrellar’ (1944), featuring a human seduced by promised immortality
into helping sinister beings from another dimension lure humans into
traps so their life-forces can be drained to sustain the aliens’ existence;
and ‘The Dancing Girl of Ganymede’ (1950), Brackett’s sensitive explo-
ration of a scenario later treated very differently in Dick’s Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) – humanlike androids who are despised
and hunted down in a future dystopia.
Seeking topics for further research, and noting that Bradbury was a
one-time collaborator and admirer of Brackett, students might look for
signs of her influence on his fiction. For example, Bradbury’s ‘Frost and
Fire’ (1946) – involving mutated descendants of stranded space travellers
who aspire to reach a rocket on a mountaintop – is, despite significant
differences, clearly reminiscent of ‘Thralls of the Endless Night’. A more
obvious area for study would be how Brackett’s haunting stories about
dying, decadent Martian cultures influenced Bradbury’s own visions of
Mars in The Martian Chronicles (1950) and elsewhere. Although there
are numerous antecedents for Bradbury’s work, ranging back to Percival
Lowell and Burroughs, students may justifiably argue that Bradbury’s
Mars is largely borrowed from Brackett’s Mars. Students may also com-
pare her science fiction stories to her screenplays. Finding evidence of
her science fiction background in scripts for crime dramas and westerns
like The Big Sleep (1946) and Rio Bravo (1959) might be challenging, but
her early horror film The Vampire’s Ghost (1946) is unusually creative,
and students will be familiar with her final screenplay, for Lucas’s The
Empire Strikes Back (1980), co-written with Lawrence Kasdan. Recalling
the striking descriptions in her stories, one is unsurprised that her con-
tributions to Lucas’s universe – immense ‘walkers’ marching across an
icy planet, the misty swamp home of the diminutive alien Yoda, the
‘cave’ Han Solo retreats to that is actually the mouth of a space mon-
ster, and the elevated city of Lando Calrissian, delicately perched upon
a narrow, floating pillar – make The Empire Strikes Back the most visually
imaginative and impressive of all the Star Wars films. One also notes her
success in making Lucas’s characters more rounded and complex than
they were in the first film – another one of her special talents.
In choosing books to represent pulp science fiction, I have limited
myself to works now in print and likely to remain in print; but other
works from the era would be inspired choices if they become available.
To survey the period’s short fiction, Asimov’s Before the Golden Age, rep-
resenting the 1930s, might be paired with Campbell’s The Astounding
Science Fiction Anthology (1952), providing excellent stories from the
1940s. One might find new retrospective anthologies featuring works
by writers such as Campbell, Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, and
Murray Leinster. Along with other books by writers already discussed,
meritorious novels include Edmond Hamilton’s space opera The Star
of Life (1947, 1959); Philip Francis Nowlan’s Armageddon 2419 A.D.
(1928, 1962), which introduced the character of Buck Rogers; Clifford
D. Simak’s apocalyptic story cycle City (1944–51, 1952); John Taine’s
dreamy time-travel epic, The Time Stream (1931, 1946), and Stanley G.
Weinbaum’s superman saga, The New Adam (1939). Also, while techni-
cally outside the realm of literature classes, no study of this subject is
complete without examining the extravagant artwork that accompanied
and influenced the stories in pulp magazines, displayed in compilations
like Brian W. Aldiss’s Science Fiction Art (1975).
Finally, by discussing works of pulp science fiction that one might
include in a standard science fiction class, I have also crafted what
amounts to an annotated syllabus for a graduate-level class devoted
exclusively to pulp science fiction, with ambitious research projects per-
haps best assigned to graduate students. And in graduate programmes
in science fiction, such a class should definitely be offered. Why take
students on a forced march through the collected works of, say, Philip
K. Dick when one might better spend a semester acquainting them with
some of the works that indelibly influenced Dick and countless other
writers of his generation and later generations? Too many of today’s
publishing science fiction critics are shamefully unfamiliar with this
literature, perhaps fearful of sullying their eyes with works that are
not ‘mature’. But they are missing out on a lot of information, a lot of
insight, and a lot of fun.
Notes
1. Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘Introduction’, in Brian Attebery and Ursula K. Le Guin,
eds, The Norton Book of Science Fiction (New York and London: W.W. Norton,
1993) 15–42 at 18.
2. Whenever two publication dates for a book are in parentheses, the first is the
date of the book’s original magazine appearance; the second is the date of its
first publication in book form (usually revised).
3. E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Galactic Patrol (1950; New York: Pyramid, 1964) 38.
4. Smith, Galactic Patrol, 67.
5. Robert A. Heinlein, ‘“If This Goes On –”’, in Revolt in 2100 (New York: Signet,
1953) 118–19.
6. Sam Moskowitz, Seekers for Tomorrow (New York: Ballantine Books, 1967)
197.
7. Gary Westfahl, ‘Rules for Robots: Version 1.0’, Interzone, 185 (2003): 53–5.
8. Gary Westfahl, ‘A.I.: Artificial Incompetence, or Robots Just Don’t
Understand: A Review of I, Robot’, Locus Online website, posted on 17 July
2004, at http://www.locusmag.com/2004/Reviews/07_Westfahl_IRobot.html.
9. Leigh Brackett, ‘The Jewel of Bas’, in Lorelei of the Red Mist (Royal Oak, MI:
Haffner Press, 2007) 90–1.
6
Good SF: Teaching the Golden Age
as Cultural History
Lisa Yaszek
I like to begin class units on Golden Age (arguably the period from
1937–50) science fiction at the Georgia Institute of Technology with
the whimsical delight that is Fred McLeod Wilcox’s film Forbidden
Planet (1956). Based loosely on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and echo-
ing the traditions of sf’s literary Golden Age, Forbidden Planet follows
the adventures of a starship crew sent from Earth to investigate the
Altair IV colony, which went silent twenty years earlier. Upon arriving
at their destination, Captain John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and his
crew discover the remains of a high-tech alien race and just two surviv-
ing members of the original expedition: the ship’s linguist, Dr Edward
Morbius (Walter Pigeon), and his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis), who
has been raised by Morbius’s creation Robbie the Robot. Threatened
with the extinction of his own crew at the hands of an unknown force,
Adams must solve a series of interlocking puzzles: what happened to the
planet’s original inhabitants? Did the same fate befall the Earth colony?
How did Morbius and Altaira survive? And finally, how can Adams pre-
vent it all from happening again? Replete with sleek starships, exotic
landscapes, mad scientists, heroic star captains and beautiful damsels,
Forbidden Planet is, as students quickly realize, the epitome of the sf
space adventure.
But that is just half the story. Students start out eager to solve the
mysteries of Altair IV, but they are quickly sidetracked by other issues:
why does Wilcox devote so much screen time to scenes of robotic
labour ranging from heavy construction work to delicate floral arrang-
ing? How can Robbie be so obviously enslaved to Isaac Asimov’s three
laws of robotics but then resist the commands of his human owners
long enough to go drinking with Adams’s crewmembers and finish ‘giv-
ing [him]self an oil job’? Perhaps not surprisingly, the rather saucy tone
102
Good SF: Teaching the Golden Age as Cultural History 103
of Forbidden Planet opens up yet another set of questions as well: why

does Morbius hold Altaira more like a lover than a daughter? Would a
single year in space really turn an all-male crew who are supposed to be
humanity’s ‘finest specimens’ into sex-starved maniacs when they catch
a glimpse of Altaira? And how is it that the ostensibly human Altaira has
somehow completely failed to learn sex and gender norms, leading to
outrageous situations in which she tries to learn biology by snuggling
with one crew member and then coolly invites Adams to ‘kiss me like
everyone else does’?
Because Forbidden Planet is an extremely witty film, students initially
respond to the situations outlined above with great hilarity. But soon
they are eager to debate whether the characters of Robbie and Altaira
actually advance the story’s main plotline, whether postwar moviegoers
could have possibly reacted to Wilcox’s film in the same manner as con-
temporary viewers, and why it is that Forbidden Planet feels like it would
somehow be less of an sf story without its more eccentric elements.
These debates get at the heart of the three main points I want students
to learn about Golden Age sf: that it is a discrete mode of storytelling
with distinct formal properties; that it is a unique window on the cul-
tural moment in which it was written; and that authors use the formal
characteristics of sf to actively participate in the most pressing cultural
debates of their day.
While similar claims can be made about any period of sf history, the
Golden Age is particularly fruitful to study in this manner because the
1940s and 1950s mark the beginning of the modern era and many of
the thematic issues introduced in this period are still very much with
us today. This has the advantage of enabling sf instructors and tutors
to focus units on Golden Age sf as cultural history in ways that will
naturally engage both themselves and their target student populations.
For example, I capitalize on the interests of Georgia Tech’s overwhelm-
ingly male student population by organizing class discussions of Golden
Age sf around two issues: the relations of humans to machines and of
men to women in a technology-intensive world. More specifically, we
consider how widespread cultural debates over these issues intersect
with debates over the definition of ‘good sf’ as they unfold within the
sf community itself.
While it is impossible to separate broad questions of science and soci-
ety from more specific ones about science, society and gender, I fore-
ground the former over the latter in my introductory sf class. This is an
upper-level undergraduate course that students can take to fulfil their
humanities graduation requirements – and as one might imagine, many
students at a school like Georgia Tech do so. The student population

tends toward heterogeneity, comprised equally of science, engineer-
ing and liberal arts students ranging from sophomores who have just
finished our introductory composition sequence to graduating seniors
who are in the process of wrapping up undergraduate theses and design
projects. Despite their overt differences, students quickly bond over
their shared love of sf and a more general excitement about discussing
it in a scholarly environment.
I take advantage of this enthusiasm and intimacy by employing a
modified lecture/discussion format in which I provide students with
primary sf readings, supplementary critical and cultural texts, and lec-
ture outlines for a series of units designed to familiarize students with sf
history. Students read in advance for each unit and then work collabo-
ratively to fill in my lecture outlines; this material, in turn, becomes the
basis for subsequent tests and paper assignments. (I strive to head off
any tendency toward chaos by actually preparing my own lecture points
in advance and then gently steering class conversations in appropriate
directions as needed.) While this format works well in my particular
situation, it could easily be adapted to a range of other pedagogical
situations. For example, instructors teaching larger or younger groups of
students might employ a more traditionally lecture-oriented approach
to their materials, while those working with smaller or more homogene-
ous groups might forgo the creation of any lecture outlines whatsoever,
instead leaving it to small groups of students to design and run each
unit. The key in each case is to teach what cultural historian Catherine
Belsey calls ‘history at the level of the signifier’ by situating individual sf
stories within larger constellations of scientific and social texts.1
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, I typically begin units
on Golden Age sf with a screening of Forbidden Planet. This provides
students with a collective experience of one representative text from
this period of sf history. After identifying the major issues raised by
Wilcox’s film, we consider whether or not it meets our working defini-
tion for ‘good sf’. We generate this definition in the first week of class
after brainstorming our own ideas about this subject and reading Darko
Suvin’s introduction to Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, which defines
good sf as a mode of literature characterized by ‘the presence and inter-
action of estrangement and cognition and … an imaginative framework
alternative to the author’s empirical environment’.2 By the end of the
week students usually decide to adopt a modified version of Suvin’s
criteria, replacing his narrow requirement that good sf must engender
progressive political estrangement in readers with the more general one
that it must simply cause them to question their assumptions about

the natural relations of science and society in some distinctive way.
Applying this definition to Forbidden Planet makes for rousing discus-
sion. While the film obviously more than meets our first requirement, it
is much more difficult to determine whether or not it meets the second
one: does Robbie’s surprising humanity or Altaira’s smouldering sexual-
ity really challenge our assumptions about how the world might look
in the future, based on what we know about it already? Is our laughter
at the shock of the new, or the recognition of the familiar? Whether
students are training to be scientists or literary critics, they know they
must provide evidence to prove their hypotheses about this film, and
as it turns out, there is plenty of evidence in both the verbal and visual
texts of Forbidden Planet to support both points of view.
At this point, we move on to consider how the definitions of good sf
generated by Golden Age authors and editors themselves might clarify
the situation. A combination of critical histories and primary liter-
ary texts guide this conversation. Students draw upon readings from
Brian Aldiss’s Billion Year Spree (1973), Gary Westfahl’s The Mechanics
of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction (1999) and Edward
James’s Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (1994) to identify the
major sf tastemakers of the era, including H.L. Gold of Galaxy Magazine,
Anthony Boucher of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and
John W. Campbell of Astounding Science-Fiction. I also provide students
with editorial statements from Golden Age magazines, anthologies and
novels to help them better identify what mid-century editors most val-
ued in sf writing. Students particularly appreciate what Edward James
describes as Campbell’s ‘rules’ for good sf: the conditions of the story
must differ from the here and now, the new conditions must drive the
plot of the story, the plot must revolve around human problems arising
from the new conditions, and finally, no scientific facts may be violated
without reasonable explanation.3 They find it easy to identify the dis-
semination of similar ideas across our editorial readings and to apply
them to Forbidden Planet. This helps students answer the question of
whether or not Robbie and Altaira are logical characters to include in
this tale. Students quickly recognize that the alien technologies of Altair
IV plus the human science of Freudian psychology are the driving forces
of Wilcox’s film and that Robbie and Altaira can be profitably discussed
as products of these forces.
Our next task is to test Campbell’s rules for good sf against key
print sf stories of the 1940s and 1950s. In keeping with the more gen-
eral set of issues raised by Forbidden Planet, we focus on stories about
human–machine relations, including Eando Binder’s ‘I, Robot’ (1939),

C.L. Moore’s ‘No Woman Born’ (1941) and Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot
(1950) collection. We begin discussion by identifying passages from
each text that either support or contradict each of Campbell’s condi-
tions for good sf. This often leads to a more nuanced consideration
of sf character types and whether or not complex characterization is
necessary for an sf story to succeed. All of these tales feature classic sf
types including brilliant (but sometimes bordering-on-mad) scientists,
noble robots (actually a noble cyborg, in the case of Moore’s story) and
at least one segment of humanity that is prejudiced against the exist-
ence of mechanical women and men. Students are struck by the fact
that Binder, Moore and Asimov anticipate Wilcox by creating relatively
stereotyped depictions of human characters while infusing their robots
and cyborgs with great personality and complex motivations – in other
words, by employing the kind of deep characterization that is more typ-
ically associated with human characters in mainstream realist literature.
This realization prompts students to consider how Golden Age authors
fulfilled Campbell’s dictates for good sf and brought philosophical
questions about human–machine relations to life for readers by imagin-
ing futures where the products of technology turn out to be far more
interesting than their creators. It also enables them to examine Pamela
Sargent’s claim that sf is a ‘literature of ideas’4 and to think about how
and why authors might use specific character types to express specific
ideas.
At this point we examine the specific ideas that Golden Age sf
authors might have been grappling with while writing robot stories.
We begin this section of the unit by reading excerpts from two critical
works that connect images of robots to postwar hopes and fears about
automation and the creation of increasingly artificial environments:
Patricia S. Warrick’s The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (1982)
and J.P. Telotte’s Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film
(1995). We then consider postwar attitudes to these subjects as they
were expressed in popular science treatises such as Norbert Weiner’s The
Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950), social cri-
tiques such as Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and Herbert
Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964),5 public education films such
as New York University’s Machine: Master or Slave? (1940), and media
advertisements such as General Motor’s Design for Dreaming (1956) and
Jam Handy Organization’s American Thrift (1962). Students enjoy these
primary texts because they dramatize the ways in which mid-century
debates over automation unfolded across various cultural arenas.
We conclude our unit on the Golden Age by pulling together every-

thing we have read over the past several weeks, putting our sf stories in
dialogue with postwar cultural texts and identifying the specific narrative
strategies that sf authors used to participate in debates over the meaning
and value of automation. After re-reading Binder, Moore and Asimov and
re-watching key scenes from Forbidden Planet, we attempt to answer the
following questions. How do all these stories dramatize Weiner’s ideas
about the scientific equivalency between biological and mechanical
systems? Where do these stories come down on the ‘machine: master or
slave’ question? How do the social critiques embedded in these stories
compare with those levied by Packard and Marcuse? Do sf authors equate
mechanization with domestic utopia in the same way as postwar adver-
tising? Students generally find that the answers to these questions are
not as easy or obvious as they might first seem, because authors – like all
participants in widespread cultural conversations – do not simply repeat
or deny what others have said about a subject. Instead, they contribute to
this ongoing conversation in unique ways that nuance, complicate and
otherwise enrich it. This is, of course, a valuable insight in and of itself
that helps students create what Clifford Geertz called ‘thick descriptions’
of cultural history.6 Furthermore, by carefully studying postwar debates
over automation and its impact on human–machine relations as they
unfolded in Golden Age sf, students are better prepared to grapple with
these issues as they evolve over time and explode, once again, in the post-
utopian and post-human worlds of cyberpunk and post-singularity sf.
If time and interest permits, we also devote part of our concluding dis-
cussion to the questions of gender that appear time and again in post-
war and Golden Age texts about automation. Some of these questions
stem from the students’ readings of sf in relation to our primary postwar
texts: how do Binder and Asimov respond to Marcuse and Packard’s fear
that humanity will be dangerously feminized if it abdicates control to
machines? Does Moore’s depiction of the cyborg Deirdre suggest that
advanced technologies will liberate women as promised in Design for
Dreaming and American Thrift? Other questions are more free form,
arising from the sf stories themselves: why does Asimov present his
nominal heroine, Dr Susan Calvin, as scientifically brilliant but socially
and sexually inept? Why is it that Altaira suddenly ‘gets’ sex and gen-
der norms when she falls in love with Adams? Is Maltzer correct when
he claims Deirdre is subhuman because she ‘hasn’t got any sex’?7 Or
does he try to commit suicide soon after making this comment because
Deirdre is superhuman and simulates sex so perfectly that he knows he
must be wrong? These are fascinating questions and we rarely get to
spend as much time on them as we would like. However, they provide

excellent background for our later unit on feminist sf, demonstrating
that questions of science, society and gender were part of sf long before
the advent of its overtly feminist offshoot.
They are also, of course, questions at the heart of my senior seminar
on gender and science in sf. This is a much smaller and more homo-
geneous course comprised of upperclassmen from Georgia Tech’s Science,
Technology and Culture undergraduate degree programme. It is an ideal
population for a cultural studies approach to an sf course because all
these students are trained in textual analysis across media and have at
least a passing familiarity with science and technology studies. Many
students take this senior seminar because they have previous experience
with sf and/or gender studies as well. As such, they are prepared to grap-
ple with the issue that Mark Poster identifies as central to cultural his-
tory: how different kinds of texts ‘configure what they point to, and …
are configured by it’ across discursive arenas.8 While these students are
indeed ready, willing and able to assess sf in relation to other texts from
a wide variety of discursive arenas, most have never heard of cultural his-
tory. Accordingly, I introduce this critical practice through a series of brief
written exercises asking students to analyse Golden Age sf in relation to
different histories of the genre. Once students have mastered the funda-
mentals of cultural history as it pertains to the study of sf, we engage in a
series of research and teaching activities that enable students to produce
cultural histories of sf on their own.9
As in my introductory science fiction class, I open my senior seminar
on gender and science in sf with a screening of Forbidden Planet. Before
we begin the film, I remind students that art is meant to make us see the
world from new perspectives and that those aspects of an artwork that
seem most confusing usually are, upon analysis, the ones that produce
the most new meaning. I then ask that students to help me keep track
of all the scenes where Wilcox seems to be making surprising claims
about science and/or sex. When we have finished viewing the film, we
compile a master list of these scenes, looking for any and all patterns
that might emerge from our collaborative efforts. We then begin to
discuss what kinds of primary and secondary texts might help us make
sense of the surprising moments in Forbidden Planet. This seemingly
simple preliminary exercise has two benefits: it encourages students to
understand themselves as a community of critical thinkers who have
already mastered basic analytic skills, and it underscores the useful-
ness of studying individual artistic texts in larger social, political and
aesthetic contexts.
This second point can be very difficult for students to grasp, even
when they are used to thinking in interdisciplinary terms. And so this
is a key moment for me, as an expert scholar and leader of this course,
to step in and introduce the practice of cultural history more formally.
I do so by providing students with a mini-lecture on the development
of this discipline as it pertains to the study of sf (drawn largely from my
entry on this subject in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, 2009).
I conclude my lecture with our first major critical assignment, asking
students to read excerpts from three cultural histories of sf: Justine
Larbalestier’s Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (2002), Brian Attebery’s
Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002) and Bonnie Noonan’s Women
Scientists in Fifties Science Fiction Films (2005). Students complete this
unit by writing two brief (3–5 page) essays, which serve as the basis for
our next two class discussions. The first essay is a fairly standard critical
exercise in which students use the assigned cultural histories to make
sense of at least one surprising element in Forbidden Planet. The second
essay is a meta-critical exercise in which students identify the range of
sources that our assigned authors used to create their cultural histories
of sf. While the first assignment helps students understand what cul-
tural histories of sf look like (and what they can do for engaged readers),
the second exercise encourages them to think more actively about the
range of sources needed to create thick descriptions of sf history. This
assignment encourages students to think past the secondary sources
that they have used to write papers for other classes and to consider
how they might also use primary sources including magazine advertise-
ments, political speeches and even sf editorials and fan letters to better
understand how debates over the proper relations of science, gender
and sf unfolded in the postwar era.10
We conclude our unit on Golden Age sf as cultural history by consid-
ering how such debates unfold in Golden Age women writers’ stories
about science, society and gender. I ask students to write one final brief
essay in which they assess the veracity of Robin Roberts’s claim that
‘women cannot control scientific narratives because, although they are
frequently its subject, they are largely excluded from the practice of
science. Through feminist science fiction, however, women can write
narratives about science … to create feminist fairy tales.’11 Since this is
our last formal class discussion of Golden Age sf, I provide students with
just three new short stories that explore what Betty Friedan described
as mid-century America’s belief in the ‘mistaken choice’ between family
and (scientific) career: Marion Zimmer Bradley’s ‘The Wind People’
(1959), Katherine MacLean’s ‘And Be Merry...’ (1950) and Doris Pitkin
Buck’s ‘Birth of a Gardener’ (1961). While Bradley’s story emphasizes

the literal insanity engendered by the mistaken choice between family
and career, MacLean and Buck’s tales more optimistically play with the
mid-century ideal of the housewife as technical expert to imagine that
women might create new modes of domestic science and even whole
new worlds built upon that science. All of these stories revolve around
images of women as technoscientific producers who strive to combine
family and work in new ways, and so it is instructive for students to
consider them synthetically in relation to both Forbidden Planet and the
cultural histories we have considered in class to date.
After completing our model unit on Golden Age sf, students are ready
to begin their own ‘sf as cultural history’ capstone projects. This assign-
ment requires students to pair off, choose a period of sf history, and
then lead their classmates in a week-long exploration of just how rep-
resentative sf texts from the period in question serve as a windows into
widespread debates about the proper relations of science, society and
gender. While the capstone teaching project is particularly relevant to
students pursuing interdisciplinary educations such as those we offer in
the liberal arts at Georgia Tech, it can easily be adapted to any group of
upper-level undergraduates because the success of this project depends
not so much on the subject matter per se as on the students’ ability
to employ a wide range of research, writing and presentation skills.
Indeed, instructors teaching more traditionally art- or science-oriented
senior seminars could easily modify this assignment so students more
specifically examined sf as a window into the cultural history of their
own discipline. This would allow students to do the work of the cultural
historian as described by Poster while keeping the content of individual
projects in line with the assessment needs of specific academic pro-
grammes.
Because the senior capstone project requires students to approach sf
texts as historical artefacts, I begin this unit with a research assignment
that requires students to boldly go where very few of them have gone
before: into the Georgia Tech science fiction collection, which is housed
in our institute’s library archives. This is often a surprisingly exciting
activity for my students, many of whom have so perfected their basic
online research skills that they have never actually set foot in the library
except to print out papers or get a cup of coffee. Students are delighted
to learn that we have one of the largest science fiction collections of its
kind at Georgia Tech and even more delighted to find out that they can
actually go into the collection and handle books and magazines dating
back to the birth of the genre itself. Indeed, the simple act of handling
old texts makes concrete a point we have discussed throughout the

first section of our class: that no individual story really stands on its
own. Instead, as Brian Attebery points out, all sf stories are ‘part of a
continuous stream of discourse’ and the messages about gender and
science that emerge in such stories are replicated and elaborated upon
by the advertisements, editorials, prefaces, conclusions and fan letters
that frame them.12
While students are often quite excited about their field trip to our
library archives, they are still novice cultural historians who need
something to structure their first research day. Accordingly, I prepare
students for the task ahead of them with a brief in-class exercise where
they use Georgia Tech’s sf search engine to quickly review our archival
holdings and identify three items that seem particularly promising for
their capstone project. Once students actually get into the sf collec-
tion, they must secure the items they found online plus three more
items they find on adjacent shelves. Students then skim their findings
quickly and write up 2–3 sentences evaluating the potential of each
text in terms of their capstone projects. This exercise has two benefits.
First, it shows students how they can productively combine the famil-
iar task of online research with its less familiar archival counterpart.
Second, it underscores the fact that online databases are only as good as
their programmers, and that such databases rarely provide all – or even
the best – references that students might need for any given project.
Indeed, students quickly realize that such databases are sometimes best
for pointing them toward real-time locations where they can explore a
range of texts that will help them build truly thick descriptions of the
historic periods under consideration in their projects.
Once students recognize that they need to expand their research
skill-set to become cultural historians of sf, they are ready to rethink
their relation to online research as a whole. My next assignment helps
them do just that. On our first electronic research day I ask students to
bring their laptops to class or to meet in one of our department’s com-
puter labs. We begin class by talking about which electronic resources
students use when writing research papers. Perhaps not surprisingly,
students are quick to admit that they rely on subscription databases like
Project Muse, which provide articles in electronic format for immedi-
ate download, and free search engines like Google Scholar, which can
be accessed from anywhere. I then provide students with a handout
listing all the different electronic resources that professional liberal arts
scholars use when doing research, putting special emphasis on the MLA
International Bibliography database (which, as I point out, archives
articles from 4000 rather than 400 scholarly journals) and the Science
Fiction and Fantasy Research Database (SFFRD), which, like Google
Scholar, can be accessed from anywhere but specifically indexes sf and
fantasy scholarship. I ask students to looks up key words and phrases
that are relevant to their chosen capstone projects using all the different
resources we have just reviewed. Upon doing so, students quickly realize
that MLA and SFFRD typically yield fewer but more relevant items than
Project Muse and Google Scholar. At this point, however, they are still
wary of these new databases because they do not provide immediate
electronic access to all their indexed items. Accordingly, I end class with
a tutorial on Georgia Tech’s Interlibrary Loan system, asking students to
request at least three articles that seem interesting or relevant to them. I
find that even the most sceptical students become converts when they
receive their requested items by email in (usually) less than a week.
Indeed, the sense that they are using the same tools – and receiving
the same respect – as their professors seems to help students think of
themselves as real members of a scholarly community.
I dedicate our last research day to the promises and perils of web-
based research. Once again, we begin class with a general brainstorming
session in which we list all the resources that could help us construct
cultural histories of sf, including timelines of scientific and social devel-
opment, repositories of political speeches and advertisements, and even
caches of sf stories, films and artwork. I then ask students to go online,
find three such resources, and evaluate them based on the credibility
of their authors and the reasonableness and accuracy of their evidence
(especially as such evidence is supported by reference to other cred-
ible authors and can be confirmed by at least two other independent
sources). As students identify resources that meet these criteria, they
email them to our class listserv and/or post them to a class wiki. Much
like our other research exercises, this one has the benefit of enabling
students to complete a good deal of work in class while underscoring
the fact that scholarship is both an individual and communal activity.
At this point students are ready to prepare their capstone teaching
projects. I aim to ensure the success of these projects by requiring all
teaching teams to do four things. First, they must prepare an annotated
bibliography including all the sf texts that are central to their projects
as well as five primary and five secondary sources that provide historical
and aesthetic context for those sf texts. Second, they must provide all
other students with copies of the sf stories in question as well as their
two best primary and two best secondary sources. Third, each team
must provide all other students with study questions about these stories
and sources. Finally, each team must prepare a brief multimedia pres-
entation that provides the rest of the class with an introduction to the
topic at hand and fosters class discussion based on the assigned study
questions. Breaking the capstone project into a series of small, manage-
able tasks enables students to put together more focused teaching pres-
entations and, in the long run, helps them become cultural historians
who can communicate the truly rich history of sf to others.
When sf studies took serious root in the college classroom of the early
1970s, sf author and literature professor Jack Williamson encouraged
instructors to ‘take the critic first’ and build courses around those issues
that most interested serious scholars of the genre. Of course, as he is
quick to note, at that time there was very little coherent sf criticism and
‘the mainstream critics have seldom made much sense about science
fiction’, while ‘the amateurs are often in violent disagreement’.13 But
Williamson turns this seeming problem into an opportunity, suggesting
that in addition to creating classes that teach students about the main
themes of sf, instructors might also create courses that actually produce
good sf critics. And he is very clear about the qualities those critics
should possess: they should have ‘a general cultural background’ in
literary studies and a good grasp of ‘the conventions of science fiction’,
including a ‘sensitivity to social change and a grasp of the scientific
method’. In short, then, sf critics ‘should not belong entirely to either of
Snow’s two cultures’, but should work interdisciplinarily to understand
the unique meaning and value of their chosen genre.14
What Williamson seems to be working toward is quite similar to
the notion of the sf critic as cultural historian. Cultural historians are
dedicated to combining the analytic methodologies of the humanities
(including art, literary and media studies) with those of the social sci-
ences (including history, sociology and anthropology) to better under-
stand how various texts function as sites of struggle about the meaning
and value of culture. While nearly any kind of text may be of value to
the cultural historian, sf is an ideal subject matter for this kind of study
because, as proponents of the genre have long argued, it is a body of
literature that developed in tandem with modern literary, political and
technoscientific systems. As such, the cultural historian of sf necessar-
ily works between methodologies and cultures. This is precisely what I
strive to teach students in my sf classes. I do so not just by encouraging
them to read key texts about cultural history or even the cultural history
of sf, but by becoming cultural historians who make active connections
between individual sf texts and other primary scientific and social docu-
ments. It is particularly rewarding to teach this critical methodology in
relation to Golden Age sf precisely because this body of speculative fic-

tion emerges at the beginning of our own literary, political and techno-
scientific era. Not only does this drive home for students the point
that sf is a privileged vehicle of cultural expression, but that as cultural
historians of sf themselves, they can also become better cultural critics
of the world around them today.
Notes
1. Catherine Belsey, ‘Reading Cultural History’, in Tamsin Spargo, ed., Reading
the Past: Literature and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) 106.
2. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1979) 6, 7–8.
4. Pamela Sargent, ‘Introduction’, in More Women of Wonder: Science Fiction
Novelettes by Women (New York: Vintage Paperbacks, 1976) xiii–lxiv at xx.
5. For details see References, Resources and Further Reading. See also Vance
Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (London: Longmans, 1957); Herbert Marcuse,
One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964).
6. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: HarperCollins,
1973) 5.
7. C.L. Moore, ‘No Woman Born’, in Lester del Rey, ed. The Best of C.L. Moore
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1975) 236–88 at 258.
8. Mark Poster, ed., Cultural History and Postmodernity: Disciplinary Readings and
Challenges (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 9.
9. While it is helpful to work with students who already have experience with
literary, gender and science studies, it is not necessary to do so. Indeed,
I often have great success using a similar sequence of assignments in my
freshman English course. They key is to match content to student interest,
introducing appropriate reading, research and communication skills when
necessary.
10. If time and class interest permits, I also assign excerpts from more general
cultural histories of gender and/or science in postwar America. If my class
seems particularly interested in the former, we read selections from Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963), Elaine Tyler
May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War (New York: Basic
Books, 1988) and Joanne Meyerowitz’s Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in
Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). If
they are interested in the latter, we read selections from Margaret Rossiter’s
Women Scientists in America before Affirmative Action, 1940–1972 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s More Work
for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the
Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1989) and Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles’s
Almost Heaven: The Story of Women in Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2003). Either way, I ask students to demonstrate their mastery of these texts
by writing two more brief essays much like the ones outlined above. Indeed,
by repeating our first two written assignments in relation to other cultural

histories, students gain an even better understanding of just how much work
is involved in the creation of truly thick histories.
11. Robin Roberts, A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction (Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 1993) 6.
12. Brian Attebery, Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (New York and London:
Routledge, 2002) 43.
13. Jack Williamson, ‘Science Fiction, Teaching and Criticism’, in Reginald
Bretnor, ed., Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow (New York: Harper and Row,
1974) 309–30 at 311.
14. Ibid., 319.
7
Teaching the New Wave
Rob Latham
The history of science fiction, like that of popular literature generally,

is made up, in large part, of a series of factional movements, emerging
on the margins, contesting for terrain and subsiding as they run out of
steam or are incorporated into the central trajectory of the genre. When
the appearance of one of these movements coincides with a period of
crisis in the field’s development, the result can be a seismic conflict over
basic definitions and core assumptions. In a discussion of the contro-
versy surrounding the cyberpunk movement during the 1980s, Carol
McGuirk refers to this process of ‘noisy polarization’ as a struggle for
consensus: ‘Each group seems sure that it represents the “real” science
fiction. … In SF studies, terms shift in meaning whenever the centre
of power shifts, and a whole group of concepts may become debased
when one generation’s avant-garde giant … is dismissed by a subse-
quent generation as a mere pygmy-with-a-giant-typewriter.’1 As I have
argued elsewhere, a ‘recurring cycle of messianic avant-gardism and
old-school intransigence is the very motor of SF as a historical genre’,2
and this reality was nowhere more visible than during the mid- to late
1960s, in the furious ideological combat that swirled around the New
Wave movement.
The New Wave in historical context
The basic contours of the struggle are well known. During this period,
a rising cohort of mostly younger authors began to question both the
format and ideology of the traditional sf story, adopting literary tech-
niques and critical perspectives that broke sharply with pulp conven-
tions. In their extrapolation of fictional futures, these writers abjured
the celebration of scientific know-how and commitment to linear
116
Teaching the New Wave 117
storytelling that had marked sf’s Golden Age in favour of powerful cri-
tiques of technocratic society articulated in offbeat, frequently experi-
mental prose. New Wave polemicists scorned the obsession with space
exploration that had marked postwar sf, defending instead an ‘inner
space’ orientation that was ‘wholeheartedly speculative … concerned
with the creation of new states of mind, new levels of awareness’ (as
J.G. Ballard put it in an influential essay).3 Reflecting trends in society at
large, the genre was riven by a generational struggle that pitted the pulp
tradition against a rising sf counterculture whose incendiary demands
for change provoked concerted resistance from the genre establishment.
By the late 1960s, this struggle had taken on all the textures and tones
of the encompassing political battles between the youth counterculture
and the silent majority.
At issue were not merely radical new modes of expression but dis-
turbing new forms of content. Capitalizing on the greater openness
of the 1960s book market to controversial material, New Wave writers
began to explore alternative gender and sexual arrangements – not to
mention forms of chemical self-enhancement – that flouted prevailing
codes of belief and conduct. In concert with the burgeoning feminist
and gay liberation movements, as well as with experimental trends in
the youth counterculture, New Wave writers launched pointed assaults
on the white, ‘straight’ male subject who had long been the heroic
centre of the pulp tradition. Ambitious authors developed multiple
techniques of ‘sextrapolation’ to generate ingenious erotic possibilities,
often in pornographic scenarios of a startling and unsettling alterity.4
At the same time, the New Wave introduced a notable strain of social
militancy into the genre, forging substantial links with countercul-
ture discourses, such as the media theories of Marshall McLuhan, the
avant-garde fictions of William S. Burroughs and the various ‘liberation
movements’ associated with antiwar activism, second-wave feminism
and ecological causes. Major sf works of the late 1960s and early 1970s
sent controversial reverberations throughout the field, reaching beyond
the borders of genre to unite with the radical traditions that informed
and inspired them, making New Wave sf a significant counterculture
discourse in its own right.
Though there is disagreement over its precise achievements and
legacy, most historians of sf agree that the advent of the New Wave
‘changed the course of genre history’.5 Yet, while the movement was
extensively debated at the time within the sf community, it has, surpris-
ingly, generated rather little in the way of sustained critical commen-
tary (outside of the summary chapters contained in genre histories).
Only one book – Colin Greenland’s The Entropy Exhibition (1983) – has
been produced on the subject, and it limits its focus to the cadre of
writers surrounding the British magazine New Worlds under Michael
Moorcock’s editorship (1964–71).6 While this group was undoubtedly
central to the debates that rocked the field during the 1960s, it was only
one component in a multifaceted set of struggles that were ultimately
transatlantic in their manifestations and effects. Though the British
New Wave was a somewhat different creature to its American cousin,
both participated in a concerted assault on the purported complacency
and decadence of the sf pulp tradition. Writers and fans throughout the
Anglophone world were unable to escape the spreading controversy,
and even subsequent generations, such as the cyberpunks, were com-
pelled to define themselves against the New Wave’s momentous claims
and accomplishments.
Teaching the New Wave: three configurations
The New Wave, as a political and an aesthetic formation, represents

a unique moment in sf history when social-critical and literary-
experimental impulses converged. It thus provides rich terrain for class-
room investigation. The absence of significant critical analyses of the
movement is actually auspicious since it allows the instructor or tutor to
place a range of texts and issues on the table and invite students to sift
through them in the process of developing their own assessments. Two
directions in which inquiry might go would be towards an excavation
of the New Wave’s roots within the genre itself and an investigation of
its connections to contemporaneous trends within the broader culture.
One could triangulate selected New Wave texts with competing sf tra-
ditions and also, since this was a period when the genre was uniquely
open to outside influences, with the social and intellectual discourses
of the 1960s.
For my own part, I have taught the New Wave in three different
contexts: as a unit in a survey of science fiction, as a unit in a survey of
postmodernist fiction and as a freestanding topics course. Each of these
options presents specific pedagogical challenges.
In an sf survey class, one has at most a couple of sessions to devote
to the subject, and one must thus select texts that at once represent the
movement effectively and also offer clear contrasts with earlier types
of science fiction. One obvious way to highlight these contrasts is to
position the New Wave’s inner-space agenda against classic Golden Age
treatments of space exploration and interstellar adventure; it is not hard
for students to grasp the radical reorientation demanded by such stories

as Ballard’s ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1963) or Pamela Zoline’s ‘The Heat
Death of the Universe’ (1967) by contrast with the work of Heinlein,
Asimov and Clarke. Unfortunately, this juxtaposition can sometimes
lead to simplistic judgements – for example, that all Golden Age sf
ignores issues of psychology or that all New Wave sf eschews space as
a narrative venue. Moreover, this sort of ‘epochal’ approach to sf his-
tory can obscure the fact that traditional stories remained quite popular
throughout the New Wave period; students can too readily be led to
suppose that, following the promulgation of Ballard and Moorcock’s
manifestos, writers all dutifully turned away from outer space, aban-
doned conventional modes of storytelling, and embraced the social
ethos of the counterculture.
One way to combat such facile misapprehensions is to frame the
entire course in terms of a series of overlapping conflicts between con-
servative and experimental tendencies. Building on McGuirk’s notion
of an ongoing struggle for consensus, one might stress that the Golden
Age was, in its time, quite revolutionary, bringing a fresh sophistication
to a field heretofore dominated by pulp super-science, only to become
a reactionary force as the social sf movement of the 1950s and then
the New Wave arose to contest its cherished orthodoxies. By the same
token, the New Wave itself eventually devolved, during the 1970s, into
a fairly predictable set of attitudes and approaches, leading to the cyber-
punk rejection of its out-dated humanism and sterile avant-gardism
in the 1980s. The essential challenge, in short, is to strike a balance
between a focus on continuity and an emphasis on change, making
clear the ways in which the New Wave was truly innovative and radical
while also keeping sight of its limitations as well as its debts to previous
historical forms of sf.
One tactic I have found useful in achieving this balance is to place
the ideological battles over the New Wave within a larger genre con-
text – specifically, the commercial matrix of publishing, distribution
and consumption, which was significantly transformed during the
1960s. Indeed, the emergence of the New Wave coincided, at least in
the United States, with the transition from a magazine culture to a
book market, a shift with major implications for the types of stories
that could be published. Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions (1967), for
example, explicitly presented itself as a showcase for fiction that would
not be welcomed in the magazines because of its controversial con-
tent, especially its sexual explicitness and political militancy.7 Other
anthology series, from Damon Knight’s Orbit to Robert Silverberg’s
New Dimensions, pushed the envelope further, providing the sort of

platform in the US that Moorcock’s New Worlds offered in the UK for
writers to break with prevailing formats and taboos. By the early 1970s,
the magazines were compelled to liberalize their content to keep pace;
even Golden Age stalwart Analog (formerly Astounding), now in the
hands of Ben Bova, began to feature work that would probably have
shocked John W. Campbell.
The advent and maturation of the New Wave movement was thus
inextricably linked with ongoing transformations in the basic institu-
tional framework of the genre. As I put it in another essay, ‘The New
Wave was … a creature of the boom years of the mid-1960s, its rise
coeval with the consolidation of an SF book market that favoured a
greater diversity and spoke to a larger audience than the magazines
could ever have hoped to do.’8 Sf writers did not simply, in the mid-
1960s, abruptly leap to the polemicists’ calls to abandon pulp styles and
thus radically reform the field; rather, the growth of the book market
made possible a break with the magazine tradition for a whole new gen-
eration of authors and readers. It is important for students to grasp this
point because it demonstrates that major shifts such as the New Wave
do not occur in a vacuum but rather are dependent on the field’s evolv-
ing material conditions, which both impose constraints and provide
enabling conditions for growth.
Teaching the New Wave in a survey of postmodernist fiction presents
a different set of challenges. Here, I do not expect students to be able
to place the movement within the context of sf history; instead, I want
them to see how the arrival of postmodernism impacted not just main-
stream literature but also popular fiction, especially sf. The class that I
have taught many times examines a range of narrative forms and exper-
imental techniques that have characterized postmodern writing since
the 1960s, including the contrast between metafictional and minimalist
styles, the playful and/or conspiratorial revision of historical narratives,
the interrogation and incorporation of mass media forms and images,
the collapse of distinctions between elite and popular cultures, and the
transformation of personal and social identity through technological
systems. Key New Wave texts, such as Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition
(1970) and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), illustrate several of
these themes, bringing SF into alignment with the cutting-edge fic-
tion of the day. I draw on prominent critics who have emphasized this
connection, such as Brian McHale, who has argued that ‘SF, far from
being marginal to contemporary “advanced” or “state-of-the-art” writ-
ing, may actually be paradigmatic of it’; like postmodernist writing, it
is ‘self-consciously world-building fiction, laying bare the process of

world-making itself’.9
Of course, the champions of the New Wave had always trumpeted
this connection, with Ballard and Moorcock frequently citing William
Burroughs as an inspiration. Teaching novels by Russ, Philip K. Dick,
Samuel R. Delany or Ballard alongside work by Burroughs, Kurt
Vonnegut, Ishmael Reed and Thomas Pynchon effectively displays the
cross-pollination of genre SF and the literary avant garde. Moreover,
assigning New Wave polemics, such as Ballard’s ‘Inner Space’ essay,
alongside similarly combative position statements by postmodernists
such as John Barth and Raymond Federman serves to illustrate how
broadly popular the manifesto form was to 1960s literary movements.
And, finally, I have found that students are consistently amused to
discover that Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) was nominated for a
Nebula Award for best novel by the Science Fiction Writers of America –
only to lose out to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama!10
Most tutors or instructors are likely to cover the New Wave in one
of the above configurations, as a unit within larger surveys of sf or
of contemporary fiction; but I have also been lucky enough to teach
a freestanding course devoted exclusively to the subject. The advan-
tage of such a setup is that it allows for greater depth and detail in
the treatment of key issues – such as the contrast between the British
and American wings of the movement – while also providing a more
expansive investigation of relevant themes and authors. The chal-
lenges include the need to present, up front, a coherent introduction
to ‘traditional’ sf without reducing it to a mere caricature, while also
representing the anti-New Wave contingent within the genre in a way
that acknowledges its historical importance. In other words, students
require sufficient historical context in order to grasp precisely what the
New Wave movement was reacting against and how it was perceived by
contemporary critics. Otherwise, one is in danger of fostering a kind of
triumphalist view, with the New Wave colonizing a genre vacuum and
effortlessly besting its competitors.
Since this was a large course (eighty students) and thus conducted
lecture style, I was able to provide essential context in summary form.
My first two lectures gave an overview of postwar sf in terms of the
typical periodization of the field, emphasizing how the social sf of
the 1950s paved the way for the New Wave by shifting from the hard
towards the ‘soft’ sciences, pioneering social-critical forms of sf (such as
Frederik Pohl’s and Robert Sheckley’s ‘comic infernos’11), and beginning
to emphasize literary quality as a prerequisite for successful stories. Our
first readings were Cordwainer Smith’s ‘Alpha Ralpha Boulevard’ (1961)

and Roger Zelazny’s ‘A Rose for Ecclesiastes’ (1963), two tales published
on the cusp of the New Wave that display some of the movement’s
key attributes. Written by humanistically-trained authors and replete
with allusions to classic and modernist literature, both stories deploy
traditional sf scenarios (alien contact, post-apocalypse futures) in off-
beat and highly stylized ways. These readings set up a pair of lectures
on Moorcock’s New Worlds and the emergence of the New Wave in
America, with students reading short fiction by Ballard, Ellison, Pamela
Zoline and Thomas M. Disch that gave a sense of the experimental ener-
gies unleashed by the movement.
The remainder of the course was divided into three broad thematic
units, entitled ‘Intimations of Apocalypse’, ‘Life-Style SF’ and ‘SF as
Social Criticism’. The first unit covered works dealing with global catas-
trophe, such as Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) and John Brunner’s The
Sheep Look Up (1972), or with apocalyptic transformations of self and
community, such as Silverberg’s Son of Man (1971). The second unit
focused on texts that foreground what Brian W. Aldiss has identified
as a core feature of New Wave fiction, its exploration of ‘experimental
modes of living’, particularly those deriving from counterculture values
of personal transformation and (spiritual and pharmaceutical) con-
sciousness-raising.12 Students read works dealing with gender identity
and sexual expression, such as Samuel R. Delany’s Triton (1976) and the
short fiction of James Tiptree Jr (a.k.a. Alice Sheldon), and with the radi-
cal reorientations of experience promoted by the drug culture and the
new media landscape – excerpts from Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head (1969)
and Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron (1969) providing paradigmatic
treatments. The third unit examined works that display the New Wave’s
political militancy: the critique of technocratic institutions and values
in Disch’s Camp Concentration (1968), the challenge to militarist norms
in Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1974), the exposure of patriarchal
assumptions in Russ’s The Female Man (1975). My overall goal in the
course was to give a cohesive overview of the movement’s conjoined
aesthetic and ethico-political agenda, showing how its best fictions
manage to be both structurally rich and critically compelling.
Lessons learned 1: the content of New Wave fiction
In the balance of this chapter, I would like to discuss the lessons I

learned while teaching this topics course on the New Wave. As I say,
most tutors and instructors will not have the leisure to cover the
movement so intensively, but I think analysing my experience with the

class could prove helpful to those planning compressed units in more
broadly focused courses. I should also acknowledge that the lecture for-
mat dictated certain decisions about content and methods that would
probably not be relevant with smaller enrolments; I did manage, how-
ever, to get the class to engage in modest dialogues over the course of
the term – exchanges that were very useful in giving me a sense of how
the students were receiving the material, which was entirely unfamiliar
to the vast majority of them (save for a handful of hardcore sf fans).
While teaching sf history always require some sketching of relevant
sociocultural background, this is nowhere more pressing than when
covering New Wave texts, not only because of their unusual permeabil-
ity to current events but also because of the historical amnesia afflict-
ing recent generations of students, for whom (as I soon discovered)
the 1960s counterculture exists merely as cartoonish images of grubby
hippies rioting in the streets. Since most of my students had been born
during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, their sense of the 1960s came
filtered not only through distorted media depictions but also through
reactionary ideological retrenchments and ‘family values’ rhetoric that
stigmatized dissent as antisocial and scorned gender and sexual libera-
tion as narcissistic delusions. Moreover, the violently antiauthoritarian
ethos of the counterculture made little sense to them since they knew
next to nothing about the Vietnam War, the military draft, the baiting
of student activists by rightwing provocateurs and so forth.
Teaching Disch’s Camp Concentration, for example, I had to provide
extensive information about militarized forms of research and develop-
ment, including bioweapons technology and psychological warfare,
and the government’s tactics of infiltrating and suppressing antiwar
protest, such as the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program, about which my
students were fundamentally ignorant. They could not grasp why the
administration of a ‘President McNamara’ in 1968 should be such a dire
prospect, nor could they hear the echoes of famous martyred dissenters
in the name of Disch’s protagonist, Louis Sacchetti. While undeniably
brilliant and a central text of the movement, Camp Concentration is a
challenge to teach because of its exegetical demands: one must spend
a great deal of time clarifying its contemporary references – not to
mention explicating its flights of erudition, its frequent allusions to
alchemy, the Faust legend, Modernist poetry and so on.
A somewhat different problem besets the teaching of Russ’s The Female
Man. A monument not only of the New Wave but of 1970s feminist sf,
the novel, with its intersecting multilevel plot-lines, is structurally very
challenging, but the real difficulty lay in getting the majority of my

students, male and female, to take its critique of gender ideology seri-
ously. This is not to say that they were avowedly antifeminist; though
they preferred not to use this term, which had been rendered suspect
by decades of conservative backlash and demonization, they generally
accepted the proposition that women were the intellectual compeers of
men and deserving of equal treatment economically and before the law.
Most of the women in the class were quite comfortable speaking out
against overt misogyny, but they squirmed almost as much as the male
students did when faced with Russ’s ferocious call to arms. The prob-
lem, ultimately, lay in the fact that they seemed to assume the major
gender battles of the past had been long since settled and were thus
embarrassed by what they perceived as the novel’s undue ‘stridency’
(their term). While willing to acknowledge the subtle subterranean
persistence of gender bias, especially when reading Tiptree’s devastat-
ing ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ (1972), they never warmed to Russ’s
fictive manifesto.
While my students’ ignorance of contemporary history and smug
sense of superiority over the counterculture’s purportedly naive, over-
blown radicalism was at times galling, I have to admit that, in other
cases, their sceptical reactions to the texts were spot on. The groovy hip-
ster lingo of Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron, which they found quite risible,
has in fact not aged well, nor has that novel’s McLuhanesque depiction
of broadcast TV as some sort of cultural watershed. Almost frighteningly
media-savvy, comfortable with a communications landscape populated
by iPhones and wi-fi, digital cameras and instant-messaging, my stu-
dents found Spinrad’s eponymous programme, where a studio-bound
host spars with guests linked by satellite and projected on split screens,
about as cutting edge as an episode of Larry King Live. When I showed
the class, during a lecture, a spreadsheet of one week’s prime-time pro-
gramming for 1968, published on a single page of the journal TV Guide,
there were audible gasps at the media poverty this implied. That said,
they did come to see how 1960s television, by bringing images of war
and social conflict directly into middle-class homes, impacted popular
attitudes towards government and the political process more generally,
which is a major theme of Spinrad’s novel.
On the other hand, the students were shocked not by Bug Jack
Barron’s sexual explicitness but by the fact that some anti-New Wave
partisans had found it shocking for just this reason. When I read them
Donald A. Wollheim’s outraged indictment of Spinrad’s ‘nauseous
epic’ – ‘depraved, cynical, utterly repulsive and thoroughly degenerate
and decadent’13 – they merely laughed. The one aspect of 1960s ‘libera-
tion’ with which most of them seemed entirely comfortable – indeed,
blasé – was its loosening of taboos on sexual expression. I considered it
something of a challenge to find a text that would genuinely scandalize
them: the android sex-machines in The Female Man, the erotic bonding
among Haldeman’s soldiers, the aggressive gender-bending of Tiptree’s
‘Houston, Houston, Do You Read?’ – all this they took quite in their
stride. I finally had to give them something from an earlier decade –
Philip José Farmer’s proto-New Wave story ‘Mother’ (1953), with its
creepily Freudian alien sex – to elicit a reaction of astonished revulsion.
In short, the New Wave’s erotic militancy, so controversial at the time,
has become, for contemporary students, almost quaint.
Lessons learned 2: the form of New Wave fiction
The aforementioned points all have to do with teaching New Wave

texts in relation to social currents and trends of the 1960s; but I also
learned some lessons regarding students’ views of the stylistic experi-
ments promoted by the movement. I had anticipated resistance to
stories like Ballard’s ‘The Terminal Beach’ or Zoline’s ‘The Heat Death
of the Universe’ based upon their fragmentary form, their wilful sub-
version of narrative linearity. In fact, however, the students – most of
them English majors, so perhaps primed to appreciate formal innova-
tion – loved these stories, and when I summarized some of the Old
Guard diatribes that decried the New Wave’s arty pretension, they actu-
ally sided with the genre rebels.14 Just as I had a challenge getting them
to respect the counterculture attitudes expressed in some New Wave
texts, so, conversely, I had great difficulty bringing them to appreciate
the conservative critique of formal experimentation and defence of tra-
ditional sf. This was true even of the hardcore sf fans in the class, who
couldn’t grasp why they should have to choose between their love of
Asimov and Heinlein on the one hand and their fascination for Ballard
and Disch on the other.
What this suggests is that the New Wave has come to exert a subtle,
subterranean influence on sf norms of representation, gradually legiti-
mating artistic experiment and social consciousness so that, today, such
qualities are seen as central to successful works of sf rather than a fringe
phenomenon. In other words, the movement’s concerted focus on
structure and style has rendered pulp modes of storytelling archaic and
thus transformed the ‘taste culture’ of sf.15 While it is certainly true that
old-fashioned adventure stories can still be published, they are clearly
marked as juvenile by contrast with more ambitious work. Space opera,

so reviled by Ballard, has now become a sophisticated subgenre in the
hands of writers like Iain M. Banks and M. John Harrison – the latter
himself a survivor of the 1960s wars. The New Wave’s emphasis on style
has, in other words, been absorbed by and disseminated throughout the
contemporary genre, expanding its technical repertoire systematically
even as the New Wave proper ebbed and died in the late 1970s. The
truth of this judgement can be tested in an sf survey class, where the
legacy of the New Wave can be tracked through subsequent generations.
In my more narrowly focused topics course, it was effectively illustrated
by Haldeman’s Forever War, a work of traditional hard sf in many ways,
yet showing clear evidence of New Wave influence in its complex struc-
ture – not to mention in its political attitudes and content.
If I teach this class again, I will probably assign a couple of texts from the
postmodernist canon, in order to help refine and focus student response
to the formal strategies of New Wave fiction. Everything I taught, even
the most extreme material, ultimately had a genre provenance: it was
published in an sf magazine or anthology, or was marketed as an sf novel.
Upon reflection, I think asking students to read, as preparation for one
of Ballard’s ‘condensed novels’ or Aldiss’s Report on Probability A (1968),
a Burroughsian cut-up or a ‘new novel’ by Robbe-Grillet could provide
useful fodder for comparative discussions. If one were even more ambi-
tious, one might consider assigning Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which
was (as noted above) embraced by a sizeable minority of the sf authorial
community in the midst of the New Wave wars. Pynchon’s short story
‘Entropy’ had, of course, been published in New Worlds in 1969, as that
journal did its utmost to shatter the boundaries between sf and the liter-
ary avant garde. Asking students to read mainstream and genre-based
texts together in a course on the New Wave is one way to seriously test
the question of how successful Moorcock’s strategy was.
Conclusion
Teaching the New Wave poses a number of challenges, as we have seen,

but it also offers many rewards. First, it gives students a sense of how
important factional movements have been to the history of sf. While
the New Wave was perhaps the most visible and voluble such group, its
polemical strategies and appetite for controversy provided a model for
subsequent cohorts eager to shake the genre up, from the cyberpunks
in the 1980s to the so-called ‘mundane sf’ movement today.16 Second,
having students grapple with the bold innovations in form and content
propounded by the movement also offers a way for them to come to

grips with the legacy of the 1960s more generally. Indeed, the New
Wave, from its aggressive political postures to its often psychedelic
prose, is a virtual compendium of counterculture attitudes and styles.
Finally, teaching the New Wave in its full complexity allows students to
perceive the blossoming and diversification of the genre that followed
the paperback revolution of the 1950s and the further expansion of the
book market during the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than a ‘wave’, a better
metaphor for the movement, as Colin Greenland has pointed out,
‘would be an explosion, starting at a definable centre and dissipating
swiftly in all directions’.17 Tracking the fallout from this detonation in
the classroom can be an invigorating process of delight and discovery,
for instructor and students alike.
Notes
1. Carol McGuirk, ‘The “New” Romancers: Science Fiction Innovators from
Gernsback to Gibson’, in George Slusser and Tom Shippey, eds, Fiction 2000:
Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative (Athens, GA: University of Georgia
Press, 1992) 109–29 at 109–10.
2. Rob Latham, ‘Cyberpunk and the New Wave: Ruptures and Continuities’,
New York Review of Science Fiction, 19:10 (2007): 8.
3. J.G. Ballard, ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’ New Worlds, 118 (1962): 117.
4. See my essay ‘Sextrapolation in New Wave SF’, Science Fiction Studies, 33:2
(2006): 251–74.
5. Roger Luckhurt, Science Fiction (London: Polity, 2005) 143.
6. Colin Greenland, The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British
‘New Wave’ in Science Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983).
7. As Ellison put it in his introduction: ‘no one has ever told the speculative
writer, “Pull out all the stops. No holds barred, get it said!” Until this book came
along’, in Dangerous Visions (New York: Doubleday, 1967) ix–xxix at xxiv.
8. Latham, ‘Cyberpunk and the New Wave’, 12.
9. Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1992) 12.
10. When I teach the class again, I may end with Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish
Policeman’s Union (2007), which has managed the feat – which Gravity’s
Rainbow could not – of being both a popular postmodernist novel and a suc-
cessful competitor for the Nebula Award.
11. The term was coined by Kingsley Amis in New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science
Fiction (New York: Harcourt, 1960) to refer to such satirical near-future dys-
topias as Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants (1953).
12. Brian W. Aldiss with David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science
Fiction (1986; New York: Avon, 1988) 291.
13. Donald A. Wollheim, ‘Guest of Honor Speech, Lunacon 1968’, in Niekas, 20
(1968): 5.
14. See, for example, Lester del Rey’s Guest of Honour speech to the 1967 World
Science Fiction Convention, published as ‘Art or Artiness?’ in Famous Science
Fiction, 8 (1968): 78–86. I discuss Old Guard assaults on the New Wave by
del Rey, Donald A. Wollheim and others in my essays ‘The New Wave’, in
David Seed, ed., A Companion to Science Fiction (London: Blackwell, 2005)
202–16, and ‘New Worlds and the New Wave in Fandom: Fan Culture and
the Reshaping of Science Fiction in the Sixties’, Extrapolation, 47:2 (2006):
296–315.
15. For a sociological analysis of ‘taste cultures’, see Herbert J. Gans, Popular
Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste, revised and
updated edition (1974; New York: Basic Books, 1999).
16. The manifesto of mundane sf is Geoff Ryman’s ‘Take the Third Star on the
Left and on ’til Morning’, New York Review of Science Fiction, 19:10 (2007): 1,
4–7.
17. Greenland, The Entropy Exhibition, 206.
8
Postmodernism, Postmodernity
and the Postmodern: Telling Local
Stories at the End of Time
Andrew M. Butler
When I was an undergraduate, there was a moment in a seminar when

I was asked who the Pre-Raphaelites were. I had probably just about
heard of them, but that did not stop me and I thought I could just
bluff. I suggested that they were a group of artists who came before the
Raphaelites. (Naturally I did not know what a Raphaelite was.) The Pre-
Raphaelites turned out to be a group of nineteenth-century artists who
wished to return to a style that existed prior to the work of Raphael
Sanzio (1483–1520). The exchange left me with a residual distrust of
chronologies, of terms such as pre- and post-, and of linear notions of
history, even those inferred in reverse (or ‘traditions’ as we call them).
This distrust has informed all of my teaching and writing on postmod-
ernism, postmodernity and the postmodern. Indeed, I would push the
phenomenon of postmodernism back to the writings of Heraclitus and
the pre-Socratics – some of whom, confusingly, post-dated Socrates and
clearly pre-dated modernism.
Whilst noting my suspicion of the prefix ‘post-’, it is not possible to
sidestep the terms ‘modernism’, ‘modernity’ and the ‘modern’. These
concepts are more straightforward to grasp than the same terms modi-
fied by ‘post-’; while modernism and its related forms are used to mean
different things by different theorists, there is nonetheless a broad
agreement that there is a suspicion of hierarchies and straightforward
binary oppositions. Joining an interdisciplinary reading group that
brought together philosophers, economists, historians, sociologists and
literary critics to discuss postmodernity, I was very aware that we did
not agree even on the meanings of key terms like ‘modern’ and ‘real-
ist’. In retrospect – after the postmodern bubble has shrunk – there is a
sense that each critic or theorist has used the term postmodernism to
mean whatever they have wanted it to mean. It might be frustrating
129
to students not to have a definition of postmodernism that fits on a

T-shirt – but a (not the) key notion of postmodernism is the problem of
drawing definitional boundaries. A distinction must be made between,
say, the architectural practices of Charles Jencks and the political inter-
ventions of Jean Baudrillard as being very different endeavours. To do
otherwise is to risk falling into a wishy-washy cultural relativism in
which there are No Wrong Answers (or, more annoyingly for students,
No Right Answers) and It’s Just One Point of View. In the book on
postmodernism I wrote with Bob Ford, we began by suggesting it is:
a movement, a set of aesthetics, a cultural logic, an ideology, a

Zeitgeist, an age, an ethos, a mood. It’s a bandwagon. It’s a scam,
a con trick, an example of the emperor’s new clothes, nihilistic
nonsense, dangerously fascist and right wing. It’s the only surviving
form of Marxism. It’s a continuation of modernism. It’s a rejection
of modernism. It is what you need before you can have modernism.
It is nothing to do with modernism. It is the only way to understand
now. It’s all over now. It never existed.1
But this vagueness can get in the way of teaching the topic.
It is only appropriate to address the fear of relativism that postmod-
ernism might evoke. Industrialized education requires the delivery of
content, in line with Intended Learning Outcomes, followed by the
measurement of the recipients’ reception of those ILOs. If anticipating
outcomes and measurement is called into question, then percentage
grades, SATs, league tables and so forth might suddenly be thought of
as being a waste of time. It should not be forgotten that Jean-François
Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979) was commissioned as a report
on the state of knowledge, which would have included universities.
In my own case, I lack the conviction to tell the Big Story, where every-
thing fits in. Of course, as a tutor you are authorized to teach, and it is nec-
essary for the student to learn. There are mechanisms to call upon when
obedience is not found. I am sure I have made statements in everyday
conversations which have unknowingly used this authority. Consciously
I try to keep aware of the narratives, the counternarratives, the excep-
tions, the paradoxes. Rather than producing what Lyotard refers to as
grand narratives or metanarratives – that is, narratives about narratives,
narratives which give legitimacy to themselves and other narratives –
I try to focus in on local narratives, which may contradict other local
narratives. I also tend to teach the ideas of those I see as the three lead-
ing figures in the philosophy of postmodernism: Lyotard, Baudrillard and
Postmodernism, Postmodernity and the Postmodern 131
Fredric Jameson. Thomas Docherty’s anthology, Postmodernism: A Reader

(1992), is a very useful gathering together of many theoretical strands, if
rather male-dominated in his choice of author. Absent from this selection
are Donna Haraway and the French feminists, especially Julia Kristeva
and Hélène Cixous.
In literary studies there is an understandable attempt to break the
discipline down into digestible chunks; these are frequently defined
by period – medieval, Elizabethan, Jacobean, eighteenth-century,
Romantic, Victorian, modernist and then nebulous categories such as
‘contemporary’ or ‘postwar’. Modernism is a name given to a range
of artistic movements between roughly 1900 and 1930, characterized
by an aesthetic of newness and refreshment in form and content – it
covered poetry (figures such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and the Imagists),
novels (Virginia Woolf, James Joyce), painting (Wyndham Lewis, Pablo
Picasso), music (Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg), architecture (Le
Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe) and beyond. There was a sense that the
world was facing an abyss – a worldview confirmed by the First World
War – after a century in which humanity was revealed to be related to
an ape (Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution) and identity was sup-
posed to be largely unconscious (Sigmund Freud). The new art broke
from straightforward representations of a shared notion of reality to a
more complex depiction of a fractured and disturbed world. The objects
produced might not look like art at all – see Marcel Duchamp’s ready-
made ‘Fountain’ (1917), a urinal signed R. Mutt, intended to be shown
at the Society of Independent Artists’ exhibition in New York.
The science fiction of the period is not interested in technology or
the space-time continuum, nor in new forms in the same way as mod-
ernist texts are. However, a modernist aesthetic can be seen at work in
Georges Méliès’s Le voyage dans la Lune (1902) and Fritz Lang’s dystopian
Metropolis (1927), but H.G. Wells’s sf novels of the decade or so after
1895, virtually an overture to the themes of the next century of sf, did
not break with the tradition of form in the manner of Woolf’s The Waves
(1931), for example. The genre’s prose style tended to be functional,
designed to tell a story rather than revivify the nature of language. Even
the epic future histories of Olaf Stapledon – most crucially Last and First
Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) – do not get considered alongside the
modernist classics.
In the 1960s science fiction changed a little – a group of largely British
writers associated with the magazine New Worlds experimented with
the techniques of modernism for both short- and long-form fiction, in
a period in which sf, trailing some five or six years behind mainstream
literature ‘briefly becomes modernist’.2 Such a late flowering can be seen

as a continuation of modernism – as with the paintings of Jackson
Pollock and Mark Rothko and the music of Philip Glass and Michael
Nyman – which it is convenient to label as postmodernism because of
its chronological tardiness. Again, though, this is to invoke a notion
of progressive development which will be questioned throughout this
chapter.
John Brunner’s disaster novels of the 1960s and 1970s – especially
Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and The Sheep Look Up (1972) – drew upon
techniques pioneered by John Dos Passos in his USA Trilogy (1930–36),
which combined traditional narration with news clippings, biography
and memoirs. Similarly Michael Moorcock mixed and matched his
way through the Jerry Cornelius novels, The Final Programme (1968),
A Cure for Cancer (1971), The English Assassin (1972) and The Condition
of Muzak (1977), a series in which the central character may have also
been a version of protagonists from other novels by Moorcock, such
as Oswald Bastable, Jherek Carnelian, Elric, Dorian Hawkmoon and
Corum Jhaelen Irsei. The characterization is broadly the same, but the
adventures occur in different milieus. The sf figure most sympathetic
to modernism was J.G. Ballard, who drew on the imagery of Salvador
Dalí and Max Ernst in his fiction. His condensed novels, collected in
The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), are assembled from paragraphs which
are entire chapters in themselves, and feature a media saturated
landscape that is as much internal as external. The protagonist frag-
ments between sections – becoming variously Talbert, Talbot, Traven
and Travis. The book also features assassinated, damaged and sexual-
ized versions of 1960s celebrities, such as Ronald Reagan, John F. and
Jacqueline Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. Less well known is the work
of John Sladek, whose work included parodies of other sf writers (col-
lected in The Steam Driven Boy and Other Strangers, 1970), explorations of
Kafkaesque scenarios and even bureaucratic forms, whose increasingly
pedantic and impertinent questions evoke a growing sense of anxiety in
the reader (see Alien Accounts, 1982).
When reading a story of this period, such as Pamela Zoline’s ‘Heat
Death of the Universe’ (1968) in which the laws of thermodynamics act
as a counterpoint to an ordinary housewife’s preparations for a birthday
party, the question is whether it is sf at all. The so-called New Wave of
1960s (and early 1970s) science fiction marks the part emergence from
the genre ghetto of some writers, whilst non-genre writers produced
works which looked like, but were not necessarily marketed as, sf. Philip
Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, William S. Burroughs
and Thomas Pynchon, among others, have been given the label of
postmodernism because they form a loose stylistic and thematic move-
ment in a period which post-dates (but might be thought sympathetic
to) modernism.
In many cases the writer was the star as much as their writing – and
there was often awareness within the narrative that the world being
described was fictional. Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1960) is a good exem-
plar: the events of the apocalypse are being related to us by someone
who invites us to call him Jonah, invoking the opening of Moby Dick
(1851) and a biblical character who (in popular recollection) was
swallowed by a whale. With Slaughterhouse 5 (1969) and Breakfast of
Champions (1973) Vonnegut goes further, writing himself as characters
within the novels; in the former because he was present during the
firebombing of Dresden that is at the heart of the novel, in the latter as
he emancipates his stock characters from literary slavery. Tom Robbins
celebrates getting to chapter one hundred in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
(1971) and in Still Life with Woodpecker (1980) intervenes in the story
to describe his deteriorating relationship with his new typewriter. In
Options (1975), Robert Sheckley despairs of getting his characters out
of a plot hole and decides to produce a cookery book instead. A (non-
sf) novel which could be comfortably read alongside these examples is
Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
(1759–67), where the author struggles to advance his deeply digressive
narrative. It was published long before the modernist, let alone the
postmodernist period.
These novels draw attention to the status of the writer as the author
of the events in each novel, playing with the boundaries between fiction
and reality. The terms ‘metafiction’ or ‘metadrama’ might be more use-
ful in these cases than the label ‘postmodernism’. The period since the
Second World War has seen many literary movements alternately being
embraced and rejected, each a reaction to all the others. Lyotard has
noted how the period of modernism was dominated by such movements,
each a more rapid or immediate response to what had gone before: ‘In
an amazing acceleration, the generations precipitate themselves. A work
can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Thus understood,
postmodernism is not modernism at its end, but in a nascent state.’3 The
reaction and rejection become so complete and rapid, that time appears
to be reversed – this feels like a science-fictional thought as indeed much
of postmodernism does on the level of its slogans.
That a postmodern work can be written prior to modern ones should
destroy any sense that one ‘movement’ is an improvement on the
other – for Lyotard there is the sense that postmodernism lacks ‘good’
form, and is perhaps immature in its aesthetics. Nothing is too low brow
and nothing is too elitist for postmodernism. It would be worth explor-
ing where your students’ boundaries of good form are – is it appropriate
to study newspapers, comic books, soap operas, pornography? Even
science fiction is a form that some people regard as a guilty pleasure at
best, and as trash at worst.
The suspicion of chronologies is both pertinent and problematic when
looking at the work of Marxist academic Fredric Jameson, who sees
postmodernism – in part – as a period which distrusts notions of history.
Marxism argues that an economic base or foundation of a given society –
its raw materials, its tools, its workforce and its market – determines the
superstructure – including social systems, legal systems, politics, arts,
culture, aesthetics, media, family structures, religions, philosophies and
ideologies. Marx identified four broad epochs – Asiatic, Classical, Feudal
and Capitalist societies – which have been part of the history of human-
ity. Jameson, following Ernest Mandel, notes that capitalism itself can
be periodized into market capitalism (1700–1850), monopoly capitalism
(1850–1960) and late capitalism (1960–), wherein corporations shift
from national to international to multinational. The three epochs cor-
respond to realism, modernism and postmodernism – although part of
the aesthetics of postmodernism is a sense of the end of history and a
distrust of historical process, progress and development.
If realism reflects accurate notions of space and time – geography and
duration – and modernism is aware of the relativity of space/time (espe-
cially post-Einstein), then postmodernism explores a collapse/explo-
sion of space/time. Lyotard notes how an eclecticism ignores national
boundaries: ‘one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s
food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in
Tokyo and “retro” clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV
games’.4 In the postmodern era, the individual is assailed from all sides
in ‘the world space of multinational capital’,5 and needs to define a new
cognitive map to deal with the contemporary world.
Jameson, who contributed an essay on Dr Bloodmoney (1965) to the
1975 special Philip K. Dick issue of Science-Fiction Studies and wrote
Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science
Fictions (2007), has no problem in turning to sf for a venue in which the
cognitive mapping can take place. Indeed, he writes that the subgenre
of cyberpunk is ‘henceforth, for many of us, the supreme literary expres-
sion if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself’.6 In one
chapter of Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)
he analyses Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint (1959), and he makes a

few passing (if misremembered) references to Dick’s Now Wait for Last
Year (1966). Jameson’s 1984 article of the same name, reprinted as the
first chapter of the 1991 book, offers a shopping list of postmodern
aesthetics which can be located in sf: depthlessness, simulation, wan-
ing of affect, death of the subject, schizophrenic écriture, the sublime,
nostalgia and pastiche. Mostly I’ve turned to films to demonstrate these
factors – any of the various cuts of the noirish Blade Runner (Scott,
1982), the body-technology blurrings of Videodrome (Cronenberg, 1983)
or Tetsuo (Tsukamoto, 1989) and the rich, but motiveless, pastiche of
Gremlins II (Dante, 1990).
If there is a need to stay with the written word, William Gibson’s
seminal Neuromancer (1984) is a fruitful choice – if necessary the first
page or so could suffice. Jamesonian postmodernism is about surfaces,
about things that are cool in themselves but have little significance – it
is Warhol’s delight in images for their own sake, and Jameson compares
Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘A Pair of Boots’ to Andy Warhol’s ‘Diamond Dust
Shoes’. (Having realized that one class had not heard of Warhol, I rue-
fully noted he must have had his fifteen minutes of fame. More blank
faces. Fortunately, they had heard of the Velvet Underground, whose
album Velvet Underground and Nico had a banana design by Warhol on
its sleeve.) Certainly Neuromancer fetishizes fashion and brand names,
and features a metaphor-heavy prose which constantly links technol-
ogy to the human. Focus in on its opening sentence: ‘The sky above the
port was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel.’ What colour
is that? I suspect these days we’d say blue, conditioned by the blank
screen which kicks in to replace static or marks an audio-video channel,
but I suspect Gibson meant dark grey to black. A port is a commercial
harbour, of course, a location in the world, but the word is also used in
computing to refer to the conduit between the machine and its printer
or an external modem. This is the first of many metaphors used by
Gibson in which the world is compared to technology, or technology
is seen in terms of nature. I think it’s worth spending time getting the
students to discuss the meaning of Gibson’s metaphors.
According to Jameson, in the era of postmodernism simulations
have replaced the authentic – most obviously in the use of virtual real-
ity. Emotions themselves may not be authentic, but assumed, perhaps
ironic, or perhaps programmed; in Neuromancer various characters
describe themselves as being ‘wired’. Emotions are but one element
of the construction of identity, and the protagonist Case is redefined
as an individual in his international capers and his moves in and out
of virtual space. Perhaps the most vivid character in the novel is Dixie
Flatliner, an identity downloaded into storage, who wants to die. The
inauthentic is more solid than the so-called real.
Schizophrenic écriture is the notion of an open style, in part where any
solid link between word and concept, signifier and signified, is broken.
Ask the students to think of the title of the novel – Neuromancer – which
is most obviously the name of an artificial intelligence within the novel,
but also suggests New Romancers, a new kind of desiring (and the New
Romantics of post-glam rock, and early 1980s fashions), even ‘neuro/
romance’, a romance of the brain, perhaps something to do with the
neurons of the brain, ‘neuromancy’, divination by the brain (and the
word is one letter away from ‘necromancer’, a magician who commu-
nicates with the spirits of the dead). Language is not fixed in the image
of its author but is allusive and intertextual, always quoting, breaking
the boundaries of where the text begins and ends. The sublime is the
sense of the infinite, what Edmund Burke called ‘delightful horror’ – it
might be invoked by a mountain, a volcano, vertigo, by the stargate
sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) – and manifests itself
as a pleasurable horror. This again might be located in Gibson’s prose
style and his representation of the data-landscape of the virtual reality
matrix. Nostalgia and pastiche might be seen together, in the ways in
which the novel draws upon Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930) or
Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939); a protagonist who is barely in charge
of his own narrative, a Mr Big calling the shots and pulling the strings,
and a beautiful but deadly femme fatale, Molly. It can be debated by
students as to whether Molly is a feminist role model, as Buffy was to be
hailed a decade later, because of her self-reliance and physical strength.
In her form-hugging leather catsuit, however, she risks becoming the
male sexual fantasy of the dominatrix.
Jameson’s shopping list of postmodernist characteristics may be
applied to many sf texts produced since the 1980s, such as Blade Runner
or Jeff Noon’s Vurt (1993), but it would also be interesting to apply it
to some of the works from the 1960s or 1970s, such as Joanna Russ’s
The Female Man (1975) or Zoline’s ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’. For
Jameson the break between one epoch and the next had come at some
point in the late 1950s or early 1960s. In addition to his own work
on postmodernism, Jameson also contributed a foreword to the 1984
English translation of Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition.
This is a volume more concerned with postmodernity than postmod-
ernism, modernity being a mode of thinking that was initially associ-
ated with the Enlightenment. Modernity continues a humanist impulse
which begins in the sixteenth-century Reformation and Renaissance,

with the rise of Protestantism over Catholicism and the emergence of
industrial capitalism. Developments in technology meant that weaving,
for example, would move from individual artisans working during day-
light hours in their own homes, to the twenty-four hour a day working
of machines in factories with two or three shifts of workers. Goods could
be mass produced, and transported across the country and exported.
Whilst the industrial revolution was built upon the exploitation of the
working classes, it also saw a growth in rational thought – the written
constitution of the United States of America (1776), followed by the
overthrow of the aristocracy in the 1789 French Revolution. Over the
next century and a half democracy spread throughout the West, with the
vote being increasingly extended from the wealthy to all men, and belat-
edly to women. As symbolized by the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde
Park, whose success funded the construction of the museums in South
Kensington and the Royal Albert Hall, the Enlightenment project of
modernity was a huge success, promising progress, liberty and freedom.
The spirit of modernity can be observed in science fiction, particularly
in the early, Golden Age and hard American varieties. Science fiction
is a problem-solving genre – classic stories set up a situation in which
characters face a problem that is solved by technology, usually thanks
to the skills, wisdom and fortitude of an individual hero. Irrespective
of the contingency of events on a multitude of intersecting factors, a
great, rational man (less often a woman) saves the day or brings down
an entire corrupt or decadent regime.
But sf is not unbridled in its optimism for the possibilities of science
or the promises of technology, although this is perhaps clearer outside
the American genre tradition. British sf is more pessimistic, whether it
is Mary Shelley’s depiction of the irresponsible scientist destroyed by
his own creation in Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818; rev.
1831), a dystopia such as E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909), or any
number of texts from the new wave. Atomic fictions – whether about
the threat of radiation or depicting the aftermath of a nuclear explo-
sion – also warn about the dangers of science and the limits of human
knowledge.
For Lyotard, the condition of postmodernity is one in which the
optimism of modernity is rejected. This does not necessarily mean
that he is against science, but that he rejects a too-rosy view of the
possibilities. There are any number of technology stories in the news
which offer a space for student debate on the benefits and downside of
scientific advances – genetic modification, gene selection, fluoridation,
vaccination, social networking sites, phone masts causing cancer – which

might allow for the anxieties to be expressed. (Some of these are real
causes for concern, others are media panics. Your own position may vary.)
We have moved now from modern to postmodern science – a term that
would make many scientists angry.
In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard notes that Nicolaus Copernicus,
‘states that the path of the planets is circular’.7 It does not, for the
moment, matter that the orbits are in fact ellipses, because the practice of
the scientific community will resolve that uncertainty as part of scientific
discourse. Copernicus is telling the truth, in that he can present empiri-
cal evidence to back his statement up, and will be called upon to refute
anyone who disagrees with him. Individuals who hear the statement are
to be treated as his equal, and will, on the one hand, test – prove – his
statement by reproducing Copernicus’s evidence or producing evidence
of their own. On the other hand, they may produce evidence that
refutes the hypothesis that Copernicus has issued. The third part of this
scientific discourse, the referent – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars – may or
may not be orbiting a star, but we cannot conclusively say whether it
is true. Proof comes from the agreement of Copernicus’s audience with
Copernicus – from his authority as scientist, and our ability to reproduce
his results. The progress of modern science is measured in verification
and falsification – the reproduction of experimental results.
But more recent science is less open to this process: first, the cost of
resources required to conduct certain experiments is ruinous and sec-
ond, the nature of science pushes beyond what is entirely measurable
or predictable. Lyotard notes as a parallel the Jorge Luis Borges story,
‘On Rigor in Science’ (1946) in which the energies of an entire country
are put into producing an accurate map of the country, at a scale of
one-to-one. The Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator under
the Franco-Swiss border, was designed to trap a theorized elementary
particle – the Higgs boson – as part of a project that will cost up to
6.4 million euros. This is not an experiment that many can afford to
repeat. Equally the search for any elementary particle bumps up against
problems of measuring reality – both in terms of their smallness and in
the odd ways in which material reality seems to behave at that level. As
Lyotard argues, ‘Quantum theory and microphysics require a far more
radical revision of a continuous and predictable path.’8 An electron
does not move around the nucleus of an atom like a planet around
a star – and it is impossible simultaneously to know the position and
momentum of a particle. There is only so much that science can dis-
cover and render intelligible in everyday language.
Two competing hypotheses now describe the behaviour of particles.

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, advanced by
Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1927, suggests that the posi-
tion of an electron at a particular point is a result of it being observed
there rather than somewhere else; location is expressed as a series of
probabilities. The relative state formulation or many-universes inter-
pretation, advanced first by Hugh Everett in 1957 and later by Bryce
Seligman DeWitt, suggests that the particle is at that particular point in
that specific observer’s universe – it is at another point for an observer
in an alternate universe. In the first case truth is a matter of probability,
in the second truth holds for the local conditions only.
Science fiction has made much use of such postmodern sci-
ence. The alternate history might be considered one version of the
many-universes interpretation. At some point in history, a key event
occurs differently, producing a still recognizable but different world –
the south wins the American Civil War (Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee,
1953), Germany and Japan win the Second World War (Philip K. Dick’s
The Man in the High Castle, 1961; Robert Harris’s Fatherland, 1992) and
so on. Sometimes such alternates seem to be little more than parlour
games; amusing reflections upon the nature of history – witness the
various volumes of ‘counterfactuals’ edited by historians such as Niall
Ferguson. Certainly in the classroom I have asked students to imagine
how society could be different as a way into getting them to think
through what sf does. (The first counterfactuals were published in the
1700s; again, these pre-date modernism.)
All of this is to leave the quantum level far behind. There is sf which
is more centrally about physics, for example Isaac Asimov’s The Gods
Themselves (1973), with traffic between alternate universes. Gregory
Benford’s Timescape (1980) features two communities, separated in
time, one a future Earth ravaged by environmental disaster, civil unrest
and nuclear terrorism, the other a recognizable version of our past. The
scientists in the future try to use elementary particles called tachyons
to convey a message back in time, to warn the scientists of the past to
avert the disaster. This notion runs into all kinds of causality paradoxes,
which require a many-universes theory to resolve; that particular future
cannot be saved, but others can. More recently the fiction of Greg Egan
invokes quantum and theoretical physics.
Lyotard argues that a whole series of factors mean that our notions of
truth and knowledge are no longer certain. Modernity – which includes
scientific endeavour, industrial capitalism and democracy – has not led
to the liberation of the individual, but to a greater degree of alienation
than ever before. For Lyotard it is rationality – especially capitalism’s

rationality – that led to the colonization of Africa and genocide, and,
in due course, to industrialized trench warfare and the gas chambers
of the concentration camps. ‘The nineteenth and twentieth centuries
have given us as much terror as we can take’, he writes in ‘Answer to
the Question’, ‘We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of
the whole and the one.’9 Both Nazism and Stalinism – as totalitarian
systems of rule – are products of attempts at the rational state. The post-
modern, which Lyotard had defined as ‘incredulity toward metanarra-
tives’10 in its fragmentations, offers a space of resistance to the ongoing
development of multinational capitalism, or a relativity which renders
notions of value (and thus of exchange) as meaningless.
A number of dystopias might be called upon to show the operation of
totalitarianism – although sf is usually too optimistic as to the ease with
which the regime is brought down. D.F. Jones’s 1966 novel, Colossus,
especially in its film incarnation, Colossus: The Forbin Project (Sargent,
1970), illustrates such misguided faith in rationality. Dr Charles Forbin
develops a supercomputer to monitor the world’s intelligence and pro-
tect the West against nuclear threat from the Eastern bloc. Colossus, the
computer, discovers the existence of a Soviet computer, Guardian, and
joins forces with it. Jointly, with their control of the nuclear weapons,
the computers can demand that the world does whatever they want it
to; peace has been achieved, as long as humanity obeys, but at a cost to
the individuality and freedom of the world’s population. The rational
solution ends in nightmare.
Lyotard’s attacks on rationality, progress and the liberating influ-
ence of the Enlightenment project of modernity led to his being
smeared as a neo-conservative by the Frankfurt School critical theorist
Jürgen Habermas. In part this could be a result of Lyotard’s dismissal
of Marxism as a metanarrative that insufficiently resists capitalism. A
similar rejection of political dogma is at the heart of the work of Jean
Baudrillard. Baudrillard had done his doctoral research in sociology at
Université de Paris-X Nanterre. When in May 1968 there was a student
uprising, Nanterre was at the heart of the protest. Baudrillard witnessed
the events, and the failure of the unions and the Communist Party to
support the move. His subsequent break with Marxism is thought of
as a move to the right, and thus to neo-conservatism – but in fact his
problem was that the left was not radical enough.
At the heart of Baudrillard’s postmodernism was his distrust of capi-
talism as a sinister force at work within society. The Marxist critique of
the system identifies use value – what an object can be used for – and
exchange value – what monetary value an object has. Capitalism

emphasizes exchange value, and exploits workers by purchasing their
labour to produce objects which can be exchanged for a greater value
than is invested in the process. Profits derive from the surplus labour
of workers. The Frankfurt School, in their analysis of the massification
of society, described how the resistance of the individual is worn down
by the onslaught of mass culture and the mass media, in which false
needs are created in order to give individuals a false sense of satisfaction
in their mass consumption. If anything, Baudrillard thought this a too-
optimistic view of the world, and felt that socialism, communism and
Marxism merely asserted use value over exchange value. In the inver-
sion of the hierarchy the underlying horror is not lifted. Baudrillard
writes of the ‘evil genius of advertising’11 which intervenes in the space
between signifier and signified.
For Baudrillard, Western society has been built upon a distinction
between truth and falsehood, and the rational distinguishing of one
from the other. The mass media has increasingly undercut this, and
political campaigning is entirely based around fakery. The staged has
taken over from the authentic to such an extent that truth no longer
has any meaning. In particular he singles out the theme park as a dan-
gerous phenomenon:
Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all
of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland ... Disneyland is presented as
imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in
fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer
real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.12
Designating something as obviously fake offers the alibi that the rest of
the world is ‘real’.
Sf is clearly a genre that can dramatize this fakery; or by acting as
a safety valve it can contribute to the conditions which facilitate it.
Sf, after all, is obviously not about the real world – thus allowing us
to believe that there is a real world. Again, the genre is not radical
enough to solve the problem rather than adding to it: ‘the “good old”
SF imagination is dead, and ... something else is beginning to emerge
(and not only in fiction, but also in theory). Both traditional SF and
theory are destined to the same fate: flux and imprecision are putting
an end to them as specific genres.’13 But Baudrillard repeatedly turned
to sf in his analysis of hyperreality and the simulacrum – the copy with
no original.
Baudrillard has written on two areas of sf: J.G. Ballard’s Crash (1973)
and the works of Philip K. Dick.14 In Crash, Ballard makes a porno-
graphic linkage between the contemporary technologies of cars, planes,
road networks and celebrity culture and sexual fulfilment – the ultimate
desire of the novel’s protagonist Vaughan is to die at the point of orgasm
crashing his car into Elizabeth Taylor, herself having an orgasm. The
naming of the still-living Taylor and the narration of the novel by one
James Ballard raises ethical issues that would require class discussion, of
course, as the novel deliberately flouts the distinction between the real
and fictional. It is perhaps more reassuring to read the novel ironically,
in the spirit of Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729), rather than actually as a
call for us to be eroticized by our relationship to technology. Clearly it
requires a strong stomach to teach the novel – and a mature audience.
An interesting factor is how it reverses expectations – in traditional
terms it is not sf at all, but Ballard in his introduction advances the
notion that the world is an sf novel, and thus Crash is very much sf.
Reality has been replaced by the model of the reality – just as polls, sta-
tistics, futures and reality television have infected the real.
Philip K. Dick’s entire output is based around the two interrelated
questions of ‘What is real?’ and ‘What is human?’, and thus almost any
of his novels and most of his short stories would be suitable to tease out
Baudrillard’s ideas. Time Out of Joint is perhaps the most significant exam-
ple. The novel is set in an ersatz 1950s, in which loser Ragle Gumm still
lives with his sister and her husband, making a precarious living from
entering a Find the Little Green Man competition in the local newspaper.
All is not as it seems. Objects disappear into thin air, to be replaced by
slips of paper. Gumm hears talk about himself on a radio. Society seems a
little too insular. By the end of the novel, we realize that the Earth is fight-
ing the colony on the Moon, and that the 1950s town was manufactured
to ensure Gumm’s participation in the war effort. Dick’s 1990s – imagined
from the 1950s – is of course very different from the one we remember,
whereas the 1950s, set up to be fake, convinces despite the odd minor
detail that later readers will miss. For example, the novel features a
Tucker motor car, which never went into mass production. But just as the
otherwise authentic seeming 1950s present turns out to be false, so the
reader should question the authenticity of their own present day. How
do your students know they are not living in a reality show – like Truman
Burbank in The Truman Show (Weir, 1998)? Baudrillard argues that thanks
to capitalism, we are living in a false world.
Baudrillard’s later writings, in particular his essays on the first Gulf
War and the attacks on the World Trade Center, are also provocative for
thinking about virtuality, spectacle and disaster. In The Gulf War Did Not
Take Place, he writes: ‘A simple calculation shows that, of the 500,000
American soldiers involved during the seven months of operations in
the Gulf, three times as many would have died from road accidents
alone had they stayed in civilian life.’15 It is perhaps typical of his
style that this is an unsourced assertion, but it is convincing because
it is counterintuitive. Baudrillard suggests that the lack of dead was an
embarrassment – the imbalance between the two sides was such that it
would be misleading to call it a war, neither like the two massed world
wars, nor like the proxy conflicts of the Cold War: ‘After the hot war
(the violence of conflict), after the cold war (the balance of terror), here
comes the dead war – the unfrozen cold war – which leaves us to grapple
with the corpse of war.’16 The American Air Force ran out of legitimate
targets but had to keep bombing anyway. In the end, it was both war as
spectacle – I remember Tony Benn complaining about the aestheticiza-
tion of the war by the media just as a television programme cut to live
footage of a firework display of an attack – and war as advertisement,
for the new generation of missile technology, for Saddam Hussein as
someone finally undefeated by the USA and for CNN as a twenty-four
hour news service from which even generals took their intelligence.
Baudrillard’s rhetoric is deliberately provocative – he makes his point
through hyperbole. What are the ethics of his argument? Real people
will have died in the war, not just simulacra.
It is postmodern that we cannot determine where Baudrillard is being
ironic – and there are moments in Lyotard’s work when he is similarly
ambiguous. Baudrillard, Jameson and Lyotard all argue that there has
been a rupture in postwar history, which has destroyed our old systems
of beliefs just as an explosion in technology – the mass media, satellites,
the internet – has exposed us to more images, words and concepts than
at any other point in history. The question we are left with – and that sf
has explored for us already – is how far we can resist the onslaught and
change the world for the better, how far we are doomed to put up with
what we have and how far we should just reach for a gin and a ham-
burger, cue up the DVD boxset of 1970s TV classics and then tap dance
our way across the abyss in our Nike boots, just having fun.
At the same time, there is the sense that the postmodern moment is
over. Post-9/11 the notion that capitalism has beaten all other ideolo-
gies is less easy to argue, and is the Bush era there were signs of new
battle lines being drawn. As to what critical movement has replaced
postmodernism – whatever would be post-postmodernist in the re-entry
into history – is still not apparent.
I have taught postmodernism in its own right, and as a critical

language for looking at particular genres. The cultural certainties of a
Matthew Arnold at the start of a module on cultural studies are thrown
into sharp relief when contrasted with the eclecticism of Lyotard.
The Leavisite Great Tradition is blown away – to be replaced with
Neuromancer, Blade Runner and, more recently, The Matrix (Wachowski
brothers, 1999). The first theoretically inclined critics to take written sf
seriously were Marxists, the next generation were postmodernists (at
the risk of writing feminisms out of critical history).
Even if the ostensible subject is not sf, I would reach for sf texts as
the best exemplars. The topic also seems to belong at or toward the end
of modules of sf – partly because no major critical approach has super-
seded it (to use an inappropriate chronological term), but also because
the texts that are likely to come late in a historical survey – whether
prose, film or television – reward a postmodern approach. Since the
mid-1980s Gibson has become the touchstone for marketing the
genre – with cyberpunk being followed by post-cyberpunk, and being
distinguished from the retrospectively named steampunk (a reimagined
Victorian age with more advanced technology).
There are a number of common student reactions to postmodernism.
The more instrumental ones, who want to know the six key facts about
the topic will be disappointed or frustrated by it, because I honestly
think that that is to miss the point of the approach. It is certainly not
in its spirit. Some students will be liberated by it – to put a graphic novel
like, say, Watchmen (1987) on a par with Shakespeare makes literature
look a whole lot less stuffy. Any work can be compared to any other.
Finally, it might be a means of awakening some political sense in the
students, whether that is in seeing the resistance to metanarratives as
a means of rejecting capitalism, in becoming aware of the various anti-
globalization movements, or in defending Marxist or other ideologies
against postmodernism’s scepticism. (There may be those who wish
to speak up for capitalism, of course; the most depressing class I ever
taught included women who wanted to marry into the family of a
media mogul so they themselves would be rich.)
Hindsight may also allow the students to question the breaking
down of categories of sex, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and so forth; the
emphasis that this puts on the individual within society (at the same
time as individuals apparently cease to exist) seems in retrospect symp-
tomatic of the ‘me’ society of the 1980s and 1990s. Whilst individuals
can make a difference, albeit infinitesimal, changes in society are more
often wrought by collectives and groups who feel solidarity. With the
undermining of ideologies in common, it may be less easy for such

groupings to come together.
Again the contradictions need to be pointed out rather than dis-
missed. The scepticism – towards time, truth, being, boundaries, hier-
archies and meaning – at the heart of postmodernism is finally a tool
to get students to work through ideas, and to question everything. I
can remember a final year media student complaining that he could
no longer watch the news as it was all a series of constructions; I con-
gratulated him on reaching such a state of being able to question the
media landscape. Such a person is harder to turn into a consumer.
Postmodernism requires students to think through ideas to their logical
if absurd conclusions, to question authority and, ideally, to think for
themselves. We can give them no more utopian a gift.
Notes
1. Andrew M. Butler and Bob Ford, Postmodernism (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials,
2003) 7.
2. Fred Pfeil, Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Culture
(London and New York: Verso, 1990) 85–6.
3. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, introduced by F. Jameson (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1984) 79.
4. Ibid., 76.
5. Frederic Jameson Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(London and New York: Verso, 1991) 54.
6. Ibid., 419.
7. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 23.
8. Ibid., 56.
9. Ibid., 81.
10. Ibid., xxiv.
11. Jean Baudrillard, ‘Barbara Kruger’, in Gary Genosko, ed., The Uncollected
Baudrillard (London and Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2001) 134.
12. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Patton, Paul Foss and Philip
Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983) 25.
13. Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Studies, 18:3
(1991): 309–13 at 309.
14. See Baudrillard, ‘Ballard’s Crash’, Science Fiction Studies, 18:3 (1991): 313–20,
and ‘Simulacra and Science Fiction’.
15. Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. and ed. Paul Patton
(Sydney: Power, 1995) 69.
16. Ibid., 23.
9
Teaching Gender and Science
Fiction
Brian Attebery
Gender is a culturally mediated way of expressing or performing

sexual difference. It pervades every aspect of human behaviour, from
baby clothing to funeral customs. It is deeply implicated in issues of
identity, power, communication and desire. With only two traditional
options, masculine and feminine, gender tends to turn differences
into polarities; to divide up the world as either this or that, with no
binary-confounding third terms; and to generate hierarchies, in which
one alternative always ranks above the other. As a fundamental feature
of most natural languages, it shapes not only the ways we talk about the
world, but even the ways we can think. Much of the influence of gen-
der on thought and behaviour is at an unconscious level, so that it can
be a challenge to make it part of a classroom discussion: students will
often react with scepticism if asked to analyse a story in gendered terms.
Nonetheless, science fiction, with its ability to defamiliarize many
aspects of culture and biology, can take the ‘natural’ out of human
nature, so that something as fundamental as gender can be brought to
awareness and examined critically.1
Historically, much science fiction was written and read without
conscious attention to issues of gender. Aside from some early experi-
ments with feminist utopias, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland
(1915), it was not until writers of the 1960s and 1970s began to chal-
lenge a number of genre conventions (including a general silence on
sexual matters) that gender became an overt object of critique. One of
the turning points was Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness
(1969), a thought-experiment in gender, or, more precisely, the lack of
it. What if there were a world, the novel asks, in which there was no
sexual difference? How would every institution be different: religion,
marriage, kinship, politics, warfare? Another milestone was Joanna
146
Teaching Gender and Science Fiction 147
Russ’s The Female Man (1975), which represents different possible gen-
der systems as a set of linked alternate worlds. Russ shows how the
same woman might become timid Jeannine; violent Jael; or, in a world
without males where females assume all social roles, confident Janet,
the ‘female man’ of the title. The novel invites us to rethink both soci-
ety and language, so that by the end we begin to understand that not
only Janet but every woman might actually be a man – that is, man as
in mankind.
The conscious exploration of gender within science fiction has con-
tinued since the 1970s and has been institutionalized in such venues
as WisCon, the long-running feminist convention held annually in
Madison, Wisconsin, and Gaylaxicon, the more recent convention
devoted to science fiction and fantasy that addresses gay, lesbian or
transgender issues. Each of these annual gatherings has generated a
related award: the James Tiptree Jr Award, founded at WisCon in 1991
by writers Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler, and the Gaylactic Spectrum
Award, first awarded in 1999. The Tiptree Award, in particular, has had
considerable influence on the field, leading directly to the creation of
several anthologies, critical studies and original stories answering the
award’s call to ‘explore and expand our understanding of gender’.2
Yet even before there was feminist sf, long before there were awards to
celebrate it, there was gender in science fiction. Most sf did not question
or even acknowledge society’s gender coding, but those codes operate
whether acknowledged or not. The first place to look for interesting sci-
ence fictional takes on sexual difference is in fiction by women. Those
most interested in challenging a system are those who are ignored or
disadvantaged by it. The traditional hierarchies of gender place white
heterosexual males above all other categories, and until recently, both
the writers and readers of sf have mostly been white heterosexual men,
who are all too often not even aware of the systems that favour them.
Yet once gender has been called into question – by those who have
incentive to do so – the invisible becomes visible, and earlier works of sf
begin to seem powerfully governed by gender assumptions and systems
of thought. A useful pedagogical method is to start from more recent
works and then move backward, from Russ and Le Guin to Heinlein and
Clarke and Asimov and beyond, to see how the earlier works imagine
social arrangements and the distribution of desire.
For example, after reading Russ’s treatment of a male cyborg sex slave
in The Female Man, one is likely to notice aspects of Lester del Rey’s
‘Helen O’Loy’ (1938) that escaped attention the first time around, or at
least that seemed to escape the attention of early readers of the story.
Del Rey’s story invites us to see it in romantic terms, as the story of a

perfect (if artificial) woman and her selfless love for her Pygmalion-like
creator. Seen through Russ’s ironic lens, however, it becomes a parody
of existing gender arrangements. Helen is the perfect woman because
she can perform femininity perfectly. She is manufactured to masculine
specifications, she learns how to ‘do’ womanhood by listening to soap
operas and reading romance magazines, and she has no human soul to
get in the way of male gratification. Because she is nothing in herself,
her last act is to commit suicide – basically an act of suttee, in which the
widow immolates herself on her husband’s pyre.
There is no direct evidence that del Rey was aware of the ironies in
his story, and it is pretty clear that most early readers either missed or
ignored them, but once the invisible assumptions about gender are
brought to readers’ awareness, they are glaringly obvious. Other classic
sf stories can be similarly reconfigured by juxtaposing them with femi-
nist reworkings of their themes. Tom Godwin’s ‘The Cold Equations’
(1954), for instance, involves a male pilot in a small shuttle, a female
stowaway, and the implacable logic of orbits and fuel allotments that
says he must jettison her or fail in his mission. Godwin’s story has been
read in many ways and has triggered fictional responses such as Don
Sakers’s ‘The Cold Solution’ (1991) and James Patrick Kelly’s ‘Think
Like a Dinosaur’ (1995). Most critical readings focus on the pilot’s ethi-
cal dilemma and whether the story’s set-up plays fair with science and
engineering. Putting the story together with a novel such as Vonda
McIntyre’s Superluminal (1983), however, brings out other aspects of its
emotional construction. McIntyre’s main character is a woman pilot
who has literally had her heart cut out – the premise is that piloting
her kind of starship requires replacing natural body rhythms with a
steady mechanical flow of blood. Symbolically, she has chosen science
over emotion, achievement over personal attachment. Godwin’s pilot
does the same, though his choice is not written upon his body in such
a powerfully symbolic way. McIntyre revises or reverses the gender
associations upon which the earlier story depends: the dichotomy of
logical, authoritative male versus vulnerable, dim-witted female, along
with the masculine imperative to protect the weaker sex. After reading
McIntyre, students are better able to think about the gender implica-
tions in Godwin’s descriptive language, including his choice of ‘girl’
rather than ‘young woman’ to designate the female character, and the
wildly inappropriate but alluring clothing she wears. They are ready to
try a critical thought-experiment in reversing the genders of the char-
acters: what happens to the emotional charge of the story’s ending?
They can ask questions about why the story has always been so popular
among male readers. Is it because readers identify with the compassion-
ate pilot’s reluctant acquiescence to scientific logic or because the story
celebrates male exclusion of the feminine from the imaginative territory
of the future? Does the pilot make a tragic choice or a clean getaway
from womankind?
Such readings across the boundaries of individual texts and historical
periods are justified by the dialogic nature of the genre. Science fic-
tion has always been a collaborative form, in which stories build upon
and talk back to other stories. There are various names for this sort of
interaction: formula, trope, theme. I have proposed the term parabola
to represent the use of a familiar but flexible scenario.3 Like a fictional
formula, as defined by John Cawelti in his studies of popular genres,4
a parabola offers a set of initial situations, characters and settings, but
unlike formula it does not dictate how those will evolve through the
course of the story. A detective must solve a murder and a romance
heroine must get married, but a science fictional hero can either solve a
problem or fail to solve it, as Godwin’s hero fails to save the girl. A lost
colony can revert to barbarism or, just as easily, surpass its home world.
The ending is open.
Furthermore, parabola is cognate with parable. This etymological kin-
ship alerts us to the fact that sf scenarios are not merely narrative struc-
tures but also vehicles for thought. If a writer selects a familiar situation
such as the creation of an artificial being, for example, a whole cluster
of ideas come as part of the package: questions of responsibility and
free will; echoes of Genesis and Frankenstein; and multiple, rather than
dual, concepts of gendered identity, as represented in the title of Marge
Piercy’s cyborg novel He, She, and It (1991).
Sf’s parabolas evolved partly as a result of the genre’s incubation in
the pulp magazines of the 1930s through the 1950s.5 Editors and read-
ers sought out stories that carried on the conversation started by other
stories – or, as they might have thought about it, they wanted more of
the same, only with a twist. Edmund Hamilton’s version of the super-
man (‘The Man Who Evolved’, 1931) led to alternatives by Stanley
Weinbaum (The New Adam, 1939), Henry Kuttner (‘The Piper’s Son’,
1945), and A.E. Van Vogt (Slan, 1946). Murray Leinster invented a new
story arc about a slow-moving starship on a generations-long journey
in ‘Proxima Centauri’ (1935), and over the next decade writers such
as Laurence Manning and Don Wilcox added details to the basic idea.
Robert Heinlein offered his version of the same parabola in his story
‘Universe’ (1941), and Samuel Delany implicitly commented on the
whole tradition in The Ballad of Beta 2 (1965). Both of these parabolas,

the superman story and the generation starship story, are still generat-
ing interesting new variations.
In these follow-ups, writers exploited logical holes and undeveloped
premises offered in their predecessors’ work. Each subsequent example
used earlier ones as thematic springboards and as shorthand ways to
fill in details of setting and back-story. Because of the prominence of
parabolas and other shared structures, the genre has been compared to
jazz, with writers continually improvising upon one another’s melodies
and chord patterns. Additionally, as reading contexts change over time,
old parabolas can be reinvented to deal with new scientific discoveries,
technological breakthroughs and social revolutions. By following the
development of a single parabola, we can see the sf community peri-
odically rethinking its views on terraforming, robotics, immortality or
gender. The scientific backdrop together with previous stories invoking
the same parabola form the cognitive horizon within which a fictional
work generates meaning – its megatext.6
A number of parabolas are particularly well suited to the exploration of
sexual identity and difference, and any of these could be the basis for a
course in sf and gender. Each represents not only a group of thematically
related readings but also a sample history of the genre and its social
contexts. Each invites a different set of critical readings to accompany
the stories. Depending on the level of the class, from introductory to
graduate, theoretical texts can be assigned or encapsulated in lectures
and handouts. The study of any parabola requires some exposure to the
basic critical terminology of sf study: megatext, extrapolation, analogy,
Darko Suvin’s cognitive estrangement, Gary K. Wolfe’s icon, Joanna Russ’s
subjunctivity, and so on.7 For a focus on gender, students will also benefit
from grounding in prominent feminist theorists such as Virginia Woolf,
Simone de Beauvoir, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Hélène Cixous,
Julia Kristeva and Donna Haraway. Haraway’s formulation of a cyborg
identity8 explicitly invokes science fictional imagery to construct a ver-
sion of female identity not tied to existing religious, social and scientific
models, and so Haraway’s work is frequently cited by sf critics, but each
of the other feminist theories interacts with science fiction in interesting
ways as well. For instance, what if Woolf’s ‘room of one’s own’ becomes
an entire planet of their own, as in Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite (1993)?
What if de Beauvoir’s ‘second sex’ is the second of five gender options,
rather than two, as Melissa Scott proposes in Shadow Man (1996)?
Kristeva’s idea of the abject, that is, that which must be cast out of con-
sciousness in order to construct a (masculine) self,9 can take concrete
form in a piece of sf; an example might be the treatment of women in

Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue (1984). These interactions are not
merely fortuitous, or the product of overly ingenious reading. Most
women writers of sf since the 1970s are immersed in those very theories:
they are in dialogue not only with the genre but also with the history
of feminist thought. The acknowledged megatext for Gwyneth Jones’s
White Queen trilogy (1991–97), for instance, includes feminist rework-
ings of Jacques Lacan’s psychological-semiotic theories. Jones’s decision
to construct fictional analogues of Lacan’s ideas is discussed in her essay
‘Aliens in the Fourth Dimension’.10
As I said above, parabolas are a particularly useful way to teach the
complex history of sf’s gender-coding, conscious and unconscious.
Compiling a reading list for any sf course can be an exercise in frustra-
tion, since relevant stories are often available only in obscure collec-
tions and novels are likely at any time to go out of print. Yet because
any given parabola is represented by a host of examples, there are
always alternatives if one’s first choice is unavailable. Nearly any parab-
ola, including those mentioned above, can be investigated in terms of
gender implications, but the following parabolas seem to me to be most
useful in the classroom: the cyborg or artificial being, the shapeshifter,
the androgyne, the single-sex utopia and the sexualized alien. Each has
at least one core example. For the cyborg, C.L. Moore’s ‘No Woman
Born’ (1944) is still unsurpassed for its exploration of the implications
of technological intervention into the human – and female – body.
The shapeshifter or metamorphosis story is well represented by Octavia
Butler’s Wild Seed (1980), which contrasts two powerful ancestral fig-
ures: a protecting female shapeshifter and a body-stealing male spirit.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness was not the first sf narra-
tive to explore androgyny, but it established the parabola through its
representation of undifferentiated, genderless beings. The same novel
can also be read as a version of the single-sex utopia, but a more central
instance of that parabola might be Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines
(1978), in which, as Charnas says, she discovered that leaving the men
out of the picture required the women characters to take on all the
social and psychological roles. Finally, the parabola of the sexualized
alien is summed up compactly and with devastating emotional impact
in Alice Sheldon’s ‘And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill
Side’ (1972), set in a future in which humans respond to alien sexual
signals so powerfully that they can no longer form attachments with
other humans. The last of these examples has the additional virtue of
being accessible in one of the most useful teaching anthologies for a
gender-sf course, Justine Larbalestier’s Daughters of Earth (2006),11 which

not only contains a number of relevant story selections but also a criti-
cal essay accompanying each.
How does one build a course around one of these parabolas? I recently
taught an introduction to the literature of the fantastic (a broader cat-
egory including not only sf but also many of its sources and analogues,
such as classical myth, medieval romance, and the philosophical
Gothic novel) organized around the theme of human-animal interfaces
and transformations. It was not designed as a course in sf and gender,
but it turned out that way, both because of the reading choices and
because of the students’ reactions to them. They discovered the gen-
der implications early on, and without prompting from the instructor
they alerted one another to many of the interactions between assigned
texts. The required texts included Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Apuleius’s The
Golden Ass, Marie de France’s twelfth-century Lais of ‘Bisclavret’ and
‘Yonec’, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, and, for sf,
H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Leslie F. Stone’s ‘The
Conquest of Gola’ (1931), Tiptree’s ‘And I Awoke’ and ‘The Women Men
Don’t See’ (1972), Lisa Tuttle’s ‘Wives’ (1976), Octavia Butler’s Clay’s
Ark (1984), Pat Murphy’s ‘Rachel in Love’ (1987), Molly Gloss’s Wild
Life (2000), and Karen Joy Fowler’s ‘What I Didn’t See’ (2002). All of the
science fiction short stories except for the second Tiptree selection are
found in Larbalestier’s anthology.
Each text includes some sort of breaching of the boundary between
human and animal. In the first half of the course, the transformations
were magical or miraculous. Ovid, for instance, shows the gods turning
human characters into stags, dolphins and spiders; Apuleius’s protagonist
spends much of the story in the form of an ass as a result of a spell gone
awry; Marie’s romances involve a werewolf and a knight who takes falcon
form; Shakespeare’s magician Prospero exerts his will through his two
nonhuman slaves, birdlike Ariel and bestial Caliban; Coleridge’s heroine
is threatened by the shapeshifting, serpent-like Geraldine. With Wells,
the course moved into sf proper, as magical transformations give way to
biological processes and technological interventions. Doctor Moreau uses
surgery and conditioning to turn a whole menagerie into quasi-people;
Stone’s ‘Gola’ presents a conflict between two races, each of which views
the other as subhuman animals; Tiptree’s ‘The Women Men Don’t See’
involves not only an animal-like alien but also a pervasive metaphor that
represents two of the characters as opossums living in secret niches in
society; Tuttle shows aliens coerced into living as companions to human
men; Butler’s novel hinges on an alien plague that turns people into lean,
wolflike predators; Murphy tells about a chimpanzee imprinted with the

personality and memories of a teenage girl; Gloss’s novel involves an
interaction with anthropoids living in the dense forests of the Cascade
Mountains; and Fowler’s Nebula-Award-winning story uses a gorilla-
hunting expedition in the 1920s to explore issues of racism, ageing,
sexuality and both inter- and intra-species violence.
With this last story, the parabolic nature of the genre becomes explicit
and is part of the meaning of the story, for both Fowler’s title and the
contents of her tale refer to the life and work of James Tiptree Jr. ‘What
I Didn’t See’ transforms Tiptree’s ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ into
something simultaneously more personal and more universal: a first-
person singular pronoun replaces the third-person plural noun, but the
‘I’ of the title can stand for both women and men who fail to see one
another as well as the natural world around them. The gorilla hunt in
the story is drawn from an incident in the life of Mary Bradley, mother
of Alice Sheldon, creator of the masculine pen name and persona
Tiptree.12 Fowler’s story is explicitly intertextual, but, again reading
backward from recent to earlier works of sf, it alerts us to the degree of
intertextuality that has always characterized the genre. It deals explic-
itly with gender, in the form of the expectations, constraints, poses and
posturings that arise from the characters’ positions as alpha male, desir-
able female, older and presumably desexualized female and so on. The
narrator comments on these roles, which she has become aware of (and
impatient with) through many intervening years and social upheavals.
Reading other works from her perspective, we can see many of the same
gendered assumptions operating in Tiptree’s own story and on back
through earlier works.
In teaching this interlocking set of readings, I first offered the students
a stock of critical terms and strategies. One especially useful strategy for
any study of gender, for example, is the structuralist trick of identifying
binary oppositions in a story (human/animal, good/evil, masculine/
feminine and so on) and looking for the way in which the events of the
story rearrange those binaries. After demonstrating these techniques, I
more or less stood back to see what would happen. Students were asked
to read the stories, comment on them in an online forum, and then
respond to someone else’s forum posting, all before we talked about the
stories together in class. Discussion of gender roles and identities began
early on. The sexual content of Apuleius’s bawdy tale led to heated
debate over whether the story was sexist – for instance, was the wealthy
woman who wanted to mate with the protagonist in donkey form any
more ridiculous than the various male suitors and sinners? That led to
the idea that species difference could stand in for sexual difference – that
all heterosexual pairings could be read as versions of bestiality, an idea
exploited in sf stories of the sexualized alien such as Tiptree’s ‘And I
Awoke’ or Tuttle’s ‘Wives’. By the time we got to Shakespeare, the class
was ready to take Prospero to task for his assumption of control not only
over his nonhuman slaves but also over the only female in the story, his
daughter Miranda. Later on, one student proposed a quite compelling
reading of Murphy’s ‘Rachel in Love’ as a science fictional version of
The Tempest, with the magician rewritten as a scientist, and the blended
human/animal Rachel as both Miranda and Caliban.
In the above descriptions of some of the stories, I deliberately left out
the gender content, since that was not the planned emphasis in the
class. Yet, as students noted, every one of the stories is rife with gendered
assumptions and challenges to those assumptions. The invading race
in ‘Conquest of Gola’ is male; the defending Golans are matriarchal.
Tuttle’s ‘Wives’ are genderless aliens, but the role they are forced to
play is that of playmates for the male explorers from earth – they must
squeeze themselves into a painful and distorting femininity like feet into
foot-binding shoes. Everywhere we looked in the stories we saw disguises
and transformations, animals-as-humans and humans-as-animals, and
the deeply disorienting effect of the Other looking back at oneself. Each
of these elements, too, can function as a metaphor for sexual differ-
ence, and the more stories we read, the more they seemed to invite such
readings. Stories began to converse with, even to rewrite other stories.
Themes reinforced and complicated one another. All of this required
almost no intervention from the instructor.
My main job was to keep reminding the class about historical con-
texts (though we allowed ourselves a bit of creative anachronism) and
about the fact that theme is inseparable from form. I called attention
to framing devices; fallible characters used as focalizers; narrative gaps;
and the ways different voices might be heard directly, indirectly, or not
at all in a given text. I asked students to look more closely at key scenes
and even individual sentences to see how those contribute to the crea-
tion of a world unlike but related to our own and how they advance
particular themes.
By the end of the course, we had discovered a specific and powerful
story-form that might be called the Parabola of the Hidden Woman.
Central examples were ‘The Women Men Don’t See’, ‘Rachel in Love’,
Wild Life, and ‘What I Didn’t See’, although all the other readings from
the course were related in some way, and one can detect hints of other
cultural references, from Tarzan to King Kong to Hemingway’s ‘The Short
Happy Life of Francis McComber’ (1936). This parabola is related to

the sexualized alien, the shapeshifter and the single-sex utopia, but it
is marked off from them by a particular setting, a cast of characters, a
central action, and a number of thematic concerns, any of which can
be brought forward at the author’s discretion. The setting is somewhere
exotic, outside of civilization. Tiptree’s foundational text is set in the
lowland coast of the Yucatan peninsula, Murphy’s story takes place in
the desert Southwest, Gloss’s novel moves into the rain-drenched for-
ests of western Washington, and Fowler’s story unfolds in the Central
African highlands. The reason for the exotic setting seems to be that in
such a place many things might still be undiscovered: there are myster-
ies to be explored. In addition, the farther one moves from the centres
of civilization, the more open to question social norms become.
Characters in the parabola include male scientists or explorers, female
characters (often older women) who are outside the power structures
of civilized society and who therefore see those structures at a criti-
cal remove, and a race of previously undiscovered intelligent aliens or
nonhumans with whom the female characters come to identify. These
roles can reduplicate or combine: Rachel, in ‘Rachel in Love’, is both the
unconsidered woman and the alien. The action of each story involves
sexual desire that is somehow frustrated or denied, a threatened or overt
act of masculine violence, and an escape. The desire, the violence and
the escape are all set in motion by a failure of perception: someone
doesn’t see someone or something else. In spite of these similarities
between the stories, the mood and message of each is quite different.
Tiptree’s is characteristically bleak – the story implies that the only cure
for gender difference is complete separation. Murphy’s story, by con-
trast, strikes a positive note in spite of Rachel’s potentially tragic situa-
tion: the mind of a young girl trapped in the body of a chimp. Rachel
does find love, of a sort; she establishes communication through sign
language; and even gains the legal right to her father/creator’s ranch.
Gloss’s novel includes both loss and gain: it combines a Crusoe-esque
story of survival in the wild and a voyage inward toward greater art-
istry. And Fowler implicates us all in the destruction of the gentle forest
giants: her story, though feminist, doesn’t let women take the moral
high ground. This is a wide range of messages, and yet all tell something
like the same story. Together, they form a much richer and more com-
plex artistic pattern than any one of the stories in isolation, and they
have more to say about our gendered ways of thinking and acting.
Similar groupings of readings could be developed for each of the
parabolas mentioned above. For a course on the cyborg or artificial
being, one might start with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), then
move to del Rey’s ‘Helen O’Loy’, Moore’s ‘No Woman Born’, and Isaac
Asimov’s I, Robot (1950). (With regard to that last selection, nobody
says that a story has to be feminist to have gender implications.) Next
could come Tanith Lee’s The Silver Metal Lover (1981), Piercy’s He, She,
and It and Emma Bull’s Bone Dance (1991). There are many works in
other media that could be incorporated as well, including the paired
(but asymmetrical) TV series The Six-Million Dollar Man and The Bionic
Woman and the films Android (1982) and Making Mr. Right (1987). Issues
raised within this parabola include the relationship between body shape
and identity, the implications of being able to choose one’s gendered
identity, the roles of mother and father and the possibilities of female
paternity and male maternity; and the projection of sexual desire and
therefore gender onto a machine.
Stories about shapeshifters go back to antiquity, but within the era
of modern science fiction, one might include Dracula (1897), not really
sf, but influential on the genre; John W. Campbell’s ‘Who Goes There?’
(1938), the source of the Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks film The Thing
from Another World (1951); Jack Williamson’s Darker Than You Think
(1948), a werewolf story with a strong dose of psychoanalysis and a
lot of interesting gender construction; and Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed.
Always implicit in the shapeshifter scenario is the possibility of cross-
ing gender lines, and this becomes the focus in several of John Varley’s
stories, especially his ‘Options’ (1980) and in Elisabeth Vonarburg’s
La Silence de la Cité (1981; translated as The Silent City, 1988). Virtual
reality offers a new way of changing shape and gender, as explored in
depth in Melissa Scott’s Trouble and Her Friends (1994). When film and
television take up the possibility of altering one’s form, transformations
between species are common but those across gender barriers are gen-
erally avoided, as with the shapeshifting Changeling race on Star Trek:
Deep Space Nine (1993–99). Having male characters suddenly become
female or vice versa evidently disturbs too many sexual taboos for the
mainstream media, though Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94) did
toy with the idea via its symbiotic species the Trill, which can inhabit
male and female hosts over its long lifespan.
Androgynous beings appear in many myths, including a mock crea-
tion myth in Plato’s Symposium. As mentioned above, the best known
treatment of the theme, and the one that launched it as a parabola, is
Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, set on a planet whose inhabitants
are hermaphroditic. Most of the time they are sexually neutral or latent,
but in a phase of sexual receptivity called kemmer, they can take on the
characteristics of either sex. The same individual can, at different times,

both father and bear children. One strength of the novel is its explora-
tion of the social implications of this arrangement: for instance, there
is no rape, and no one is especially tied down by children because all
are subject to childbearing. Le Guin has returned to the same imagined
world in a short story called ‘Coming of Age in Karhide’ (1996), which
explores some implications, especially regarding sexuality, that were
left out of the novel.13 An earlier work by Theodore Sturgeon, Venus
Plus X (1960), imagines a similarly hermaphroditic race, which turns
out to have been artificially created as a solution to many of humani-
ty’s deepest problems. David Gerrold’s Moonstar Odyssey (1977) imag-
ines a world in which individuals select a gender only upon reaching
sexual maturity. Kelly Eskridge’s story ‘And Salome Danced’ (1994) has
a character of indeterminate sex who seems to be whatever the other
characters desire her/him to be. Raphael Carter’s ‘Congenital Agenesis
of Gender Ideation, by K.N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin’ (1998) is written in
the form of a scientific paper on the inability of certain individuals to
assign gender to others, though the problem turns out to be not blind-
ness to gender but overly-acute awareness of it. The individuals affected
perceive not two genders but twenty-two, which barely correspond with
our conventional pair. In the absence of a clear binary system, everyone
is potentially androgynous.
The idea of a single-sex utopia is that females or males can fully
exhibit their gendered identities without interference or influence from
the other sex. A closely related form of utopia includes both sexes, but
puts one or the other in charge. That description is somewhat mislead-
ing: a work of fiction that imagines men in charge is not likely to be
read as utopian or even science fictional – it comes too close to a zero
degree of subjunctivity, or deviation from the historical world. Yet
there are such works, and they include Elgin’s Native Tongue as well
as Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937), Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Suzy McKee Charnas’s Walk to the End of
the World (1974). These novels are utopian, in the larger sense of the
word. Any rationally conceived ideal society contains potential flaws
or abuses – the defects of its virtues. By emphasizing these, rather than
improvements over current social systems, writers can turn the hopeful
vision, sometimes called eutopia (or utopia), into its photographic nega-
tive, the social-experiment-gone-wrong or dystopia. Elgin’s, Burdekin’s,
Atwood’s and Charnas’s novels are dystopian looks at patriarchy. They
function simultaneously as warnings about future trends and as satires
on existing society.
Utopias with women in charge, or with women entirely alone, fall

into two main categories. There are dystopias written by men, empha-
sizing women’s supposed inability to invent or adapt or organize – or
their tendency to organize too well, forming a sort of hive society.
These stories include William G. West’s ‘The Last Man’ (1929), Edmund
Cooper’s Gender Genocide (1972) and a number of works in between,
many of them explored in Joanna Russ’s essay ‘Amor Vincit Foeminam:
The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction’ (1980).14 A more recent
work that hovers between positive utopia and anti-feminist dystopia is
David Brin’s Glory Season (1993). When women write about all-female
or female-dominated societies, the result is much more likely to fall
toward the positive, utopian side. After a handful of early works such as
Gilman’s Herland or Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1890), the form disap-
peared until the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s, which pro-
duced Charnas’s Motherlines as well as Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères
(1969), Dorothy Bryant’s The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You (1971), Sally
Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1979), Alice Sheldon’s ‘Houston,
Houston, Do You Read?’ (1976; published as by James Tiptree Jr) and
‘Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!’ (1976; published
as by Raccoona Sheldon) and Russ’s The Female Man. More recently, a
number of feminist works, while still more eu- than dys-topian, explore
the difficulties of achieving a feminist paradise and even some of the
darker ramifications of a society without gender balance. These include
Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean (1986), Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite
(1992) and Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country (1988).
One outgrowth of feminist critique has been the recognition that
masculinity too is constructed and often constricting. Following on the
all-female utopias, a few male separatist societies have appeared in sf –
most of them, to date, written by women. The most fully developed are
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Ethan of Athos (1986), Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The
Matter of Seggri’ (1994) and Eleanor Arnason’s Ring of Swords (1993). In
the last two, the all-male society is paired, naturally enough, with a cor-
responding all-female society, though we don’t see those close at hand.
One additional work depicts not only sexually segregated societies
but even the moment of division. In Philip Wylie’s The Disappearance
(1951), the separation is not a deliberate utopian venture but a mysteri-
ous occult event that pulls men and women into separate dimensions.
Each group has to recreate the world with one half of its population
missing. For women, the greatest challenge is stepping into leadership
roles that have been denied them; for men, it is getting over masculine
posturing and competitiveness. The women fare better.
Utopian fiction is relatively easy to teach. There are many fine critical
and theoretical works to consult,15 and the form lends itself naturally
to classroom debate and writing assignments – design your own utopia,
argue for your own society as a form of utopia, identify trends in today’s
world that could lead to dystopia. The parabola of the sexualized alien is
considerably more difficult to turn into a teaching unit. Even if students
have no problem reading about sexual matters, they are likely to balk at
talking about them in class. It is possible to assemble a set of readings
on sex or sexual desire between humans and aliens, though, and most
of them are relatively tame with regard to erotic content, partly because
the genre grew up with a strict code of censorship over such matters.
Sex had to be snuck in, often disguised as something else. Many of the
magazine stories of the 1930s are full of weirdly sexualized imagery, but
that imagery is frequently attached to machines or bits of landscape.
A good example (but unfortunately not an easy one to get hold of) is
John Edwards’s ‘The Planet of Perpetual Night’. Edwards describes both
a machine and a landscape apparently getting it on: ‘Watching closely
the blue beam, Dr. Davidson noted that it was slowly but surely pushing
its sputtering way down to the surface below, moving and thrusting like
a shaft of solid fire through the strange black shroud which obstructed
its progress like a solid thing.’16
By the 1950s, however, sex could at least be considered, and Philip
Jose Farmer was one of the first writers to take advantage of the change.
His story ‘The Lovers’ (1953) started the parabola of human/alien sexu-
ality, and a number of his later stories explore the possibilities, always
from the point of view of a male human confronting female or femi-
nized aliens. His aliens are genuinely weird, at least, and not just green-
skinned dancing girls, as in the classic Star Trek episodes and a host of
B-grade movies. Paul Park’s Coelestis (1993) explores another side of the
scenario of masculine desire, with an alien creature deliberately imper-
sonating a female human. Park’s novel is as much about colonization
as sexuality, but in Lisa Tuttle’s ‘Wives’, sexuality is colonization. The
title of Tuttle’s story is carefully chosen: it is about wives, not women,
and about the process that warps the latter into the former. Tiptree’s
‘And I Awoke’ is an essential work in this parabola; it is also included
in a collection of such stories, Alien Sex, edited by Ellen Datlow.17 The
collection contains stories by Harlan Ellison, Pat Cadigan, Geoff Ryman,
Pat Murphy and many other major sf writers.
Whichever parabola one teaches, the point is that science fiction is
not only a collection of individual works of varying quality but also
a collective enterprise. Reading masterworks such as The Left Hand of
Darkness not as isolated creations but as voices in a ongoing debate is

the best way to let students discover that the genre is, above all, a way
of thinking about things. One of the things it thinks about in particu-
larly interesting ways is gender. Clustering together works related by
form, theme, or the combination of form and theme that I am calling
parabola allows individual texts to pose questions to which other texts
may propose answers. Within any given parabola, the primary texts are
also the best theoretical sources, offering the deepest insights into their
own inner workings. Here I am in agreement with Carl Freedman, who
proposes that science fiction is itself a form of critical theory.18 The
great theorists of sf – that is, Russ, Le Guin, Tiptree and so on – are the
best teachers as well. They can teach students to ask questions where
no questions are usually expected, where things ‘go without saying’. Sf
can teach us all to query the basic structures of thought and identity,
including gender.
Notes
1. There are a number of useful studies of science fiction and gender, includ-
ing Brian Attebery, Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (New York and London:
Routledge, 2002); Marleen S. Barr, Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science
Fiction and Beyond (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina
Press, 1993); Jane Donawerth, Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science
Fiction (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997); Justine Larbalestier, The
Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 2002); Sarah Lefanu, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and
Science Fiction (London: Women’s Press, 1988); Robin Roberts, A New Species:
Gender and Science in Science Fiction (Urbana and Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993); Joanna Russ, To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism
and Science Fiction (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1995); Lisa Yaszek, Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008).
2. Karen Joy Fowler, ‘On James Tiptree, Alice Sheldon, and Bake Sales’, 1996,
http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue22/tiptree.html (accessed 14 June 2008).
3. Brian Attebery, ‘Science Fiction, Parable, and Parabolas’, Foundation: The
International Review of Science Fiction, 95 (2005): 7–22.
4. John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green
University Popular Press, 1971); Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula
Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1976).
5. Histories of the genre paying particular attention to the magazine era include
Brian W. Aldiss with David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science
Fiction (New York: Avon, 1986); Mike Ashley, The Time Machines: The Story of the
Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950 (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2000); Paul A. Carter, The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of
Magazine Science Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); Edward
James, Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994); and Brooks Landon, Science Fiction after 1900: From the
Steam Man to the Stars (New York: Twayne, 1997).
6. The term megatext was borrowed from narratologist Philippe Hamon for
use in science fiction criticism more or less simultaneously by Damien
Broderick and Brian Attebery: see Broderick, ‘Reading SF as a Mega-text’,
New York Review of Science Fiction, 47 (1992): 9; Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992).
7. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a
Literary Genre (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979); Gary
K. Wolfe, The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1979); Joanna Russ, ‘Speculations:
The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction’, in To Write Like a Woman, 15–25.
8. Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-
Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, 1985; rpt. in Simians, Cyborgs, and
Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York and London: Routledge, 1991)
149–81.
9. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
10. Gwyneth Jones, ‘Aliens in the Fourth Dimension’, in Deconstructing the
Starships: Science, Fiction and Reality (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
1999) 108–19.
11. Justine Larbalestier, ed., Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the
Twentieth Century (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006).
12. Julie Philips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (New York:
St Martin’s Press, 2006).
13. Le Guin’s version of androgyny has been attacked as implicitly privileging
the masculine or assuming gender differences as natural or universal: see,
for instance, Craig Barrow and Diana Barrow, ‘The Left Hand of Darkness:
Feminism for Men’, Mosaic, 20:1 (1987): 83–96. For Le Guin’s own rethink-
ing of the issue, see ‘Is Gender Necessary? Redux’, in Dancing at the Edge of
the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove, 1989) 7–16.
14. Joanna Russ, ‘Amor Vincit Foeminam: the Battle of the Sexes in Science
Fiction’, 1980; rpt. in To Write Like a Woman, 41–59.
15. See, for example, Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and
the Utopian Imagination (New York and London: Methuen, 1986) and Chris
Ferns, Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 1999).
16. John Edwards, ‘The Planet of Perpetual Night’, Amazing Stories,11:1 (1937):
15–57 at 52.
17. Ellen Datlow, ed., Alien Sex (New York: Dutton, 1990).
18. Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Hanover and London:
Wesleyan University Press, 2000).
10
Teaching Postcolonial Science
Fiction
Uppinder Mehan
Postcolonial science fiction is science fiction written by those who

are the ‘survivors – or descendants of survivors – of sustained, racial
colonial processes; the members of cultures of resistance to colonial
oppression; the members of minority cultures which are essentially
colonized nations within a larger nation; and those of us who identify
ourselves as having Aboriginal, African, South Asian, Asian ancestry,
wherever we make our homes.’ I shamelessly borrow from my afterword
to the collection of short stories I was fortunate enough to co-edit with
Nalo Hopkinson, So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and
Fantasy, because that polemical point brings up an important issue of
identification.1
As is the case in studying and teaching postcolonial literature in gen-
eral, so also is it the case in studying and teaching postcolonial science
fiction that there is a broad distinction to be made between the litera-
ture of the colonizer and the literature of the colonized. This distinc-
tion lead to two different critical assumptions that guide analysis: the
literature of the colonizer is examined in order to reveal its underlying
racist and ethnocentric assumptions; the literature of the colonized is
examined in order to understand how it responds to the colonizer, and
how it imagines a future. While it is important to show the colonialist
underpinnings of the literature of the colonizer, and I will address some
of these issues below, I feel the greater focus should be on the literature
of the (formerly) colonized. I should also point out a couple of caveats
that anyone who has taught postcolonial literature for some length of
time already knows: one, although colonialism formally ended around
the second half of the twentieth century, imperialist nations are still
structured by their colonial adventures and are still greatly conditioned
by ‘the rhetoric of empire’ (as, of course, are the politically decolonized
162
Teaching Postcolonial Science Fiction 163
nations); two, much important literature of the colonizer is highly crit-

ical of colonialism and empire, and, conversely, not all literature of the
colonized is automatically devoid of imperialist, racist and ethnocentric
elements. The remainder of this chapter is divided into three connected
sections: the first section, on postcolonial science fiction, examines the
peculiar understanding postcolonial science fiction writers have of tech-
nology, history and the body; the second section, on colonial science
fiction, examines racist and colonial/imperial assumptions in science fic-
tion in general; and the third section introduces dissident science fiction
which, although not written by postcolonial writers, is highly critical of
colonialist/imperialist assumptions. When I teach postcolonial science
fiction I find it useful to start by studying a couple of colonialist science
fiction works. I have made use of H. Beam Piper’s The Fuzzy Papers (coll.
Little Fuzzy, 1962, and Fuzzy Sapiens, 1964) (and will make use of Mike
Resnick’s Paradise, 1989, the next time I teach the class) as an example
of a novel that seems to me to be entirely unconscious of its racist and
patronizing elements. It may appear so to inexperienced readers as well
since its plot revolves around the question of sentience and the determi-
nation of sovereignty. For the purposes of this chapter with its focus on
teaching postcolonial science fiction that is where I will begin.
Postcolonial science fiction
Although it is a truism that sf treats technology ambivalently (it is both

the problem and the solution), postcolonial sf adds a further complica-
tion. The formerly colonized countries mistrust technology because it is
seen as an ‘alien’ imposition by the colonizer – an imposition that shat-
ters familiar cultural and social patterns (and in many cases the ‘alien’
technology destroys a native technology and supplants it) – but at the
same time it is recognized that technology is the key to a more prosper-
ous future. One fictional response to such a dilemma is to accept the
technology but put it to the service of native goals, another response is
to treat the technology as an inferior version of an earlier native prac-
tice, a third response explores the development of native technologies
that had either been disrupted or ones that answer culture-specific con-
cerns (see my article ‘The Domestication of Technology…’ for specific
examples of Indian sf touching on these aspects2).
Surprisingly, the great anxiety and fear of technology enslaving human-
ity is not a strong feature of postcolonial sf partly because the survivors
of colonialism realize that ‘the degradation and dehumanisation caused
by machines is nothing as compared to that imposed by poverty’.3
A remarkable postcolonial sf novel by Nalo Hopkinson presents an

acceptance of technology that is more likely to be associated with
the degrading surveillance of Big Brother in colonialist sf. In Midnight
Robber, nanotechnology (one nanometer is 10⫺9 or one billionth of a
meter) combined with AI (Artificial Intelligence) programs have enabled
enterprising cultural groups to make entire planets inhabitable with a
minimum of labour. The world in Midnight Robber is that of a Caribbean
culture transported to its own planet. Caribbean traditions and holidays
are maintained with an eye toward remembering and celebrating the
past and present. Each member of the culture is born with nanomites
already at work building an earbug that puts one in continuous com-
munication with the main AI program, the beneficent Granny Nanny
who helps maintain ease and social order.
Hopkinson could have given us a tale of the intrigues and preda-
tions of the Marryshow Corporation in the development of its Grande
Nanotech Sentient Interface software that mimics the divine creative
act in making the world ready for human habitation. She could have
given us a tale of programming machines turning us into programmed
beings. In other words, Midnight Robber could have been a story of
the excesses of technological dependence and control (it is, but only
in part) and it might even be appropriate for a writer from one of the
victimized cultures of techno-imperialism to cast technology as only a
negative. What we are offered instead is a tale of technology as a wise
and beneficent god. The main AI program monitors and communicates
through an aspect of itself affectionately called Granny Nanny. This
humanly-perceptible reduced version of the main program that can see
in all dimensions is individually attuned to every single person through
sub-programs that are called Eshu. The Eshu are also AI programs that
rest inside one’s head and are primarily used to access information and
to make life almost labour-free. Finally, technology has made it possible
to labour authentically; no longer are workers trapped in the Marxian
hell of sacrificing their art and labour in the production of an alienated
object.4 No one need work; those who do so select the crafts that satisfy
some need. Or so it appears, for some of these workers are busy re-learn-
ing older technologies in order to produce goods that will allow Granny
Nanny to gather only the most basic information about their physical
health. As it turns out Granny Nanny gives them the illusion that they
can create a system of goods and services outside her ken until she finds
it necessary to punish those who harm others with their free will.
Granny Nanny is not simply a humanizing trope, translating the
machine intelligence into a doting caretaker, it is also laden with a
historical dimension of rebellion and protection. Granny Nanny was

the nom de guerre of a slave woman in eighteenth-century Jamaica who
escaped with members of her family into one of the Maroon communi-
ties and formed Nanny Town. Declared a national heroine in Jamaica
in 1975, Granny Nanny helped free hundreds of slaves and repeatedly
repelled the British over a period of some fifty years. Having knowledge
of the historical Granny Nanny greatly affects the acceptance or rejec-
tion of technology in Midnight Robber, and postcolonial sf in general
calls for a historical awareness in order to more fully comprehend and
appreciate the plots and ideas of such novels.
Accordingly, Archie Weller’s Land of the Golden Clouds assumes that
the reader is aware of the historical nightmare of Australia’s Aboriginal
peoples. This dystopic novel is set some three thousand years after a
nuclear holocaust in the second millennium. The plot revolves around
the enmity between those who dwell on the surface and those who
dwell underground. The hero’s journey to the final battle site takes him
through remnants of various deformed cultures from contemporary
Australia as he gathers a band of fighters to face the Nightstalkers. The
coda to the story shows how the two sides learn to work together and
live in harmony. However, just before the big celebration that marks
the end of the conflict, the major Aboriginal warriors leave with their
leader. The surviving Aboriginals decline membership in the new multi-
cultural Australia and go back to the land and their ancient ways.
An awareness of Australian history helps explain the refusal of
Weerluk and Mungart (the twin warriors of The Keepers of The
Trees) to join the new society. Contemporary Aborigines in Australia
have already suffered an eco- and techno-catastrophe. In 1778 when
Europeans started arriving in substantial numbers there were 300,000
Aborigines divided into over 500 tribes, each with their own distinct ter-
ritory, history, dialect and culture. Just as in the US and Canada, so too
in Australia; Dalaipi, a Queensland Aborigine, speaking in 1896 gives a
tragic summary of European-Aboriginal interactions: ‘We were hunted
from our ground, shot, poisoned, and had our daughters, sisters and
wives taken from us. They stole our ground where we used to get food,
and when we got hungry and took a bit of flour or killed a bullock to
eat, they shot us or poisoned us. All they give us now for our land is a
blanket once a year.’5
Strongly connected to the issues of history and technology is the
postcolonial body. Both postcolonial and sf writers have a rich literary
history of complicating the notion of the body as an unmediated and
sovereign entity: postcolonial writing examines the effects on identity
when a profound distance is created between self and body by the histo-
ries of slavery and conquest which erase the lively and vibrant cultural
context necessary for a fuller understanding of the native’s body, and by
the ‘scientific’ construction of the black or brown body as either inferior
or superior to but definitely different from the ‘normal’ white body;
while sf tales of robots, shape-shifting and humanoid aliens, androids,
clones and cyberspace have all contributed to calling into question the
‘natural’ body far earlier than most commentators and critics. Although
some sf writers have allegorically addressed the significance of bodies
via alien versus human bodies or artificial versus human bodies, most
have assumed when pressed that the constructs of race have disappeared
in the far future. Unfortunately, the black or brown body is often the
one that disappears in the new post-racial body. Both Samuel Delany
and John Varley give us remarkable futures (Delany’s Triton, 1976;
and any fiction of Varley’s set in Luna, Steel Beach, 1992, for example)
where body and gender modification are considered the norm. None of
Varley’s characters are black and none consider becoming black whereas
Delany’s characters readily play with racial signifiers.
Perhaps the sf writer who has most consistently and most forcefully
explored the territory of history, technology and body is Octavia E.
Butler. The most significant discourse helping define the body and self
in her Xenogenesis trilogy (Dawn, 1987; Adulthood Rites, 1988; and
Imago, 1989; collected together in one volume as Lilith’s Brood, 2000)
is that of slavery. The trilogy focuses on a breeding programme, as did
her Patternist series, but this time post-nuclear apocalypse humans are
confronted by the alien oankali who make the humans an interbreed-
ing offer they can’t refuse. The oankali value biological diversity above
all else, and they have come to an earth where those surviving humans
are either sterile or give birth to horrific offspring. The trade the oankali
offer is to make humans fertile and whole and physically far superior in
return for the privilege of mating with us. The central character of the
first novel and one of the main characters in the second and third is an
African-American woman named Lilith who lost her husband and son
in the nuclear catastrophe. She resists the offer of the oankali. Lilith’s
initial refusal is understandable but given that her only other option
is, at best, to live out a sterile life in an isolated village, her reluctance
makes less logical sense without an understanding of the lack of control
over one’s own body in slavery and the body under the oankali.
The opening scene of Dawn has almost nothing to do with aliens;
Lilith could be in solitary confinement in any prison. She learns
eventually that the prison is an organic part of a biological spaceship
grown from a seed. The aliens travel from star to star, planet to planet,
exchanging biological and cultural material and information with the
many species they contact. The oankali are determined to offer Lilith a
better life. They try to create human families for her, enhance her brain
so that she can recall and learn with ridiculous ease, give her almost
superhuman reflexes and healing abilities, but Lilith rejects them.
She correctly sees that the more she lets them do for her, the less she
remains herself. Although the oankali are not responsible for having
separated Lilith from her family, they behave like slave owners who
viewed the breeding of their slaves as their prerogative. By refusing to
let her have paper and writing instruments, the oankali imitate slave
owners who saw in education a threat to their control. In short, the
oankali behave like the colonizers who seek to remake the savage into a
more civilized being. Of course, by the end of the first part of the trilogy
Lilith has been made pregnant by the aliens, and she spends the rest of
her life trying to reconcile her conflicting feelings.
Colonial science fiction
The phrase I used earlier, ‘the rhetoric of empire’, is also the title of an
insightful work by David Spurr which looks at the major tropes in colo-
nial discourse.6 Although Spurr’s interest is in travel writing, journalism
and imperial administration, the tropes of colonial discourse are in play
throughout the field of postcolonial writing in general. After a brief
discussion of the word ‘alien’ and the easy substitution of ‘alien’ for any
number of minority groups (from Pacific Islanders to Native Americans
to women to Easterners to Africans to African-Americans), I find it use-
ful to begin by discussing briefly how Spurr’s tropes are easily found in
science fiction. A good trope for beginning a discussion of colonialism
in science fiction is that of surveillance. There is little more powerful
than a ship in orbit around one’s planet to signal discovery and control.
The distance of the ship from the planet is necessitated by physical laws
of space travel but the orbiting also serves as a period of assessment and
preparation for a safe, antiseptic entry into the alien biosphere. The fear
of contamination in science fiction is rooted in biological safety rather
than psychological unease, but it is often a short a step to viewing the
alien native through the trope of debasement as the source of that con-
tamination. If it is we humans who have come to the alien home world
then, of course, we must be the more technologically advanced beings
and therefore the natives are inferior to us (classification) and their real
history starts with our arrival (negation). Spurr’s discussion includes
seven more tropes and I make use of them as occasion demands but
those discussed above are a productive beginning. The main principle
is that the tropes are a means of organizing either conscious justifica-
tions for eradicating others and taking over their land or subconscious
attempts at reducing the cognitive dissonance that comes about from
knowing that one is behaving abominably but wanting to believe that
one is a good and moral being.
Rather than presenting a catalogue of the numerous thinly disguised
colonialist science fiction novels, I’ll mention two that allegorize set-
tler colonization and occupation colonization (I take the terms from
The Empire Writes Back, 1989, by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin as this
is still the best introduction to the major issues of and approaches to
postcolonial literature7). A settler colony takes over an area completely
(Australia, for example) by eradicating or displacing any indigenes;
indeed, the rhetoric of the settlers often figures the land as empty,
awaiting development. The planet Zarathustra in The Fuzzy Papers by
H. Beam Piper is valued for its mineral deposits and is seen to be devoid
of any native life until a prospector, Jack Holloway, accidentally comes
across a small furry biped. Holloway names this particular native Little
Fuzzy and the rest of the story is a struggle between the rich, evil corpo-
ration that wants all rights to the planet and the Fuzzies. Much of the
novel is taken up in establishing that the Fuzzies are sentient and that
they have rights to the planet that supersede the rights of the corpora-
tion. This is certainly a step up from humans encountering BEMs (bug-
eyed monsters) and just blowing them up, but it is a very small step.
The Fuzzies apparently love Holloway and the ‘good’ humans and seek
to re-make themselves over in their image. Piper inserts the occasional
comment regarding the virtues of the simple life as practised by the
Fuzzies but, on the whole, the natives are represented as innocent chil-
dren in desperate need of protection and guidance. As it turns out, the
economic justification for continued interaction between the Fuzzies
and humanity is the presence of a euphoric bond between the two spe-
cies somewhat like the affection between parents and children and pets.
The Fuzzies are granted full sentience status and rights but the humans
are clearly in control, and Piper makes it clear that the natives much
prefer the joys of an idyllic existence to the burdens of administration
and development.
Unlike the colonization of uninhabited new lands, the colonization
of sovereign existing lands fully acknowledges a conflict between two
populations over a territory. The rhetoric of discovery and the frontier
gives way to the rhetoric of development. The occupiers willingly take
on Kipling’s ‘white man’s burden’ in order to develop the land and

to bring enlightenment and morality to the natives. All the civiliz-
ing weight falls on humans in Mike Resnick’s novel Paradise. With
his tongue firmly in his cheek Resnick informs the reader in the fore-
word that a parable Kenyans tell each other about the self-destructive
nature of Africa ‘obviously has nothing to do with this novel, which
is about the mythical world of Peponi rather than the very real nation
of Kenya’.8 Anyone familiar with Kenya’s history will recognize that
Resnick has rewritten its colonialist past with a minimal patina of
science fictionalization (instead of seagoing ships and aircraft there
are spaceships, instead of the country of Kenya there is the planet of
Peponi, instead of rhinos and elephants there are ‘landships’ which
provide their version of ivory). Resnick has the narrator express admira-
tion for the efforts of a particular native leader’s attempts to develop his
planet but nowhere in Resnick’s universe has the educated native leader
found a formerly undeveloped world become a developed country. A
cursory examination of postcolonial countries in the real world would
have shown Resnick a number of successes, and if not successes then
certainly a variety of strategies that have contributed to the ongoing
struggles in the postcolonial world. Although the narrator ends with a
sentiment that the natives of Peponi (ill-suited as they are to modernity)
will be the ones to decide the planet’s future, the focus of the novel is on
the nostalgia that a succession of human explorers, game-hunters, and
farmers all have for the paradise they thought they had found.
Dissident science fiction
So much for colonizing science fiction, but not all science fiction that
comes from the colonizer (or the beneficiaries of the colonizing process)
is the simple translation of the colonizing process into space. A number
of writers from within the centre (the Empire, the metropolitan – again,
see The Empire Writes Back) offer important critiques of the process and
effects of colonization. For the lack of a better word, I borrow a term
from politics and call these writers ‘dissidents’. Two such dissident writ-
ers who are fully aware of the various forms of violence that colonizing
commits on all involved are Kim Stanley Robinson and C.J. Cherryh.
Robinson’s Mars trilogy, Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1994) and Blue
Mars (1996), takes the reader from the original group of astronauts
training in Antarctica to a terraformed Mars that is home to the second
and third-generation descendants of those astronauts and millions of
other immigrants who consider themselves Martians first. In outline,
the trilogy follows the pattern of settler colonization but unlike Earth
there are no sentient beings that need to be erased or managed out
of any meaningful existence: the settlers arrive and under difficult
circumstances spend the next few years creating inhabitable surround-
ings. As the years pass the colonists have less in common with the
home country and begin to chafe at long-distance attempts to control
them. The settlers eventually declare independence and create their
own constitution. At first the constitution is closely modelled on the
American constitution, but the Martians settle on a confederation
with a mixed economy enshrining both free-market principles for
non-essentials and not-for-profit status for social rights (housing, food,
health-care, education). Robinson is historically astute enough to have
one of the original settlers (importantly, the one who had stowed away
on the original flight to Mars) sound a warning note about keeping a
healthy distrust of regimes no matter how revolutionary their intro-
duction. Whilst the Martians seek to create a global constitution they
are fully aware that they are both Martians and inhabitants of more
local places with each locality articulating its own mix of regional and
global rights and responsibilities within the framework of the constitu-
tion. In the first few decades each region finds its place in the Martian
political and economic landscape based on its technological strength
and focus.
Although a few regions on Robinson’s fictive Mars find an economic
place due to tourism, the importance of technology to the develop-
ment of a region or country cannot be understated. Countries that do
not invest in technological and industrial development are doomed to
be providers of either raw material or purveyors of tourism and manual
labour (in a science fiction context the militarily contested planet
Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s Dune, 1965, exists solely as the source of
‘spice’ – a naturally occurring product necessary for space transporta-
tion). The technologies that come most readily to mind are related to
weapons development and nuclear energy, with the arms race between
the USA and the USSR each forcing the other to greater production
of conventional and nuclear armaments. An important aspect of the
arms race was an attempt to prevent the other side from acquiring the
mechanical processes and theoretical knowledge that enabled the pro-
duction of ICBMs and spy satellites. The fear of technology transfer is
not new; countries have made various attempts to stop and/or direct
that flow for centuries. The majority of patent, intellectual property and
trademark laws were established over the course of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, and nations have also attempted to ban the sale
and exportation of actual machines and the emigration of skilled work-

ers (see Chang’s Bad Samaritans, 2008, for an excellent discussion of the
connections between protectionism, free trade, technology transfer and
economic development9).
Although all of C.J. Cherryh’s novels wrestle with the effect of tech-
nology on society, nowhere is it more pronounced and thorough than
in the Foreigner series (to date ten volumes, commencing with Foreigner,
1994; Invader, 1995; Inheritor, 1996). Here, technologically superior
humans find themselves far from home in an enclave on a planet with a
sentient humanoid species. The atevi are about half as large again as the
humans with jet black skin and hair and glowing eyes, have an intuitive
grasp of higher-order mathematics, and structure their emotional lives
and kinship patterns according to loyalty above all else. The humans are
allowed one interpreter who must study the major sociological and lin-
guistic intricacies of atevi culture before interacting with them in order
to manage technology transfer without upsetting the balance of power
among the atevi and between atevi and humans. Notably, Cherryh
does not represent the less technologically developed atevi as primitive
natives awaiting the boon of human technology. Neither does she rep-
resent the humans as gods deigning to bestow marvellous but harmless
largesse on the benighted savages.
Rather than show the atevi as either for or against technology
Cherryh portrays atevi divided into various groups that have a sophis-
ticated understanding of the potential disruptions. There are those who
desire to maintain the status quo, while others recognize the inevita-
bility of technological and thus cultural change. There are those who
chafe under the limitations of the carefully scheduled transfer of human
technology, and those who actively pursue their own technology. The
humans themselves are conflicted about the reasons and methods for
technology transfer. The isolationists want nothing further to do with
aliens who might break the treaty that established the enclave, while
the interventionists seek to work with the particular government in
power to pursue policies most favourable to the humans and a third
faction seeks to manipulate the atevi into building a space programme
only sufficient to help the humans get back to their two-hundred-year
old orbiting platforms.
Given the richness and variety of the literature available, any course
or seminar that addresses postcolonial sf or reads/reinterprets sf through
postcolonial theory and contexts offers fertile pedagogic possibilities.
The following notes are provided to indicate the approach I have taken
in my teaching of the subject.
Course design
In structuring a course on postcolonial science fiction, I make use of

material from the following lists of creative and critical works:
Science fiction
Isaac Asimov, Foundation (1951)
Tobias Buckell, Ragamuffin (2007)
Octavia E. Butler, Lilith’s Brood (2000) (collects the Xenogenesis trilogy,
Dawn, 1987; Adulthood Rites, 1988; and Imago, 1989)
Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976)
Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome (1995)
Robert E. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966)
Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber (2000)
H. Beam Piper, The Fuzzy Papers (1979)
Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars (1995)
Archie Weller, Land of the Golden Clouds (1998)
Selected stories from Sheree R. Thomas (ed.), Dark Matter: A Century of
Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (1998) and So Long Been
Dreaming
Additional reading
The following list of postcolonial science fiction writers and works is only
partial. Two extremely useful places to start are the Carl Brandon Society
(http://www.carlbrandon.org/index.html) and Afrofuturism (http://www.
afrofuturism.net). I have purposely kept my list here focused on science
fiction – it would be greatly expanded with the addition of fantasy.
Steven Barnes (with Larry Niven), The Descent of Anansi (1982)

Rimi Chatterjee, Signal Red (2005)
Andrea Hairston, Mindscape (2006)
Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring (1998)
Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl (2002)
Walter Mosley, Futureland (coll. 2001)
George Schuyler, Black Empire
Vandana Singh, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other
Stories (2009)
Critical works
Monographs
Barr, Marleen S., Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 1994).
Crosby, Janice C., Cauldron of Changes: Feminist Spirituality in Fantastic

Fiction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Inc., 2000).
Delaney, Samuel R., The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of
Science Fiction, rev. edn. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
2009).
Haraway, Donna, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (London: Routledge,
1991).
Hayles, Katherine, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago, IL: Chicago University
Press, 1999).
Hume, Kathryn, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western
Literature (London: Methuen, 1985).
Huntington, John, The Logic of Fantasy: H.G. Wells and Science Fiction
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
Jameson, Fredric, Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and
Other Fictions (New York: Verso Books, 2007).
Le Guin, Ursula K., The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and
Science Fiction (New York: Perennial, 1993).
Melzer, Patricia, Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought
(Austin, TX: Texas University Press, 2006).
Myers, Robert E., The Intersection of Science Fiction and Philosophy (Santa
Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 1982).
Rabkin, Eric S., The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1977).
Rieder, John, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008).
Rose, Mark, Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1981).
Sisk, David, Transformations of Language in Modern Dystopias (Santa
Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 1997).
Slusser, George and Eric S. Rabkin, Styles of Creation: Aesthetic Technique
and the Creation of Fictional Worlds (Athens, GA: University of Georgia
Press, 1993).
Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975).
Wagar, Warren W., Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982).
Westfahl, Gary, Cosmic Engineers: A Study of Hard Science Fiction (Westport,
CT: Greenwood, 1996).
Wolfe, Gary, The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science
Fiction (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1979).
Articles
Ahmad, Aijaz, ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National
Allegory”’, Social Text, 17 (1987): 3–25.
Bhabha, Homi, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial
Discourse’, in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994) 85–92.
Chambers, Claire, ‘Postcolonial Science Fiction: Amitav Ghosh’s The
Calcutta Chromosome’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 3:1 (2003):
57–72.
Chrisman, Laura, ‘The Imperial Unconscious? Representations of
Imperial Discourse’, Critical Quarterly, 32:3 (2007): 38–58.
Dery, Mark, ‘Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg
Tate, and Tricia Rose’, in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994) 179–222.
Dillon, Grace L., ‘Miindiwag and Indigenous Diaspora: Eden Robinson’s
and Celu Amberstone’s Forays into “Postcolonial” Science Fiction
and Fantasy’, Extrapolation, 48:2 (2007): 219–43.
Fanon, Frantz, ‘On National Culture’, in The Wretched of the Earth (New
York: Grove Press, 1965) 206–49.
Gilbert, Sandra, ‘Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in
Modern Literature’, Critical Inquiry, 7:2 (1980): 391–417.
Harlow, Barbara, ‘Narratives of Resistance’, in Resistance Literature
(London: Methuen, 1987) 75–116.
hooks, bell, Postmodern Blackness (http:www.africa.upenn.edu/ Articles_
Gen/Postmodern_Blackness_18270.html) (accessed 28 June 2010).
Said, Edward, ‘Crisis’, in Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979) 92–110.
Sharpe, Jenny, ‘Figures of Colonial Resistance’, Modern Fiction Studies,
35:1 (1989): 137–55.
Shklovsky, Victor, ‘Art as Technique’, in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reiss,
eds, Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln, NE: University
of Nebraska Press, 1965) 3–24.
Showalter, Elaine, ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’, Critical Enquiry,
8:2 (1981): 179–205.
Sterling, Bruce, ‘Preface’, in Mirror Shades (London: Paladin, 1986) vii–xiv.
Students are provided with two introductory handouts: the first offering
several definitions of science fiction; the second a list of imperial tropes
from Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire (1993).
Handout one: definitions of science fiction

• ‘We do not expect romances to provide subtle psychological por-
traits of fully rendered images of the world as we know it. Rather, we
expect to hear of marvels and adventures in strange places populated

by such preternatural creatures as giants and dragons. …Call your
magic a “space warp” or a “matter transformer,” your enchanted
island the planet Einstein … call your giants and dragons “extrater-
restrials,” and what you have is merely the contemporary form of
one of the most ancient literary kinds.’10
• ‘From the beginning, characters in science fiction have tended to be
types rather than personalities – the scientist, the ordinary man, the
religious fanatic…’11
• ‘Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his sta-
tus in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused
state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the
Gothic or post-Gothic mode.’12
• ‘Science fiction is a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient con-
ditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cogni-
tion, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework
alternative to the author’s empirical environment.’13
• ‘Science fiction is romance fitted out with the trappings of techno-
logical futurism.’ (Anonymous)
• ‘Science fiction frequently tries to imagine what life would be like on
a plane as far above us as we are above savagery; its setting is often of
a kind that appears to us as technologically miraculous.’14
Handout two: imperial tropes from David Spurr’s The Rhetoric of

Empire
1 Aestheticization – objectification and containment leading to con-
sumption
2 Surveillance – discovery and control
3 Classification – for example, Joseph-Arthur, Comte de Gobineau’s
hierarchy of races: White, Yellow, Black. Phillipe Rushton is a con-
temporary manifestation.15
4 Debasement – abjection and contamination
5 Negation – darkness, void, denial of history, for example, in Stargate
(Roland Emmerich, 1994) the abducted Egyptians have a static soci-
ety until the Americans arrive.
6 Eroticization – seduction, fear and loathing, for example,in Stargate Jaye
Davidson as the homosexual and despotic, vampiric alien, Ra, dresses
in metal and gossamer, surrounds himself with pretty semi-naked boys
and muscle-bound guards: the sexually degenerate Oriental.
7 Appropriation – land – colonizer is rightful inheritor because he is
civilization. Lord Lugard’s Dual Mandate (1922): ‘The tropics are the
heritage of mankind and neither, on the one hand has a suzerain

power the right to their exclusive exploitation, nor, on the other
hand, have the races which inhabit them a right to deny their
bounties to those that need them. The merchant, the miner and
the manufacturer do not enter the tropics on sufferance or employ
their technical skills, their energy and their capital as interlopers or
“greedy capitalists,” but in the fulfillment of the mandate of civili-
zation.’16
Appropriation – development – eighteenth-century international
law – if land doesn’t appear settled it can be taken over.
8 Affirmation – justification of moral and legal superiority
9 Idealization – ‘Noble Savage’
10 Naturalization – closer to Nature, the assumption that the current
state of affairs is the natural state of things.
11 Insubstantialization – the dreamlike alien land as backdrop to the
play of the self.
After an introductory period of two to four weeks depending on the

level of the class and their familiarity with science fiction, I pair up
a creative work with a critical work each week of the semester. I have
usually begun by screening The Matrix (Wachowski brothers, 1999)
and Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). However, now District 9 (Neill
Blomkamp, 2009) and Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) are available I will
begin with them in order to make apparent some of the issues around
race, ethnicity, colonization, migration and so on considered on the
course. The students create alter-avatars of themselves (that is, avatars
that are visibly different from their ‘normal’ gendered, racial, ethnic
selves) and then spend time each week of the course interacting with
others in a virtual space such as Second Life to ascertain and reflect on
reactions to their alternate selves. As a bridge between the films and
the literature I show The Last Angel of History (John Akomfrah, 1995), a
video that examines science fiction and pan-African culture.
Undergraduate assessment
The modes of assessment for the course depend on the level of delivery
and vary in order to mobilize different learning styles. They include:
• a portfolio of weekly meditations on the students’ experiences in

Second Life as alter-avatars;
• a ten-minute presentation on the creative work scheduled for a par-
ticular seminar session;
• a 1000-word (or four-page paper) that reads at least one of the crea-
tive texts through one of the critical texts explored on the course;
• a 3000-word (or twelve-page paper) analysing either a creative work
not covered in class or a different creative work from a writer dis-
cussed on the course. The topic must be negotiated with the tutor/
instructor.
Graduate assessment
Two presentations:
• select a novel from the Additional Reading list and present your
understanding of one aspect of the imagined world.
• locate the novel in a critical discussion centring on one of the critical
works from the list provided.
Each presentation should be approximately 20 minutes, in order to

leave sufficient time for questions and feedback.
• Final Paper – the final paper may be a development of one of

your presentations or it may be a new topic but either way it must
encompass more than one creative work. You may also decide to
write a science fiction story as your final paper; however, it must be
accompanied by a shorter critical paper in which you demonstrate
your awareness of the major issues of the course as they pertain to
your story.
Since I started by quoting myself from So Long Been Dreaming I’ll come
full circle and end by doing the same. In postcolonial science fiction,
whether by postcolonial writers or dissident writers, the
binaries of native/alien, technologist/pastoralist, colonizer/colonized

are all brought into question by … thematic and linguistic strategies
that subtly subvert received language and plots. One of the key strat-
egies employed by these writers is to radically shift the perspective of
the narrator from the supposed rightful heir of contemporary tech-
nologically advanced cultures to those whose cultures have had their
technology destroyed and stunted. … [Postcolonial science fiction]
is both a questioning of colonial/imperialist practices and concep-
tions of the native or the colonized, and an attempt to represent the
complexities of identity that terms such as ‘native’ and ‘colonized’
tend to simplify.17
In the context of teaching science fiction, such literature is essential in

challenging students’ assumptions and preconceptions regarding his-
tory, culture, identity and ideology.
Notes
1. See Uppinder Mehan, ‘Final Thoughts’, in Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder
Mehan, eds, So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy
(Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004) 269–70.
2. Uppinder Mehan, ‘The Domestication of Technology in Indian Science
Fiction Short Stories’, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction,
74 (1998): 54–66.
3. Baldev Raj Nayar, India’s Quest for Technological Independence: Policy Foundation
and Policy Change, 2 vols (New Delhi: Lansers Publishers, 1983) 1.
4. Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregory Benton
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).
5. Dalaipi cited in Nigel Parbury, ‘Terra Nullius: Invasion and Colonization’, in
Rhonda Craven, ed., Teaching Aboriginal Studies (Australia: Allen and Unwin,
2000) 101–28 at 104.
6. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel
Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).
7. See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes
Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London and New York:
Routledge, 1989).
8. Mike Resnick, Paradise: A Chronicle of a Distant World (New York: Tor Books,
1989) ix.
9. See Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret
History of Capitalism (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2007).
10. Mark Rose, Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1981) 8.
11. Ibid., 8.
12. Brian Aldiss with David Wingrove. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science
Fiction (New York: Atheneum, 1986) 25.
13. Darko Suvin, The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History
of a Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) 8–9.
14. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; Princeton: Princeton
15. See Comte Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines
(Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, 1853–1855), trans. Adrian
Collins (1915; New York: Fertig, 1999) and J. Phillipe Ruston, Race, Evolution
and Behaviour: A Life History Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction,
1995).
16. Frederick Lugard cited in Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 28.
17. Mehan, So Long Been Dreaming, 269–70.
11
Teaching Latin American Science
Fiction and Fantasy in English:
A Case Study
M. Elizabeth Ginway
I am currently teaching a course, in English, entitled ‘Latin America

Science Fiction and Fantasy’. Although I have taught courses on
Brazilian science fiction in Portuguese, this is the first time that I have
taught texts from Spanish America and Brazil in English translation.
Based on my experience so far, I hope to provide some suggestions in
this chapter to help others put together a similar course. I begin with
a list of possible films, and then discuss the general themes of the
stories included in Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from
Latin America and Spain (2003), edited by Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda
Molina-Gavilán. Since these stories alone cannot fill an entire semes-
ter, I suggest other novels and stories available in translation, as well as
the possibility of including novels written by Anglo-Americans about
Brazil.
Incorporating a section or module on texts from Latin America into
sf courses provides an opportunity to examine underlying assump-
tions about First World political and technological hegemony. In
the countries of Latin America where First World and Third World
realities coexist, the role of technology cannot be taken for granted.
It may be imposed or misused by the authorities, or be unavailable
to the majority of the population. Often, Latin American sf stories
about space exploration re-interpret the conquest of the New World
or examine political relations between the First and Third Worlds.
I have found that the recasting of common sf icons, such as aliens,
mutants, the Cold War, time travel, and even cyberspace, gives new
resonances to these tropes in light of Latin America’s distinct socio-
political reality.
179
Science fiction and fantasy films from Latin America
The Brazilian comedy Basic Sanitation: The Movie (Saneamento Básico,

O Filme, 2007), directed by Jorge Furtado, makes a clear reference to sci-
ence fiction, although it is not an sf film per se. In fact, the film is about
the making of an sf film and, as such, is a commentary on how the
special-effects blockbusters that we associate with sf are out of reach for
Third World filmmakers. As Basic Sanitation shows, however, directors
like Furtado are able to use the genre to comment on First World/Third
World economic, artistic and political realities.
Although some of my students thought Basic Sanitation had little to
do with sf, I convinced them to be patient and to focus on the sf film
within the film and its relevance to Latin American reality. Big budget
special effects are out of the question for Third World countries, where
the film industry is often concerned with portraying national reality
instead of providing Hollywood escapism. Thus, to understand Latin-
American science fiction, it is often necessary to consider the genre from
a slightly different perspective, seeing its presence in seemingly unlikely
places. In the frame story of Basic Sanitation, town leaders find out that
although they need money to fix the sewer the only government funds
available are for making a creative or fiction-based film. They arrive at
the idea of making a low-budget sf film, with the intention of using the
rest of the grant to fix the town’s drainage problem. Unfortunately, their
production – based loosely on Jack Arnold’s 1954 The Creature from the
Black Lagoon – is so deficient that they opt to hire a professional edi-
tor/director to ‘fix’ it. Ultimately the movie is a success, but they still
have the sewer problem. Here we see the contradictions surrounding
the Brazilian film industry, which uses government and private sector
funds that are needed for basic necessities such as sanitation in order
to promote filmmaking instead. The government itself engages in
‘escapism’ since, while priding itself on elevating national culture via
cinematic prestige, it neglects problems of basic infrastructure. This is
again mirrored in the behaviour of the characters themselves, who lose
touch with reality by becoming so involved in movie-making that they
forget about the money for the sewer. In the end, the sewer monster
‘lurks’ in the background, in the form of the unresolved sanitation
problem, showing us how an ‘escapist’ genre can reflect the ongoing
environmental and political concerns of the townsfolk.
Another film that could be used at the onset of the course is an
Argentine short, ‘Trip to Mars’ (‘Viaje al Marte’, 2004), directed by Juan
Pablo Zaramella.1 In this claymation film, an Argentine boy dreams of
Teaching Latin American Science Fiction and Fantasy 181
space travel to Mars, only to be magically transported there in an old

tow truck by his grandfather. In the final scene, when American astro-
nauts land to find him already on Mars, they call Earth to say, ‘Houston,
we have a problem.’ These comedies, which challenge our usual expec-
tations about the language and culture of space travel and sf, may
not seem like ‘real’ science fiction to American students and teachers,
because they do not meet our conventional First World expectations. A
course like this helps us rethink and recast our own conceptions about
sf and its presence in cultures other than our own.
I included several additional films touching on themes such as the
Cold War, dictatorship and issues of cultural and technological hegem-
ony. The films are from Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, countries that
produced, additionally, the highest number of science fiction texts.2
Fortunately all of these have English subtitles.3 The film The Sputnik
Man (O Homem do Sputnik, 1959), directed by Carlos Manga, is a type
of Brazilian comedy called a ‘chanchada’ that pits stereotyped agents
from the US, the USSR and France against common-sense Brazilian
locals, thereby shifting the discourse of the Cold War away from hege-
monic powers and toward the Third World. Alberto Pieralisi’s The Fifth
Power (O Quinto Poder, 1962) is a Brazilian film about foreigners inciting
unrest via subliminal messages in order to justify a right-wing takeover
aimed at allowing foreign exploitation of Brazil’s natural resources. Its
suspenseful chase scenes, filmed in Rio de Janeiro are quite spectacular,
despite the film’s generally uneven timing and editing. Macunaíma
(1969), directed by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, long considered a
Cinema Novo classic, has been re-issued recently, and could be con-
sidered a fantasy film. In Macunaíma, the eponymous hero, based on a
trickster of indigenous lore, changes from black to white and encoun-
ters giants and other figures from Brazilian folklore and popular culture,
thus showing how fantasy hides a critique of the fast-paced policies of
development adopted by the military dictatorship. Eventually we see
the hero devoured by the country’s ‘self-cannibalism’, as he is caught
in the struggle between leftist guerrillas, right-wing capitalists and the
temptations of consumerism.4
In Argentina, science fiction films also explore the theme of military
dictatorship during the period 1976–83, albeit in a more subdued way.
Eliseo Subiela’s films, The Man Facing Southeast (Hombre mirando al
sudeste, 1986) and Don’t Die Without Telling Me Where You Are Going (No
te mueras sin decirme adónde vas, 1995), use science fiction and fantasy to
question issues of power and collective imagination. The first film deals
with an alien who suddenly appears in a mental hospital. Endowed
with unusual powers, he represents a source of hope to the hospital

patients and a threat to the establishment, both political and medical.
Laden with imagery that recalls religious art and the Holocaust, the film
poses many moral and political dilemmas in a country where thousands
disappeared during the ‘Dirty War’ under the 1976–83 military dicta-
torship.5 Don’t Die Without Telling Me Where You Are Going involves a
man who invents a machine to read dreams, and his wheelchair-bound
friend, who invents a service robot that sings the songs of the legendary
tango singer Carlos Gardel. Subiela entwines stories of invention and
reincarnation, using technology for pursuits that are spiritual, personal
or political rather than practical. For example, the robot Carlitos fails
miserably as a service robot, dropping all the dishes on his first trial
run, but succeeds as a singer and philosophical conversationalist. The
dream machine allows the protagonist to converse with a friend, long
dead, who disappeared during the military’s Dirty War. The film thus
combines the fantasy and icons of science fiction to fit Argentine real-
ity. Another Argentine sf film is Gustavo Mosquera’s Moebius (1996),
about a mathematician/engineer hired to track a mysterious subway
train that appears periodically as if caught in a dimensional trap like a
Moebius strip. With its slow build up of suspense and its convincing if
low-tech special effects capturing the sensation of the runaway subway
car, the film recalls themes of the disappeared and of Jorge Luís Borges’s
preoccupation with the infinite.
Finally, low-budget Mexican films such as The Aztec Mummy vs. the
Human Robot (La momia azteca contra el robot humano, 1957) directed by
Rafael Portillo, and Santo and Blue Demon vs. Doctor Frankenstein (Santo
y Blue Demon contra el doctor Frankenstein, 1974), directed by Miguel
M. Delgado, can be used to discuss the struggle between the icons
of Mexican culture (the Aztec mummy) or Mexican folk heroes (the
masked wrestlers or ‘luchadores’)6 and villains such as mad scientists
Dr Krupp and Dr Frankenstein, who represent foreign technology and
interests. In the historical context of post-revolutionary Mexico in the
twentieth century, the country’s cultural identity has centred on its
indigenous heritage and the greatness of Aztec and Mayan cultures. The
prevalent themes in these popular films are tradition vs. technology, or
‘old’ Mexico vs. ‘new’ Mexico. The theme of loss is reinforced by the sci-
entists, who sell out national patrimony to imperialist or outside inter-
ests either by stealing the mummy’s amulet and belt or by kidnapping
women from the countryside. When the treasure and the women are
rescued by the legitimate Mexican heroes, the educated archaeologist
in the case of the Aztec mummy films and the wrestlers Santo and Blue
Demon in the other, we experience a cultural victory by Mexico. This is

reinforced in Santo and Blue Demon vs. Doctor Frankenstein, when the sci-
entist is foiled by the wrestlers, since Golem, Frankenstein’s strong but
slow-witted henchman, fails to kidnap one of the wrestlers for Golem’s
future brain transplant. The role of Golem is replayed by Ron Perlman’s
character in Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos (1993), a film in which an ail-
ing Mexican man seeks to prolong his life via the ‘chronos’ machine,
enlisting the aid of his American nephew, Angel de la Guardia, played
by Perlman. Sent to find the machine, which has fallen into the hands
of an Argentine antique dealer exiled and living in Mexico, Perlman
represents the violent, thieving, ignorant American. The fact that the
antique dealer, Jesús Gris (Frederico Luppi), whose name recalls that of
Jesus Christ, is now living in Mexico with his wife, a tango instructor,
and their grandchild, suggests that the girl’s parents were likely victims
of Argentina’s Dirty War. In Cronos, it is a machine that causes vampir-
ism and provides eternal life, but at the price of a craving for blood,
a circumstance that recalls both Latin America’s bloody past and its
ambivalence towards technology. The film provides the vampire myth
with family ties through a Third World version of the typical vampire
plot, and like the Santo and Aztec mummy movies, it again pits Latin-
American culture against that of United States, since the hero, Jesús
Gris, chooses tradition, family and sacrifice over progress, individualism
and technology.7
While these films are not typically sf, most contain recognizable ele-
ments of the genre, such as Cold War scenarios, space ships, alien crea-
tures, sinister technologies, robots, mad scientists and fantastic figures
with super powers, all of which are familiar to students with a passing
knowledge of the genre. In my experience, the screenings generated
lively discussion, since most students feel confident about expressing
their own feelings and interpretations.
Since many of the students in the class are majoring in Latin
American Studies, Anthropology, Spanish or Portuguese, they are gener-
ally familiar with the region or the study of foreign cultures. I did have
to offer some critical concepts to help them with the broad outlines of
science fiction and fantasy, especially the idea of the social contract and
the dialectic structure of utopias (for which I looked to Northrop Frye
and Darko Suvin).8 I also employed David Hartwell’s ‘sense of wonder’,9
Suvin’s concepts of the novum and cognitive estrangement, as out-
lined in his Metamorphosis of Science Fiction (1979), and Gary K. Wolfe’s
exploration of the iconography of Golden Age sf from his The Known
and the Unknown (1979). Many of these concepts are outlined in my
own book Brazilian Science Fiction (2004), which may serve as a quick
study guide. I gleaned material from Larry McCaffrey’s introduction
to Storming the Reality Studio (1991) for discussions of cyberpunk in
general, and included summaries of Latin American theories of post-
modernism, such as Beatriz Sarlo’s Scenes from a Postmodern Life (1994)
and Martin Hopenhayn’s 1995 essay ‘Postmodernism and Neoliberalism
in Latin America’.10 I also relied on introductions to alternate worlds
(or alternate histories) and feminism in sf in Clute and Nicholl’s The
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993).
In order to supplement and add variety to the readings, I included
texts of the Latin American fantastic or ‘magical realism’ subgenre, since
these are more commonly associated with Latin America. I believe it is
important to characterize the Latin American subgenre as a variant of
the fantastic, akin to what Farah Mendlesohn characterizes as ‘liminal’,
or absurdist fantasy, in that their characters experience little or no
surprise even when faced with strange situations.11 I use Mendlesohn’s
taxonomy to distinguish Latin American fantasy from other more
conventional types, such as The Lord of the Rings. In addition, the
Todorovian concept of a reader’s ‘hesitation’ between natural and
supernatural explanations of a story’s events is an essential concept for
understanding the workings of a fantastic text. I cite these theoretical
and critical sources on handouts, but find that lectures or outlines are
most efficient in conveying this material, which students can explore
further in assignments and exams. My general approach, however, has
always been to compare texts from the Anglo-American science fiction
and fantasy tradition to their Latin America counterparts. In this way,
instructors, tutors and students can draw on their own knowledge to
explore the genres productively from a new perspective.
Themes in Cosmos Latinos
The same problems that make film selection difficult are evident in the
search for suitable texts, since many works, especially those from Brazil,
are unavailable in translation. The foundational text for the course is
the aforementioned Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from
Latin America and Spain. It is an excellent anthology, with a solid intro-
duction and short introductory notes on the authors, and it offers an
overview of different periods and themes. It provides a useful starting
point for teaching Latin American sf, since it is clearly annotated and
concisely written, although instructors may wish to supplement their
students’ knowledge of the political history of speciﬁc countries.
The stories discussed below are all from Cosmos Latinos, which begins
with early selections from the utopia and sf genres, in which authors
view science as a means of overcoming the remnants of colonialism.
These early stories also show that technology has not always been
viewed in Latin America as a threat to the region, especially in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the mid-twentieth cen-
tury, we begin to see an appropriation of Golden Age sf’s iconography,
but not always its narrative trajectory. Many stories include astronauts,
aliens and spaceships, but their conventional heroes are often defeated
by the very aliens they set out to conquer. Clearly, such inversions
can be seen as fantasies of reverse colonization. They are most clearly
evidenced in stories coming from communist or socialist regimes, such
as Cuban Ángel Arango’s ‘The Cosmonaut’ (1966), or Chilean Hugo
Correa’s ‘When Pilate Said No’ (1971), in which outside threats to
national sovereignty are strongest.
Latin American Cold War or post-Holocaust texts often convey the
sense of individual and national powerlessness felt during the period.
This can be observed in the figure of an astronaut lost in orbit in
Salvadoran Álvaro Desleal’s ‘Cord of Nylon and Gold’ (1965). It is also
prominent in Brazilian Jerônimo Monteiro’s ‘The Crystal Goblet’ (1964),
where the disenchanted protagonist experiences both anti-communist
imprisonment and visions of nuclear destruction. The theme of pow-
erlessness is at its most acute in the lives of painfully under-educated
protagonists who are trying to survive in a post-nuclear holocaust world
in Argentine Alberto Vanasco’s ‘Post-Boom Boom’ (1967).
Fears of mechanization, modernization and military governments are
evident in stories in which technology fails to help protagonists escape
from demeaning forms of existence. In Argentine Pablo Capanna’s
‘Anacronia’ (1966), life in a utopian society becomes so routine as to fall
into spiritual entropy, and humans appear more mechanized than the
robots that serve them. Allusions to T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Hollow Men’,
pepper the text, capturing the sense of existential angst. Venezuelan
Luís Britto García’s three-page story ‘The Future’ (1970), structured as
a series of theses, antitheses and syntheses, parodies a dialectical argu-
ment of progress: as technology advances to replace all organs of the
body, these cease to function, until even the human brain becomes
obsolete. In Argentine Eduardo Goligorsky’s ‘The Last Refuge’ (1967),
the protagonist finds himself living in a future where censorship and
isolation from the rest of the world afford him few pleasures. When his
son unwittingly shows his album of forbidden space travel photographs
to his classmates, the man is immediately pursued by the authorities
who have closed off their society from alien contact, technological
progress and space travel. After running day and night, the man hopes
to escape with the aliens, yet fails to gain entry to a departing alien ship.
The first two stories portray disillusionment with the promises of tech-
nology for improving the human condition – both the mind and the
body deteriorate in the presence of technology – while the third uses
sf iconography as an allegory of escape from a repressive regime. Both
prophetic and tragic, Goligorsky comments in the story’s brief introduc-
tion that he wrote it to protest the violent, nationalistic, internecine
fighting and military dictatorship that plagued Argentina from the late
1960s to the early 1980s.
The excesses of nationalist rhetoric are critiqued in time-travel nar-
ratives, while other stories, written under dictatorships, combine social
criticism and the sexual revolution, although in Latin American terms.
In the time-travel narratives of Argentine Magdalena Mouján Otaño,
‘Gu Ta Guttarak’ (1967), and Spaniards Ricard de la Casa and Pedro
Jorge Romero, ‘The Day It Changed’ (1996), the travellers are not soli-
tary heroes as in the Anglo-American tradition, but rather partners or
families. Their experience is used to question nationalistic discourse and
promote democratic values in Argentina and Spain.
Alternate sexualities and alien presence are examined in Argentine
Angélica Gorodischer’s ‘The Violet Embryos’ (1973), a brilliantly dis-
turbing anti-sexist and anti-military text, in Brazilian André Carneiro’s
‘Brain Transplant’ (1978), an exploration of polymorphous sexuality,
and in Cuban Daína Chaviano’s ‘The Annunciation’ (1983), a re-writ-
ing of the biblical scene between Mary and Gabriel, transformed by
sexuality, aliens and eugenics. Chaviano’s story is perilously close to
heresy in its challenge to both communist and Catholic dogma. Gabriel
criticizes Mary for her people’s codifying moral teachings to establish a
religion while also seducing her in a scene that mocks the Immaculate
Conception. In these stories, sexuality subverts the hypocrisy and cen-
sorship of authoritarian regimes in Argentina, Brazil and Cuba.
Cyberpunk themes appear in stories from Mexico, such as Guillermo
Lavín’s ‘Reaching the Shore’ (1994), and Pepe Rojo’s ‘Gray Noise’
(1996), and also from Brazil, in Braulio Tavares ‘Stuntmind’ (1989). As
I have suggested,12 with the advent of neo-liberalism in the late 1980s,
technology and the global market ‘invade’ the Latin American region,
leaving the population vulnerable to forces beyond their borders. Thus,
these cyberpunk stories often represent the physical body as portray-
ing a sense of crisis in the body politic, a sense of powerlessness in the
face of new technologies, or of violation stemming from torture and
disappearances during the periods of political dictatorship. The pro-

tagonists of these stories, unlike those of Anglo-American cyberpunk,
have implants that they consider more as a violation of their identity
than as an enhancement, showing technology’s invasive threat to the
body and, perhaps, the body politic. In Tavares’s story, ‘stuntminds’
are humans capable of absorbing knowledge from aliens. In exchange,
the aliens (known as ‘Intrusos’ or Intruders) gain access to human
sensations, but the stuntminds’ lifespans are greatly shortened. Even
though very few humans benefit from the aliens’ esoteric technologi-
cal knowledge, the desire for prestige and hunger for novelty makes
the stuntminds’ sacrifice worthwhile to the governments of Earth. This
represents the rapid influx of technoculture to the region, and the crisis
of future shock, a sense of powerlessness and informational overload.
Another story of violation is ‘Exerion’ (2000), by Chilean Pablo Castro,
in which the protagonist’s hacking skills allow him to recover the files
regarding his father’s disappearance. At the same time, however, a new
interface in the computer allows the government to send viruses to
mutilate his mind and body, eroding his memories of his father’s disap-
pearance and his own pain, until he finally dissolves into cyberspace.
As he becomes an avatar of Exerion, the game he once played, his given
name, Víctor Morales, or moral victory, suggests that the sacrifice has
deeper significance.
Supplementing Cosmos Latinos
Despite the high quality and diversity of the stories it contains and
the brief essays that introduce them, Cosmos Latinos does not provide
enough material for an entire semester, though it would provide more
than sufficient fiction for a focused seminar or two. Equally, in my
biased view as a Brazilianist, it has far too little material from Brazil,
a country that constitutes half of South America in population and
territory. What I propose here is supplementing Cosmos Latinos with
several Brazilian absurdist fantasy stories available in English. Among
the first would be ‘The Siamese Academies’ (1884) by Machado de Assis,
in which the two main characters, a king and his concubine, magically
exchange ‘souls’ (that is, genders), then return to their original state
after six months. As an early story about transgendered characters, it
raises questions about gender roles, and how society maintains order,
since the doctrine regarding transgendered souls is violently repressed.
Machado often points out the hypocrisy of the Brazilian nineteenth-
century elite, and as a self-educated mulatto who rose to the literary
pinnacle of his day – founding the Brazilian Academy of Letters shortly

before his death in 1908 – he criticizes the repression of Otherness and
difference while appearing to endorse it. I read the story as a literary
example of Jacques Derrida’s ‘Law of Genre’13 in that just as ‘genres
are not to be mixed’, the same could be said of genders. Machado de
Assis uses the story to reveal the madness underlying the sense of order
that governs gender relations, a madness repeated in his own society’s
defence of slavery.
Similarly, the fantastic stories of Murilo Rubião, which originally
appeared in the 1940s and were later anthologized in The Ex-Magician
and Other Stories (1979), are politically and culturally illuminating. The
unending building of ‘The Edifice’ recalls stories by Jorge Luís Borges,
because it uses the concept of the infinite, yet does not remain abstract
or theoretical in the style of Borges’s masterful ‘Library of Babel’ (1941),
which shares a similar theme. Rubião’s main character, the engineer João
Gaspar, is at first enthusiastic but then horrified at the prospect of build-
ing an edifice with an infinite number of floors. By the end of the story,
like an artist or a prophet, he begins to question the undertaking, as the
physical weight of the project weighs on him psychologically, while the
workers cheer him on as their hero. Similar ecological, economic and
ideological questions arise regarding the wisdom of engineering projects
undertaken by the Brazilian military government (1964–85), such as the
failed transamazonian highway, the damming of rivers for the construc-
tion of the Itaipu hydroelectric power plant, and the construction of the
lengthy bridge linking the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Niterói. The ideol-
ogy of economic ‘development’ is also captured in Rubião’s ‘Barbara’, a
story that can be read as an absurdist allegory of colonization and late
development. When her husband meets her desires for water from the
ocean and a baobab tree, her desires, along with her body, grow ever
larger. She ignores her own child while demanding an ocean liner, even
though the couple live far from a port. Paralleling Brazil’s destructive
colonial past and irrational need to industrialize at all costs, Barbara
ignores the needs of her stunted child while admiring the ship her hus-
band brings in by rail.
Rubião’s rural counterpart, José J. Veiga has published two stories along
similar lines, ‘The Misplaced Machine’ and the ‘Importunate Rooster’,
both appearing in The Misplaced Machine and Other Stories (1970). In
the story ‘The Misplaced Machine’, a machine is assembled overnight
in a small-town square, and while its use is unknown, it immediately
becomes the centre of the town’s cultural and political events, attracting
the envy of other towns in the region. The innocence and enthusiasm
of the narrator and the region’s population are misdirected at the sin-
ister machine, whose only action is to catch a drunkard’s leg in one of
its gears. Veiga’s ‘Importunate Rooster’ recounts the building of a new,
modern highway. When finally opened, the highway seems ideal, until
a strange rooster begins to attack cars and passengers. While accounts
of the attacks vary, the military is eventually sent in, but after a tank
is reduced to molten metal by the beast, the highway is closed and
abandoned. As allegories of modernization, both stories capture a naive
admiration for technology, while linking it to the questionable develop-
ment policies of the military regime.
Sf writer André Carneiro has three stories available in English trans-
lation: ‘Darkness’ (1963), about an unexplained phenomenon that
impedes the functioning of the sun or any other light source on Earth,
‘A Perfect Marriage’ (1966), about the failure of a computer-based con-
jugal match, and ‘Life as an Ant’ (1986), a story about a man who earns
success after an alien takes over his body. As I suggest in my analysis
of these stories,14 each offers a particularly Brazilian perspective on its
topic. In ‘Darkness’ the protagonist experiences a type of temporary
blindness, much like that of St Paul, as suggested by the story’s setting
in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. After reaching out to a neighbouring
family and allowing a community of the blind to lead them to a safe
haven, the protagonist experiences an unexpected renewed faith in
urban life. In the utopian society of ‘A Perfect Marriage’ a newly mar-
ried couple, although maliciously mismatched by computer hackers,
choose not to have their union annulled, preferring to live in a type of
domestic anarchy that undermines the government’s official ideology.
Similarly, the female protagonist of ‘Life as an Ant’ begs the alien visi-
tor who inhabits her boyfriend’s body to stay, since she has come to
enjoy the multifaceted nature of their relationship. None of the char-
acters choose a clear-cut or obvious solution (urban flight, annulment
or a break-up), selecting instead what anthropologist Roberto DaMatta
characterizes as the ‘in-between space’ of the Brazilian social imaginary,
consciously avoiding either-or choices.15
Additional textual possibilities beyond Brazil could include stories
from Argentine Jorge Luís Borges’s Ficciones (1944), such as ‘Tlön,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’. In this playful, ironically pretentious story in the
guise of an essay, the narrator immerses the reader in the workings of
an imaginary utopian world, only to jolt us when its objects suddenly
appear in the narrator’s world (and our own). Anthologies including
Roberto González Echeverría’s The Oxford Book of Latin American Short
Stories (1997) and Cass Canfield Jr’s Masterworks of Latin American Short
Fiction (1996) also provide canonical tales of the fantastic and magical
realism from Spanish America and Brazil. In addition to the uncanny
tale of pseudo-science by Argentine Juana Manuela Gorriti, ‘He Who
Listens May Hear’ (1876), The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories
contains more contemporary stories of the fantastic, including ‘The
Third Bank of the River’ (1962) by Brazilian João Guimarães Rosa, ‘The
Garden of the Forking Paths’ (1944) by Borges, ‘Night Face Up’ (1966)
by Julio Cortázar, and ‘Walk’ (1965) by Chilean José Donoso. Another
Guimarães Rosa story, ‘My Uncle, the Jaguar’ (1962) also appears in
translation in Masterworks of Latin American Short Fiction. Other notable
Argentine novels include Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel
(1940), concerning a man trapped on an island with human holograms,
and Manuel Puig’s Pubis Angelical (1981), the third part of which refers
to a grim, dystopian future. These are canonical texts and criticism on
them is more readily available in English.
There are also several novels that could be used to supplement course
readings. I recommend Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of Argentine
author Angela Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial (1983), a fantasy novel
about the rise and fall of an imaginary empire, Bolivian writer Edmundo
Paz Soldán’s slipstream novel Turing’s Delirium (2003), or Latino author
Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). These nov-
els represent different subgenres and distinct time periods. The first,
Kalpa Imperial, is an idiosyncratic fantasy, filled with castles, empires,
royalty and servants, which uses Gothic imagery while following a laby-
rinthine, repetitive logic that, in my mind, captures the suppression of
trauma and the cycles of Argentina’s experience with authoritarianism
and political violence. The novel opens cautiously, in a time of repres-
sion and censorship, with a storyteller who begins a tale calculated to
restore collective memory. The second novel, by Paz-Soldán, takes place
in the imaginary city of Rio Fugitivo, Bolivia. The novel explores the
internet as a place to construct an alternate reality, a type of momentary
refuge to escape persecution and political trauma. Eventually, however,
this sanctuary slips into the politicized world of anti-globalization hack-
ers and government agents bent on hunting them down and killing
them. The portrayal of the young, lower-class hacker Kadinsky, and the
older characters, with their recurrent memories of past political crimes,
offers a distinct view of the internet in a country that has been plagued
by dictatorship and political trauma.16 A third alternative, Junot Díaz’s
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), is a work written in English
about Oscar, whose family members flee the Dominican Republic
after trauma suffered under the brutal Trujillo dictatorship (1930–61).
Although neither sf nor fantasy per se, the text likens the plight of
Oscar, a gifted student and social misfit in his tough neighbourhood
of Paterson, New Jersey, to that of a mutant or alien attempting to fit
into human society: ‘You really want to know what being an X-Man
feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of colour in a contemporary U.S.
ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles grow-
ing out of your chest.’17 Although peppered with footnotes, references
to comics, and sf and fantasy genres, the narrator also refers to spirits
that are more typical of ‘Macondo’ (the setting of García Márquez’s One
Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967, the quintessential novel of magical real-
ism), than ‘McOndo’, the gritty text of the novel itself.18 ‘McOndo’ is a
reference to a literary movement pioneered by Chilean Alberto Fuguet,
who believes that Latin America’s latest generation of authors needs to
incorporate the violent urban underworld into their fiction, shunning
the facile exoticism of magical realism.19 In short, all three of these nov-
els use fantasy, sf and variants of cyberpunk effectively to criticize their
country’s past, where political crimes continue to haunt the present,
even in conventionally escapist scenarios of the fantasy realm and the
internet.
Translated SF novels by Brazilian authors
In the case of Brazil, choices are more limited. Three Brazilian novels that
have been translated into English are Herberto Sales’s The Fruit of Thy
Womb (1976), Ignacio de Loyola Brandão’s And Still the Earth (1981) and
Marcio Souza’s The Order of the Day (1983). The Fruit of Thy Womb con-
cerns a society where a technocratic government enforces a strict, zero-
growth birth-control programme in order to save the population from
starvation. The second, And Still the Earth, describes an eco-dystopia in
which an everyman protagonist is faced with stifling heat, mutants and
military officers as he travels through a nightmarish São Paulo toward a
desert-like Amazon. The third novel, The Order of the Day, is about two
aliens who control rival military officers in a type of good (democracy)
vs. evil (dictatorship) scenario, as Brazil undergoes the transition to
democracy. The reservation I have concerning these works is that they
are written by mainstream authors who venture into the genre only to
criticize the policies of Brazil’s military government (1964–85), using
the ‘low-brow’ genre of sf to make their point. As is evident in the brief
plot summaries, the iconography and themes employed are somewhat
hackneyed and unoriginal, with authors using sf tropes more to deni-
grate government than to use the genre to explore new ideas. I used
The Fruit of Thy Womb with some success, however, since it can be com-
pared to similar dystopias, including Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s
Tale (1985) and P.D. James’s The Children of Men (1992). Still, in the
Brazilian novel, the constant oppression and silencing of women, who
are allegorically supposed to represent the Brazilian people, is disturb-
ing, and its messianic ending by a male saviour, clichéd.
Works of fantasy and science fiction about Brazil
In seeking alternative readings for the course, I decided to compare sf

works written by Latin-American authors with similar works by Anglo-
American writers who employ Latin America as their setting. I found
several candidates for this comparison. What follows is a guide and a
caveat to those who wish to explore this topic. Paralleling the works
by Gorodischer, Paz-Soldán and Díaz outlined above are the fantasy
novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990) by Karen Tei Yamashita,
and the hyperkinetic, high-tech, time-warp novel, Brasyl (2007) by Ian
McDonald. I will also briefly discuss S.N. Lewitt’s Songs of Chaos (1993),
a work I find so stereotypical that it could be used to illustrate the pit-
falls of ‘tropicalization’ or exoticism, outlined below. I conclude with
a brief analysis of Samuel Delany’s ‘Driftglass’ (1967), an earlier story
whose cultural authenticity and postcolonial critique are lacking in
some of the other texts.20
Accordingly, the concept of ‘tropicalization’ is useful in studying
the literary representation of Latin America by outsiders. It is a term I
borrowed from Tropicalizations: Images of Latindad (1997), a collection
of essays edited by Frances R. Aparicio and Susana Chávez-Silverman.
Tropicalization parallels Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, but
applies to the stereotyping of the population of Latin America rather
than that of the Middle East. I would note that, as the editors point out,
the authors represented in this collection are of varied backgrounds:
some are Latinos living in the US, while others are from Latin America.
This allows for ‘plural forms and multiple subject locations’. This cir-
cumstance differentiates ‘tropicalization’ from Orientalism, which is
unilateral and refers to European discourse about the Orient.21
In general, as Said and others have noted, both tropicalization and
Orientalism tend to reveal more about the anxieties of the colonizer (or
global power) than about those of the colonized (or global underling), in
that they invent, fantasize and take liberties with an exotic or unknown
culture.22 In Said’s view, intellectuals in Europe and other developed
nations create a discourse whose very construction naturalizes power
over ‘recalcitrant phenomena’, that is, other cultures.23 Two useful

essays from Tropicalizations, the first by Debra Castillo and the second
by Steven Benz, make it clear that while tropical lands may inspire
Anglo-American writers, any insight derived from cultural ‘contact’
with the people living there is more of a projection than a reality.
Brazil poses a slightly different problem in that, along with its tropi-
cal exoticism, it also has a futuristic side symbolized by the modernist
architecture of Brasília, its planned capital. As early as 1941, Stefan
Zweig dubbed Brazil ‘the land of the future’, implying that it had the
basis for cultural progress (because of its lack of overt racism) and that it
was on the brink of an economic breakthrough (because he believed in
the potential of its vast natural resources).24 I have found that the ‘tropi-
calization’ in novels set in Brazil has more to do with authors ‘going
native’ and believing that a basic familiarity with Brazil’s cultural icons
(the Amazon region, carnival and samba schools, Afro-Brazilian culture,
soccer) gives them instant insight into Brazilian culture. Like Zweig,
outsiders tend to be blind to racial and social divisions that lie below
the surface, and to the deep historical roots of urban tensions or social
problems stemming from modernization which are among the most dif-
ficult to resolve. Even in films such as Victor Meirelles and Katia Lund’s
urban drama City of God (Cidade de Deus, 2002), violence is glamorized,
shot in MTV style, all quick cuts and bright topical colour. Rather than
fearing the Brazilian Other, the outsider tends to be seduced by a facile
exoticism, which is viewed from a position of naive wonder.
As an illustration of a reductive combination of Brazil’s traditional
and futuristic cultures, I offer a brief analysis of S.N. Lewitt’s sf novel
Songs of Chaos (1993). In my view, this novel is a lesson in how not to
write about Brazil. Lewitt’s novel is clearly sf, as it takes place on a space
ship run by Afro-Brazilian deities, with a culture based on the samba
schools of the favelas (slums) of Rio de Janeiro. Here the use of religion
and carnival are the first evidence of a cultural misconception. Afro-
Brazilian religions and carnival function within the structure of Brazil’s
markedly hierarchical society, and putting them to ‘use’ to run the ship
breaks with their basic principles of subversion and self-expression. In
the novel, the ship runs on a mystical biotechnology that operates on
frequencies of samba rhythms that defy the purely scientific solutions
of other ‘rational’ cultures. The protagonist, the freethinking cyber-
neticist Dante, escapes persecution by the repressive and conformist
Eurostate, stowing away on the Brazilian space ship. After a period of
adjustment, he is able to appreciate the ship’s tropical wonders, with its
exotic talking parrots and macaws, and its crew, who are obsessed with
samba music and whose ‘samba schools’ prepare to compete in a carni-

val parade. In the end, Dante is able to use his creativity to help some
recalcitrant crewmembers overcome the division between the rational
and intuitive, helping their school win the samba competition. In my
view, the novel reads like a tourist describing the marvels of Rio de
Janeiro and carnival while on vacation – with some futuristic touches.
While films like City of God exaggerate drug violence, this novel mis-
represents favela culture by ridding it of all the unpleasant social reali-
ties of poverty, and related social or political problems.
Karen Tei Yamashita’s fantasy novel, Through the Arc of the Rainforest
(1990), is more subtle than Lewitt’s, although it does not hesitate to
emphasize the exoticism of Brazil. Yamashita has the advantage of
being married to a Brazilian and having lived nine years in Brazil,
which explains why her text has fewer linguistic and cultural errors.
Her experience in Brazil allows her to examine the diverse classes and
ethnicities that come together in São Paulo, where the Japanese have a
marked presence, along with immigrants from the impoverished region
of the Brazilian north-east. Her novel has a wide cast of characters who
are incorporated into the kind of episodic plots and melodramatic
situations associated with Brazilian telenovelas. She also captures the
strength of popular religion, contrasting and mixing popular and elite
classes, while including American characters, in an effort to highlight
the assimilative nature of Brazilian culture. Two foreigners – a Japanese
man who becomes inseparable from a ball that inexplicably gyrates
in front of his forehead, and an American executive with an extra
arm – feel at home in Brazil, but they represent antagonistic forces
and their respective personal and corporate interests start to collide.
The main plot hinges on a potential ecological disaster in the Amazon,
where a giant plastic bubble with magnetic qualities appears to have
come through the river’s tributaries and broken through the forest floor.
The curative power of the bubble or ‘matacão’, as it is known, attracts
pilgrims and corporations, threatening to destroy the pristine rainforest
and its surrounding area. While I find Yamashita’s characterization of
Brazilians and their culture to be accurate, I find her unexplained scien-
tific phenomena (the man’s gyrating ball, the third arm, the magnetic
plastic of the matacão) more problematic. Yamashita’s strength is that
she offers a believable social panorama combined with ecological con-
cerns. Her plotline is successful in drawing together myriad characters,
and she manages to blend a sensitive concern with improving the lives
of the Third World poor with First World ecological concerns about the
Amazon.
Ian McDonald’s Brasyl (2007) is by far the most ambitious of foreign

sf or fantasy texts written about the country. Indeed, it was hailed as a
‘masterpiece’ by Asimov’s Science Fiction, according to the novel’s jacket,
which also states that the novel takes a perspective that is neither
European nor American, offering an original view of South America’s
‘largest and most vibrant country’. Paul Raven praises McDonald’s novel
in his 2008 review for Foundation, for its authentic and refreshing portrait
of a ‘Latino metropolis’.25 Gary K. Wolfe also gave the novel a positive
review in the February 2007 edition of Locus,26 stating that it seemed to
follow in the line of Brazilian cyberpunk – dubbed tupinipunk by Roberto
de Sousa Causo – which I analyse in some detail in my book Brazilian
Science Fiction.27 I disagree with this assertion since tupinipunk tends to
be highly allegorical, mystical, satirical and political, and a critique of
First World powers impinging on Brazilian sovereignty. It is precisely this
political critique that McDonald misses, replaying the flaw that Timothy
Brennan points out in his essay about the novel of empire, ‘The National
Longing for Form’, in which the Anglo-European ‘“novel of empire” in
its classic modernist version ... has been blind to the impact of a world
system largely directed by Anglo-American interests, however much it
involved itself passionately, unevenly, and contradictorily in some of
the human realities of world domination’.28 In Brasyl, African deities and
secret warriors from the past and present are collapsed into a multiverse,
de-historicizing the central role played by slavery, monarchy and neo-
colonial powers such as the United States and the British Empire during
Brazil’s period of national formation,29 ultimately turning the country
into a globalized pop-phenomenon for foreign consumption.
Although Brasyl takes place during widely separated years (2006, 2032
and 1732), interweaving three stories set in the three periods, there is
no sense of history, only a cyberpunk façade of postmodernity, predi-
cated on a sense of the commodification of art and the destruction of
historical memory.30 As the work takes us from contemporary Rio de
Janeiro to a near-future São Paulo, then back to the eighteenth-century
Amazon, we follow a cast of characters that runs the social gamut from
slum dwellers to the social and cultural elite. One of these, Marcelina
Hoffman, a producer of television reality shows and practitioner of
capoeira (a type of Brazilian martial art), becomes a multiverse-jumping
ninja, who rushes to the rescue of the other characters. Edson/Efrim, a
bisexual, cross-dressing thief of high-end fashion attire, falls in love with
the heroine from another line of the multiverse, whom he consults in
order to free himself of a tracking device on a pilfered item. Luís Quinn,
an eighteenth-century priest, finds himself going native after imbibing
an indigenous potion that reveals the presence of the multiverse and

the value of multicultural history. He takes up arms against a Portuguese
Jesuit who navigates a large craft along the rivers of the Amazon region,
forcibly recruiting and converting all those who fall under his domain.
While all of these story lines are told with narrative suspense, they fall
short of capturing more than a superficial understanding of Brazilian
history, geography and culture.
While the shifting narratives allow McDonald to offer views of diverse
regions, cultures and classes, the novel re-packages Brazil for consump-
tion by non-Brazilians (hence his inclusion of a ‘playlist’ of Brazilian
music for readers at the end of the novel). I found more allusions to
Brazilian music, pop culture and current events in one chapter of Brasyl
than in all the other novels combined. As a Brazilianist, I can generally
follow these allusions, but one wonders whether this would be possible
for average readers or, more specifically, students. References to super-
model Gisele Bundchen, the international hit film The City of God, and
the Brazilian martial art of capoeira may be familiar to some readers, but
the film Bus 174, acronyms like the PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital,
a powerful prison gang that organized massive bus stoppages and burn-
ing in São Paulo in 2006), MST (Movimento Sem Terra, the landless
movement), and words like Skol (a brand of beer) and ladeiras (the word
for steep streets, often rendered incorrectly by McDonald as ‘ladeiros’)
are certainly much less widely known. While McDonald includes a glos-
sary (which averages one to three Portuguese spelling or factual errors
per page), I found that Bus 174, PCC, ladeira, and MST fail to appear in
it. José Padilla’s Bus 174 (2002), for example, is a documentary portray-
ing a dramatic hostage scenario, in which a black man holds a white
female student hostage. The film examines his background and the
motivations behind his crime. In every sense, McDonald’s text displays
a postmodern density that can be overwhelming, especially in light of
the necessity of understanding a complex plot set in a foreign culture.
While the fast pace of the novel appeals to students, they may complain
about confusion when confronted with so much information.
In the end, I think the novel can be useful as a teaching tool, since
few Brazilian cyberpunk texts are available in translation. Some web
research by instructors or students on the history and practice of capoeira,
historical figures like Padre Antônio Vieira (a seventeenth-century priest
who defended the rights of Amerindians in the north), the eighteenth-
century Jesuit missions in southern Brazil, and the social role of Brazilian
soap operas in television viewing habits may offer some counterbalance
to the cultural exoticism of the text.
Concluding observations
One American text about Brazil that I find rewarding is Samuel

R. Delany’s 1967 short story, ‘Driftglass’, which captures the grittiness of
life in the Brazilian north-east. Despite its inaccurate Portuguese spell-
ings (such as Juao for João), it conveys a remarkable cultural authen-
ticity. Moreover, Delany’s portrayal of teenagers who are willing to
undergo surgery that allows them to do underwater mining, often risk-
ing life and limb, seems to fit the psychology of Brazil’s regional poor.
It also seems accurate in portraying a Brazilian fishing village that offers
the expatriate protagonist Cal Svenson, a crippled former miner, a sense
of community and belonging. As David Samuelson points out in the
critical commentary following the story in The Science Fiction Research
Association Anthology’s 1988 edition, Delany consciously and artfully
alludes to characters from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a text about the
colonization of the New World. The character of Cal, in particular, can
be seen as a parallel to Shakespeare’s Caliban, inverting the typical roles
of the indigenous culture (represented by Caliban), and the foreign
white colonizer (associated with Prospero), which recasts the story in a
Latin American or postcolonial light.
I began investigating the topic of Brazil in fantasy and science fiction
because I thought I might eventually want to teach more courses in English.
Since only a few Brazilian sf novels are available in translation, I began
looking for appropriate texts. Of all the works I have examined, I would
recommend teaching those of Yamashita and Delany, though I have to
admit that McDonald does bring a cybernetic edge to Brazil, a theme other-
wise unavailable in translation. These authors convey a portrait of Brazil
that I would share with students and non-Brazilianists, although other
novels would also make for interesting discussion. These may include
Patricia Anthony’s Cradle of Spendor (1996), Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for
the Dead (1986), Amber Hayward’s The Healer (2002), Richard Kadrey’s
Kamikaze L’Amour: A Novel of the Future (1995) and John Updike’s Brazil
(1994).31
As I draw to a conclusion, I ponder the verbal feedback of my students.
They requested a change in classroom practice (that I send out questions
and introductions before the readings), but liked the fact that they were
able to choose their presentation topics freely. As I worked through the
material, I found that Cosmos Latinos works very well, although students
tend to over-generalize themes and interpretations based on only one
story. They were also surprised that there were few women writers in trans-
lation. The best I could do was to refer to articles I wrote about recent sf
written by Latin American women.32 I was generally pleased with the film
selection. Students who were unfamiliar with sf thanked me for showing
them that the genre was something more than ‘spaceships and aliens’.
One student initially asked that more magical realism texts be included,
but later told me that she realized that she had exposure to those texts in
her Latin American literature classes. She also commented that she had
never thought of linking Borges to science fiction. I invite you to read
these texts, to try them out on a class of undergraduates and to judge for
yourself how sf is enriched by the Latin American perspective.
Notes
1. The film is included on the DVD accompanying María Cinta Aparisi, José
A. Blanco and Marcie D. Rinka, Revista: Conversación sin barreras, 2nd edn
(Boston: Vista, 2007).
2. See Yolanda Molina-Gavilán, Andrea L. Bell, Miguel Ángel Fernández-
Delgado, M. Elizabeth Ginway and Juan Carlos Toledano Redondo, ‘A
Chronology of Latin-American Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Studies, 34:3
(2007): 369–431.
3. With the exception of The Fifth Power, supplied to me by Alfredo Suppia, a
film specialist at the Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, the films are avail-
able at Brazilian bookstores and possibly online. Professor Suppia is most
willing to help others in locating or suggesting Latin American sf films. He
can be contacted at [email protected].
4. For an allegorical reading of the film, see Randal Johnson, ‘Cinema Novo
and Cannibalism: Macunaíma’, in Randal Johnson and Robert Stam, eds,
Brazilian Cinema (Irvington, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995) 176–90.
5. In its modern history, Argentina has experienced political strife among
Peronists (supporters of populist leader General Juan Perón, who built his
support among unions and the working classes in 1940s), and other military
leaders, who first overthrew Perón in 1955. Another military dictatorship,
headed by Juan Carlos Ongania, ruled the country after 1966 until Perón’s
takeover in 1973. Following Perón’s death in 1975, a military junta led by
Gen. Jorge Videla took power and began the ‘Dirty War’, in which thousands
disappeared. The junta’s rule ended after the Falklands War in 1983.
6. For a list of plot summaries of Santo films, see http://terpconnect.umd.
edu/~dwilt/santo.html (accessed 23 July 2009). Santo has fought – among
other villains – Martians, mummies, Frankenstein and mad scientists. As for
secondary texts, Lourdes Grobet, Lucha Libre: Masked Superstars of Mexican
Wrestling (Mexico: Trilce, 2005) is a pictorial history with an essay by Carlos
Monsivais in Spanish, one of the few Spanish texts that addresses this phe-
nomenon in a scholarly way. A more recent study is Heather Levi, The World
of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2008).
7. Themes of Mexican migrant labourers, outsourcing and water rights are
brought up in New York-based filmmaker Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2007),
which won the award for Best American Screenplay at the Sundance
Film Festival in 2008. See http://www.fest21.com/en/blog/sundance/sleep_

dealer_wins_alfred_p_sloan_prize (accessed 23 July 2009). The film recalls
several of the Mexican cyberpunk stories in Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda
Molina-Gavilán, eds, Cosmos Latinos (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 2003); see http://www.slashfilm.com/2008/09/16/sleep-dealer-movie-
trailer/ (accessed 23 July 2009). Rivera’s web page, http://www.alexrivera.
com/, has his contact information. His five minute mockumentary short,
‘Why Cybraceros’, explores similar themes in a low-tech way. See http://
www.invisibleamerica.com/movies.html (accessed 23 July 2009).
8. For definitions of utopia I use the traditional sources: Northrop Frye,
‘Varieties of Literary Utopias’, in Frank Manuel, ed., Utopias and Utopian
Thought (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966) 25–59 and Darko Suvin, ‘Defining
the Literary Genre of Utopia: Some Historical Semantics, Some Genealogy, a
Proposal, and a Plea’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 6:2 (1973): 121–45.
9. As Hartwell notes, ‘A sense of wonder, awe at the vastness of space and
time, is at the root of excitement of science fiction.’ See David Hartwell,
‘Worshipping at the Church of Wonder’, in Age of Wonders (New York:
Walker, 1984) 40–58 at 41.
10. Larry McCaffery, Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and
Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Beatriz
Sarlo, Scenes from Postmodern Life, trans. Jon Beasley-Murray (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001). In Sarlo’s view, postmodernity typi-
cally celebrates dispersion, the breakdown of traditional social ties and the
loss of traditional communities. Once freed or ‘de-territorialized’, these new
cultural nomads theoretically represent the new found autonomy of cultural
minorities. However, in Argentina, she posits that this may not always be
the case. New technologies blur class traditional differences, but economic
opportunity and education remain highly unequal (88–95). Hopenhayn
outlines the insidious implications of neo-liberalism and the myth of the
market within postmodern celebration of diversity in Latin America. See
‘Postmodernism and Neoliberalism in Latin America’, in John Beverly, José
Oviedo and Michael Aronna, eds, The Postmodern Debate in Latin America
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995) 93–109.
11. See Farah Mendlesohn, The Rhetorics of Fantasy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 2008) 182–245.
12. See M. Elizabeth Ginway, ‘The Body Politic in Brazilian Science Fiction:
Implants and Cyborgs’, in Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox, eds, New
Boundaries in Political Science Fiction (Columbia, SC: University of South
Carolina Press, 2008) 198–211.
13. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’, trans. Avital Ronell, in W.J.T. Mitchell,
ed., On Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) 51–77.
14. See Ginway, Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood in the
Land of the Future (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004) for a dis-
cussion of Carneiro’s ‘Darkness’ (80–1) and of ‘A Perfect Marriage’ (78–80).
15. In his essay ‘For an Anthropology of the Brazilian Tradition or “A Virtude
está no Meio”’’ DaMatta asks, ‘Is it possible that Brazil is caught among one
perspective that is truly Catholic, another that is authentically civic and
modern, and still another that is fully popular and Carnivalesque’, implying
that Brazilians accommodate all three belief systems, avoiding the typical
either-or logic of Western thought. See DaMatta’s essay in David J. Hess and
Roberto DaMatta, eds, The Brazilian Puzzle: Culture on the Borderlands of the
Western World (Irvington, NY: Columbia University Press) 270–91 at 281.
16. For more on the sf debate on this novel and its sf provenance, see J. Andrew
Brown, ‘Edmundo Paz-Soldán and his Precursors: Borges, Dick and the SF
Canon’, Science Fiction Studies, 34:3 (2007): 473–83.
17. Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead Books,
2007) 22.
18. Ibid., 7.
19. See Mac Margolis, ‘Is Magical Realism Dead?’ Newsweek, 6 May 2002 at
http://www.letras.s5.com/af0812047.htm (accessed 23 July 2009).
20. One might also include James Tiptree Jr’s ‘The Women Men Don’t See’
(1973), which takes place on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. After their light
plane crashes in a remote area, the white male hero treats the women and
the male Mexican pilot in the same chauvinistic way, hardly believing that
they do not accept him as their ‘natural’ leader. Instead they prefer to leave
with alien visitors rather than remaining with him. The story, told from
the male narrator’s point of view, explores gendered perspectives and literal
and metaphorical alienation, it does not examine the Mexican culture of
the ‘other’, a lacuna left for readers to ponder. Clearly, each of these works
should be read with a certain wariness regarding cultural context, content
and approach.
21. See Frances R. Aparicio and Susana Chávez-Silverman, eds, Tropicalizations:
Images of Latindad (Durham, NH: Dartmouth College, 1997) 1–17 at 2.
22. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979) and John Storey,
Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (Essex: Pearson, 2001) especially 79–80.
23. Said, Orientalism, 146.
24. Author and biographer Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) left his native Austria
for fear of Nazi persecution. After becoming an English citizen in 1938,
he travelled to South America in 1940, deciding to reside in Brazil. While
in Rio de Janeiro he wrote Brazil: A Land of the Future (1941), in which he
saw the future in the country’s racial tolerance and in its natural resources.
Pessimistic about the potential spread of Nazism, he committed suicide in
Rio de Janeiro in 1942. Because of his importance in promoting Brazil, the
populist president at the time, Getúlio Vargas, had his funeral paid for at
state expense. See Stefan Zweig, Brazil: A Land of the Future, reprinted, with
an afterword and translation by Lowell A. Bangerter (Riverside, CA: Ariadne
Press, 2000).
25. Paul Raven praises McDonald’s novel in his 2008 review for Foundation, for
its authentic and refreshing portrait of a ‘Latino metropolis’. See ‘Brasyl by
Ian McDonald’ Foundation, 102 (Spring 2008): 105–10 at 106. Latino seems
to be used incorrectly here; ‘Latin American’ would have been a better
choice. Also the novel includes a whole section that takes place in the
Amazon, which is hardly a metropolis. ‘Latino’ more aptly refers to people
of Spanish American descent living in the United States. Few Brazilians see
themselves as ‘latinos’.
26. Gary K. Wolfe, review of Brasyl, by Ian McDonald, Locus, February 2007, at
http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2007/02/locus-reviews-ian-mcdonald.
html (accessed 23 July 2009).
27. Combining issues of race, tribalism, technology, sex and an urban setting,
its general feel is street-smart, yet it is analogue rather than digital in nature,
since none of the action takes place in cyberspace. See Ginway, Brazilian
Science Fiction, 155–7.
28. Timothy Brennan, ‘The National Longing for Form’, in Homi K. Bhabha, ed.,
Nation and Narration (New York, Routledge, 1990) 44–70 at 48.
29. The English were key in having the Portuguese court move to Brazil in 1808,
allowing them to take advantage of a new open port policy to obtain new
markets for their manufactured goods. See Nelson Piletti, A história do Brasil
(São Paulo: Ática, 1991), 89. The War of Paraguay or the Triple Alliance of
1865–70 was also largely financed by the English to crush the fledgling eco-
nomic independence of Paraguay, resulting in a near genocide of its male
population, and in the indebtedness of the alliance (Brazil, Uruguay and
Argentina) to England. During the same period, the United States began
to buy more than half of Brazil’s coffee crop (harvested by slave labour),
becoming an important trading partner. This was also the beginning of
America’s long-term influence in the region in the twentieth century. See
ibid., 112–15.
30. I am thinking here of Carl Freedman’s Critical Theory and Science Fiction
(Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000) 190–200.
31. I am indebted to Roberto Causo who told me about several of these novels
and lent me copies of texts by Kadrey and Lewitt.
32. M. Elizabeth Ginway, ‘Recent Science Fiction and Fantasy Written by
Women’, Foundation, 99 (2007): 49–62. Here I explore how women writers
first appropriate male voices, then place women in male roles, and finally
explore incipient feminist themes in the fantasy and horror genres. See also
Mary Ginway, ‘Interview with Argentine Author Liliana Bodoc’, Femspec, 9:1
(2008): 20–8, about Bodoc’s trilogy about the role of women in her re-writing
of the conquest of the New World from the point of view of indigenous
peoples.
12
Teaching Science and Science
Fiction: A Case Study
Mark Brake and Neil Hook
This chapter describes a unique experiment: namely, the design and

delivery of an undergraduate border study at the University of Glamorgan
which explores the interrelationship of science and science fiction. We
begin by looking at the context of the degree award: previous educational
initiatives, the widening access agenda, and the award’s avowed intent
to address the issue of social inclusion in science education at university
level. We go on to look at the structure of the award itself, including a
curricular analysis of the degree’s content. Finally, we consider the salient
aspects of this unique experiment in terms of the broader outcomes after
a decade of teaching the science and science fiction programme.
Introduction
As a theme for undergraduate study, science is a giant in the academic

world. It has acquired a generic status through representing not only
its own constituent and pure knowledge areas, such as physics and
biology, but also as a methodological paradigm associated with the pur-
suit of truth. Through systematic attempts to publicly refute or verify
hypotheses and theories, this paradigm has been adopted for the teach-
ing of social sciences. But science also extends beyond the laboratory.
It extends beyond the academic community, beyond the associated
scientific professions. It positions itself within popular culture, and
specifically within science fiction. The proliferation of science fiction in
literature, cinema, television and gaming reflects its increasing impact.
Science fiction has moved into the mainstream with the advent of the
information age it helped realize. Of the fifty highest grossing movies
of all time, science fiction films account for twenty-two entries as of
21 July 2009 (a further thirteen are fantasy).1 Audiences of all ages will
202
Teaching Science and Science Fiction 203
watch the latest science fiction blockbuster in the cinema. Millions of

viewers regularly tune in to the BBC to watch Doctor Who, Life on Mars
or Ashes to Ashes. Science fiction even has its own channels running
back to back series and films. And in the ever-expanding field of com-
puter gaming, science fiction titles dominate. The fastest selling media
product in history was Microsoft’s science fiction video-game Halo 3,
with the game’s sales generating US$170 million on its first day.
The use of a broad theme for the application of scientific ideas and
methods is commonplace within higher education. At the most power-
ful levels it has led to the creation of new disciplines associated with, for
example, the study of behaviour, psychology, and the study of society,
sociology. Nonetheless, the exploration of science through science fic-
tion was a new endeavour for our academic community, representing
an important challenge to conventional curriculum design.
Traditions and perspectives within education question the position-
ing of scientific knowledge within society, and within popular culture.
A common dialectic has often been used: science against art, and the
conflict of paradigms associated with what at first seem to be such dif-
ferent traditions within academia. An effective technique for explor-
ing this kind of academic debate involves a critical exploration of the
boundaries and barriers that define what, at first glance, appear to be
discrete subject areas and methodologies.
Our degree award is an attempt to explore one such boundary. It seeks
a critical and multidisciplinary understanding of the relationship between
science and science fiction. It examines the texts of genre fiction, whilst
testing the validity and integrity of scientific theories and methods. The
intention is to produce a unique, provocative and compelling account of
science fiction as a touchstone of the dialectic of science and progress.
The programme aims to explore the metamorphoses of science fiction and
their rapport with science. And to encompass both the science fictional
visions that have shaped science, politics and society, and conversely, the
impetus given to science fiction by discovery and invention.
Science fiction narratives are well established as a mode of thinking.
Their crucial field of discourse is the reducible gap between the new
worlds uncovered by science and exploration, and the fantastic strange
worlds of the imagination through which we come to see our own condi-
tions of life from a new and potentially revolutionary perspective. With
this in mind, it was our intention to present science fiction as a sustained,
coherent and often subversive check on the oppositions and contradic-
tions of science – the promises and pitfalls of progress through the ages.
In this way we hoped to highlight the genre as a story of our hopes and
fears for science, of the ongoing relationship between scientific material-

ism and the cultural scepticism of science fiction. Furthermore, there was
clear potential that the programme would enable an evolving and unpar-
alleled description of the way in which science fiction has influenced
issues and dialogues in the communication of science. Science fiction
is still the leading creative catalyst of scientific ideas into symbols and
metaphors of the human condition; an often unconscious and therefore
especially valuable reflection of the assumptions and attitudes held by
society. By virtue of its ability to project and dramatize, science fiction is
recognized as a particularly effective, and perhaps for many people the
only, means for generating concern and thought about the social, philo-
sophical and moral consequences of scientific progress.
Such an approach to the study of science had a good pedigree. In the
late 1970s and early 1980s, the SISCON (Science in a Social Context) project
was launched at a number of UK universities including Edinburgh,
Manchester, Stirling and Sussex. SISCON was a joint programme whose
aim was to introduce social aspects in the study of science, including
the sociological, economic, technological and ecological effects of sci-
ence on society. Another aim was to produce a different kind of science
graduate. In the past, higher education in science had focused on edu-
cating highly skilled and specialized professional scientists, graduates
proficient in the techniques of a particular scientific discipline. But the
belief had grown that there was also scope to produce graduates with
a unique mixture of skills, possessing flexible and practical abilities
to respond to a dynamic and evolving cultural working environment
where artistic creativity and science often meet. With this in mind, we
began to realize that the study of science fiction may be a powerful fac-
tor in extending the franchise for science education, to perhaps draw
in those excluded by science’s apparent mathematical and technical
exclusivity. Perhaps the border study of science and science fiction
could promote a greater social inclusion for lifelong learners who may
otherwise feel disenfranchised from such study.
Context
The BSc Science and Science Fiction emerged out of an initiative led
by Higher Education institutions in South Wales in partnership with
community groups. This has come to be known as the Community
University of the Valleys, and was cited by the Dearing Report as
an example of good practice in widening access and increasing par-
ticipation in higher education in the UK.2 Courses at accredited and
non-accredited levels are offered within local learning centres located at

community venues, and where possible new and innovative curricula
are offered to a wide range of learners. They include disaffected youth,
as well as those who have been redundant for a number of years.
One of the new community courses that proved a success was a mod-
ule on the science and culture of astrobiology.3 The module attracted
much attention from local lifelong learners who proved very interested
in this rather speculative and multidisciplinary aspect of astronomy. In
many cases these individuals had no formal qualifications in science
related subjects, yet they demonstrated understanding and pronounced
interest in aspects of scientific enquiry. It became apparent that these
community students had interpreted a wide range of science fiction
texts. They had used knowledge sources that reach beyond the more
conventional source literature, extending into the critical reading of
magazines, role-play exercises, fanzines and video games.
The community experience led eventually to the creation of a degree
award in astronomy, which is now contained within the University of
Glamorgan’s curriculum portfolio. Details of the early development of our
programme were reported to the 162nd Colloquium of the International
Astronomical Union at London and the 110th National Conference of
the Astronomical Society of the Pacific at Albuquerque, New Mexico.4
Subsequent developments, especially to the more science fictional and
astrobiological aspects of the programme, were reported on the Great
Barrier Reef, PCST-8 in Barcelona, NASA Ames, Seattle and Canterbury.5
The programme attracted much interest from students and staff, and
it was soon realized that science fiction was a recurring and even domi-
nant theme for discussion. The planning of the degree programme was
approved in September 1998, and a grant awarded to engage in more
detailed curriculum planning, involving the schools of science, human-
ities and art and design. One of the key initial considerations was the
need to identify a demand for this new curriculum, and an indication
that it would also appeal to a new kind of student, thereby achieving
the objectives of increasing access and widening participation.
Aims and objectives of the degree
The degree award in science and science fiction that emerged focuses
primarily on science, both historical and contemporary, as an integral
part of culture. The vast majority of degree awards in science – and
particularly ‘pure science’ – specialize exclusively in the science domain.
They pay little regard to the context in which science is developed,
practised and received. The science and science fiction degree is an award
about science as much as it is an award in science, since it encompasses
the multifarious influences brought to bear on the continuous creation
and consumption of science. In particular, the award uses a number of
contrasting methodologies to explore the relationship between science,
culture and society. The science fiction modules provide, in one sense,
an imaginative forum that focuses on this relationship.
Aims
The aims of the science and science fiction degree award are to produce
graduates who have a dynamic and pluralistic understanding of the
nature and evolution of science and who can also critically develop
and communicate ideas about science and its cultural context. Science
fiction is the vehicle for an exploration of the relationship between sci-
ence and culture. The award provides the students with the conceptual
and methodological frameworks necessary to achieve these aims. These
frameworks include science: its methodology, philosophy and sociol-
ogy. Critical theories from media and cultural studies are also explored.
It is hoped that, in this way, the students gain a more dynamic and crit-
ical understanding of science, that they recognize that issues in science
also require social and cultural analysis. Naturally, the award also spe-
cifically hopes to cultivate a critical analysis of science fiction, one that
recognizes its scientific, philosophical, cultural and social influences. It
is hoped that this exploration of the boundaries between disciplines will
also have another benefit; and that ability is engendered in the students
to imaginatively communicate the nature and evolution of science, and
science fiction, and their interrelationship.
Objectives
The objectives of the award were manifold. The intention was to incul-
cate in students a critical understanding of the social development of
science and science fiction, as well as examining the nature of science
and its relationship with science fiction. The use of science fiction on
the award should also lead to a greater understanding of issues related to
the public understanding of science, particularly the social implications
of science and technology, and the way in which they are represented
within various forms of media and culture.
Degree structure and cognate strands
The award encompasses two cognate strands: the science strand, and
the science fiction strand. In each strand students are provided with
the necessary research tools, frameworks and methodologies to enable

them to construct differing interpretations, paradigms and perspectives
on the nature of the subjects under study. In many ways, the science
fiction strand represents an open debate forum for the award. It is here
that the convergence of the cognate strands is potentially the most
dynamic, providing an opportunity for debate and contrasting the dif-
fering perspectives and frameworks encountered in the two strands.
The award represents a unique mixture of skills since it brings together
science and the humanities, challenging the ‘two culture’ myth. It is
hoped that graduates develop flexible and practical abilities to respond
to a dynamic and evolving working environment after graduation.
Science strand
The modules chosen for this strand are drawn from the physical sci-
ences and astronomy. There is an appropriate rationale for this choice.
As well as being a fascinating and challenging subject in its own right,
astronomy can also be used to teach the principles of other sciences: in
particular physics, earth science, chemistry and some important aspects
of life science. Optics, thermodynamics and mechanics can be applied
to astronomical objects – an effective way to make the learning process
more dynamic and motivating.
Furthermore, our account of the physical sciences is pluralistic, and
that is probably its most important innovation. We recognize that the
scientific revolutions have influenced, or have been influenced by, con-
ceptual changes in cosmology, chemistry, biology, physics, philosophy
and religion. Specialized accounts are perhaps inhibited from analysing
the nature of these links and their influence upon the growth of human
knowledge and endeavour. Indeed, pursuit of this pluralism has led to a
second innovation – our modules repeatedly cross the institutionalized
boundaries which separate ‘science’ from ‘history’ or ‘philosophy’.
Our science strand provides a cognate group of multidisciplinary
modules. They are based on the physical sciences and astronomy, but
use an innovative syllabus balanced between the scientific and historic/
cultural aspects of each topic. The modules are also open to students of
all other disciplines. The strand explores the development of scientific
ideas and beliefs through the use of social and historical frameworks.
This helps lend clarity to the nature and evolution of scientific concepts
and methods, whilst also embracing the wider cultural influences and
impact.
Each module is studied through lectures, tutorials and directed study.
The tutorials are provided to enable all students to study the modules
without the need of exempting prerequisites, whilst extending the
opportunity to promote the understanding of science beyond the con-

fines of normal undergraduate science programmes.
Science fiction strand

One of the key aims of the award is an exploration of the relationship
between science, culture and society. As was mentioned earlier, the sci-
ence fiction strand acts as an imaginative forum that focuses on this
relationship. Consequently, our definition of science fiction, and our
associated choice of key texts, had a great bearing on the content of this
strand. Science fiction has been variously defined.6 Even though students
are discouraged from the naive notion of science fiction as simply reflect-
ing science, our emphasis remains on the relationship between science,
science fiction and society. Science fiction questions science, examines
individuals and communities often in terms of technological systems,
and those systems and technologies in terms of identity and conscious-
ness. For example, Judith Merril defines the heart of science fiction as:
the mode which makes use of the traditional ‘scientific method’

(observation, hypothesis, experimentation) to examine some pos-
tulated approximation of reality, by introducing a given set of
changes – imaginary or inventive – into the common background of
‘known facts’, creating an environment in which the responses and
perceptions of the characters will reveal something about the inven-
tions, the characters, or both.7
Sam Moskowitz (1963) suggests a definition that is useful because of

its catholic conception of science, a conception that was not always as
broad nor as acceptable to practitioners and readers of science fiction
as it is today:
science fiction is . . . identifiable by the fact that it eases the ‘willing

suspension of disbelief’ on the part of its (audience) by utilising an
atmosphere of scientific credibility for its imaginative speculations in
physical science, space, time, social science, and philosophy.8
Joanna Russ (1995) holds that science fiction, ‘attempts to assimilate

imaginatively scientific knowledge about reality and the scientific
method, as distinct from the merely practical changes sciences has
made in our lives’.9 Patrick Parrinder suggests that, ‘up to the present,
SF has continued to be moulded and shaped by scientific thought, even
in its moments of rebellion against it’.10 In short, science fiction has
been used as a way of imagining the relationship between technology,

science and society. It is the conviction of the science fiction strand that
in following this approach a student would find the extrapolations of
science fiction more intriguing, rewarding and challenging, and would
gain, as a result, a more rounded and informed criticism of science itself.
As a consequence, the criteria for selecting works is not solely on literary
merit, but also takes into account the ways in which works articulate
the relationship between scientific thought and society.
Traditionally, works of, and courses in, science fiction have been
legitimated within a literary tradition, that is, the creation of canonical
works, and an evaluation of works in terms of their contribution to the
development of a humanistic aesthetic. However, for all of its imagina-
tion and innovation, science fiction would have remained the province
of a limited readership had it not been for the expansion of the genre to
the visual media. Consequently, literature is not prioritized within the
award; common materials also involve works from television, film and
other media. Nor are literary techniques especially used to analyse these
materials. As Joanna Russ points out:
criticism of science fiction cannot possibly look like the criticism

we are used to. It will – perforce – employ an aesthetic in which the
elegance, rigorousness, and systematic coherence of explicit ideas
is of great importance. It will therefore appear to stray into all sorts
of extra-literary fields: metaphysics, politics, philosophy, physics,
biology, psychology, topology, mathematics, history and so on.11
She also remarks that: ‘(medievalists) enjoy ... (sf) ... much more than do
students of later literary periods. So, in fact do city planners, architects,
archaeologists, engineers, rock musicians, anthropologists, and nearly
everyone except most English professors.’12 Therefore, our degree award
focuses on the concept of fiction as an invented idea or statement or
narrative, an imaginary thing; and as the act or process of inventing
imaginary things, or a conventionally accepted falsehood. The notion
of truth and falsehood has also been central to the evaluation of sci-
ence fiction. The award addresses this issue in a number of ways: first,
through the physical limits of realizing imagined scientific invention;
second, through the connections between fact and fictional work,
which leads to deeper questions about science’s dependence on nar-
rative to support and justify scientific thought and activity; and third,
through the possibility of achieving a mimetic relationship between
reality and representation.
The creation of science fiction is a social and cultural practice involv-

ing practitioners and audiences; a product of cultures of production
and consumption. The science fiction strand therefore exploits the
close links between science practitioners and the production of science
fiction. It recognizes that science fiction has a particular appeal to sci-
entists who evaluate it and write it in terms of their own cultural com-
petencies. Science exists as a prestigious idea and commodity within
particular cultural groups who have their own hierarchies of taste that
run counter to the literary imagination. So, the science fiction strand
also seeks to analyse the parameters and composition of these groups.
Award content and curricular analysis

Table 12.1 Award structure and cognate strands
Science strand Science fiction strand

Level 4
Space I: Planets and Philosophy What is Science Fiction?
Space II: The Nature of the Universe The Evolution of SF
Earth Story Independent Study
Level 5
Stars, Science and the Bomb Utopias and Dystopias
Cosmology and Controversy Exploring Space and
Time
Exploring the Sky Independent Study
Level 6
Life in the Universe CyberScience
Project/Dissertation Quantum Worlds
Curricular analysis of Level 4

Space I: Planets and Philosophy What is Science Fiction?
Space II: The Nature of the Universe The Evolution of SF
Earth Story Independent Study
When we were faced with the curriculum challenge of representing the

border study of science and science fiction, we considered the ways in
which the genre could be pared down into six modules of study, two
at each of levels four, five and six. Like most of the modules listed in
the schema above, each science fiction module represented 20 credits
of study.
How then should we present the genre alongside science? Rather than
plumping for a linear, episodic or genre-oriented approach, our minds
were made up for us by the fact that many of the modules in the science
strand were already validated and running. So, the award was structured
in order that each cognate strand presents at each level modules whose
curriculum themes run concurrently with the other strand. In other
words, the themes and sub-themes presented in the science fiction
strand reflect the major themes of study in the science strand.
Consider Level 4 (Year One): the main themes in the science strand are
critical analyses of the nature and evolution of science. For example, the
module ‘Space I: Planets and Philosophy’ introduces the students to the
evolutionary role of planetary astronomy in the development of Western
thought. The students study a history and philosophy of scientific knowl-
edge, which demonstrates the importance of culture and anthropology to
a critical understanding of modern science. Thus, in ‘Space I’, the evolu-
tionary development of science is studied in a cultural context, from the
Greeks through the Renaissance and the determinism of the Newtonian
synthesis, to the indeterminate models of the twentieth century.
In ‘Space II’, the critical method and sceptical tradition of science is
presented by communicating not only the findings and products of sci-
ence, but also the actual, tortuous history of its great discoveries, along
with the frequent misapprehensions and occasional stubborn refusal by
its practitioners to change course. Scientific development is character-
ized by parallel acceptance (development) and denial (dogma). The stu-
dents are encouraged to realize that the popularizer and communicator
of science may use its history to enable communicants to distinguish
science from pseudoscience: the method of science is as important as
the findings of science. In ‘Earth Story’, the study of the home planet
enables the students to critically examine the various causes and proc-
esses, both proximate and ultimate, of globalization: human migration,
cultural and socio-political. Case study material allows the students
to understand the modern world’s inequalities without reverting to
Eurocentric or even racist stereotypes.
With the curriculum of the science strand in mind, the science fic-
tion strand introduces its concurrent themes against a changing socio-
scientific background. In ‘What is Science Fiction?’ we introduce the
themes and sub-themes to be studied in the strand, and in ‘Evolution
of Science Fiction’ present an examination of how science fiction has
critically perceived developments in science throughout its 500-year
history, particularly the last two centuries. The students are also intro-
duced to the necessary theory to enable an understanding of the sig-
nification of science fiction work. The strand offers a critical approach
to the question of science and culture, helping to promote the science
fiction strand as a forum for the award, an imaginative meeting place

where contrasting scientific and cultural theories converge.
In all modules students are expected to communicate clearly, both
verbally and in writing, and take responsibility for their own learning.
An ‘Independent Study’ module enables them to engage in an inde-
pendent study of a focused topic in greater breadth and depth than in
the main programme of taught modules. Use of tutorials and seminars
throughout encourages students to act as critics and analysts rather than
mere recipients of presented information, both scientific and cultural.

Stars, Science and the Bomb Utopias and Dystopias
Cosmology and Controversy Exploring Space and
Time
Exploring the Sky Independent Study
It is important to realize that science fiction is not ghettoized to the

science fiction strand itself. Many of the core science strand modules,
at all levels, use science fiction texts to complement, criticize and com-
municate the main science subjects under study.
For example, one of the main themes at Level 5 in the science strand
is the social responsibility of science and scientists. The module ‘Stars,
Science and the Bomb’ looks at the parallel development of stellar
nucleosynthesis and the hydrogen bomb in the first half of the twentieth
century. Many of the key players made major contributions to both stel-
lar evolution and the Manhattan project. Essentially, a star is a bomb that
goes off slowly. The role of Wells’s ‘The World Set Free’ is examined in the
module, as are the post-apocalyptic fictional commentaries of Pat Frank
(Alas, Babylon, 1959), Walter Miller Jr (A Canticle for Leibowitz, 1959),
Stanley Kubrick (Dr Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
the Bomb, 1964) and Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five, 1969).
Ominous trends in bomb theory and practice are also assessed in
terms of their influence on the socio-political landscape of the Cold War
epoch. These ideas sit very comfortably alongside the sister module,
‘Utopias and Dystopias’ which discusses, among other things, absolute
power and totalitarianism in society, and the rise of post-apocalyptic
fiction under McCarthyism and Stalinism.
The space race and subsequent space exploration are considered in this
political light and greatly inform the curriculum agenda in the science
fiction module, ‘Exploring Space and Time’. The module evaluates the
mechanics of spacetime travel, technically informed by the ‘Cosmology
and Controversy’ module in the science strand, which looks at the post-
war emergence of cosmology as a science, and the changing nature of
the concept of spacetime itself. ‘Exploring Space and Time’ also explores
the notion of space as an allegory of imperialist venture and the causal
relationships of spacetime travel as theorized within science and fiction.

Life in the Universe CyberScience
Project/Dissertation Quantum Worlds
A major part of Level 6 study is the concept of life, both natural and arti-
ficial. The astrobiology double module, ‘Life in the Universe’, is placed
in the science strand, but is a heady mix of the science and culture on
the questions of life. How has the concept of life changed? How will life
evolve in the future? Is there life on other planets? Indeed, what is the
future for life in the cosmos?
In recognition of the growing academic research status of astrobiol-
ogy, NASA established its Astrobiology Institute (NAI) in 1998 as one
element of its research programme. The NAI Roadmap outlines a net-
work of pathways for development among academic researchers world-
wide. The Roadmap includes a crucial societal and cultural dynamic,
recognizing the intrinsic public interest in astrobiology that offers an
opportunity to educate and inspire the next generation of citizens.
In a paper presented to the Astrobiology Science Conference at NASA
Ames in 2004, Sam Abrams and David Morrison surveyed 1364 science
departments in North American universities, yielding data on around
50 undergraduate courses on ‘life in the universe’. From the posted
curricula for these standard astrobiology courses, it was clear that the
question of alien life in philosophy, fiction and the imagination plays
an important part in these programmes. Furthermore, two members of
our teaching team, Mark Brake and Martin Griffiths, served for three
years as co-founders of the NAI science communication group. Through
the example of our own ‘Life in the Universe’ module, an Astrobiology
Communication Roadmap was developed, which explicitly recognizes
the innovative use of popular literature and film as a bridge to public
consciousness on the more reflective questions of astrobiology.
So, our ‘Life in the Universe’ module uses a blend of the science and
culture of astrobiology to look at the history and development of the
‘plurality of worlds’ tradition, informed and critical speculation on the
question of alien life, and visions of the future of human evolution. Key
cultural commentators are used, including Stapledon, Lem, Clarke and
Kubrick, and the Strugatsky brothers.
In light of these thoughts on life, the ‘CyberScience’ module critically
assesses the science and culture of intelligence, identity and conscious-
ness. Fictional speculation on the question of artificial intelligence is
considered alongside emergence, the way in which complex systems
and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.
This philosophical, systems theory approach is used to examine the
question of human intelligence and evolution.
‘Quantum Worlds’ looks at the relationship between quantum
mechanics and relativity theory and narrative structure within the
genre. Specifically, the module critically examines the influence of
quantum indeterminacy and the many worlds interpretation, and
its use in science fiction. A distinction is drawn between quantum-
influenced alternate timelines and the alternative history sub-genre,
which firmly locates a counterfactual history in a single past to cre-
ate long-term social speculations. Counterfactual works are examined
as an instance of an alternate timeline where only one such timeline
is portrayed. Parallels are drawn between historical sciences, such as
astronomy, cosmology and evolutionary biology, and this sense of past
and future history in science fiction. Life’s pathway on planet Earth is
considered as a single actualized history among millions of possibili-
ties. The students are encouraged to critically consider science fiction
as a serious creator of plausible futures, to examine the genre’s sense of
history and deliberations on the question of free will. Science fiction is
critically considered for the way in which it presents a different sense
of history to its readers.
The classroom experience
Amit and Maggie Goswami remind us that:
Science Fiction is that class of fiction which contains the currents

of change in science and society. It concerns itself with the critique,
extension, revision, and conspiracy of revolution, all directed against
static scientific paradigms. Its goal is to prompt a paradigm shift to a
new view that will be more responsive and true to nature.13
The traditional classroom experience has been based around a deficit

model of communication. The deficit model is focused on the idea that
teaching and communication in science seeks to overcome problems
caused primarily by a lack of adequate knowledge. Associated with this
idea is the contention that by providing ample information about sci-
ence we can surmount this ‘knowledge deficit’. In essence the model of
teaching associated with the deficit model is a linear model in which
information flows from the lecturer to the student whose comprehen-
sion is measured through the repetition of that information. The deficit
model of teaching (involving lectures, essays and exams) has been with
the formal Western model of education since its inception. Although
undergraduate teaching at Glamorgan had its origin within this system
we moved away from this in favour of a dialogue model of science com-
munication.
In this dialogue model (sometimes referred to as ‘the public opinion’
model), the key is democracy. The pivotal concept within a democracy
is public participation in all facets of discussion. The dialogue model of
science communication highlights the need to create venues and oppor-
tunities for discussion. It emphasizes the need for seminar-based work.
As part of the development of the teaching practice associated with the
undergraduate course in science and science fiction we responded to
this new model with a set of modules designed around the concept of
democracy. Students respond to the material being presented in a wide
variety of ways, with significant portions of their assessed work being in
the public realm (presentations and seminar discussions) as opposed to
private linear communication between teacher and student (essays).
Following from the success of this approach it was decided to take
things a stage further and adopt the deference model of science com-
munication as it can be applied to the teaching and classroom experi-
ence. We found that a paradigm shift to a new view that was more
responsive and true to nature was required. This third approach is ‘a
model of communication according to which scientists acknowledge
the value of, or “defer” to, the insights of other intellectual disciplines
and cultural activities on their own’.14 We found ourselves increasingly
moving towards this nexial approach in which we draw upon the expe-
rience and approaches of other academic fields. In particular science fic-
tion is ideally suited to this approach as the deference model ‘relates to
the possible contribution of arts, humanities, and social sciences to the
better understanding of science’s place within contemporary culture’.15
This deference model emphasized extending the communication of
science through the deficit model (of linear communication) and past
the dialogue model (in which student response is integrated into the
teaching) to a context in which students draw down their own experi-
ences to cascade an integrated and holistic synthesis into the learning
experience. The results were very encouraging. We found there was an
increase in cohort cohesion, the cross-pollination of ideas and mutual
support was developed, and a peer-enriched learning environment was
created.
Outcomes
The science and science fiction degree has now been taught for the best
part of a decade. We hope that the award has provided students with a
more dynamic and critical understanding of science than is normally
achieved in typical undergraduate programmes. A common feature of
the modules has been a multidisciplinary approach. The science fiction
modules, in particular, are delivered through the use of staff teaching
teams, giving students an experience of a variety of viewpoints from
contributing fields personified by informed experts from those fields.
The use of such staff teams has helped present the broadest possible
selection from the genre, producing intellectual versatility in graduates
and encouraging them to approach science from a range of different
theoretical viewpoints.
The exploration of the boundary study of science and science fiction
has engendered in the students an imaginative ability to communicate
the nature and evolution of science and science fiction, and their inter-
relationship. Witness to this observation are a number of graduates
who have proceeded to postgraduate study in communicating science.
Such graduates have a clear tendency for better imagination, articulacy
and comprehension of issues in science than their ‘lab rat’ counterparts
who have been educated through the more traditional route of science
undergraduate training.
On the eve of the millennium The Times asked a number of promi-
nent scientists to identify major issues in science leading into the
twenty-first century. Professor Susan Greenfield of Oxford University,
the first female head of the Royal Institution, suggested the scientific
breakthrough of the twenty-first century would be ‘The engagement of
the public in science and the expression of scientific ideas in a way they
can understand and contribute to.’
Our development of a border study in science and science fiction has
led to a number of further broad and positive outcomes in public out-
reach. The award team acted as educational consultants to the Science
Fiction Museum in Seattle on its launch in 2004. This is the world’s first
museum devoted to the ideas and experiences of the genre, carrying
exhibitions to promote appreciation and education of science fiction
media, while encouraging visitors to envision new futures for science
and humanity.
As was mentioned earlier, members of our teaching team were
among the co-founders of the NAI science communication group. This
cross-disciplinary service to the academic and wider communities has
provided an Astrobiology Communication Roadmap which clearly
identifies and encourages the use of science fiction for an effective and
broad communication of astrobiology across diverse audiences includ-
ing citizens, policymakers, administrators and sponsors.
The unusual nature and subsequent prominence of our programme
has also attracted the interest of a number of publishers, most nota-
bly Macmillan and the Science Museum in London. Consequently, a
number of book projects are planned which seek to further explore the
symbiosis of science and science fiction. The first of these, Brake and
Hook’s Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives
Science (2007) and FutureWorld: Where Science Fiction Becomes Science
(2008), have already been completed.
Finally, it is our contention that the border study of science and sci-
ence fiction can help demystify science, highlight its social and cultural
context, and act as a bridge to public consciousness on controversial
issues in the communication and control of science. In short, science
fiction can help to play an important part in bringing science out of the
laboratory and into the culture.
Notes
1. See www.imdb.com/boxoffice/alltimegross?region⫽world-wide (accessed 21
July 2009).
2. See Sir Ron Dearing, ‘Higher Education in the Learning Society’, National
Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (London: HMSO, 1997). An
electronic copy is available at www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/ (accessed
21 July 2009).
3. See Mark Brake, Martin Griffiths, Neil Hook and Steve Harris, ‘Alien Worlds:
Astrobiology and Public Outreach’, International Journal of Astrobiology, 5:4
(2006): 319–24.
4. Mark Brake’s relevant papers were ‘An Integrated, Interdisciplinary Astronomy
Teaching Programme’, presented at New Trends in Astronomy Teaching,
162nd Colloquium of the International Astronomical Union, London,
8–12 July 1996; and ‘An Interdisciplinary Approach at the University of
Glamorgan, UK’, presented at the Educational Symposium on Teaching
Astronomy to Non-Science Majors, at the 110th Annual Meeting of the

Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 25 June–1
July 1998.
5. The relevant papers and publications are: Mark Brake and Martin Griffiths,
‘Broad Horizons: SETI, Science Fiction, and Education’, proceedings of the
Bioastronomy and Fulbright Education Conference, Hamilton Island, Great
Barrier Reef, Australia, 8–12 July, 2002, later published in International Journal
of Astrobiology, 3:2 (2004): 175–81; Mark Brake, Rosi Thornton and Naomi
Turnbull, ‘“What if . . . ?”: Science Fiction and PCST’, paper presented at
the 8th International Conference on Public Communication of Science and
Technology, Scientific Knowledge & Cultural Diversity, Barcelona, Spain, 3–6
June 2004; Mark Brake and Martin Griffiths, ‘Alien Worlds – Astrobiology
& Public Outreach’, NASA Astrobiology Institute Conference, University of
Colorado, Boulder, 10–14 April 2005; Mark Brake, Neil Hook, Rosi Thornton,
Naomi Turnbull and Kathryn Williams, ‘The Counterfactual Classroom’,
paper presented at the 26th Eaton Conference ‘Inventing the 21st Century:
Many Worlds, Many Histories’, Seattle, 5–7 May 2005; Mark Brake, Martin
Griffiths and Neil Hook, ‘Astrobiology and the Curriculum’, paper presented
at UKAC06 ‘Life Here, There and Everywhere’ Conference, University of
Kent, 18–21 April 2006.
6. See, for examples, Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree: The
History of Science Fiction (London: Gollancz, 1986) and Darko Suvin, Positions
and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988).
7. Judith Merril, ‘What Do You Mean: Science? Fiction?’, in Thomas D.
Clareson, ed., SF: The Other Side of Realism (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling
Green University Press, 1971) 53–95 at 60.
8. Sam Moskowitz, Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction (New York:
Hyperion, 1963) 11.
9. Joanna Russ, To Write Like A Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) 7.
10. Patrick Parrinder, Science Fiction: A Critical Guide (London: Longman, 1979)
67.
11. Russ, To Write Like A Woman, 12.
12. Ibid., 6.
13. Amit Goswami and Maggie Goswami, The Cosmic Dancers: The Science in
Science Fiction (Columbus, OH: McGraw-Hill, 1985) 2.
14. Brian Trench and Kirk W. Junker, ‘Scientists’ View of Public Communication’,
proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Public Communication
of Science and Technology, Trends in Science Communication Today:
Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice, Geneva, 1–3 February 2001.
Available at www.cern.ch/pcst2001/programme.html (accessed 21 July
2009).
15. See ibid.
13
Design, Delivery and Evaluation
Developing and delivering a course in science fiction poses opportuni-

ties and challenges, particularly to the lecturer or instructor undertaking
such a venture for the first time. Accordingly, this chapter addresses
some of the factors relevant to the construction of a science fiction
course whilst offering practical guidance on syllabus structure, modes
of teaching and possible forms of assessment. It is not, in any way,
intended to be prescriptive. Rather, it highlights a number of approaches
and strategies valued by the contributors to the current volume.
Designing a science fiction module
Given the wealth of primary material available, one of the key chal-
lenges for lecturers and instructors developing a course in science fic-
tion is shaping an appropriate curriculum. The selection of primary
texts depends, of course, on one’s purpose in teaching a science fiction
course in the first place. Curriculum content will necessarily reflect the
lecturer’s or instructor’s intention. The fecundity of science fiction will
satisfy a variety of academic objectives; whether the lecturer’s or instruc-
tor’s aim is to familiarize students with the historical development of
sf, to undertake a genre-based or modal approach, to adopt a specific
ideological stance to the literature (a feminist or postcolonial position,
for example), or to employ an intertextual or megatextual study trac-
ing a particular science fictional concept through its various historical
and/or formal manifestations.
In Inside Science Fiction (2nd edn, 2006) James Gunn, almost certainly
the person with the greatest experience of teaching sf still engaged in
the practice, notes that when he began offering sf courses in 1969 he
identified four ways of tackling the task.1 The first was a ‘great books’
219
approach, wherein attention was given to significant novels or stories

and to analysing what made them ‘great’. This method is not only selec-
tive but subjective. Nevertheless, the debates that are likely to arise from
the presentation of a particular text as a ‘great’ work of science fiction
will provide considerable learning opportunities. The themes of the
course could encompass the literary canon, alternative canonization,
the classification of, and tensions existing between, literature and para-
literature within the academy and popular culture, the historic/generic/
modal/thematic qualities of sf, and literary and cultural marginalization
both within and outside science fiction itself.
Gunn’s second approach was a focus upon the ideas in sf: ‘How SF
stories can be used to dramatise contemporary problems or to encour-
age critical thought.’2 Here, Gunn’s strategy inevitably leads to an
exploration of the ideology both in and of science fiction. In any discus-
sion of the representation of possible futures, new technologies or alien
encounters, there is the understanding that such representations are
ideologically inflected. Why, scholars and students might feel entitled
to ask, are the futures envisaged in so much science fiction the appar-
ent property of one particular version of human culture? If there is, as
many have claimed, a megatext or ‘default future’ in science fiction,
has this made it more difficult, rather than easier, for dissenting voices
to be heard? In Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000) Carl Freedman
argues that critical theory and sf share a similar ‘project’ of explaining or
at least demystifying the world. How that demystification or explana-
tion is achieved inevitably requires an interrogation of the assumptions,
prejudices and alternate voices of science fiction.
Gunn’s third method acknowledged the possibility of teaching
another subject – physics, biology, history, sociology, politics, religion –
by considering how these subjects had been treated in science fiction.
This is not uncommon, particularly in the United States. Leroy Dubeck,
for example, was a pioneer in the early 1990s in using sf films to teach
science, a practice that resulted in Dubeck, Moshier and Boss’s Fantastic
Voyages: Learning Science through Science Fiction Films (1994).3 In Teaching
Science Fact with Science Fiction (2004), R. Gary Raham offers resources
and lesson plans for American High School teachers intent on the same
strategy.4 Gregory Benford, in Gunn, Barr and Candelaria’s Reading
Science Fiction (2008) describes how physics can be examined effectively
through the employment of science fiction.5 A representative example
of this use of science fiction is outlined in Chapter 12 of the current
volume. In the majority of cases, however, science fiction courses are
provided within English departments with a largely literary focus.
Design, Delivery and Evaluation 221
Gunn’s fourth approach returned critical attention to the literature

itself by first analysing the nature of contemporary sf and then con-
sidering how it reached that point; it is, in effect, a historical course
structured using a reverse chronology. It is a method not uncommon
in some first-year literature survey courses which begin with contempo-
rary literature and work back through Modernism, Victorian literature
and so forth. Gunn’s own teaching, as he describes it, drew upon the
first, second and fourth categories; that is, on using ‘great’ books to
explore sf historically and ideologically.
Gunn’s influence can be readily observed in a number of undergradu-
ate sf courses delivered by contributors to this volume. Chris Ferns, for
example, adopts an approach comparable to Gunn’s in the sf course he
teaches at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In
the introductory material he provides for his students, he identifies four
central topics:
1 The emergence of science fiction as a distinct genre, and its rela-

tion to the fears and anxieties aroused by social and technological
change. Does science fiction offer a critique, or a celebration of the
notion of progress?
2 The implications of new technologies – genetic engineering, bio-
technology, artificial intelligence – for our understanding of what
constitutes the human. How is our concept of ‘humanity’ in fact
constructed?
3 Issues of gender and its representation in a genre which has his-
torically been dominated by male authors. In what ways does sci-
ence fiction either challenge, or reinscribe conventional gender
stereotypes?
4 The ideological implications of narrative. What sorts of stories do
writers choose to tell about the worlds they imagine? What ideologi-
cal assumptions do these stories imply?
In order to address these questions, Ferns constructs a syllabus accord-

ing to the ‘great’ book criteria identified by Gunn:
Mary Shelley Frankenstein (rev. edn, 1831)

H.G. Wells The Time Machine (1895)
H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds (1898)
Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932)
Stanislaw Lem Solaris (1961)
Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Ursula K. Le Guin The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

William Gibson Neuromancer (1984)
Michael Crichton Jurassic Park (1990)
Marge Piercy He, She and It (1991)
Rob Latham at the University of California, Riverside, teaches two sf

courses: ‘The History of SF’ and the more focused ‘Topics in SF’, the
thematic content of which varies from semester to semester. As Latham
points out,
My ‘History of SF’ class is a large class (around 100 students), con-

ducted in lecture format and … assumes the students have no previous
acquaintance with the genre. I do use the first day’s session, however,
getting them to volunteer – or just call out – their own ideas about
what the characteristics of a genre called ‘science fiction’ might be,
and it is clear they know some basics (at least from media culture):
it’s about future societies, alien beings, new technologies, space travel,
etc. My selection of texts covers the field from Wells to roughly the
present, with units on the early pulps, the Golden Age, the 1950s,
the New Wave, feminist SF, and cyberpunk. I do try and pursue the-
matic threads: sometimes, I only use texts that deal with the theme of
‘artificial persons’ broadly construed, starting with Wells’s The Island
of Doctor Moreau (1896) and running through Asimov’s I, Robot (coll.
1950) to the cyborgs of Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). We read novels
and stories, and I try to make them representative of major authors.
More specialized is Latham’s ‘Topics in SF’ class, which ‘is designed for
English majors only. It also assumes no prior knowledge of the field,
though having taken my “History of SF” class helps. Its content varies
by thematic emphasis or historical focus: I have taught a class on the
New Wave under this rubric, for example, and hope to teach a class on
“Gender and Sexuality in SF” soon.’
M. Elizabeth Ginway’s course is also historical, running from
Wells to Gibson, broadly speaking, which assumes no previous

knowledge and which, in its selection of texts, provides students
with at least two texts from different periods that are thematically,
conceptually and/or historically related; e.g. for time travel we con-
sider Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and Moorcock’s ‘Behold the
Man’ (1966); for gender Lester Del Rey’s ‘Helen O’Loy’ (1938) and
James Tiptree Jr’s ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ (1973).
Such a preponderance of historically structured courses does not reflect

a lack of imagination amongst teachers, but the recognition of the ben-
efits of a coherent historical structure to students new to the subject. Of
course, the historical approach to curriculum design presupposes that
there is a coherent and consistent literature that can be termed ‘science
fiction’, that it can easily be identified, and that it has a recognizable
history that can be traced from one historical period to the next. Such
assumptions are not necessarily to be trusted and are certainly the
basis of academic debate – as the chapters in this book have indicated.
Nevertheless, for undergraduates often unfamiliar with science fiction
beyond its cinematic and televisual manifestations, the historically
structured course provides a convenient framework that leaves open the
possibility of contesting its assumptions which, by postgraduate level,
students should certainly be invited to do.
Of course, the essential decision in formulating any course is the
choice of an appropriate (depending on purpose) starting point. For
sf, Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Wells’s The Time Machine (1895),
Gernsback’s first Amazing Stories (1926) or even More’s Utopia (1516)
can all be claimed as seminal texts, but the courses that evolved from
each could be significantly different in content and nuance as a conse-
quence of that initial discriminatory selection. Whatever starting point
is chosen, the judicious selection of subsequent texts can render a his-
torically-structured course a rich learning experience capable of famil-
iarizing students with the themes, concerns and concepts pertinent to
a broader understanding of the subject. The following table sets out a
course, based on a twelve-week semester, that attempts to ensure such
a learning experience.
The first week of the module is designed to introduce students to the
discourse of science fiction by identifying it in the context of the fantas-
tic (Vance’s ‘Turjan of Miir’ and Weis and Hickman’s appendix to Dragon
Wing). The extracts from Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of
the Conciliator facilitate students’ understanding of sf by exploring the
discourse of science fantasy or rationalized fantasy. Finally, ‘The Woman
Who Loved the Centaur Pholus’ assists the students’ comprehension of
sf’s rationalist perspective and the ways in which language is employed
to construct its sense of rational speculation. Brian Attebery’s Strategies
of Fantasy (1992), Damien Broderick’s ‘SF as Generic Engineering’6 and
Mendlesohn’s ‘Introduction’ to The Cambridge Companion to Science
Fiction (2003) provide useful critical starting points for undergraduates.
Wells’s The Time Machine is an ideal text for offering students addi-
tional contextual material relating to utopian and anti-utopian fiction
224
Table 13.1 Proposal for a 12-week semester sf course
Week Topic Text(s)

1. What is ‘Science Fiction’? Jack Vance, ‘Turjan of Miir’, from The Dying Earth (1950)
Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, ‘Magic from the Sundered Realms:
Excerpt from a Sartan’s Musings’, appendix to Dragon Wing (1990)
Gene Wolfe, extracts from The Shadow of the Torturer (1980) and The Claw
of the Conciliator (1981) and ‘The Woman Who Loved the Centaur Pholus’
(1979)
2. The Strange and the Familiar: Cognitive H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895)
Estrangement and Utopianism
3. Pulp Science Fiction E.R. Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (1912/1917)
Hugo Gernsback, extracts from Ralph 124C 41⫹ (1925)
L. Taylor Hansen, ‘The Undersea Tube’ (1929) John W. Campbell, ‘Twilight’
(1934)
4. The Golden Age Lester del Rey, ‘Helen O’Loy’ (1938)
Robert A. Heinlein, ‘The Roads Must Roll’ (1940)
Isaac Asimov, ‘Liar’ (1941)
A.E. Van Vogt, ‘The Weapon Shop’ (1942)
5. The Iconography of SF Arthur C. Clarke, The City and the Stars (1956)
6. British SF 1: Science Fiction and the John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (1951)
Catastrophe J.G. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964)
Charles Platt, ‘The Disaster Story’ (1966)
7. British SF 2: The New Wave Langdon Jones, ‘I Remember Anita’ (1964)
Michael Moorcock, ‘Symbols for the Sixties’ (1965) and ‘Behold the Man’
(1966)
J.G. Ballard, ‘You and Me and the Continuum’ (1966)
Pamela Zoline, ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’ (1967)
8. Divine Madness: Philip K. Dick Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
9. Encountering the Alien: Colonialism, Harry Harrison, ‘The Streets of Ashkelon’ (1965)
Postcolonialism and Science Fiction Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head of Cerberus: Three Novellas (1972)
Carole McDonnell, ‘Lingua Franca’ (2004)
10. Feminism and SF C.L. Moore, ‘No Woman Born’ (1944)
Judith Merril, ‘That Only a Mother’ (1948)
Joanna Russ, ‘When It Changed’ (1972)
James Tiptree Jr, ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ (1973)
11. Cyberpunk and Postmodern SF Bruce Sterling, ‘Introduction’ to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986)
William Gibson, ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ (1981), ‘The Gernsback Continuum’
(1981) and ‘Burning Chrome’ (1985)
12. Contemporary SF Variable
225
while introducing them to Suvin’s concepts of the novum and of sci-

ence fiction as cognitive estrangement. Freed from Suvin’s rather lim-
iting Marxist application, cognitive estrangement – and the forms of
estranging effect found in sf – affords students a key critical framework
from which to read science fiction. Equally, the idea of the novum
focuses attention on how sf texts can be interpreted as thought experi-
ments dramatizing social, political and historic concerns. Additionally,
Wells’s Time Traveller’s efforts to comprehend the social structure and
socio-political history of the year 802,701 dramatize the reading strate-
gies and protocols, so often based upon contingency, that individuals
employ when reading sf. Teaching The Time Machine – in part – as a
metafiction can be useful in alerting students to how they read, or are
learning to read, sf.
In weeks 3–4, the course introduces students to the origins of American
sf, stressing the importance of the pulp and magazine years. The stories
and extracts selected introduce pulp sensationalism and the influence
of the ‘Machine Age’ (Ralph 124C 41⫹), the separation and gradual
reconciliation of scientific and literary discourses (notably through
‘The Undersea Tube’ and ‘The Roads Must Roll’), the influence of Wells
(Campbell’s ‘Twilight’), the significance to American sf of two key edi-
tors: Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell, and the political pos-
sibilities and limitations of the genre in its masculine North American
context (Heinlein, Asimov and van Vogt). Readings from Westfahl’s The
Mechanics of Wonder (1999) and Ashley’s The Time Machines: The Story of
the Science Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950 (2000) make
available reliable historical material. Westfahl’s Hugo Gernsback and
the Century of Science Fiction (2007) and Albert Berger’s The Magic That
Works: John W. Campbell and the American Response to Technology (1993)
give additional insights into these two seminal figures while Thomas
D. Clareson’s Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The
Formative Period 1926–1970 (1990) presents a good assessment of the
nature of pulp and Golden Age sf.
Week 5, which takes its critical approach from Gary K. Wolfe’s The
Known and the Unknown: The Icons of Science Fiction (1979), allows stu-
dents to reflect back on their learning at this mid-point whilst acquiring
an additional mode of (structuralist) interpretation readily applicable to
Clarke’s The City and the Stars. Clarke’s novel provides a series of reso-
nant and multivalent icons (the spaceship, the city, the wasteland, the
robot, the monster) all of which are discussed by Wolfe. Extracts from
The Known and the Unknown draw attention not only to the strategies
available for interpreting these resonant icons but also to each icon’s
dynamic and ideologically rich potential. As a consequence the stories

considered in weeks 3–4 obtain new interpretative possibilities as stu-
dents can reassess, for example, the robot (‘Helen O’Loy’, ‘Liar’), the
city (‘Twilight’, ‘The Roads Must Roll’) and the monster (A Princess of
Mars).
Clarke’s novel also represents a turning point in the course as attention
shifts from American to British sf. Although The City and the Stars bor-
rows much of its iconography from American sf and, indeed, its narra-
tive structure adheres to the expansive nature common to the American
context, its initial tone – often melancholic and elegiac – is distinctly
British. As such, it prepares students for the more pessimistic nature of
much British sf of the 1950s–1970s. Week 6 addresses a key theme in
British sf: catastrophe. Antecedents for the disaster fiction of Wyndham
and Ballard include Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Shelley’s
The Last Man (1826) and Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901). The selection
of texts above (possibly supplemented with extracts from Defoe, Shelley
and Shiel where appropriate) make available a compressed history of
the form in the last half of the twentieth century which ranges from
the comparatively straightforward recovery narrative of The Day of the
Triffids to the physical and psychical catastrophes of Ballard’s nuclear-
inspired story to Platt’s satiric treatment of the form, which exposes the
tradition’s conventions with stark and often bitter brevity.
Ballard’s story and Platt’s critical metafiction prepare students for
a week considering New Wave science fiction and its self-conscious
opposition to the characteristics – thematic, conceptual, ideological – of
American sf. Following Moorcock’s manifesto, ‘Symbols for the Sixties’,
each story selected draws attention to at least one of the New Wave’s
principle preoccupations. American writer Pamela Zoline’s ‘The Heat
Death of the Universe’ brings the New Wave’s fascination with entropic
dissolution into the domestic sphere to explore in a strongly feminist
narrative the meaningless routine, expectations and pressures placed
on a wife and mother. Moorcock’s irreverent retelling of the crucifixion
in ‘Behold the Man’ draws attention to the New Wave’s preoccupation
with psychology or ‘inner space’. The novella is likely to provoke con-
siderable debate amongst students surprised by its treatment of faith,
myth, self-delusion and sacrifice. It is also a useful contextualizing
exercise to trace the controversy that followed this story and Jones’s
soft-core, post-apocalyptic tale, ‘I Remember Anita’, in New Worlds’
letters pages and editorials. The responses therein highlight the con-
temporary conservatism of sf and its readership and frame distinctly
the conventions and attitudes Moorcock was prepared to challenge. For
investigating the stylistic experimentation of the New Wave, Ballard’s

‘You and Me and the Continuum’ is an instructive example. Ballard’s
‘condensed novel’ provides an elegant puzzle in the form of twenty-
seven paragraphs, each subtitled with a heading that begins with the
successive letter of the alphabet following an ‘Author’s Note’. It is ‘A.N.
A–Z’ in which the reader has the opportunity to reconstruct the decon-
structed, ‘condensed’ narrative in a variety of possible ways. As such,
it is a valuable text for assisting students in reflecting on the activity
of reading in both sf and wider contexts, in highlighting how mean-
ing is, and can be structured, and in underlining the writerly – in the
Barthesian sense – aspects of sf.
Such an awareness is vital for the consideration of the demanding
fiction of Philip K. Dick and Gene Wolfe. Dick’s writing again allows stu-
dents to reflect on their learning, particularly their understanding of the
icon of the robot and the role of entropy, while drawing attention to the
possible importance of a writer’s philosophical beliefs and other auto-
biographical details. The questions underpinning Dick’s work – what
is real? And what makes us human? – can generate significant debate,
particularly through Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Studying Dick,
however briefly, also encourages students to explore the extensive criti-
cal literature available on him, and to observe how a single author can
sustain a considerable critical industry and assist in the acceptance of sf
as a serious literature within the academy.
Weeks 9–11 read sf through three key critical discourses: postcolonial
theory, Anglo-American feminism and postmodernism. In Week 9, stu-
dents are introduced to three narratives dramatizing the consequences
of human colonization on indigenous alien populations. All address
and/or problematize key colonial and postcolonial concepts, includ-
ing the notion of aboriginal peoples, primitivism, the binary logic of
imperialism, the concept of colonial discourse, mimicry and hybrid-
ity. In Mehan’s taxonomy as presented in Chapter 10, Harrison’s ‘The
Streets of Ashkelon’ is an excellent example of colonial science fiction
and Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus: Three Novellas an equally valu-
able instance of dissident sf. Together, they provide a fruitful contrast.
Harrison sees the commercial exploitation of an indigenous people as
acceptable – even excusable – and religious conversion as culturally,
spiritually and psychically damaging. The story reinforces the binarism
underpinning colonial discourse whilst implicitly defending capital-
ist exploitation. Wolfe’s novellas, on the other hand, deconstruct the
binarism of colonial discourse to raise broader philosophical and politi-
cal questions regarding identity, memory, culture and miscegenation.
Carole McDonnell’s distinctly postcolonial ‘Lingua Franca’ (2004) is

much more direct in its critique of colonialism and cultural imperial-
ism than Wolfe’s elliptical, writerly text. On an obliquely described
alien world, ‘Earthers’ surgically alter the silent, indigenous popula-
tion to encourage them to communicate verbally in English rather
than through the sophisticated system of sign language they have
traditionally employed. The Earthers’ motivation is purely commercial;
their objectives typical of any imperial enterprise: assimilation and
exploitation. Recounted through an alien perspective, McDonnell’s
story illustrates, by paradoxical inversion, how the Earthers steal the
population’s authentic ‘voice’. They alienate the younger generation
from their elders – here represented elegiacally through a mother-child
relationship – and instigate an irrevocable change to their culture. As
such ‘Lingua Franca’ forms a stark contrast with Harrison’s naive repre-
sentation of capitalism as comparatively benign.
Additional pertinent primary material can be found in Sheree
Thomas’s edited collections, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction
from the African Diaspora (2000) and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones
(2004). In terms of relevant texts, Patricia Kerslake’s Science Fiction and
Empire (2007) and John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science
Fiction (2008) provide genre-specific starting points, but the wealth of
theoretical writing available on colonialism and postcolonial theory
provides students with the opportunity to apply a non-sf related critical
discourse to science fiction in new and intellectually stimulating ways.
Introductory texts include John McLeod’s Beginning Postcolonialism
(2000), Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s Postcolonial
Studies: The Key Concepts (2nd edn, 2007) and Barbara Bush’s Imperialism
and Postcolonialism (2006). These are all helpful starting points, but
students should also be encouraged to engage with Franz Fanon’s Black
Skin, White Masks (1952) (which is particularly relevant to The Fifth Head
of Cerberus), Edward Said’s Orientialism: Western Conceptions of the Orient
(1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), and, more specifically, Philip
D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins’s edited volume, Black Experience and the
Empire (2004).
Similarly, the week dedicated to feminist sf enables students to use
critical frameworks and concepts drawn from cultural and literary
studies in the study of science fiction. Most importantly, it encourages
students to recognize the potential of sf for envisioning and advocating
feminist objectives. From around 1970 (when Joanna Russ published
her influential essay ‘The Image of Women in Science Fiction’ ) feminist
critics have continued to explore the role of women as readers and
writers of science fiction, the influence of feminist theory on writers

and their works, and the way sf, especially in its utopian form, could
address matters of concern to women.
James Tiptree Jr’s ‘The Women Men Don’t See’, with its incisive,
sophisticated treatment of women’s objectification and alienation, forms
a valuable link between postcolonial sf and feminist sf, focusing as it
does on othering and otherness. With its male/female persona-slippage
reverberating between the author’s pseudonym, her real identity as Alice
B. Sheldon, her authorship of genuinely feminist stories within her ‘male’
perspective, the ineluctably masculine tone of her writing, her bisexuality,
and the stark viewpoints expressed within the story, ‘The Women Men
Don’t See’ remains highly pertinent and is capable of sparking off heated
debates. A useful teaching strategy is to ask, after discussing the story,
how many of the group are aware that the author was in fact a woman.
(With a following supplementary question about whether this actually
matters.) Similar questions could be applied to L. Taylor Hansen’s ‘The
Undersea Tube’, if the tutor has not already disclosed Hansen’s identity.
Tiptree’s critique of male attitudes toward women and to female
alienation can be developed through Moore’s earlier ‘No Woman Born’,
which addresses themes including the construction of women under
patriarchy, female identity and the nature of humanness. It can be read
productively in the context of Donna Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs:
Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century’ (1985) and in response to Del Rey’s ‘Helen O’Loy’. Both stories
focus on the social construction of gender through the metaphor of
the robot/cyborg yet approach their topic from very different perspec-
tives. Merril’s ‘That Only a Mother’ and Russ’s ‘When It Changed’ are
both important texts for considering gender roles, subjectivities and the
impact of male perspectives on female–child relations. Key critical read-
ing for the week could include selections from Justine Larbalestier’s The
Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (2007), Lisa Yaszek’s Galactic Suburbia:
Recovering Women’s Science Fiction (2008) and Brian Attebery’s Decoding
Gender in Science Fiction (2002).
In Week 11, the course turns its attention to cyberpunk, perhaps the
latest re-invigoration science fiction has experienced, a new New Wave
equally preoccupied with contemporary relevance and literary style,
although it rejected the more extreme experimentations of the 1960s.
Sterling’s ‘Introduction’ to Mirrorshades provides a useful starting point
and, although it documents contemporary changes in sf rather than
setting out a manifesto in the manner of Moorcock’s ‘Symbols of the
Sixties’, it points to the association between the two phenomena and the
debt owed by cyberpunk writers to the New Wave and Philip K. Dick.
Although Gibson’s Neuromancer is the most perceptible cyberpunk text,
his stories are condensed treatments of cyberpunk’s key preoccupations:
artificial intelligence, bodily invasion and physical augmentation by
technology, the interface of the human brain with digital information
systems, the effects of global capitalism, street culture and criminality,
all conveyed on a jetstream of hardboiled prose and punk aesthetics.
Gibson’s stories permit sufficient space for a discussion of these concepts
and cyberpunk’s ambivalence towards the interface between human and
machine. Given Western humanity’s growing reliance upon informa-
tion technology, a fact readily apparent to students who understand
the benefits and hazards of the internet, cyberpunk generally fosters
considerable discussion and debate regarding the growing intimacy in
the relationship between the human and the machine. Scott Bukatman’s
Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (1993),
Dani Cavallaro’s Cyberpunk and Cyberculture (2000) and McCaffery’s
Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science
Fiction (1991) all provide possibilities for key critical reading.
The topic of the final week of any science fiction module is likely
to undergo annual or biannual revision to accommodate discernible
shifts in the literature. Possible candidates include ‘mundane sf’, a
form founded by Geoff Ryman which eschews scientific improbabili-
ties (interstellar travel, particularly) in favour of credible technological
speculation. Ryman’s Air (2005) or When It Changed: Science into Fiction
(2009), a collection of mundane sf stories edited by Ryman, are appro-
priate texts. When It Changed is of particular interest given that each
story is written following advice from a scientist who then explains the
plausibility of the story in an accompanying endnote. As a concept,
mundane sf is valuable for encouraging students to reflect back on the
course and consider the representation of technology, technological
speculation and technological change throughout twentieth century
science fiction. Such (re-)contextualization also reinvigorates debates
regarding the relationship between science fiction and the fantastic and
the role of technological rationalization within sf.
The discrete borders implied by generic classification can also be ques-
tioned in a final session on the ‘New Weird’, an often stylistically and
conceptually sophisticated literature displaying a synthesis of tropes
and conventions from sf, the fantastic and horror fiction. Jeff and
Ann Vandermeer’s anthology The New Weird (2008) provides a range
of representative texts from Michael Moorcock, China Miéville, Clive
Barker and Hal Duncan. Alternatively, Jeff Vandermeer’s City of Saints
and Madmen (2004) or Miéville’s Iron Council (2005) are accomplished

and instructive examples of the form, although these lengthy novels
may increase a students’ workload unnecessarily. In either case, the New
Weird highlights the fluidity of the conventions of popular fiction and
reminds students that literature is a dynamic medium, shifting, synthe-
sizing and engaging in aesthetic and conceptual dialogue.
Accordingly, a thoughtfully structured historical survey course can
avoid the compartmentalizing effects of concentrating on historical peri-
ods by drawing out connections across the semester using themes, icons,
approaches to representation (of gender, of the alien, of political systems
and so forth), and the contextual and megatextual qualities of individual
narratives. With sufficient primary reading, lecturers and instructors can
direct students to reflect back on the course to reconsider sf modally;
that is, to readdress what can be encompassed within the term ‘science
fiction’ or ‘speculative fiction’. Through the judicious selection of pri-
mary material, the historical course can equally draw attention to the
many different voices that ‘speak’ science fiction. A year-long course
would obviously provide greater opportunity for listening to these voices
more intently. Feminist sf could be explored to a greater depth through
selections from Pamela Sargeant’s Women of Wonder anthologies (most
recently Women of Wonder, the Classic Years: Science Fiction by Women
from the 1940s to the 1970s and Women of Wonder, the Contemporary Years:
Science Fiction by Women from the 1970s to the 1990s, both 1995). Equally,
European sf could be incorporated more readily to balance the largely
Anglo-American bias of the course outlined above. James Morrow and
Kathryn Morrow’s anthology, The SFWA European Hall of Fame: Sixteen
Contemporary Masterpieces of Science Fiction from the Continent (2008),
provides a useful source that can be supplemented with fiction by Jules
Verne, Stanislaw Lem and others. Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-
Gavilán’s Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America
and Spain (2003) is equally important, collecting stories that range his-
torically from the 1860s to 2001 from countries including Mexico, Brazil,
Argentina and Spain. In selecting from these anthologies, the tutor can
expose certain assumptions, the most common (and dangerous) being
that there is a single coherent narrative of science fiction.
Delivering a science fiction module
Clearly, any historical course must acknowledge that while sf is, as a

branch of literature, subject to exactly the same theoretical approaches
(Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, and so forth) as other literary
texts, its criticism – to a greater degree than that of other popular fic-
tional forms – has engaged in a distinct argument with traditional liter-
ary studies. This argument is primarily against the idea of the canon
and the liberal-humanist approach of studying the ‘best’ and arguably
most appropriate texts. Sf criticism might argue that the most central
texts are not necessarily the ‘best’ in conventional literary terms. For
example, in The Mechanics of Wonder Gary Westfahl argues strongly
that the ‘tawdry illiterate’7 Ralph 124C 41⫹ by Hugo Gernsback is one
of modern sf’s most important documents. Inevitably, the historical sf
course – and most courses that purport to explore science fiction repre-
sentatively – will engage with such fiction. In some cases literature stu-
dents more familiar with Austen, Dickens, Eliot and Joyce – or Melville,
Whitman, Dickinson and Wharton – will take considerable persuasion
to accept that it is perfectly appropriate to study Ralph since they often
view it with the condescension usually reserved for comic books or soap
operas. Alternatively, they may feel that they ought to value (and treat)
it as a ‘literary text’ because it is on an academic syllabus. When they
discover that it does not conform to any literary standards with which
they are familiar, they have little idea how to approach it.
Overcoming any student’s dismissal, distaste or confusion when
encountering sf for the first time, or when first experiencing sf’s histori-
cal, literary and/or cultural diversity, can be challenging. Many students,
schooled in the reading protocols appropriate to the literary canon, sim-
ply do not comprehend how to read science fiction. Recognizing this
fact is the first step in engaging students and diffusing any resistance
or cynicism one might encounter in seminars. In his excellent Science
Fiction in the Twentieth Century (1994), Edward James draws a distinction
between the ‘mainstream’, which he takes to be ‘synonymous with “the
modern novel”, “the contemporary novel”, the novel as taken seriously
by the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books’ and
science fiction.8 Acknowledging that his observations reflect ‘generali-
ties’, James provides a series of contrasts between the mainstream and
science fiction.9 These are summarized in Table 13.2.
As a consequence of these differences, readers new to sf often require
assistance in developing reading protocols appropriate to an under-
standing of the formal qualities of the subject. As James points out, ‘One
of the problems for the non-sf reader approaching an sf book is that a
different style of reading is involved from that encountered in most
“mainstream” fiction.’10
The delivery of any sf course needs to take this observation into
account. An early introduction to Darko Suvin’s conception of science
Table 13.2 Contrasting ‘mainstream’ and science fiction
‘Mainstream’ fiction Science fiction

The subject matter of mainstream The subject matter of science
fiction focuses on human fiction concentrates on the created
personalities and human environment and the interaction of
relationships. characters with that environment.
Provides perceptions of, or Speculates about human potential and
perspectives on, the human psyche. humanity’s position within the cosmos
‘either with serious extrapolative intent
or playfully’.a
Traditionally set in the world as Usually set in or on worlds that
experienced. have been altered in either minor or
significant ways.
Usually located in the writer’s Often set in the future and/or on other
present in a recognizable worlds or on Earths rendered radically
geographical location. different by time, technology and
so on.
The readers of mainstream fiction Science fiction readers can make no
can assume that they know how such assumption. They must construct
the world works, that they ‘share a and revise their conception of the
knowledge of the background to the fictional world as they glean more
narrative with the author’.b information from the events of the
narrative.
Mainstream fiction generally Frequently science fiction is ‘more
concentrates on individual characters concerned with the individual as a
and their personal development. representative of humanity as a whole
than with the individual’s particular
quirks’.c Sf is often more interested
in the fate of groups, populations or
species than of individuals.
Notes: (a) James, Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, 96; (b) ibid.; (c) ibid., 97.
fiction as ‘cognitive estrangement’ is therefore essential. Admittedly, the

totality of Suvin’s The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) might be
somewhat indigestible to many undergraduates. Nevertheless, it is pos-
sible to extract two key statements. The first, that ‘SF is a literary genre
whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and inter-
action of estrangement and cognition and whose main formal device
is an imaginative alternative to the author’s empirical experience’11
reassures the unfamiliar reader that the often dizzying sense of defa-
miliarization found in sf is a formal quality of the material. Sf’s various
estranging effects can form a coherent series of seminar exercises, where
students could be encouraged to identify and critique an author’s use
of historical estrangement (through alternative histories or extrapolated

futures), unfamiliar environments, defamiliarizing language, techno-
logical innovations, evolutionary changes and so forth, all of which are
available for decoding.
Estrangement is something to be expected and it underpins sf’s
cognitive dimension. Indeed, as James indicates, sf’s ‘main subject’
is cognition, ‘the process of acquiring knowledge and of reason’.12
Recognizing these qualities, and experiencing their effects through an
appropriate text situated early in the course – Wells’s The Time Machine
is extremely useful in this instance – prepares the reader for the more
extreme estrangement found in subsequent narratives (Wolfe’s The Fifth
Head of Cerberus: Three Novellas, for example, or Gibson’s cyberpunk
stories). Suvin’s second observation, that ‘SF is distinguished by the nar-
rative dominance or hegemony of a fictional “novum” (novelty, inno-
vation) validated cognitive logic’13 alerts the reader to the centrality of
ideas – speculations, innovations, subjunctivity – in science fiction. The
notion of ‘the idea as hero’ in science fiction, a concept advanced by
Kingsley Amis in New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960), one
of the earliest scholarly treatments of sf, remains pertinent. Although
a proportion of science fiction has increasingly reflected literary aspi-
rations regarding character development and style (particularly after
the New Wave and the emergence of feminist sf), the novum remains
central to sf’s formal qualities. Again, Wells’s The Time Machine provides
an accessible example, with the eponymous craft and the denuded
world of 802,701 providing hegemonic innovations requiring cognitive
consideration. It is important, however, to consider sceptically Suvin’s
Marxist tendency to reject the majority of what is commonly consid-
ered science fiction because it lacks a critical/ideological agenda. As
James remarks, ‘Suvin’s formula … has much to offer us … particularly
if we regard it as a definition of the core of what is sf and do not use it
over rigidly to include or exclude.’14 From Tom Shippey’s perspective,
‘“Estrangement”… means recognising the novum; “cognition” means
evaluating it, trying to make sense of it. You need both to read science
fiction.’15
Encountering a literature with unfamiliar formal properties, acquiring
a fresh set of reading protocols and learning to discuss fiction though a
range of theoretical frameworks and methodologies both old and new
can be an anxious time for students. To compensate for such anxiety, it
is often valuable to deploy material likely to be familiar to students in
particular teaching scenarios. Most students are familiar with sf in its
cinematic and televisual forms and, whilst the analysis of sf film and
television often requires its own set of critical approaches, such mat-
erial can be beneficial in assisting the sf student’s development from
novice to practised reader. With this in mind, it goes without saying
that lectures and seminars could be illuminated by a creative use of
visual materials. Indeed, the lecture – whose value as a learning and
teaching strategy has often been questioned, yet which remains a mode
of delivery both economically and pragmatically viable – can be greatly
enhanced by the incorporation of visual sources that facilitate a range
of learning styles, particularly amongst increasingly visually-oriented
student populations.
Rather than merely supplementing literary studies, film or television
extracts – or even examples of author interviews found on the web or
available commercially – can be employed more productively. Visual
material can introduce and expose, often dramatically, the qualities,
tensions, ambiguities and ideology of specific science fictional concepts.
For example, Gary Wolfe’s account of the iconography of science fiction
described above is telling, because the ‘icon’ is a visual image, express-
ing an object or idea by presenting in sometimes striking visual form its
qualities for interrogation.
An ‘icon’, as Wolfe uses the term for science fiction, is a fundamental
image. It is known and understood far beyond its context. As such, it
shares similarities with the concept of the ‘emblem’ as used to describe
the spectrum of late-medieval and Renaissance public and occult sym-
bolism, including heraldic devices, pageants, masques, hieroglyphs,
hermetic magic and alchemical writings. In this sense, an emblem is
both a rhetorical and a moral device consisting of an image, a motto
and a verse gloss. In science fiction, symbols or emblems often appear in
visual form, in films, on television, in graphic works and on the covers
of pulp magazines and paperbacks. These appearances range from gen-
eral images (the spaceship, the robot) to more specific representations,
such as the ‘Star Child’ in the Kubrick/Clarke film 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968). Sometimes they constitute a visual shorthand somewhere
between the two, such as the cityscapes of 1920s and 1930s print sci-
ence fiction, which owe a considerable debt to Lang’s Metropolis (1927)
(inspired by Lang’s first view of New York as he and his wife arrived in
the harbour), David Butler’s Just Imagine (1930) and William Cameron
Menzies’s H.G. Wells’s Things to Come (1936). In other instances, reso-
nant images are generated specifically through text: Clarke’s unforget-
table ‘Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out’ from ‘The
Nine Billion Names of God’ (1953) or the confusions of identity in
Philip K. Dick’s ‘Colony’ (1953) where the protagonist, Hall, is attacked
first by a microscope and then by a towel and a belt. Dick glosses, ‘the
ultimate in paranoia is not when everyone is against you but when
everything is against you’.16
Clearly, the emblematic resonance of an icon depends upon its spe-
cific treatment in a particular narrative. By focusing upon the complex
and often contradictory nature of an icon’s visualization in a lecture
before embarking upon textual analysis during the seminar, the intrica-
cies of meaning in an sf story – and more broadly within sf itself – can
be rendered more vividly. Magazine covers – many readily available on
the internet – offer both implicit and explicit visual renderings of dif-
ferent forms of sf. The pulp covers from the 1930s often emphasize sf’s
sensationalist adventure story possibilities (and often bore little resem-
blance to the stories they purported to illustrate); in contrast the space
vistas of 1960s Analogs and the baroque machines of early Astoundings
speak of a more austere sense of wonder. On rare occasions, cover
images constitute a ‘device’ reminiscent of the Renaissance use of the
term, providing an explicit pictorialization of a particular conception of
sf. The celebrated cover of Amazing from September 1928, for instance,
is a crude but effective use of symbolism designed specifically to define
Gernsback’s concept of ‘scientifiction’:17
Science is represented by the gear wheel, while the pen represents

the fiction part. Here, then, we have Fact and Theory … the frame
of the design, representing structural steel, suggests more machinery.
The flashes in the central wheel represent Electricity. The top of the
fountain pen is a test tube, which stands for Chemistry, while the
background, with the moon and stars and planet, gives us the science
of Astronomy.18
The rest of the cover evokes a sense of movement through the title
lettering, the star to the left of the giant ‘A’ and the respectable letters
(PhD) after the name of contributing author David H. Keller.
A more complex and subtle example of the visual conceptualiza-
tion of sf was Frank R. Paul’s ‘eye’ cover of the April 1928 issue of
Amazing.19 The eye, surrounded by ‘lashes’ of forked lightning/electric
bolts, contains within it a ‘march of human progress’ from primitive
club-wielding ‘cave-men’ to futuristic machines. The cover perhaps
alludes to, or symbolizes, the ‘mind’s eye’ within which the inventions
of Gernsback’s ‘scientifiction’ are visualized, and can be examined in a
number of ways. Students may well notice the clunky gear-wheels and
other simplistic signs of ‘science’ which constitute the September cover,
but will they notice that the signs of ‘progress’ in the April cover are
concerned with weapons of war?
Such visual material can also be used to initiate seminar activities.
Once attention is drawn to these ‘emblems of science fiction’, discus-
sions can focus upon what these images might mean, with students
encouraged, individually or in groups, to analyse the images and/or
design their own symbols for science fiction. Asking students to pro-
duce emblems they deem representative of feminist or postcolonial or
New Wave sf can expose initial preconceptions and, following critical
analysis and debate, lead to iconic aide-memoirs. Additional semiotic
analyses of cover art during seminars can explore the ways in which
different magazines over various periods of time reflect contrasting
assumptions regarding technological change, for example, or how par-
ticular ‘icons’ – a space scene, a mechanical creature, a cityscape or alien
life – are used and reused in simple combinations to attract changing
audiences.
Considering the ways in which particular magazines (Astounding
or New Worlds, perhaps) experimented at different times with differ-
ent images or visual styles is also a productive exercise, providing an
opportunity for locating science fiction in broader cultural contexts (the
‘Machine Age’ or the ‘Atomic Age’, for example). A simple but revealing
activity is to take a cover illustrating a short story and, before students
read that story, ask them to write notes about what they are expecting
from the narrative given the ‘evidence’ of the cover. Then, once the
story is read, the students may note how these expectations have, or
have not, been fulfilled. As a consequence, their sensitivity to how sf
has been marketed through cover art becomes more acute. Their aware-
ness of factors including sensationalization, emphasis and distortion
inform their understanding of mediation and reception.
A lengthier – and often more instructive – version of this exercise
involves considering how a particular novel has been marketed through
the cover art of its first edition and its subsequent reprints. One could
ask how these covers reflect changes in attitudes to the novel, its author
and/or science fiction in general, since it was first published. Such
changes could include different emphases upon the book’s subject-
matter by its publishers and markets (foreign-language translations can
be rewarding here), and different cultural evaluations of the book and
its author (Philip K. Dick’s movement from minor ‘sci-fi’ writer to a cult
figure in the ‘literary post-modern’, for instance). Both exercises can
lead the student to a greater understanding of sf in its various cultural
contexts.
Whilst such activities certainly assist students in thinking critically

about science fiction, it is equally important for the tutor or instructor
to encourage learners to think ‘science fictionally’, to develop further
the reading protocols necessary for a deeper comprehension of sf’s for-
mal qualities. Given that science fiction is a speculative literature, stu-
dents should be encouraged to think speculatively – about technology,
society, gender and so forth. An initial task might require them to reflect
on how one piece of technology has impacted upon human behaviour
(the mobile phone, which most of them carry habitually, is often the
most useful example). Relevant questions might include: how has such
technology changed their society over the last decade? How has it
changed their personal and social behaviour or the behaviour of those
they know? How would their lives be changed if they did not have
access to such technology? Following this discussion, it is then possible
to move students from thinking reflectively to thinking speculatively.
One might ask, what piece of so-far uninvented technology might
they find particularly valuable (or threatening)? From here, it is only
a small step to introducing the key subjunctive question, What if…?
Students could be asked to imagine their own speculative scenarios. The
tutor might provide a familiar or plausible example: what if a volcanic
eruption grounded all air traffic – not for a few days (as over Europe
following the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland), but
for months? As students work through the process of speculation and
implication, it generally becomes clearer to them how science fiction
writers undertake the same activity.
From this sort of exercise, the kind of mental processes involved in
literary speculation can be explored, and the students’ own imaginings
of how a technology may create difference could be read alongside
essays such as Judith Merril’s ‘What Do You Mean? Science? Fiction?’20
in which she discusses the use of the scientific method and its tradition
of hypothesizing imaginary changes into the common background of
‘known facts’. It is always worth engaging the students in reflecting
on the unintended consequences of any technological development,
exploring, as William Gibson puts it, how ‘the street has its own use
for things’.21
More exploratory learning designed to investigate science fiction’s use
of language could centre around the nomenclature/neologisms of sf.
How language shapes fictional reality (and, by extension, the quotidian
world) may be examined by engaging with the different linguistic reg-
isters of science fiction – the difference, for instance, between language
that is ‘opaque’ (the recontextualized archaisms of Gene Wolfe’s The
Shadow of the Torturer, 1980, for example) and that which is awkward
or unsophisticated (the ‘telephots’ and ‘detectophones’ of Gernsback’s
Ralph 124C 41⫹). Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewel Hinged Jaw (1979) or
Peter Stockwell’s The Poetics of Science Fiction (2000) provide useful
possible directions here. In this instance, students might be asked to
explore how authors construct an alternate, estranging reality through
language. Similarly, they might critically assess how a story is recounted
from the viewpoint of an alien. Creative as well as critical exercises can
be productive for enabling students to think in science fictional terms.
Students could be asked to write a paragraph describing a narrative
event from a sense not possessed by humans, for example. Alternatively,
they can engage in describing an object familiar to human beings from
the perspective of an alien to whom the item is completely unfamiliar
(Craig Raine’s ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’, 1979, makes an
engaging starting point for this approach to estrangement). More criti-
cally, close-reading approaches can focus upon the lexical sets pertinent
to the information communicated in specific science fiction texts. Greg
Egan’s Diaspora (1997), for instance, contains language which is heav-
ily science- or mathematically-centred. The novel also features passages
which absolutely reflect mundane life – apart from the fact that the
viewpoint character is actually sentient software sharing none of the
biological senses familiar to humans. When words like ‘see’, ‘heard’,
‘said’ are used as metaphors rather than descriptors, or the language of
sexual attraction is being employed, the reader needs to reflect on how
far he or she has understood the events and experiences recounted.
Further means of access into sf for students can be found in the mul-
timedia nature of sf’s textuality. One of this book’s editors recalls a col-
league fulminating at length about a student who wrote a commendable
essay on John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) – except that it
was quite clear from the student’s description of events that they were
drawn from Wolf Rilla’s 1960 film adaptation, Village of the Damned.
Such an occurrence can, of course, be attributed to laziness, to a refusal
to read a book when a film is more accessible. Nevertheless, the fact
that sf texts exist in multiple media forms provides an opportunity for
employing one version to illuminate another. For example, a short film
extract can be used to open up the discussion of a short story or novel
with stark immediacy. A key scene in Steve Sekeley’s 1963 version of
Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) is a case in point. Struck blind,
the crew of an airliner instil a very British ‘stiff-upper-lip’ calm into their
passengers by preparing for landing in a professional way until a young
child asks whether the pilot ‘is blind too’ and all-out panic ensues.
Such events – absent from the source novel – provide a means of recog-
nizing Wyndham’s quiet reserve and the extended metaphor of blind-
ness intrinsic to the novel. Similarly, contemporary radio adaptations
of classic short stories such as Murray Leinster’s ‘First Contact’ (1945)
or Katherine MacLean’s ‘The Snowball Effect’ (1952) offer opportunities
to explore the ways in which such stories were interpreted and which
sub-texts were emphasized or decentred in the process of adaptation at
a given time. Indeed, even a film as flawed and ideologically unsound
as Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) can, when considered within the con-
text of other relevant sf texts (Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World
is Forest, 1976, for example), highlight sf’s intertextual nature and the
idea of the science fiction megatext with a directness lacking from many
textbooks.
Perhaps more than any other literary subject, sf challenges the tradi-
tional authority of the seminar discussion itself, where students tend
to look to the tutor/instructor as the authoritative source of knowledge
and wisdom. Indeed, sf is exactly the kind of subject where the tutor-
student relationship can be at its most ambiguous. Most tutors and
instructors working with sf will have encountered the student who
knows more about aspects of the subject than they do, who has read
authors unfamiliar to them, or who will be more closely involved in the
fannish aspects of the field than they. Inevitably, tutors will admit their
ignorance of various aspects of the topic (a particular author or text, for
example). The revelation that the ‘teacher’ does not have all the answers
(or at least does not have all the facts) should not be a surprise to either
tutor or student. In discussing a field which has partaken of the nature
of ‘cult fiction’, it is hardly remarkable that some (albeit a small minor-
ity) of the students will have been attracted to the academic study of
sf by having been heavily involved in some aspect of the subject. They
will have read, perhaps, the entire oeuvre of an author who is repre-
sented on the course by one story.
It may be uncomfortable for those students new to sf to observe their
tutor as being less knowledgeable in certain subject matter than one of
their peers. It may also be an uncomfortable experience for the tutor/
instructor. Nevertheless, such circumstances provide valuable learning
opportunities for all concerned. The tutor is alerted to additional – and
hopefully pertinent – material; those students familiar with particular
aspects of sf are encouraged to re-evaluate their knowledge from various
academic and critical standpoints; and the students who are less famil-
iar with the topic benefit not only from the exchange between the tutor
and their peers but from being reminded of the nature of the enterprise
in which they are engaged. Seminars are intended to facilitate a flow of

knowledge, an exchange rather than a one-way presentation. Having an
informed peer or peers within the group highlights the fact that science
fiction is a literature discussed outside the academy. It may be the subject
of debate by enthusiasts and experts who may not be enthusiasts and
experts in other forms of literature (though they sometimes are), who
may not be academics (but occasionally are, although not necessarily in
literary studies), and who are, in on-line discussion groups and conven-
tions and other collective modes, engaged in a subject for pure pleasure
rather than the instrumental learning that can often define student
engagement with undergraduate courses and evaluation. The recogni-
tion of this fact can help students transcend the institutionalized objec-
tives of a course by alerting them to the ‘pleasures of the text’ that lie
outside the narrow delineations of set reading, learning outcomes and
assessment.
Assessment strategies
Evaluation for most courses is something bound by the practices of

the providing institution and, in the UK at least, by learning outcome-
oriented assessment strategies and national benchmark statements.
Nevertheless, there is usually sufficient flexibility within such strictures
to allow for varied and subject-specific assessment. Of course, like any
other means of evaluation, sound assessment strategies for sf modules
will encourage students to interpret and critique what they are reading.
Students should be directed to move beyond the text itself to theoretical
interpretation, incorporating literary and, if necessary, scientific theory,
and considering the importance of historical, literary, scientific and
generic contexts in the understanding of texts. However, a student’s
understanding of sf can be most productively evaluated with assessment
strategies that test their acquisition of sf’s reading protocols. Both M.
Elizabeth Ginway and Peter Wright partly assess their undergraduate sf
courses with 1500-word assignments that require students to analyse a
key sf text using Suvin’s concept of cognitive estrangement. Although
almost all sf texts are amenable to this form of analysis, Wells’s The Time
Machine, with its aforementioned potential for metafictional interpreta-
tion, is often a useful text to set.
Given the varied nature of science fiction, with its contrasting liter-
ary and paraliterary styles, its diverse subject matter and its megatextual
and/or transmedial nature, students often discover a particular interest
in specific authors, themes or concepts. As most tutors and instructors
recognize, assessment strategies often elicit the students’ best work when
they are enabled to explore those new interests. Clearly, this can be
achieved through the conventional academic essay, written in response
to either set questions or to assignment titles/subjects negotiated with
the tutor. However, one of the key shortcomings of the academic essay
is that its content – the texts, interpretations and conclusions – is barely
disseminated. An end-of-module ‘student conference’ provides a solu-
tion, where students deliver the results of their research as conference
papers in a conference environment (with moderators, panels and
questions to follow). This not only allows students to share the results
of their research with staff and peers but also assists them in develop-
ing key communication skills valuable for graduate interviews, profes-
sional presentations and/or postgraduate conferences. If the archiving
of assessment is a requirement – as it is in many UK universities – the
presentation can be recorded and the script submitted together with
any multimedia elements (Powerpoint slides and the like).
Where the application of cognitive estrangement to a particular text
and the organization of a student conference provide possible examples
of formative and summative assessment, the fanzine or blog allows the
tutor or instructor to ensure continuous engagement from the students.
Student critical responses to texts may be evaluated by asking them
to produce and/or post book reviews modelled on various sf-related
publications (for example, a popular magazine, an online resource and
an academic journal). Here, the intention is also to draw the student’s
attention to the similarities and differences between the discourse
used within each publication and its implications for style, structure
and content. These reviews – and longer work – can be presented as a
printed fanzine or as a live blog. Such activity draws attention to the
differing contexts within which sf is read, mediated and consumed.
Ancillary material can easily be added into the fanzine or blog, pro-
viding further opportunities for varied assessment. Exercises set early in
a science fiction course might include a simple bibliographical activity,
for example. A select bibliography of novels addressing the theme of
invasion or alien contact, with a critical commentary comparing the
anxieties to be found within them, is a useful means of broadening the
students’ knowledge and preparing them for possible extended pieces of
work set later in the semester.
In contexts where creative–critical assignments are encouraged (or
permissible), assessing students’ capacity to think ‘science fictionally’
can become a much more stimulating process. This is evident from the
variety of responses to papers set by Chris Ferns at Mount Saint Vincent
University. By uniting the creative with the critical, Ferns is able to

engage his students directly (and at times wittily) in the processes of
cognitive estrangement, critical analysis and scholarly reflection. For
example:
Topic 1: The Martians invade Nova Scotia (H.G. Wells, The

War of the Worlds, 1898)
Imagine you are H.G. Wells. Having travelled forward in time, you are
now writing an alien invasion narrative set in early twenty-first cen-
tury Nova Scotia. Your response paper is a part of that narrative. Bear
in mind that Wells’s invasion story is a fantasy about jolting people
out of their complacent assumptions, about undoing the effects of
urban expansion, and about showing Western society on the receiv-
ing end of what it does to other species, and indeed other races. See
if your narrative can touch on one or more of these themes.
Alternatively, imagine you are one of the Martians, landing in

Nova Scotia. What is your perspective on the chaos you create?
Topic 2: Brave New World
You are an Alpha from Brave New World, and as part of a research
project, you have visited our world for a month. What is wrong with
it? How do you answer justifications like ‘at least we’re free’?
or
You have been visiting Brave New World, and have decided to stay.
What made you decide to do so? Why do you find it preferable to
our world?
or
Write some copy for a tourist brochure advertising Brave New World
as a holiday destination. Try using an actual travel brochure as a
model – or else a travel piece from one of the daily papers – and see
how far you can make Brave New World appeal to the same kind of
audience that such writing assumes.
Topic 3: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974)
FROM: The Stabiles on Hain DATE: Cycle 93 E.Y. 1508
TO: Members of the Terra/Gethen
Education Exchange Programme
RE: End of Year Report
You are Gethenian students taking part in an education exchange

programme which involves spending three years at a Terran univer-
sity. To minimize culture shock, you have been assigned to a region
where the climate and speed of traffic most closely resemble those on
Gethen – Nova Scotia, which is a small province of a large, sparsely
inhabited country in the Terran northern hemisphere.
You have now spent one year at Mount Saint Vincent University, an
institution where roughly 85% of the students are female,* and while
you received a thorough briefing from Genly Ai and his colleagues
before your departure, you will doubtless have encountered much that
is strange and unfamiliar. For the benefit of students taking part in
future exchanges, you should try to answer the following questions:
• What aspects of Terran society have you found most problematic?
• What kinds of behaviour should you at all costs avoid?
• What differences have you noticed between the behaviour pat-

terns of female and male* Terrans? Do you believe these differ-
ences to be cultural, or biological in origin?
• What have you learned during your stay?
* There being no words for female/male in Gethenian, the above

represents a translation of the Gethenian word for persons in the
culminant phase of kemmer.
Fern’s assessments demonstrate the creativity that science fiction tutors

and instructors can employ in both assessing and enhancing their stu-
dents’ reading and understanding. They epitomize the opportunities
offered by science fiction, its teaching and learning, for fostering intelli-
gent and critical reflection not only upon a salient popular cultural phe-
nomenon, but also on the nature of human speculation, aspiration and
anxiety. More than any other literature, sf has the capability for exposing
and challenging the assumptions and prejudices that continue to define
contemporary societies and international relations. It has the potential
to awaken politically lethargic students to the possibility of cultural
change beyond the technological. Accordingly, it is never a question of
if science fiction should be taught and always a matter of when.
Notes
1. James Gunn, Inside Science Fiction, 2nd edn (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press,
2006) 82.
2. Ibid.
3. Leroy Lubeck, Suzanne E. Moshier and Judith E. Boss, Fantastic Voyages:
Learning Science through Science Fiction Films (Melville, NY: AIP Press, 1994).
4. See R. Gary Raham, Teaching Science Fact with Science Fiction (Portsmouth,
NH: Teacher Ideas Press, 2004) 57–104.
5. See Gregory Benford, ‘Physics Through Science Fiction’, in James Gunn,
Marleen S. Barr and Matthew Candelaria, eds, Reading Science Fiction
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 212–18.
6. Damien Broderick, ‘Sf as Generic Engineering’, Foundation, 59 (Autumn
1993): 16–28.
Press, 1998) 92.
University Press, 1994) 95–6.
9. Ibid., 96.
10. Ibid., 107.
11. Darko Suvin, The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (Yale: Yale University Press,
1979) 7–8.
12. James, Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, 108.
13. Darko Suvin, Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: Discourses of Knowledge and of
Power (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1983) 63.
14. James, Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, 111.
15. Tom Shippey cited in ibid., 112.
16. Philip K. Dick, The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Volume One: Beyond Lies
the Wub (London: Millennium, 1999) 404.
17. The cover is viewable, at http:www.philsp.com/mags/amazing_stories.html
(accessed 24 June 2010).
18. Hugo Gernsback in Amazing, September 1928: 519.
19. Frank R. Paul’s cover is also viewable, at http:www.philsp.com/mags/
amazing_stories.html (accessed 24 June 2010).
20. Judith Merril’s ‘What Do You Mean? Science? Fiction?’, in Thomas D.
Clareson, ed., SF: The Other Side of Realism (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling
Green University Press, 1971) 53–95.
21. For a more detailed discussion of this concept see Gibson’s article ‘Rocket
Radio’ in Rolling Stone, 15 June 1989. The essay is also available online, at
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/cyberpunk/gibson/rocketradio. shtml (accessed
25 June 2010).
References, Resources and
Further Reading
Useful organizations/websites
The British Science Fiction Association, http://www.bsfa.co.uk/.
Center for the Study of Science Fiction, http://www2.ku.edu/~sfcenter/index.html.
International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, http://www.iafa.org/.
Locus magazine, http://locusmag.com/.
The Science Fiction Foundation, http://www.sf-foundation.org/.
The Science Fiction Hub, http://www.sfhub.ac.uk/.
Science Fiction Research Association, http://www.sfra.org/.
Science Fiction Writers of America, http://www.sfwa.org/.
Further Reading
Key Journals
Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy, http://extrapolation.utb.edu/.
Femspec, http://www.femspec.org/.
Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, http://www.sf-foundation.
org/publications/foundation.html.
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/iafa/jfa/jfa.html.
New York Review of Science Fiction, http://www.nyrsf.com/.
Science Fiction Studies, http://www.depauw.edu/SFs/.
General
Aldiss, Brian W. Science Fiction Art. New York: Bounty Books, 1975.
Aldiss, Brian. The Detached Retina: Aspects of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 1995.
Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction. London: Victor
Gollancz, 1961.
Atheling, William, Jr [James Blish]. The Issue at Hand. Chicago: Advent, 1964.
Atheling, William, Jr [James Blish]. More Issues at Hand. Chicago: Advent,
1970.
Ben-Tov, Sharona, The Artificial Paradise: Science Fiction and American Reality. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
Booker, M. Keith and Anne-Marie Thomas. The Science Fiction Handbook. London:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
Bould, Mark, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint, eds. Fifty Key
Figures in Science Fiction. London: Routledge, 2009.
Bould, Mark, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint, eds. The
Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. London: Routledge, 2009.
Brake, Mark and Neil Hook. Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction
Drives Science. Basingstoke: Macmillan Science, 2007.
247
248 References, Resources and Further Reading
Brake, Mark and Neil Hook, FutureWorld: Where Science Fiction becomes Science.
Basingstoke: Macmillan Science, 2008.
Clareson, Thomas D. SF: The Other Side of Realism. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling
Green University Popular Press, 1971.
Clarke, Stephen R. How to Live Forever: Science Fiction and Philosophy. London:
Routledge, 1995.
Clute, John. Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews. Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 1995.
Clute, John. Canary Fever: Reviews. Romford, Essex: Beccon, 2009.
Clute, John. Scores: Reviews 1993–2003. Romford, Essex: Beccon, 2009.
Clute, John and Peter Nicholls, eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. London:
Orbit, 1993.
Disch, Thomas M. The Dreams Our Stuff is Made of: How Science Fiction Conquered
the World. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.
Gunn, James, Marleen Barr and Matthew Candelaria, eds. Reading Science Fiction.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Hartwell, David. Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction. New York:
Tor, 1996.
Hassler, Donald and Guy De Wilcox, eds. Political Science Fiction. Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1997.
Hassler, Donald and Clyde Wilcox, eds. New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008.
Hollinger, Veronica and Joan Gordon, eds. Edging into the Future: Science
Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
James, Edward and Farah Mendlesohn, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Science
Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Kincaid, Paul. What Is It We Do When We Read Science Fiction. Essex: Beccon
Publications, 2008.
Knight, Damon. In Search of Wonder: Essays on Modern Science Fiction. Chicago:
Advent Publishers, 1956. Second Edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1967.
Manlove, Colin N. Science Fiction: Ten Explorations. Ohio: Kent State University
Press, 1986.
Mendlesohn, Farah. The Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
Moskowitz, Sam. Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Science Fiction. Cleveland: World,
1966.
Moskowitz, Sam. Strange Horizons: The Spectrum of Science Fiction. New York:
Scribner’s, 1976.
Pierce, John J. Odd Genre: A Study in Imagination and Evolution. Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1994.
Prucher, Jeff. Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007.
Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
Roberts, Adam. Science Fiction. London: Routledge, 2000. Second Edition,
London: Routledge, 2005.
Sawyer, Andy and David Seed, eds. Speaking Science Fiction: Dialogues and
Interpretations. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.
Schneider, Susan. Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence.
London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
Scholes, Robert and Eric Rabkin. Science Fiction: History – Science – Vision. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977.
Seed, David, ed. A Companion to Science Fiction. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005.
Stableford, Brian. Science Fiction and Science Fact: An Encyclopedia. London:
Routledge, 2006.
Stableford, Brian. Heterocosms: Science Fiction in Context and Practice. Rockville,
MD: Borgo Press, 2007.
Telotte, J.P. Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film. Champaign,
IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
Wagar, Warren W. Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1982.
Warrick, Patricia S. The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1982.
Weiner, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. New
York: Doubleday, 1950.
Westfahl, Gary. Cosmic Engineers: A Study of Hard Science Fiction. Santa Barbara,
CA: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Westfahl, Gary. Space and Beyond: The Frontier Theme in Science Fiction. Santa
Barbara, CA.: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Westfahl, Gary and George Slusser, eds. Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization
and the Academy. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2002.
Westfahl, Gary and George Slusser, eds. Science Fiction and the Two Cultures:
Essays on Bridging the Gap between the Sciences and the Humanities. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland and Co. Inc., 2009.
Bibliographical guides
Barron, Neil. Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction. London: Elek/
Pemberton, 1975.
Bleiler, Everett F. Science Fiction: The Early Years. Ohio: Kent State University Press,
1992.
Bleiler, Everett F. and Richard J. Bleiler. Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years. Ohio:
Kent State University Press, 1998.
Clarke, I.F. The Tale of the Future, 3rd edn. London, Library Association, 1978.
Ruddick, Nicholas. British Science Fiction, 1478–1990: A Chronology. Santa Barbara,
CA: Greenwood Press, 1992.
Watson, Noelle. Twentieth Century Science-Fiction Writers. Farmington Hills, MI:
St James Press, 1991.
History
Aldiss, Brian, W. and David Wingrove. Trillion Year Spree. London: Gollancz,
1986.
Alkon, Paul. Science Fiction before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology.
Woodbridge, CT: Twayne Publishers, 1994.
Ashley, Michael. The Time Machines: The Story of the Science Fiction Pulp Magazines
from the Beginning to 1950. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.
Ashley, Michael. Transformations: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines
1950–1970. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005.
Ashley, Michael. Gateways to Forever: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines,
1970–1980 Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007.
Bartter, Martha. The Way to Ground Zero: The Atomic Bomb in American Science
Fiction. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 1988.
Carter, Paul A. The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
Clareson, Thomas D. Some Kind of Paradise: The Emergence of American Science
Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985.
Clareson, Thomas D. Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The
Formative Period 1926–1970. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1990.
Davin, Eric Leif, ed. Pioneers of Wonder: Conversations with the Founders of Science
Fiction. New York: Prometheus Books, 1999.
Harris-Fain, Darren. Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Age
of Maturity, 1970–2000. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005.
James, Edward. Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994.
Landon, Brooks. Science Fiction after 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars.
Woodbridge, CT: Twayne Publishers, 1997.
Luckhurst, Roger. Science Fiction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.
Philmus, Robert. Into the Unknown: The Evolution of Science Fiction from Francis
Godwin to H.G. Wells. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.
Roberts, Adam. The History of Science Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007.
Seed, David, ed. Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Precursors.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995.
Seed, David. American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Stover, Leon. Science Fiction from Wells to Heinlein. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and
Co., 2008.
Theory
Attebery, Brian. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT:
Delany, Samuel R. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009.
Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
Gunn, James. Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow Press, 2004.
Huntingdon, John. Rationalising Genius: Ideological Strategies in the Classic
American Science Fiction Short Story. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1989.
Malmgren, Carl D. Worlds Apart: Narratology of Science Fiction. Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1991.
Parrinder, Patrick. Science Fiction: A Critical Guide. London: Longman, 1979.
Scholes, Robert. Structural Fabulation: Essays on Fiction of the Future. Indiana:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1975.
Stockwell, Peter. The Poetics of Science Fiction. Essex: Longman, 2000.
Suvin, Darko. The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a
Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Suvin, Darko. Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction. London: Macmillan,
1988.
Wolfe, Gary K. Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Glossary and Guide
to Scholarship. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 1986.
Wolfe, Gary K. The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction.
Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979.
Utopia and anti-utopia

Bailey, J.O. Pilgrims through Time and Space: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and
Utopian Fiction. New York: Argus Books, 1947.
Bammer, Angelika. Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s. London:
Routledge, 1992.
Ferns, Chris. Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other
Science Fictions. London: Verso Books, 2007.
Katerberg, William. Frontier West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction.
Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008.
Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in
Space. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
Kumar, Krishan. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. London: Wiley-
Blackwell, 1987.
Kumar, Krishan. Utopianism. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991.
Kumar, Krishan and Stephen Bann, eds. Utopias and the Millennium. London:
Reaktion Books, 1993.
Little, Judith A. Feminist Philosophy and Science: Utopias and Dystopias. New York:
Prometheus Books, 2007.
Mohr, Dunja M. Worlds Apart? Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female
Dystopias. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2005.
Morton, Arthur Leslie. The English Utopia. London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1952.
Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible. London: Methuen, 1986.
Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 2000.
Moylan, Tom and Raffaella Baccolini, eds. Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the
Dystopian Imagination. London: Routledge, 2003.
Parrinder, Patrick. Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition and the
Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
1999.
Sargisson, Lucy. Contemporary Feminist Utopianism. London: Routledge, 1996.
Scientific romance
Bergonzi, Bernard. The Early H.G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961.
Clarke, I.F. Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars, 1763–3749. Oxford: Oxford
Parrinder, Patrick. Shadows of the Future: H.G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy.
Ruddick, Nicholas. The Ultimate Island: On the Nature of British Science Fiction.
Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 1993.
Stableford, Brian. The Scientific Romance in Britain 1890–1950. New York:
St Martin’s Press, 1985.
Pulp science fiction

Ashley, Michael and Robert A.W. Lowndes. The Gernsback Days. Rockville, MD:
Wildside Press, 2004.
Asimov, Isaac. In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920–1954.
Garden City: Doubleday, 1979.
Attebery, Brian. ‘The Magazine Era: 1926–1960’, in The Cambridge Companion
to Science Fiction, eds Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003, 32–47.
Bleiler, Everett F., with Richard Bleiler. Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years. Kent,
Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1998.
Westfahl, Gary. The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction.
Westfahl, Gary. Hugo Gernsback and the Century of Science Fiction. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland & Co., 2007.
Golden Age science fiction

Berger, Albert I. The Magic That Works: John W. Campbell and the American Response
to Technology. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1993.
Campbell, John W., Jr. The John W. Campbell Letters, Volume I, ed. Perry
A. Chapdelaine, Tony Chapdelaine and George Hay. Franklin, Tennessee: AC
Projects, 1985.
Clarke, Arthur C. Astounding Days: A Science Fictional Autobiography. New York:
Bantam, 1990.
Pohl, Frederik. The Way the Future Was: A Memoir. New York: Ballantine,
1978.
Williamson, Jack. Wonder’s Child: My Life in Science Fiction. New York: Bluejay,
1984.
New Wave
Greenland, Colin. The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British New
Wave in Science Fiction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.
Latham, Rob. ‘The New Wave’, in A Companion to Science Fiction, ed. David Seed.
London: Blackwell Publishing 2005, 202–16.
Luckhurst, Roger. The Angle between Two Walls: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard.
Postmodern science fiction

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Glaser. Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Broderick, Damien. Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. London:
Routledge, 1994.
Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science
Fiction. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1993.
Cavallaro, Dani. Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of
William Gibson. London: Continuum, 2000.
Dinello, Daniel. Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.
Docherty, Thomas. Postmodernism: A Reader. London: Longman, 1992.
Featherstone, Mike and Roger Burrows, eds. Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk:
Cultures of Technological Embodiment. London: Sage Publications, 1996.
Graham, Elaine. Representations of the Post/Human. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers
Gray, Chris Hables. The Cyborg Handbook. London: Routledge, 1995.
Gray, Chris Hables. Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age. London:
Routledge, 2000.
Haney, William S. Cybercultures, Cyborgs and Science Fiction: Consciousness and the
Posthuman. New York: Editions Rodopi, 2006.
Haraway, Donna. ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-
Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’. Socialist Review 80 (1985):
65–108.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991.
Hayles, N.K. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature
and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Heuser, Sabine. Virtual Geographies: Cyberpunk at the Intersection of the Postmodern
and Science Fiction. New York: Editions Rodopi, 2003.
Hollinger, Veronica. ‘Science Fiction and Postmodernism’, in A Companion to
Science Fiction, ed. David Seed. London: Blackwell, 2005, 232–47.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London:
Verso, 1992.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1984.
McCaffery, Larry, ed. Storming the Reality Studio: Casebook of Cyberpunk and
Postmodern Science Fiction. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1992.
Palmer, Christopher. Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern.
Slusser, George and Tom Shippey. Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of
Narrative. Athens GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992.
Vest, Jason P. The Postmodern Humanism of Philip K. Dick. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow
Press, 2009.
Yoke, Carl B. and Carol L. Robinson. The Cultural Influences of William Gibson,
the ‘Father’ of Cyberpunk Science Fiction. Ceredigion: Edwin Mellen Press,
2007.
Gender and science fiction

Armitt, Lucie, ed. Where No Man Has Gone Before: Essays on Women and Science
Fiction. London: Routledge, 1991.
Attebery, Brian. Decoding Gender in Science Fiction. London: Routledge, 2002.
Barr, Marlene, ed. Future Females. Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, 1981.
Barr, Marlene. Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction. Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 1992.
Barr, Marlene. Lost in Space: Probing Feminist SF and Beyond. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1993.
Cortiel, Jeanne. Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction.
Davin, Eric Leif. Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction,
1926–1965. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005.
Delany, Samuel R. The Motion of Light on Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in
the East Village. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Donawerth, Jane. Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing SF. New York: Syracuse
Donawerth, Jane and Carol Kolmerten, eds. Worlds of Difference: Utopian and
Science Fiction by Women. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994.
Larbalestier, Justine. The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction. Middletown, CT:
Larbalestier, Justine, ed. Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth
Century. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006.
LeFanu, Sarah. In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction.
London: The Women’s Press, 1988.
Melzer, Patricia. Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2006.
Merrick, Helen and Tess Williams. Women of Other Worlds: Excursions through
Science Fiction and Feminism. Perth: University of Western Australia Press,
1999.
Noonan, Bonnie. Women Scientists in Fifties Science Fiction Films. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2005.
Roberts, Robin. A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Russ, Joanna. To Write Like a Woman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1995.
Wolmark, Jenny. Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism.
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994.
Yaszek, Lisa. Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction. Columbus, OH:
Ohio State University Press, 2008.
Postcolonial science fiction

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory
and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Studies: The Key
Concepts. 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2007.
Bhabha, Homi K, ed. Nation and Narration. New York, Routledge, 1990.
Bush, Barbara. Imperialism and Postcolonialism. London: Longman, 2006.
Eakin, Marshall C. Brazil: The Once and Future Country. New York: St Martin’s
Press, 1997.
Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. New edition. London: Pluto Press, 2008.
Grayson, Sandra M. Visions of the Third Millennium: Black Science Fiction Novelists
Write the Future. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003.
Hopkinson, Nalo and Uppinder Mehan, eds. So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial
Visions of the Future. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004.
Kerslake, Patricia. Science Fiction and Empire. Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2007.
McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2000.
Morgan, Philip D. and Sean Hawkins, eds. Black Experience and the Empire.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT:
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Latin American science fiction and fantasy

Aparicio, Frances R. and Susana Chávez-Silverman, eds. Tropicalizations:
Transcultural Representations of Latinidad. Durham, NH: Dartmouth College
Press, 1997.
Bell, Andrea and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán, eds. Cosmo Latinos: An Anthology
of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
Beverly, John, José Oviedo and Michael Aronna, eds. The Postmodern Debate in
Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.
Causo, Roberto de Sousa, Ficção Científica, Fantasia e Horror no Brasil, 1875 a 1950.
Belo Horizonte, Brazil: Editora UFMG, 2003.
Ginway, M. Elizabeth. Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood in
the Land of the Future. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004.
Grobet, Lourdes. Lucha Libre: Masked Superstars of Mexican Wrestling. Mexico:
Trilce, 2005.
Hess, David J. and Roberto DaMatta, eds. The Brazilian Puzzle. Culture of the
Borderlands of the Western World. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Johnson, Randal and Robert Stam, eds. Brazilian Cinema. New York: Columbia
Levi, Heather. The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National
Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Piletti, Nelson. A história do Brasil. São Paulo: Ática, 1991.
Puig, Manuel. Pubis Angelical, trans. Elena Brunet. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000.
Sarlo, Beatriz. Scenes from Postmodern Life, trans. Jon Beasley-Murray. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Index
Abrams, Sam, 213 as Analog, 120, 237

Adam Adamant Lives! 82 Attebery, Brian, 16, 45, 86, 109, 111,
Aldiss, Brian W., 5, 30–1, 40, 44, 74, 146, 223, 230
100, 105, 122, 126 Atwood, Margaret, 7
Barefoot in the Head, 32 The Handmaid’s Tale, 56, 65, 157,
definition of science fiction, 49 192
Greybeard, 32
Report on Probability A, 126 Bacon, Francis, The New Atlantis, 23,
Space Opera, 47 55
Trillion Year Spree (with David Bailey, Hilary, ‘Fall of Frenchy
Wingrove), 11, 49 Steiner’, 27
alternate history, 41, 47, 48, 83, 139 Bailey, J.O., 4
Amazing Stories, 6, 12, 25–8, 43, 98, Pilgrims Through Space and Time,
223, 237 10–11, 44, 224–5, 227–8
Amis, Kingsley, New Maps of Hell, 11, Ballard, J.G., 2, 16, 34, 37, 117,
235 119–22, 125–7, 132
Analog, see Astounding Stories The Atrocity Exhibition, 32, 84, 132
Anderson, Kevin J., Slan Hunter, 87 Crash, 142
Anderson, Poul, 30 The Crystal World, 32
Android, 156 ‘You and Me and the Continuum’,
Anthony, Patricia, Cradle of Spendor, 225, 228
197 Bammer, Angelika, 56–7
Apulius, The Golden Ass, 152–4 Banks, Iain M., 126
Arango, Ángel, ‘The Cosmonaut’, 185 Consider Phlebas, 35
Arnason, Eleanor, Ring of Swords, 158 Barnes, Steven, The Descent of Anansi,
Arnold, Jack, The Creature from the 172
Black Lagoon, 180 Barron, Neil, 42, 46
Asimov, Isaac, 8, 11, 15, 19, 28–9, 31, Baudrillard, Jean, 15–16, 130, 140–3
39, 87, 94–6 Baxter, Stephen, 21
Before the Golden Age, 87 Coalescent, 35
‘Bicentennial Man’, 29 The Time Ships, 26
Foundation trilogy, 29 Bear, Elizabeth, Hammered, 36
The Gods Themselves, 139 Bell, Andrea L. (with Yolanda
I, Robot, 28, 94–6, 101, 106, 156 Molina-Galiván), Cosmos Latinos,
‘Little Lost Robot’, 95 17, 179, 184–7, 197, 232
‘Nightfall’, 28 Bell, Neil, 72
‘Robot Dreams’, 29 Bellamy, Edward, Looking Backward,
three laws of robotics, 28–9, 94–6, 55, 58–60, 63, 65–6
102 Bellow, Saul, 132
Astounding Science Fiction, see Benford, Gregory, 220
Astounding Stories Beyond the Fall of Night, 89
Astounding Stories, 14, 28, 43, 88, 90, Beyond Infinity, 89
91, 97, 105, 238 In the Ocean of Night, 33
256
Index 257
Timescape, 33, 139 Burke, Edmund, and the sublime, 24,

Berdiaeff, Nicholas, 60, 61, 65 136
Beresford, J.D., 72, 74 Burroughs, Edgar Rice
Bernal, J.D., 61 Llana of Gathol, 98
Bester, Alfred, Tiger! Tiger!, 30 Pellucidar, 23
Biggle, Lloyd Jr, 38 Princess of Mars, 98
Binder, Eando, ‘I, Robot’, 106–7 Burroughs, William S., 117, 121, 132,
Bionic Woman, The, 156 224
Bleiler, Everett F., 38 , 46 Butler, Andrew M., 5, 15–16
Blish, James, 30 Butler, Octavia, 166
Bloch, Ernst, 63, 69 Clay’s Ark, 152
Bogdanov, Alexander, Red Star, 56 Wild Seed, 151, 156
Borges, Jorge Luis, 198
Ficciones, 189 Cadigan, Pat, 2, 159
‘The Garden of the Forking Paths’, Synners, 34
190 Cameron, James, Avatar, 241
‘The Library of Babel’, 188 Campanella, Thomas, City of the Sun,
‘On Rigor in Science’, 138, 182, 188 22, 55, 65
Boulle, Pierre, 36 Campbell, John W., 14, 28, 43, 87,
Bova, Ben, 38, 120 91–2, 96–7, 100, 105–6, 120,
Brackett, Leigh, 98–100 224
Bradbury, Ray, 44, 99 ‘The Black Star Passes’, 28
The Martian Chronicles, 30, 86 definition of science fiction, 43
Bradley, Marion Zimmer, ‘The Wind ‘Night’, 28
People’, 109–10 ‘Twilight’, 28, 226
Brake, Mark, 18 ‘Who Goes There?’, 156
Brigg, Peter, 42 Canfield, Cass Jr., Masterworks of
Brijs, Stefan, The Angel Maker, 36 Latin American Short Stories,
Brin, David 189–90
Glory Season, 158 Capanna, Pablo, ‘Anacronia’, 185
Sundiver, 33 Capek, Karel, R.U.R. (Rossum’s
Broderick, Damien, 19, 45, 161, 223 Universal Robots), 10, 28–9
Brunner, John, 132 Card, Orson Scott, Speaker for the
The Sheep Look Up, 122 Dead, 197
Stand on Zanzibar, 32 Carneiro, André
Bruno, Giordano, 22 ‘Brain Transplant’, 186
Bryant, Dorothy, The Kin of Ata Are ‘Darkness’, 189
Waiting for You, 158 ‘Life as an Ant’, 189
Buck, Doris Pitkin, ‘Birth of a ‘A Perfect Marriage’, 189
Gardener’, 110 Carter, Raphael, ‘Congenital
Buckell, Tobias, Ragamuffin, 36 Agenesis of Gender Ideation, by
Budrys, Algis, 30, 38, 39, 41, 52 K.N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin’,
Bujold, Lois McMaster 157
Ethan of Athos, 158 Casanova, Jacques, Icosameron, 23
The Warrior’s Apprentice, 33 Casares, Adolfo Bioy, The Invention of
Bulgarin, F.V., Plausible Fantasies, 25 Morel, 190
Bull, Emma, Bone Dance, 156 Castro, Pablo, ‘Exerion’, 187
Burdekin, Katherine, Swastika Night, Cavendish, Margaret, The Blazing
26, 157 World, 23
258 Index
Charnas, Suzy McKee, 2 cyberpunk, 2, 6, 15, 30, 34, 46–7, 52,

Motherlines, 151, 158 83, 107, 116, 118, 119, 126, 134,
Walk to the End of the World, 157 144, 184, 186–7, 191, 195–6, 199,
Chatterjee, Rimi, Signal Red, 172 222, 225, 230–1
Chaviano, Daína, ‘The Annunciation’,
186 Dann, Jack, The Memory Cathedral, 48
Cherryh, C.J., 17, 169 Dante, Joe, Gremlins II, 135
Foreigner series, 171 Darwin, Charles, 25–6, 72, 78, 131
Chesney, George T., The Battle of On the Origin of Species, 25
Dorking, 26, 73, 79–80 Davenport, Basil, 50
Cixous, Hélène, 131, 150 De Andrade, Joachim Pedro,
Clareson, Thomas D., 4, 50, 226 Macunaíma, 181
Clarke, Arthur C., 8, 15, 21, 35, 49, De Assis, Machado, ‘The Siamese
98, 119, 147, 214, 224 Academies’, 187–8
2001: A Space Odyssey, 31, 89, De Beauvoir, Simone, 150
236 De Camp, L. Sprague, 28
Against the Fall of Night, 88 De la Casa, Ricard (with Pedro Jorge
Astounding Days, 87 Romero), ‘The Day It Changed’,
Childhood’s End, 31, 86 186
The City and the Stars, 31, 226–7 De France, Marie
‘The Nine Billion Names of God’, ‘Bisclavret’, 152
236 ‘Yonec’, 152
Rendezvous with Rama, 121 De Loyola Brandão, Ignacio, And Still
Clarke, I.F., 79 the Earth, 191
Voices Prophesying War, 47 Defoe, Daniel, Journal of the Plague
Clement, Hal, 51 Year, 227
Mission of Gravity, 28 Del Rey, Lester, 28, 38, 127–8
Clute, John, 4, 6, 8–9, 42, 184 ‘Helen O’Loy’, 147–8, 156, 222,
cognitive estrangement, 7, 42, 45, 224, 230
150, 183, 224, 226, 234, 242, Del Toro, Guillermo, Cronos, 183
243–4 Delany, Samuel R., 2, 40, 45, 51, 56,
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ‘Cristabel’, 70, 121, 149, 166, 172
152 The Ballad of Beta, 2, 149–50
colonial science fiction, 167–9, 228 Dhalgren, 33
see also postcolonial science fiction ‘Driftglass’, 17, 192, 197
Conklin, Groff, 46 The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, 240
Conquest, Robert, 1, 19 Nova, 33
Conroy, Robert, 48 Triton, 58, 122
Constantine, Murray, see Burdekin, Delgado, Miguel M., Santo y Blue
Katherine Demon contra el doctor Frankenstein
Cooper, Edmund, Gender Genocide, (Santo and Blue Demon vs. Doctor
158 Frankenstein), 182–3
Correa, Hugo, ‘When Pilate Said No’, Desleal, Álvaro, ‘Cord of Nylon and
185 Gold’, 185
cosy catastrophe, 31, 37 Díaz, Junot, Brief Wondrous Life of
critical utopia, 56, 67–9 Oscar Wao, 190–1
Cronenberg, David, Videodrome, 134 Dick, Philip K., 2, 5, 6, 16, 96, 101,
Crowley, John, 11 121, 134, 225, 228, 231, 238
curriculum design, 205–17, 219–23 ‘Colony’, 236
Index 259
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, extrapolation, 41, 50–1, 61, 116, 150,
30, 91, 221, 225, 228 209
Dr Bloodmoney, 134 Extrapolation, 4
Eye in the Sky, 48
The Man in the High Castle, 30, 139 fandom, 6, 12, 27, 40–1
Now Wait For Last Year, 135 Farmer, Philip José, ‘The Lovers’, 159
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, feminist science fiction, 16, 33, 46,
30 108, 109, 123–4, 146–9, 222,
Time Out of Joint, 10, 125, 135, 142 229–30, 232, 235
Disch, Thomas M., Camp Ferns, Chris, 13, 55, 221, 243–4
Concentration, 122–3, 125 Forster, E.M., ‘The Machine Stops’, 137
Doctor Who, 19n, 82, 203 Foundation: The International Journal of
Doni, Anton Francesco, I Mondi, 22 Science Fiction, 4, 9, 11, 195
Dos Passos, John, USA, 32, 132 Fowler, Karen Joy
Doyle, Arthur Conan, 72 Sarah Canary, 33
The Lost World, 73, 81 ‘What I Didn’t See’, 152–5
Duchamp, Marcel, 131 Fowler Wright, Sydney, 72, 74, 147
Dumas, Alexandre, The Count of Monte Deluge, 24
Cristo, 30 Frank, Pat, Alas, Babylon, 212
dystopia, 7, 26, 46, 47, 56, 60–2, 67, Franklin, H. Bruce, 50, 180
89, 91, 99, 127, 131, 127, 140, Freud, Sigmund, 105, 125, 132
157–9, 190–2, 210, 212 Furtado, Jorge, Basic Sanitation: The
Movie, 8, 180
Echeverría, Roberto González, The future war, 40, 47, 49, 79
Oxford Book of Latin American
Short Stories, 189–90 Galaxy, 29, 86, 105
Edison, Thomas Alva, 25 García, Luís Britto, ‘The Future’, 185
Edisonades, 25 Gearheart, Sally Miller, The
Edwards, John, ‘The Planet of Wanderground, 158
Perpetual Night’, 159 gender, 146–61
Egan, Greg, 34–5, 139 genetic modification, 24, 221
Diaspora, 34, 240 genres, 21–2, 40–52, 56, 59, 73, 81,
Electrical Experimenter, 25 84, 86, 149
Eliot, T.S., 131, 185, 233 Gernsback, Hugo, 6, 8, 13–14, 25,
Elgin, Suzette Haden, Native Tongue, 27–8, 223, 237
151, 157 definition of science fiction, 43
Ellis, Edward S., 25 Ralph 124C 41+, 11, 27, 224, 226,
Ellison, Harlan, 2, 47, 122, 127, 233, 240
159 Gerrold, David, Moonstart Odyssey, 157
‘A Boy and His Dog’, 32 Ghosh, Amitav, The Calcutta
Dangerous Visions, 32, 119 Chromosome, 172
I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay, Gibson, William, 2, 69, 144, 225, 235,
95 239
‘“Repent, Harlequin!” said the Neuromancer, 15, 19, 34, 83, 135–6,
Ticktockman’, 32 222, 231
Eskridge, Kelly, ‘And Salome Danced’, Gilbert, Sandra, 150
157 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 5
Evans, Arthur, 76 Herland, 56, 146, 158, 179
Evans, Christopher, 35 Ginway, M. Elizabeth, 8, 17, 222, 242
260 Index
Glass, Philip, 132 Haywood, Amber, The Healer, 197

Gloag, John, 72 Heard, Gerald, 72, 74
Gloss, Molly, Wild Life, 152, 153 Heinlein, Robert A., 11, 15, 28, 31,
Godwin, Francis, The Man in the 39, 44, 52, 95–8, 119, 125, 147,
Moone, 22–3 149, 226
Godwin, Tom, ‘The Cold Equations’, ‘Coventry’, 94
28, 148–9 definition of science fiction, 44, 50
Goligorsky, Eduardo, ‘The Last For Us, the Living, 94
Refuge’, 185–6 ‘If This Goes On –’, 91–3
Golden Age, see under science fiction The Man Who Sold the Moon, 29
Gorodischer, Angelica Methuselah’s Children, 94, 97
Kalpa Imperial, 190, 192 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, 29
‘The Violet Embryos’, 186 The Number of the Beast, 9
Gott, Samuel, Nova Solyma, 23 Revolt in 2100, 29, 91, 93
Greenland, Colin, 127 ‘The Roads Must Roll’, 19, 29, 224
The Entropy Exhibition, 118 Sixth Column, 92
Take Back Plenty, 35 Starship Troopers, 86
Greg, Percy, Across the Zodiac, 73, 81–2 Stranger in a Strange Land, 29
Griffith, George, 72 Time Enough For Love, 94
Griffith, Nicola, Ammonite, 150, 158 ‘Universe’, 149
Griffiths, Martin, 213 Herbert, Frank, Dune, 30, 170
Grimwood, Jon Courtenay, Pashazade, Hickman, Tracy (With Margaret
35 Weiss), Dragon Wing, 223
Gubar, Susan, 150 Hillegas, Mark, 3
Gunn, James, 4, 219–21 Hodgson, William Hope, 72
Holberg, Ludvig, Niels Klim in the
Hairston, Andrea, Mindscape, 172 Underworld, 23
Haldane, J.B.S., 61 Holdstock, Robert, 35
Haldeman, Joe, The Forever War, 122, Hook, Neil, 18, 202, 217
125–6 Hopkinson, Nalo, 17
Hamilton, Edmond Brown Girl in the Ring, 172
‘Captain Future’ series, 27 Midnight Robber, 164, 172
‘The Man Who Evolved’ , 149 So Long Been Dreaming, 162
The Star of Life, 100 Huxley, Aldous
Hansen, L. Taylor, ‘The Undersea Brave New World, 3, 27, 39, 56,
Tube’, 224, 226 60–6, 221, 244
Haraway, Donna, 131, 150, 230 Brave New World Revisited, 65
hard sf, 28–9, 31, 33, 35, 46, 126 Island, 56
Harris, Robert, Fatherland, 139 Huxley, T.H., 78
Harrison, Harry, ‘The Streets of
Ashkelon’, 225, 228 icons of science fiction, 4, 10, 150,
Harrison, M. John, 51, 126 179, 182, 183, 185–6, 191, 224,
Centauri Device, 32 226–8, 232, 236–8
Light, 32 If, 29
Hartwell, David G., 43, 183, 199 Interzone, 35
Hawks, Howard, The Thing From Ishiguro, Kazuo, 7
Another World, 156
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, ‘Rappaccini’s James, Edward, 5, 44–5, 105, 233
Daughter’, 24 James, P.D., Children of Men, 192
Index 261
James Tiptree Jr. Award, 147 Latham, Rob, 15, 58, 116, 222
Jameson, Fredric, 15, 59–60, 131, Latin American science fiction, see
134–6, 143 under science fiction
Jeffries, Richard, After London, 24, 80 Lavín, Guillermo, ‘Reaching the
‘jonbar point’, 48 Shore’, 186
Jones, D.F, Colossus, 139 Le Corbusier, 131
Jones, Gwyneth, 5 Le Guin, Ursula K., 6, 56, 86, 147,
Spirit, 30 160, 190, 222
White Queen, 35, 151 ‘Coming of Age in Karhide’, 156
Jones, Langdon, ‘I Remember Anita’, The Dispossessed, 33, 58, 60, 66–9,
225, 227 245
Jonson, Ben, 11 The Left Hand of Darkness, 33, 51,
Newes from the New World Discovered 146, 151, 156–7
in the Moone, 22 ‘The Matter of Seggri’, 158
Joyce, James, 131, 233 learning outcomes, 130, 216–17, 242
Lee, Tanith, The Silver Metal Lover, 156
Kadrey, Richard, Kamikaze L’Amour: A Leiber, Fritz, 30
Novel of the Future, 197 Leinster, Murray, 100
Kant, Immanuel, 24 ‘First Contact’, 241
Kelly, James Patrick, ‘Think Like a ‘Proxima Centauri’, 149
Dinosaur’, 148 Lem, Stanislaw, 36, 232
Kepler, Johannes, Somnium, 22 Solaris, 68, 221
Kerslake, Patricia, Science Fiction and Lewis, C.S., 10, 72
Empire, 229 Lewis, Wyndham, 131
Keyes, Daniel, 30 Lewitt, S.N., Songs of Chaos, 192–4
Kincaid, Paul, 12, 21 Link, Kelly, Stranger Things Happen, 33
Kingsley, Charles, The Water Babies, 26 lost world stories, 80–1, 82
Knight, Damon, 42–4 Lucian of Samosata, True History, 8, 22
definition of science fiction, 44 Luckhurst, Roger, 43, 45
Orbit, 119 Lyotard, Jean-François, 15, 130,
Kornbluth, C.M. (with Frederik Pohl), 133–4, 136–40, 143–4
The Space Merchants, 30
Kristeva, Julia, 131, 150 Maclean, Katherine
Kubrick, Stanley, 214 ‘And Be Merry . . .’, 109–10
2001: A Space Odyssey, 136, 236 ‘The Snowball Effect’, 241
Dr Strangelove or, How I Learned to MacLeod, Ian, The Light Ages, 84
Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, MacLeod, Ken, The Star Fraction, 35
212 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
Kuttner, Henry, 100 29, 38, 86, 105
‘The Piper’s Son’, 149 Mailer, Norman, 132
Making Mr. Right, 156
Lacan, Jacques, 151 Malmgren, Carl, 45
Lai, Larissa, Salt Fish, 172 Manga, Carlos, O Homem do Sputnik
Lake, Jay, Mainspring, 36 (The Sputnik Man), 181
Lang, Fritz Manning, Lawrence, 149
Frau Im Mond, 90 Marxism, 130, 134, 140–1, 232
Metropolis, 131, 236 McAuley, Paul
Larbalestier, Justin, 11 Cowboy Angels, 35, 48
Daughters of Earth, 151 Fairyland, 35
262 Index
McDonald, Ian ‘No Woman Born’, 106–7, 151, 156,

Brasyl, 17, 192, 195–7, 200 225, 230
River of Gods, 35 Moore, Ward, Bring the Jubilee, 139
McDonnell, Carole, ‘Lingua Franca’, More, Thomas, Utopia, 22, 55
225, 229 Morris, William, 78
McIntyre, Vonda, Superluminal, 148–9 News From Nowhere, 55–6, 59, 63,
megatext, 14, 19n, 150–1, 161n, 219, 65
220, 232, 241, 242 Morrison, David, 213
Mehan, Uppinder, 16–17, 162, 228 Moskowitz, Sam, 93
So Long Been Dreaming (with Nalo definition of science fiction, 49, 208
Hopkinson), 162 first college sf course, 3
Méliès, Georges, Le voyage dans la Mosley, Walter, Futureland, 172
Lune, 131 Mosquera, Gustavo, Moebius, 182
Melville, Herman, 233 Moylan, Tom, 56–8
Moby Dick, 133 Mullen, R.D., 3, 38
Mendlesohn Farah, 5, 9–10, 184, 223 mundane sf, 35, 126, 231
Menzies, William Cameron, Things to Murphy, Pat, 147, 159
Come, 90, 236 ‘Rachel in Love’, 152–5
Merrick, Helen, 11
Merril, Judith, 208, 225, 239 Neville, Henry, The Isle of Pines, 23
definition of science fiction, 208 New Wave sf, 6, 7, 15, 31–3, 47, 52,
England Swings sf, 32 116–28, 132, 137, 222, 225,
‘That Only a Mother’, 230 227–8, 230–1, 235, 238, 252–3,
metafiction, 120, 133, 226, 242 255
Miéville, China, 231 New Weird, 25, 35, 84, 231–2
Iron Council, 231 New Worlds, 31–2, 35
Perdido Street Station, 35, 84 Noon, Jeff, Vurt, 136
military sf, 33, 36, 47, 50 Nordau, Max, 78
Miller, Walter M., A Canticle for Nowlan, Philip Francis, Armageddon
Leibowitz, 30, 86, 212 2419 A.D., 100
Modern Electronics, 25 Nyman, Michael, 132
modernism, 131–3
Molina-Galiván, Yolanda (with Odoevsky, V.F., The Year 4338, 25
Andrea L. Bell), Cosmos Latinos, Orientalism, 192
17, 179, 184–7, 197, 232 Orwell, George, 26
Monteiro, Jerônimo, ‘The Crystal Nineteen Eighty-Four, 3, 26, 59–60,
Goblet’, 185 63–4
Moorcock, Michael, 31–2, 118–22, Otaño, Magdalena Mouján, ‘Gu Ta
126, 225, 227, 230–1 Guttarak’, 186
‘Behold the Man’, 222, 227 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 152
Jerry Cornelius novels, 132
The Land Leviathan, 83 Paltock, Robert, The Life and
The Steel Tsar, 83 Adventures of Peter Wilkins, 23
The Warlord of the Air, 83 Panshin, Alexei and Cory Panshin,
Moore, Alan definition of science fiction, 49
The League of Extraordinary ‘parabola’ formula, 16, 149–60
Gentlemen, 84 Park, Paul, Coelestis, 159
Watchmen, 144 Parrinder, Patrick, definition of
Moore, C.L., 100 science fiction, 208
Index 263
Paul, Frank R., 237 Pynchon, Thomas, 133

Paz Soldán, Edmundo, Turing’s Gravity’s Rainbow, 121
Delirium, 190–1
‘Perry Rhodan’ series, 36 quantum mechanics, 14, 48, 138–9,
Picasso, Pablo, 131 210, 213–14
Pieralisi, Alberto, O Quinto Poder (The
Fifth Power), 181 Rabkin, Eric, 45
Pierce, John J., 50 Raine, Craig, ‘A Martian Sends a
Piercy, Marge, 56 Postcard Home’, 240
He, She and It, 149, 156, 222 reading protocols, 6, 40, 233–5, 239,
Woman on the Edge of Time, 67 242
Piper, H. Beam, 17 Reed, Ishmael, 233
The Fuzzy Papers, 168, 172 Resnick, Mike, Paradise, 163
Little Fuzzy, 163 resources, 5, 247–55
Fuzzy Sapiens, 163 Rilla, Wolf, Village of the Damned, 240
Plato, Symposium, 156 Robbins, Tom, 7
Poe, Edgar Allan, 6 Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, 133
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym Still Life With Woodpecker, 133
of Nantucket, 24 Roberts, Adam, 5, 13–14, 43, 45, 72
Pohl, Frederik, 121 The History of Science Fiction, 7
The Space Merchants (with C. M. Splinter, 75
Kornbluth), 30 Roberts, Keith
The Way the Future Was, 87 The Chalk Giants, 32
Pollock, Jackson, 132 Pavane, 32
Portillo, Rafael, La momia azteca ‘Weinachtsabend’, 27
contra el robot humano (The Aztec Robinson, Kim Stanley, 17, 56
Mummy vs. The Human Robot), ‘Mars Trilogy’, 34, 169–70
182–3 robots, 10, 24, 28–9, 46–7, 88, 94–5,
postcolonial science fiction, 16, 162–77 98, 102, 106, 150, 166, 182–3,
see also colonial science fiction 185, 226–8, 230, 236
postmodernism, 2, 5, 15–16, 34, 36, Rojo, Pepe, ‘Gray Noise’, 186
40–1, 75, 84, 118, 120–1, 126, Romero, Pedro Jorge (with Ricard De
129–45, 184, 195, 196, 225, 228, La Casa), ‘The Day It Changed’,
253 186
and science, 138–9 Roth, Philip, 132
Pound, Ezra, 131 Rothko, Mark, 132
Priest, Christopher Rubião, Murilo, The Ex-Magician and
The Affirmation, 32 Other Stories, 188
The Inverted World, 32 Russ, Joanna, 2, 5, 45, 56
The Separation, 27 definition of sf, 208–9, 225
The Space Machine, 26 The Female Man, 33, 120, 136, 158
Priestley, J.B., I Have Been Here Before, ‘The Image of Women in Science
27 Fiction’, 229
Proyas, Alex, I, Robot, 95 Russell, Bertrand, 66
Prucher, Jeff, 42 Ryman, Geoff, 34–5, 128n, 159, 231
Puig, Manuel, Pubis Angelical, 190 Air, 34, 35, 231
pulp science fiction, 2, 3, 8, 14, 27,
40–1, 43–6, 49, 72, 86–101, 116–19, Said, Edward, 192
125, 222, 224, 226, 237–7, 252 Sakers, Don, ‘The Cold Solution’, 148
264 Index
Sales, Herberto, The Fruit of Thy scientifiction, 25, 27, 37n, 237
Womb, 191–2 Scott, Melissa
Sarban (John W. Wall), The Sound of Shadow Man, 150
His Horn, 26 Trouble and Her Friends, 156
Sawyer, Andy, 18, 219 Scott, Ridley, Blade Runner, 135, 136,
Saxton, Josephine, Queen of the States, 144, 176
33 Serviss, Garrett P., Edison’s Conquest of
Scalzi, John, Old Man’s War, 36 Mars, 25
Schoenberg, Arnold, 131 Shakespeare, William, 11, 144, 154
Scholes, Robert, 4, 45 The Tempest, 101, 152–4, 197
Schuyler, George, Black Empire, 172 Sheckley, Robert, 121
science and science fiction, 18, 202–17 Options, 133
science fiction Sheers, Owen, Resistance, 27
‘academic invasion’, 41 Sheldon, Alice (James Tiptree Jr), 2,
assessment of courses, 176–7, 242–3 122, 153, 160, 230, 255
British science fiction, 35 ‘And I Awoke and Found Me Here
challenges to the canon, 10–11 on the Cold Hill Side’, 151–4, 159
classification, 42, 45–7, 220, 231 ‘Houston, Houston, Do You Read?’,
conceptions of the future, 8–9 125, 156
critical terms, 39, 41–2, 153 James Tiptree Jr. Award, 147
definitions, 21, 38–52, 86, 103–5, ‘The Women Men Don’t See, 10, 33,
174–5, 208–9, 235 124, 152, 155, 200n, 222, 225, 230
editors, 27–8, 31–2, 38, 43, 105, ‘Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your
118, 149, 226 Faces Filled of Light’, 158
first college courses, 3–4 Sheldon, Raccoona, see Sheldon, Alice
‘First SF’, 6–7, 9, 12–14, 16–17 Shelley, Mary
genre categories, 52 Frankenstein, 24, 40, 55, 74, 137,
Golden Age, 14–16, 28, 41, 102–15, 156, 221
117–20, 137, 183, 185, 222, 224, The Last Man, 24
226, 252 Shiel, M.P., 72
Gothic mode, 24–5, 36n, 49, 175 The Purple Cloud, 227
growing literary sensibility of, 2–3 Shippey, Tom¸ 42, 235
history of, 7, 12, 21–37, 116 Silverberg, Robert
imperial tropes in, 175–6 Dying Inside, 32
language of, 9–10 New Dimensions, 119–20
Latin American science fiction, Son of Man, 32, 122
179–98 Simak, Clifford D., City, 100
literalizing the metaphor, 10, 51 Singh, Vandana, The Woman Who
magazines, 27–30, 35, 43 Thought She was a Planet, and
pedagogical value, 5–6, 13, 16, 18, Other Stories, 172
77–8, 104, 118, 147, 171 Sinisalo, Johanna, Not Before Sundown,
preconceptions of, 11 36
race and ethnicity, 9 Sisk, David, 60
reference books, 5 Six Million Dollar Man, The, 156
themes, 46–8 Skinner, B.F., Walden Two, 56
Science Fiction Research Association, Sladek, John, The Steam Driven Boy, 132
4, 38, 49 Sleight, Graham, 6
Science Fiction Studies, 4, 38, 134 Slonczewski, Joan, A Door into Ocean,
scientific romance, 7, 13, 13–14, 49, 158
69, 71–85 Smith, Cordwainer, 29
Index 265
‘Alpha Ralpha Boulevard’, 122 Suvin, Darko, 4, 7, 10, 40, 42, 45, 56–7,
‘The Ballad of Lost C’Mell’, 29 104, 150, 183, 226, 233–5, 242
‘The Dead Lady of Clown Town’, 29 Swift, Jonathan, 40
Smith, E.E. Gulliver’s Travels, 23, 74
‘Lensman’ series, 27, 90, 91 ‘A Modest Proposal’, 142
‘Skylark’ series, 27
Souza, Marcel, The Order of the Day, Taine, John, The Time Stream, 100
191 Tavares, Braulio, ‘Stuntmind’, 186–7
space opera, 27–8, 30, 33, 35–40, 42, Tenn, William, 38
46–7, 88, 90, 96, 100, 126 Tepper, Sheri S.
Spinrad, Norman The Gate to Women’s Country, 158
Bug Jack Barron, 122, 124–5 Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, 33
definition of science fiction, 44 Thomas, Sheree, Dark Matter, 172, 229
Stableford, Brian, 4, 11, 49, 72–4, 77 Tiptree, James Jr, see Sheldon, Alice
Stapledon, Olaf, 21, 72, 214 Tolkien, J.R.R., The Lord of the Rings, 183
Last and First Men, 27, 73, 82, 131 tropicalization, 17, 192
Star Maker, 82, 131 Tsukamoto, Shinya, Tetsuo, 134
Star Trek, 2, 14, 33, 90–1, 159 Turtledove, Harry, 48
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, 156 Tuttle, Lisa, ‘Wives’, 152–4, 159
Star Trek: The Next Generation, 156 Twain, Mark, A Connecticut Yankee in
Star Wars, 2, 14, 33, 69, 90–1, 100 King Arthur’s Court, 26
steampunk, 13, 36, 42, 46, 73, 83–4,
144 Updike, John, Brazil, 197
Stephenson, Neal, Snow Crash, 34 utopias, 25, 49, 50, 55–71, 146, 158,
Sterling, Bruce, 2 183, 210, 212
The Difference Engine (with William
Gibson), 83 Vanasco, Alberto, ‘Post-Boom Boom’,
Islands in the Net, 34 185
Mirrorshades, 34, 225, 230 Vance, Jack, ‘Turjan of Miir’, 223
Stevenson, Robert Louis, The Strange Van der Rohe, Mies, 131
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 25 Van Vogt, A.E., 96–7, 226
Stoker, Bram, Dracula, 76, 156 Slan, 96–7, 149
Stone, Leslie F., 12 The Voyage of the Space Beagle, 28
‘The Conquest of Gola’, 152, 154 The Weapon Shops of Isher, 28, 224
Stravinsky, Igor, 131 The World of Null-A, 97
Stross, Charles, 34–5 Varley, John
Accelerando, 34 The Ophiuchi Hotline, 33
Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, 214 ‘Options’, 156
Stuart, Don A., see John W. Campbell Steel Beach, 166
Sturgeon, Theodore,15, 28, 44 Veiga, José J., Misplaced Machine and
definition of science fiction, 44 Other Stories, 188–9
More Than Human, 86 Verne, Jules, 6, 13, 27, 40, 73–7, 232
Venus Plus X, 157 Around the Moon, 77, 81
Subiela, Eliseo Around the World in Eighty Days, 77
Hombre mirando alsudeste (The Man From the Earth to the Moon, 25, 77
Facing Southeast), 181–2 Hector Servadac, 75–7, 81
No te mueras sin decirme adónde Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 23
vas (Don’t Die Without Telling Me Robur the Conqueror, 25
Where You Are Going), 181–2 Twenty Thousand Leagues under the
subjunctivity, 45, 150, 157, 235, 239 Sea, 25, 76–7
266 Index
Vinge, Vernor, 48 Wilkins, John, The Discovery of a

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) World in the Moone, 23
Contes, 74 Williamson, Jack, 48, 113
Micromègas, 23 After World’s End, 88
Vonarburg, Elisabeth, Silent City, 156 Darker Than You Think, 156
Vonnegut, Kurt, 30, 121, 132–3 The Legion of Time, 89
Breakfast of Champions, 133 Wonder’s Child, 187
Cat’s Cradle, 122, 133 Wingrove, David, 49
Slaughterhouse, 5, 133, 212 Trillion Year Spree (with Brian W.
Aldiss), 11, 49
Wachowski brothers, The Matrix, 144, Wittig, Monique, Les Guérillères, 158
176 Wolfe, Gary K., 4, 12–13, 38, 150,
Walpole, Horace, The Castle of 183, 195, 226, 236
Otranto, 24 Wolfe, Gene, 5, 6, 228–9
Watson, Ian, 35 Book of the New Sun, 34, 223–4,
Weinbaum, Batya, 11 239–40
Weinbaum, Stanley, The New Adam, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, 225, 228,
100, 149 235
Weir, Peter, The Truman Show, 142 ‘The Woman Who Loved the
Weiss, Margaret (with Tracy Centaur Pholus’, 223
Hickman), Dragon Wing, 223 Wollheim, Donald, 124
Weller, Archie, Land of the Golden definition of science fiction, 49
Clouds, 165 Woolf, Virginia, 131, 150
Wells, H.G., 2, 6, 11, 26, 28, 30, 40, The Waves, 131
58, 60, 62–3, 68–9, 72–4, 77–83, world-building, 51–2, 121
131, 222 Wright, Peter, 18, 242
The First Men in the Moon, 26, 81 Wright, Ronald, A Scientific Romance,
The Invisible Man, 26 13, 26
The Island of Doctor Moreau, 26, Wylie, Philip, The Disappearance, 158
78–9, 152 Wyndham, John, 7, 227
Men Like Gods, 56 The Chrysalids, 31
A Modern Utopia, 56 The Day of the Triffids, 31, 224, 227,
The New Adam, 100 240
The Sleeper Awakes, 26 The Midwich Cuckoos, 240
The Time Machine, 26, 61, 68, 83,
78, 221–4, 226, 235, 241 Yamashita, Karen Tei, Through the Arc
Things to Come, 236 of the Rainforest, 17, 192, 194, 197
The War of the Worlds, 25, 79–80, Yazek, Lisa, 11, 14–15, 102, 230
221, 244
The World Set Free, 212 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, We, 26, 55, 60,
West, William, ‘The Last Man’, 158 62, 63–4
Westfahl, Gary, 14, 40, 86 Zaramella, Juan Pablo, ‘Viaje al Marte’
The Mechanics of Wonder, 11, 105, (‘Trip to Mars’), 180–1
226, 233 Zelazny, Roger, ‘A Rose for
White, T.H., Earth Stopped, 27 Ecclesiastes’, 122
Wilcox, Don, 149 Zoline, Pamela, 122
Wilcox, Fred McLeod, Forbidden ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’,
Planet, 100–1, 104–5, 108–9 32, 119, 125, 132, 136, 225, 227

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Teaching Science Fiction

Teaching the New English

Teaching the New English

12 Teaching Science and Science Fiction: A Case Study 202

References, Resources and Further Reading 247

12.1 Award structure and cognate strands 210

One of many exciting achievements of the early years of the English

is dedicated to the development of the craft of teaching within English

The English Subject Centre

Founded in 2000, the English Subject Centre (which is based at Royal

We would like to thank Professor Ben Knights and Jane Gawthrope

Mark Brake is an author, broadcaster and professor in the communication

Andrew M. Butler is the author of Pocket Essentials on Philip K. Dick

Chris Ferns is a Professor of English at Mount Saint Vincent University

M. Elizabeth Ginway is Associate Professor of Portuguese in the

Paul Kincaid is a winner of the Thomas Clareson Award and is the

Rob Latham is Associate Professor of English at the University of

Uppinder Mehan teaches at the University of Houston-Victoria in

at work on a book-length introduction to postcolonial science fiction

Adam Roberts is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at Royal

Andy Sawyer is librarian of the Science Fiction Foundation Collection

Gary Westfahl, who teaches at the University of California, Riverside,

Gary K. Wolfe, Professor of Humanities and English at Roosevelt

nominated for a Hugo Award by the World Science Fiction Convention.

Peter Wright is Reader in Speculative Fictions at Edge Hill University

Lisa Yaszek is Associate Professor in the School of Literature,

1516 Thomas More, Utopia

1865 Jules Verne From the Earth to the Moon

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World

1934 E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Triplanetary

1952 Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire

1962 Cuban Missile Crisis

John Brunner, The Jagged Orbit

1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident

Storm Constantine, The Fulfilments of Fate

1998 Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

Geoff Ryman, Air

The continuing contemporary growth in science fiction scholarship, the

Historically, however, science fiction’s growing literary self-awareness,

When my own course began in 1969 I received a visit from a reporter

The gradual, sometimes begrudging, recognition that ‘a number of

in the country’ at that time.5 A comparable progress was not seen in

third edition is likely to be so extensive that it will be available exclu-

facilitates close textual analysis (particularly through the work of the

to new theories about the universe, by speculating about their effects

professional writers and editors, and the terminology of scholars

notes how Baudrillard’s recognition of the collapse of the distinction

science fiction’. In his discussion of the former, Mehan focuses on how

Many undergraduates embarking on a course or module in science fic-

highly influential, inspiring, among many other works, a play by Aphra

Frenchy Steiner’ by Hilary Bailey (1964), ‘Weinachtsabend’ by Keith

Gernsback lost control of Amazing Stories in 1929, and during the

promulgated the Three Laws of Robotics. ‘Robot’, a term coined by Karel

aesthetic but brought to it greater literary sensibility. In the stories

Aldiss somewhat dismissively termed the ‘cosy catastrophe’,6 the best

atmosphere thus established, particularly Brian Aldiss and J.G. Ballard.

future and obsessive interest in new technologies. But in fact cyberpunk

Egan is Australian, Stross British and Ryman a Canadian resident

interstitial arts (the literature that, supposedly, occupies the interstices