The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (review)

Science fiction (SF) is a tricky genre to talk about. There is an aspect of SF associated with low-brow aesthetics and pop culture—this is the terrain of the fan. But there is also a high-brow, elite-culture aspect to SF, especially as scholarship in literary and film studies has begun to look at SF as a relevant mode of cultural expression—this is the terrain of the scholar. Ideally, the fan is minimally aware of the scholar, at least insofar as one gains a historical appreciation of SF. Likewise, the scholar must be minimally aware of the fan, especially since SF has been, for a large chunk of its history, a "pulp" phenomenon. But this is the ideal situation; the fact is that one rarely sees scholars at fan conventions such as DragonCon, and one rarely sees fans at academic conferences such as the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.

There are, however, signs that this is changing, and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's book is an indicator of how we might move beyond the gap between the scholar and the fan, the elite and the popular notions of SF. In a way, Csicsery-Ronay's book signals a third kind of figure beyond the scholar and the fan, which we can, a bit tongue-in-cheek, call the SF "dweller." Whereas both the scholar and the fan are beholden to the specialized, genre-based status of SF, the dweller is not only the person who lives in SF story worlds but the person who takes it for granted that the actual world must be understood in terms of SF. It is this expansion and diffusion of SF that constitutes the overarching concern of Csicsery-Ronay's book. Today, the increasing ubiquity of SF in culture stimulates

science-fictional habits of mind, so that we no longer treat SF as purely a genre-engine producing formulaic effects, but rather as a kind of awareness we might call science-fictionality, a mode of response that frames and tests experiences as if they were aspects of a work of science fiction [2].

That said, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction is, first and foremost, a book about SF as a genre. Csicsery-Ronay has done something remarkable—he has posed a number of philosophical questions concerning SF itself, while, at the same time, providing a set of conceptual tools for understanding SF as a genre and as a narrative form. Csicsery-Ronay is in a good position to do this; for a number of years he has edited the journal Science Fiction Studies, and SF scholars are well aware of his important essays on SF, in which he has consistently tried to think about SF outside the genre itself (his essays on globalization and SF, and on postmodern theory and SF, are noteworthy in this regard). Csicsery-Ronay avoids the more predictable routes of deliberating over the definitions of SF, as well as re-telling the history of SF. Instead, he borrows from classical aesthetic theory to talk not about definitions or history, but about the major figures that together constitute SF—something like the "poetics" of SF.

As its title indicates, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction is organized along seven core figures. In each chapter, Csicsery-Ronay not only discusses these conceptually but also provides plentiful examples, including a number of insightful close readings of key SF texts or films. Csicsery-Ronay also takes up ideas from thinkers such as Kant or Burke, as well as engaging with SF critics such as Darko Suvin, Carl Freedman, Frederic Jameson and many others.

Briefly, the "seven beauties" of SF are: (1) "fictive neology" (the signs and language of SF, from the technical jargon and the language of future politics, to futuristic slang and alien linguistics); (2) "fictive novums" (borrowing from Darko Suvin's use of the term novum to mean the central imaginative novelty in an SF story...