The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (review)

In the seven chapters of The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. outlines seven aesthetic ideas, from the neologism to the sublime. In the process, he takes a long and idiosyncratic tour of sf criticism and the genre's own classic texts, wanting to make two arguments that have to do with the pleasures of what he calls the 'science fictional'. Csicsery-Ronay wants to think about sf not only in terms of genre but also as a kind of cognitive attraction. The science fictional describes a technoscientific attitude that is both a feature of the generic imagination and a more general modality of contemporary consciousness. A second argument describes this consciousness as the hesitation between the possible-plausible and the desirable-ethical, as the imagination speculates about the feasibility and goodness of this or that gizmo, the ramifications of this or that technoscientific future. These are aesthetic hesitations, as if Kant is drawing breath, and they enable Csicsery-Ronay to think about pleasure as the definitive component of the science fictional idea, a pleasure that lies in dwelling in the ambivalence of the fictional's relationship to the actual. This focus on cognitive attraction marks the difference of Seven Beauties from the general run of ideological-historical totalisations of sf. Instead of telling us how interesting retro-rockets, synthetic sex and time travel should be for anyone with a leftist feminist intellectual bent, Csicsery-Ronay tries to work out the brainy buzz of excitement that such novums generate. Instead of waxing lucidly about what cyberpunk and the new space opera have in common, Csicsery-Ronay mixes the gothic novel in with the space race, Star Trek with the Sokal hoax, turns to Arabic reformism to understand Klingon and describes the way that séances constitute an early history of space opera.

The question that haunts Seven Beauties is whether the seven chapters on the seven beauties are adequate to this concept of the science fictional, whether we are really engaging with a post-generic imagination or a subtly camouflaged variation on postmodern genre theory. I think we can take Csicsery-Ronay's argument more seriously than his own pomo suggestion that we treat the seven beauties as a 'constellation' (5) or a 'map of suggestions' (10). For while some of his pleasures repeat established themes in sf studies, others offer near new territory for sf scholars. In the first category are revisionist chapters on the novum and its multipication into novums, imaginary sciences that turn out to be real, future histories that displace our own and a narrative theory that synthesises the Robinsonade and adventure tale into sf. Other chapters on techno-neologisms — and the sublime and grotesque as two sides of the genre's aesthetic attraction — offer substantially new territory for thinking the technoscientific imaginary. Seven Beauties reads best when these categories facilitate the frisson of the actual and fictional, and Csicery-Ronay is able to show off his eclectic grasp of all kinds of knowledge. As neologisms both real and unreal merge, the history of technoscience is shaped by aesthetic monstrosities, in an imagination that flits between the genre and the world.

As far back as 1991, Csicsery-Ronay was testing what a post-generic conception of sf might look like by proposing a science fictional turn in critical theory. His essay 'The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway' argues that these theorists come to define the world in a science fictional way because the world has come to look like sf. Or to put it another way, they write about sf but take as their subject the world's own transformations. The very reverse is true of Seven Beauties, which treats sf not as a metaphor for larger transformations but as the very transformation itself. In doing so, however, Csicsery-Ronay gets caught in the paradox of a minor mode that has become major, that can no longer claim a critical place for itself in a world that has...