Science Fiction, Children's Literature, and Popular Culture: Coming of Age in Fantasyland (review)

Gary Westfahl. Science Fiction, Children's Literature, and Popular Culture: Coming of Age in Fantasyland. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Academic books require such an impressive commitment of time, energy, and thought that I can't help feeling respect for their authors, and I therefore tend to emphasize the strengths of a given text when I write a review. In this case, however, emphasizing strengths will take one sentence. Science Fiction, Children's Literature, and Popular Culture only has two strengths: it is readable, and its author knows science fiction. If Gary Westfahl had confined himself to science fiction, I would have been able to write a more positive review; unfortunately, more than half of the essays in this collection attempt to analyze facets of children's literature or popular culture, fields about which Westfahl knows very little. In fact, that is my major criticism of this volume: Westfahl writes about these two fields without first familiarizing himself with primary and secondary material in both.

To take one essay as an example, "Mystery of the Amateur Detectives: The Early Days of the Hardy Boys" is based almost entirely on the unreliable autobiography of Leslie McFarlane, one of the early ghostwriters of the series. Besides several Hardy Boys volumes, the only other sources consulted are Carol Billman's The Secret of the Stratemeyer Syndicate: Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, and the Million Dollar Fiction Factory (1986) and one nonacademic book published by a popular press. Westfahl is apparently unaware of the extensive scholarly work that has been done on the Hardy Boys and the Stratemeyer Syndicate. I cannot imagine a reputable scholar writing about this subject without reading Deidre Johnson's two books, Stratemeyer Pseudonyms and Series Books: An Annotated Checklist of Stratemeyer Syndicate Publications (1982) and Edward Stratemeyer and the Stratemeyer Syndicate (1993), not to mention the numerous journal articles available on the subject. Westfahl assumes that other than McFarlane, the ghostwriters of the Hardy Boys series are unknown, yet scholars such as Johnson have long since identified almost all of the writers of the original series, and the information is readily available in print publications and on the World Wide Web.

Westfahl's research in other areas is equally shallow. In an essay titled "Even Better than the Real Thing: Advertising, Music Videos, Postmodernism, and (Eventually) Science Fiction," he argues that postmodernism is a direct descendant of advertising. Postmodernist scholarship is abundant and easy to find, yet Westfahl cites merely two sources, one of which is more about cyberpunk science fiction than about postmodernism. He states several times that critics commonly claim that science fiction is the source of postmodernism. Most postmodernist scholars would be astounded by that claim since many of the texts they study predate the 1960s cyberpunk novels to which Westfahl refers. A few science fiction critics have made the specious argument that science fiction is the precursor of postmodernism, but theirs is simply a feeble attempt to legitimize science fiction studies. (Science fiction studies does not need to be legitimized; it can stand on its own three feet.)

The same essay exhibits another of Westfahl's failings, a tendency to leap to conclusions based on little or no evidence. Because he sees postmodern characteristics in advertising, he concludes that postmodernism descends from advertising. The problem here is that he is really discussing contemporary advertising; older advertisements do not exhibit similar characteristics. A more logical conclusion would be that advertising has been influenced by postmodernist literature. In another essay, noting that a musician committed suicide several months after a VH1 program about his defunct duo, Westfahl leaps to the conclusion that the program caused his suicide. Any number of personal tragedies can lead to suicide, yet Westfahl has made no effort to research recent events in the subject's life. Likewise, his first essay states that children hated an unimportant...