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Reviewed by:
  • Reading Science Fiction
  • Darin Bradley
Gunn, James, Marleen S. Barr, and Matthew Candelaria, Eds. Reading Science Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 256 pp. $28.95.

There is a trend among companion readers to the science fiction genre to qualify the volume in question. Most analyze the various science fiction literary traditions with one eye on the problematic specter of contemporary canonicity and one looking askance at popular culture studies. For most such volumes, editors hedge their work by contextualizing their volumes with introductions that, by way of personal anecdotes, explain how their various backgrounds in theory and criticism have brought them to science fiction. While often highly readable and even compelling pieces of narrative nonfiction, these introductory approaches prime their volumes’ readers to suspend their ideas of disciplinarity just enough to engage the work at hand. What often results is a continued sense of misdirection regarding canonicity, its breakdown, and the “literariness” of science fiction.

Reading Science Fiction is no different in this regard. However, unlike other volumes of its kind, Reading imagines the undergraduate scholar (or educator) as its audience. As such, the qualifying introduction does less to “defend” science fiction studies as a viable field of literary analysis and more simply to disarm students’ reservations about analysis and collegiate literary studies in general. Further, whereas the anecdotal or personalized critical introduction can complicate a volume’s overall contribution to reconsidering canonicity (sending a mixed message, of sorts), Reading’s emphases on practical pedagogy and true interdisciplinarity raise useful questions for the student struggling with the importance of literature beyond an English Department, especially since, as Sherryl Vint and Mark Bould argue in their essay, “there is no such thing as science fiction”: “SF is increasingly a generic label for media other than print, and for many now their first or formative experience of SF will be in film, television, or games” (50).

As a whole, Reading offers many familiar essays to the world of companion science fiction readers, such as historical surveys and introductions to feminist, Marxist, or postcolonial perspectives—all traditionally very useful (essential, even) for creating a multi-focal science fiction reading strategy. However, unlike other essays of this kind, those that appear in Reading offer an easy approach to balancing multiple theories at once, as well as successfully deploying them: “Being a ‘better’ reader requires awareness that all hermeneutics have ideological investments and that interpretation needs to take account of these, as well as of the text” (Vint and Bould 51). The volume struggles, however—as most do—with a unified definition of science fiction. Of course, this internal dissonance is itself pedagogically useful (and most of Reading’s contributors are careful to explain why they intentionally complicate the definition), but for young scholars struggling to reconcile, for example, Eric S. Rabkin’s Suvin-esque system of definitions with Vint and Bould’s argument that there never was any such artistic platform as “science fiction,” the approach offers few stable entrances to the larger discussion of what science fiction is. For example, Rabkin explains, in “Defining Science Fiction” that “debate between FT [fairy tale] and SF [science fiction] suggests that SF, with its frequent clashes of good and evil, heroic protagonists, and the indulgence of what Sigmund Freud called the illusion of central position, has strong roots in fairy tale” (18). However, Vint and Bould regard any solid definition of science fiction as the result of “producing, marketing, distributing, consuming and understanding texts as SF” (43, emphasis added). This sort of variance certainly equips young scholars for today’s ongoing critical discussions about science fiction, but it necessitates that they also become adept with an ad hoc historiography of the genre, its criticism, and the evolution of its forms. Overall, however, Reading [End Page 496] offers strategies for doing exactly this—for example, Brian Stableford observes about story marketing in “Narrative Strategies in Science Fiction,” that “The necessity of getting over the hurdle of the metanarrative preface was the principal reason for the unusually immense importance within the history of labeled science fiction of the science fiction magazine. The title of such a magazine functioned as a device to inform readers of...

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