Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West by Carl Abbott (review)

b o o k R e v ie w s 2 0 3 American identity politics should invest in a copy of Becoming Western. In addi­ tion, because Nicholas uses familiar texts, figures, and landmarks to inform her argument, teachers and students alike can use this text as a well-marked map to navigate the complex discourses that comprise Wyoming’s place in the national narrative. Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West. By Carl Abbott. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. 230 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by David Mogen Colorado State University, Fort Collins Though at first glance science fiction and western literature may appear to be utterly disconnected, they are in fact deeply entwined, since much science fic­ tion is conceived as, in Robert Heinlein’s words, “history of the future” (5). As Carl Abbott observes in his introduction to Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West, “every story' about a possible future— whether ten years or ten centuries out— is a projection of some aspect of human history” (1). And historically, as Abbott also observes, “the West has always symbolized the national future,” so that much American science fiction continues this tra­ dition by projecting imagined futures as extensions of earlier frontiers opened up by new developments in science, technology, and culture (34)Like much of the best western writing, these new frontiers evoke stories about dreams and devastation, an often bittersweet legacy of regenerated aspira­ tion and ironic disillusionment. Abbott evokes this ambivalent frontier tradition by transposing the words of one of our most thoughtful western writers to apply to imagined futures as well as the past. He reminds us that Wallace Stegner writes, “look at any book that is western in its feel and you will find that it is a book not about place but about motion, not about fulfillment but desire.” Abbott continues by saying that “much science fiction is a search for places to start over, for new ‘geographies of hope,’ to borrow another Stegner phrase” (14). As is suggested by his adaptation of Stegner’s words to describe science fiction frontiers, Abbott is conversant with a broad range of writing about both the West and science fiction, and he succeeds admirably in orchestrating a meaningful and often witty dialogue between the two traditions. After summa­ rizing and giving appropriate tribute to earlier scholarly writings on this subject, he defines an ambitious and timely agenda for his new study: “My goal is to take the discussion to the next step by examining the multiple and often conflicted stories Americans have developed behind the façade of the ‘frontier’” (29). The result is an in-depth survey of previously mapped terrain as well as of new territory. Abbott integrates earlier criticism with postmodernist commentary, traditional western historiography with contemporary post-Tumerian studies of the New West. He provides extended interpretations of Golden Age and New 2 0 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 7 Wave science fiction and of cyberpunk and a new generation of writers who consciously integrate the ongoing dialectic about western frontiers into their complex projections of the future. As Abbott observes about his book’s design, it reconstructs earlier discus­ sions through the perspectives of contemporary literary and cultural studies and current historiography. “The organization of the book mirrors both the Turnerian sequence and the complicating arguments of recent historians” (32). Thus, his chapter titles provide a kind of historiography of future histories inter­ woven with aesthetic assessments of the stories they inspire. From an introduc­ tion titled “Launching Pads,” we proceed to examine “Never Final Frontiers,” and literal, new, physical frontiers in chapters such as “Beyond Alaska: Sourdoughs, Lunies, Belters, and Other Tough Guys” and “Johnny Appleseed, John Wayne, and Homesteading on the Extraterrestrial Frontier.” He examines thematic frontiers such as “Frontier Democracy” and “On the Urban Edge” and informational and virtual frontiers in “Information Everywhere: Pacific Destinies in the Twenty-First Century.” Artfully weaving connections between history and fiction, cultural theory and aesthetics, Frontiers...