Classical Traditions in Science Fiction ed. by Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens (review)

The fourteen essays which this volume comprises explore different intersections between two fields that might at first seem worlds apart. However, there is a long tradition of harking back to the classical past when speculating about humanity’s possible future. Explorations both backwards and forwards in time are, in their different ways, speculative journeys to an “undiscovered country” (7): “The strangeness of images of the ancient past is marked by the ‘cognitive estrangement’ of futures imagined in modern SF” (18). Frankenstein, subtitled “The Modern Prometheus,” is a locus classicus of this synergy between the classics and SF. An equally apt illustration is Mary Shelley’s less well known novel, The Last Man: the frame narrative, set in Shelley’s present, documents the chance discovery of a cache of Sibylline documents from the distant past which reveal mankind’s future extinction in the twenty-first century.

The volume opens with four essays on “SF’s Rosy-Fingered Dawn” before addressing more recent examples of classical presences in television, film, and literary science fiction. Whereas some contributors focus on SF texts whose debt to classical culture is unmissable, others track looser ties between these two traditions, and demonstrate how each may become an illuminating lens through which to view the other. Rebecca Raphael and Brett M. Rogers offer thought-provoking discussions of shifts in the way hybridity and post-human identity have been conceptualized. George Kovacs proposes an irresistible parallel between myth-making in the classical world and Star Trek’s later myth-building. In both cases the “mythology” first develops organically, before being refined in a more self-conscious age; Hellenistic sophisticates and avid Star Trek fans alike are fully aware of the divergences, contradictions, and subtexts within their traditions (203).

Sometimes, where a more direct link is claimed between a SF text and a classical source, the argument seems more tenuous. Although he has interesting things to say about both works, some of the connections Joel P. Christensen identifies between Dune and the Iliad are a little generic. Erik Grayson draws suggestive parallels between the fall of Rome and the post-apocalyptic America of Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz but seems to be clutching at straws in some of his attempts to tease significance out of Miller’s classicizing names. Jesse Weiner’s evidence for identifying Lucretius as a key intertext for Frankenstein is strained in places. He makes a better case, however, for the presence of Lucan’s necromantic witch Erichtho in the novel, a parallel that amplifies the monstrosity of Frankenstein himself.

Although it rests on just three quotations from the Aeneid, Benjamin Eldon Stevens’ essay on Journey to the Center of the Earth presents a meticulously argued case for seeing Verne’s narrator, Axel, as a “rewritten epic hero” (91) whose own katabasis offers not a prophetic glimpse of his people’s future (as granted to Aeneas), but a scientific revelation of humanity’s past through the living fossils who dwell in the underworld. The monstrous proto-human who shepherds mastodons is a figurative father figure who replaces the ghostly presence of Anchises.

There are many other highlights in this consistently stimulating collection. Tony Keen makes a thoroughly convincing case for Lucian as a significant influence on H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. Marian Makins demonstrates how Panem, the dystopian society of The Hunger Games, synthesizes elements from both the historical Rome and “misrepresentations” of Rome in American popular culture in order to create “a carefully constructed hybrid reconfiguration that implicates aspects of contemporary society” (304). Gaël Grobéty offers a crisply argued analysis of how Dan Simmons, in Ilium and Olympos, both restages Homeric epiphanies and demystifies them, replacing awe at divine intervention with wonder at human ingenuity.

Inevitably, any reader who already has an interest in both classical traditions and science fiction will...