Medieval Science Fiction ed. by Carl Kears and James Paz (review)

In recent years, medievalists have become much more comfortable doing scholarly work in fantasy-genre literature. Although the overlap between the two fields seems undeniably obvious today, less than a generation ago it was not yet so. Medieval Science Fiction is a collection of essays that act as an apologia for similarly bringing science fiction under the umbrella of generally accepted topics of medieval academic discourse. Even though the authors frequently acknowledge that "science fiction" as we typically understand it is a particularly modern genre, they demonstrate its mutual relevance with medieval literature, from the perspectives of both modern science fiction that employs medieval themes, and medieval writing that is illuminated by science fiction.

The Foreword, by James Hannan, acts as a much-needed primer on the state of science in the Middle Ages, in a dozen pages demolishing the absurd modern stereotype of the Middle Ages as a time of scientific backwardness. Hannan walks through the sciences and their expression in medieval literature in brief, and rather than focusing on more obscure scientific texts such as Medicina de Quadrupedibus or Bald's Leechbook, he chooses to point out the scientific content in the most well-known and accessible authors: Macrobius, Boethius, Boccaccio, Chaucer, etc. In terms of this particular volume, Hannan's foreword acts to establish that the Middle Ages had science about which to have science fiction. Taken independently, however, Hannam provides a small, readable essay that should be required reading for most undergraduate medieval literature survey courses.

In the Introduction ironically entitled "Medieval Science Fiction: An Impossible Fantasy," Carl Kears and James Paz trace the history of science fiction, showing that timelines of the genre typically skip completely over the Middle Ages, even when including Classical texts. They argue that this omission stems from a prejudice against the medieval world as inherently unscientific, and therefore without science fiction. Building on Hannam's foreword, they point out the great number of important medieval literary works that can be illuminated by considering them as science fiction, and leave it ambiguous as to what that would mean. In a short summary of the content of the book, they write, "[We] have essays uncovering the science behind medieval fictions; essays debunking the fictions about medieval science; essays exploring the medievalism of science fiction; and essays that create new science fictions from the medieval" (p. 26).

As that summary suggests, the book acts as a broad introduction to the topic, each essay dipping into one approach or another just enough to demonstrate the potential line of inquiry. Furthermore, the authors of the individual essays avoid the dilettantish naïveté of assuming that any text containing a scientific improbability is science fiction. For example, Daniel Anlezark's essay, "Is Beowulf Science Fiction?" answers his own question: "The answer must be 'no' because the question implies a range of assumptions about the history of literature and genre, as well as problematic assumptions about the history of science" (p. 39). This sentiment is echoed many times throughout the collection, the authors typically focusing on how examination of medieval literature through the lens of science fiction (and vice versa) is fruitful, rather than making arguments about genre.

The three essays on "Time & Space Travel" act as a unit to compare our sense of past and present with the medieval sense. The section opens with R. M. Liuzza's "The Future is a Foreign Country: The Legend of the Seven Sleepers and the Anglo-Saxon Sense of the Past," but puts it in the larger context of time-travel narratives, especially nineteenth-century works like The Time Machine and Looking Backward. Patricia Clare Ingham examines fictional time travel in the opposite direction, with "Untimely Travel: Living and Dying in Connie Willis's Doomsday Book," offering a fairly sympathetic view of Willis's book, particularly where it calls into question both modern popular...