Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System by John Rieder (review)

In 1979 Darko Suvin offered a strictly formal definition of the science fiction (SF) genre: "the literature of cognitive estrangement'" (qtd. in Rieder 4). By throwing up the formal walls, Suvin's definition worked to turn the genre against itself, with some works being excluded from a developing SF canon for failing to meet certain formal properties. John Rieder's Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System represents an important intervention in SF studies by disrupting Suvin's paradigm, not by disputing his formal requirements but by questioning the very premise that form determines genre. Instead, Rieder conducts a historical analysis to argue that SF "is an organic genre of the mass cultural genre system" and that its unique properties are tied explicitly to modes of economic production and continual communal definitions (9). In Rieder's study, the SF genre manifests at the intersection of various historical contingencies and cultural shifts rather than as a singular set of formal principles. Rieder situates SF ultimately as a perpetually mediated, socially constructed genre, a "product of multiple communities of practice" whose difficulty of definition exists at least in part because of its perpetual exclusion from the classical, academic genre system (11). With his interest in exploring the relationship between the academy and mass culture, Rieder's stakes move beyond simply whether SF is defined according to formal or historical principles and into the realm of epistemological dissemination inherent to the academy's perpetuation of a specific set of traditional genres and their accompanying value systems, which work to introduce "effects of stratification that pervade the entire field of modern literary production" (9). In this way, Rieder's work speaks not only to the historical emergence of the SF genre and its continued evolution but also to the fields of genre and cultural studies, to the tension between academic and popular culture, and to the ways these elements intersect within and disrupt processes of genre reception and canonization.

Rieder makes his case through six chapters, bracketed by a wonderfully accessible introduction and a conclusion that argues for three central periods in SF's ongoing development. The first three chapters ("On Defining Science Fiction, Or Not,""lThe Mass Cultural Genre System," and "Genealogies of SF") accomplish most of the theoretical heavy lifting, while the remaining chapters ("Philip K. Dick's Mass Cultural Epistemology""Communities of Interpretation (1): Two Hollywood Films and the Tiptree Award Anthologies," and "Communities of Interpretation (2): Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism") serve as close-reading exercises on Rieder's part to demonstrate how SF arises from and contends with the mass cultural genre system. Coming in at just under two hundred pages (not including notes and bibliography), the book is a testament to Rieder's ability to stage a convincing argument by concisely marshaling a wealth of critical material and historical examples. And though Rieder engages in decades old conversations related to SF specifically and genre more broadly, he helpfully rehearses many of these discourses, lending the text an additional layer of utility.

So what is SF? To answer that notoriously slippery question, Rieder turns to a historical approach, following Ralph Cohen's claim that genre theory writ large has already "changed from identifying and classifying fixed, ahistorical entities to studying genres as historical processes" (13). Rieder's work, then, is novel in its comprehensive attempt to graft onto SF studies this historical method, to privilege the genre's historical construction in its definition over its form. From this historical perspective, Rieder maps out five propositions, which he proceeds to elaborate both through the first chapter and the entire book. This "newer paradigm," he argues, "considers generic organizations and structures to be just as messily bound to time and place as other literary historical phenomena, albeit with patterns of distribution and temporalities of continuity and discontinuity" (16). Importantly, a historical approach to SF admits a lack of origin, attending instead to "an accretion of repetitions, echoes, imitations, allusions, identifications, and distinctions that testifies to...