Landscape and the Science Fiction Imaginary by John Timberlake (review)

Sf is a very visual genre, especially when its full range of medial expressions is taken into account. Images from film and television, video and role-playing games, graphic novels and cover art, as well as verbal descriptions in literature, present us with a wide range of possible settings. Many of these settings may be alien, but also come across as hauntingly familiar, such as the Martian desert, the post-apocalyptic wasteland or the astronomical landscape. In Landscape and the Science Fiction Imaginary, John Timberlake relocates some of sf’s landscapes from background to foreground and discusses why they look the way they do, how they are constructed and what their function in the genre is.

Timberlake’s book consists of an introduction in which he establishes a critical basis for his analyses, six chapters that explore various themes by means of theory, careful readings of ‘ur-images’ or the works of representative artists, and interpretations of examples from sf (including films, television shows and video games as well as novels and short stories). Drawing mainly on the work of Leo Marx, Timberlake suggests that ‘landscape is not just spatiality, but embodies a sense of its histories’ (15) and, throughout the book’s discussions and readings, he returns to the distinction between an atemporal topographical space and a historical landscape. This distinction makes for some interesting readings (for instance of the desert landscape in chapter six) but it also prepares the ground for future scholarship in literary geography that parallels Timberlake’s thoughts with works based on, for instance, Michel de Certeau and Yi-Fu Tuan.

The introduction covers the theoretical foundation for the following chapters, including a somewhat defensive section on why ‘commercial’ works have been chosen for analysis, but it also includes some puzzling lacunae. With the title of the book being what it is, one would perhaps expect a clarification not only of how the author understands the term landscape but also what science fiction and imaginary mean in this particular text. Like landscape, these are terms that can have a range of meanings depending on the reader’s disciplinary or theoretical background and assumptions. That the book ‘is not about science fiction literature per se’ but about ‘science fiction as an expanded field’ (9) goes a bit towards explaining what the reader can expect in terms of examples but not all the way. My impression is that examples (such as Gulliver’s Travels, the online environment Second Life and the Minecraft computer game) are included by virtue of their contribution to the sf imaginary, but occasionally I was less certain. The term imaginary has some different but related meanings and it could save readers – in particular readers unfamiliar with the term – some confusion if the meaning being used were spelt out clearly. Leaving to the conclusion to state that the ‘science fiction imaginary’ is aligned ‘with the place of the imaginary in psychoanalytical discourse’ (171) is somewhat late; for a reader unfamiliar with (the psychoanalytical meaning of) the term, the parenthetical remark about Lacanian psychoanalysis on the first page is a very subtle hint easily missed. (A reference to Lacan’s relation between the Imaginary, the Real and the Symbolic at some point would probably have been useful as well, as these concepts are occasionally brought into the discussion.) Another curious lacuna is the absence of any kind of overview of what the six chapters contain. The introduction contains occasional hints, but there is no sense of the book’s overall structure or what areas are covered – again, the reader has to wait for the conclusion to get that, or tease it out from the chapter names in the table of contents.

The discussion of well-chosen ur-images, ‘images emanating from non-science fiction sources [that] influence and condition the imagery of science fiction’ (13), is one of the things that make this book stand out. Through careful analysis of, for example, paintings...