Peculiar Shuttling Movements

I half-jokingly say to anyone who engages me on the topic of science fiction that the 1960s and 1970s were the pinnacle of craft in the genre.

This period, of course, encompasses the New Wave, interpreted by Philip Wegner (cited by our wonderful guest editor, Paul March-Russell) as the moment when science fiction crashes into the modernist sensibilities of Literature-with-a-capital-L, exploding formal and thematic conventions. When science fiction, in Wegner’s words, ‘briefly becomes modernist.’ 

This is far too brief a space (and far too ignorant an author) to offer anything more than a speculation of the socio-historical forces that brought about this convergence. Perhaps it was the unhappy but generative confluence of decolonization, civil rights struggles, the ongoing threat of nuclear war, the resurgence of crises of and about immigration. Science fiction – that bright imaginer of glittering new technology and utopian social formations – suddenly found its joy leached away as the futures it tantalized became manifest in bleaker and, truthfully, mundanely cruel realities. Literature, always seen as a dangerous beast in times of social upheaval, became implicated in countercultural movements, and science fiction was no exception. It was time to throw away the spaceships and oddly familiar aliens, the simpering space damsels (jettison them entirely, they use up far too much oxygen) and dashing colonists. Outer space lost the sheen of adventure and became dull, cold, dead, and empty; Inner space became the place: woman looked out into the cosmos, and saw her own neuroses and hopes and desires staring, baldly, back at her. Doris Lessing defined inner-space fiction best (and possibly first) in the epigraph to her 1972 novel, Briefing for a Descent Into Hell: ‘there is never anywhere to go but in.’ 

If the contributors to this special issue ‘tend to cleave to Anglo-European modernisms’, let me, in this remaining space, slice a bracing paper-cut before the cleft (if you will excuse the word-play). Let me make the bold claim that the Botswanan author, Bessie Amelia Emery Head, is one of the landmark figures of twentieth century Anglophone modernism. Let me cite A Question of Power (1974) as a novel that, like its almost-contemporary, Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To… (1977), writhes not just in a refusal of prevailing cultural norms pertaining to race (on Head’s part), gender (both Russ and Head strangle that particular serpent) and class (likewise), but enacts a sitting-in that space. A discomfort that, like Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), is almost, but not quite, deadly. It is almost too much for the English language to bear. 

Perhaps the comparison is unfair. Russ’s novel is acceptedly ‘science fiction.’ Head’s is not. I, of course, argue that both should be welcomed into the home-place of genre. 

A Question of Power was Head’s third novel, and the second of hers to be published in the Heinemann African Writers’ Series: a bold, vexed, and expansive project that brought writers from the continent of Africa to the United Kingdom, from 1962 to 2003. (Again, here is not the place to transcribe the debates about whether the novel form, a distinctly European technology, was appropriate to writers and artists from primarily oral traditions. The series gave us Head, and Amos Tutuola, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and so many other literary greats). Head herself was born in Pietermaritzburg in 1937 to a white woman and a black father. Much of her life was spent traveling between regions, stateless, illegible to an Apartheid regime. Her mental health, unsurprisingly, suffered. A Question of Power is a largely autobiographical novel that documents one woman’s struggle to make a ‘home-place’ (to repeat Carla Peterson’s human construct) in a country that not only wanted her dead, but that did not recognize her existence. Cruelty abounds within the narrative, but so too does beauty and grace. At times, the narrative falls apart, rupturing as it veers from descriptions of domesticity to mythic terror. Medusa makes an appearance, along with Hitler, Buddha, God Himself and His angelic cohorts, and Priapic demons that torment her with their sexuality. Caligula speaks. Icons of ‘classical’ western education manifest in the novel’s setting of Motabeng, Botswana, reversing the visual iconography of African art that so inspired those venerable European modernists. It is an extraordinary work. 

Helen Kapstein writes of the ‘peculiar shuttling movements’ made by Head throughout her life: moving from state to state, inverting violent social norms and turning them back upon themselves, ‘trespassing’ between frameworks of normalcy. Perhaps this is where the modernist subject resides, having ‘reeled towards death’, and then ‘turned and reeled towards life’ (Head, A Question of Power, p. 219).  In moving synchrony, it is a trajectory that similarly informs the writing of contemporary Motswana author Tlotlo Tsamaase. Speaking in a 2023 conversation in World Literature Today about her short story ‘Peeling Time’ (2022), Tsamaase describes it as a journey ‘from oppression to freedom, in conjunction with demonstrating one woman’s agency.’ 

If I may characterize contemporary SF: it has performed a similar swinging-back-necessarily-to offer stories of hope and adventure, inclusivity and peace: places where, as Tsamaase poignantly remarks in the same interview, the woman ‘does not die.’ The genre begrudgingly agrees, in one voice, to keep the woman on the spaceship, after all, and the modernist subject, in all its mess and complexity, may finally make it to outer space.

Phoenix Alexander, March 2024 

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, by Molly McGhee (Astra House, forthcoming October 17th, 2023)

I’ve always found fascinating the shifting registers of an author’s ‘voice’ as they move between fiction and non-fiction prose; McGhee’s intimate introduction to her debut novel reads like a novel-in-miniature in its own right, and is utterly captivating. I was mesmerized, in that deliciously unseating way, by the frisson of authorial vulnerability and beautiful writing. From the outset, know that you are in the hands of a Writer with this book. I mean no snobbery by saying that. What I mean is: there is a commitment here to exquisite prose, the assembling of words in unexpected formations, that both heightens and grounds the speculative nature of the story. The introduction is an assurance that McGhee is more than capable of leading you through the crystalline tragedy of Jonathan Abernathy’s life. Of life, period/full stop (delete as you prefer). 

‘Jonathan Abernathy you are kind’ is one affirmation of many that the orphaned protagonist invokes for himself to get through the days of his minimum-wage, debt-weighted life.  He has no friends. He may be falling in love with his neighbour, Rhoda, and her daughter, Timmy. An offer of salvation comes in the form of encouragement to apply for the job of ‘Dream Auditor,’ to rid himself of debt. The work? Cleaning the dreams of American workers so that their little worker bodies wake, refreshed and ready to give more, give it there all, each and every morning, with minds cleaned of any anxiety. 

It is a job that, again, from the outset, we are told Abernathy will not survive. But he will try. He will try very hard. And the trying is this story. 

There is a much pleasure as there is terror in these pages – yes, the novel makes a slide into a genre that I wasn’t expecting, but welcomed warmly, regardless – thanks to the gorgeous, surreal dreamscapes that McGhee renders: dreamscapes tempered by precise prose that sketches in, fully, the lives of the novel’s refreshingly small cast. The author’s use of the omniscient narrative voice is startling and original and leaves the denouement, still, as a genuine surprise. 

The book has a lot to say about the structures, and systems, and – most importantly – the people we hold ourselves accountable to. As always with these kinds of dystopian speculations, I sincerely hope that no enterprising techie, sometime in the near future, thinks ‘hey! That novel about sucking up bad dreams to make people more productive… now *that’s* a great idea,’ because while SFF does not, should not predict futures, and does not, should not, prescribe them – there is always the danger that dreams and speculations, unleashed, can take on an after-life of their own. Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is a road map to empathy. Break open in times of crisis.

And it is always a crisis.

Hello, and welcome to an extra-special post from Vector’s new Editor-in-Chief: me! 

I had such a wonderful time guest-editing the special issue on Greek SF/F back in Spring 2022, as well as the forthcoming issue on Libraries, Archives, and the Future of Information, with the wonderful Stewart C. Baker, that when I heard on the grapevine that the journal was looking for a new EiC, I just had to throw my hat in the ring. And the Vector gods (aka. Jo and Polina) smiled upon me, and here we are. 

A brief introduction: I’m Dr. Phoenix Alexander, Klein Librarian of Science Fiction and Fantasy at the University of California, Riverside. I curate the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy: one of the largest collections of genre literature in the world. Before that, from 2019-2022, I was the Science Fiction Collections Librarian at the University of Liverpool: one of Europe’s largest collections of, yes, genre literature. I hold a Ph.D. in English and African American Studies from Yale University, and an MA and BA from Queen Mary, University of London. Before *that*, there was fashion school… which was just as fantastical as any genre novel. And, of course, the usual “I’ve been reading since I was a wee lad,” and so on. (To this day, I ascribe my… sanguine taste in SF/F to the outrageous, gratuitous works of David Gemmell and Peter F. Hamilton that I read, in hindsight, at far too young an age). Phew. That’s a lot of ‘science fiction’ in one paragraph.

The belaboured point I’m making is that I’ve been immersed in science fiction, and fantasy, and (yes!) horror, my whole life, and feel so fortunate, every day, to work with scholars and artists and writers and creatives of all permutations. I’m also an author of SF/F (well, mostly SF, and horror) myself, and a full member of SFWA and HWA. 

As my resume suggests, I’ve had the privilege of moving between geographic locations; I was born in Cyprus, raised in the UK, studied for six years in America, briefly returned to the UK, before settling on the US West Coast. My hope, going forward, is to further strengthen the connections between the scholarly, creative, and fannish communities, not just within the US and the UK, but across the world. Genres of the fantastic bring people together in their passions and eccentricities like no other genre. There can be friction, of course – but there can also be magic. 

In the coming months, there are many exciting things to look forward to from ‘Vector’: the aforementioned issue on Libraries, scheduled for late Fall/Winter, reviews and columns from our wonderful (and growing!) list of contributors – both new and familiar faces – with plans to publish even more articles, making Vector, in its physical and online iterations, more vibrant than ever. As always, and most importantly: the journal is a celebration of new fiction, new art, and new scholarship, in and across SFF-nal genres. 

In this spirit of celebration, I’ll end by sharing a review (in the next post) of a forthcoming title from debut author Molly McGhee: a title I greatly enjoyed, and that I hope you enjoy, too.

Warmth and light,

Phoenix Alexander

Vector, EiC