For a literature supposedly intent upon the new, the inventive, the futuristic, science fiction seems inordinately interested in its own past. I am as guilty as anyone of this, which may be why I notice the phenomenon so much. But the question is: what are we looking for in the past, and (a very different question) what are we finding? Generally, the past is assumed to hold the key to where we are now and what we might become. That, however, is far from always being the case. The history of science fiction is extraordinarily full of false trails, dead ends, U-turns, twists, side tracks, abrupt changes of direction, and so on. Somehow, where we are today emerged out of the mess of what we once were, but in retrospect the route is neither clear nor consistent. Simply diving willy-nilly into the science fiction of days gone by, shining a light at random onto a story over here, a novel over there, offers no clue as to how or even if those writings are connected. And it offers even less of a clue about the evolution of what came after.
That, in a nutshell, is my problem with this latest selection of hoary tales from the dusty and neglected by-ways of science fiction’s infancy. Or rather, since the various contributors seem wedded to Gary Westfahl’s bizarre argument that true science fiction only came into being with the launch of Amazing Stories, this is science fiction from before there was science fiction. There are seven stories and three novel extracts gathered here, the earliest of which was written in 1826 (though not published until 1863), and the most recent published in 1923. Ten pieces of writing drawn from near enough a century of science fiction, each accompanied by an introduction (to call them “critical essays” as the subtitle does is, to my mind, to over-inflate their role); there should be enough here to forge a narrative, give us a perspective from which to consider where we come from and where we might be going.
Reviewed by Paul Kincaid. This review first appeared in The BSFA Review.
There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, drowns us all. Not quite what Brutus was trying to say, but a sentiment much closer to the common impulse of humankind. We are drawn to disasters and catastrophes, to worst-case scenarios and conspiracy theories. Even if the thing we dread the most is no more likely to occur than the thing we hope for most fervently, still it is the dread that seems to prevail. And so we tell ourselves tales of the end of the world and the hopelessness of existence, perhaps secretly believing that the more we detail the worst the less chance there is of the worst occurring.
A sense of collective guilt runs through our fictions of a dying earth. At one point it might be nature, or perhaps more commonly god, reacting against the hubris of humanity. In time that became a common dread of the finger poised above the nuclear button. Nowadays, our visions of finality seem to fall into one of two variants. Either we dread the failure of the technology we have become so reliant on, as in Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice (2018) or The Silence by Don DeLillo (2020); or we dread the failure of our ecology. Since the natural disaster that is climate change is most commonly caused by human technology, these two variants are perhaps not that far apart.
A Diary in the Age of Water by the Canadian author and environmental activist, Nina Munteanu, clearly belongs in the second camp. It is a step-by-step guide to the way that human malfeasance, greed, and ignorance exhaust the water that we all rely upon for our very existence. One of Munteanu’s recent works, Water Is … (2016), is a non-fiction account of the role that water plays in every aspect of our lives. The influence of that earlier work in shaping Munteanu’s new novel is illustrated by the frequency with which the phrase “water is …” is repeated throughout the work.
Except I hesitate over the word “novel”. I’m not exactly sure what this book is, but it has few of the novelistic virtues – well-drawn characters, story, sense of place – that we might normally expect to find. Apart from relatively brief opening and closing scenes set in an undefined but relatively distant future, the bulk of the book is made up of extracts from a diary written over a period of some 20 years starting in 2045. The author of the diary, Lynna, (like the author of the book) is a limnologist, someone who studies the relationship between lakes and rivers and their ecological context. As the diary opens, she is an academic at the University of Toronto whose work is sponsored and controlled by an outfit called CanadaCorp. CanadaCorp, it turns out, is really an American company owned by China, and it is concerned with channelling Canadian water to the drought-stricken USA, leaving Canada itself subject to severe water rationing. Despite Lynna’s tendency towards self-deception (during the course of the book she is apparently responsible for the firing of one colleague and indirectly for at least one murder) her doubts about her political masters grow until she is forced out of her job, only to watch as her daughter, Hilde, takes to dangerous but only vaguely described activism.
Outlined like this, the book might seem dramatic enough, but none of this is centre stage. There is nothing that might be considered dramatic that does not occur off-stage; and even the overall story I’ve imputed to the book is mostly drawn from reading between the lines. The entries in the so-called diary are not accounts of the events of the day, but are rather meditations on the behaviour of rivers and lakes and their impact on the surrounding environment. These are almost invariably couched in technical language that is not, for the most part, interpreted for a non-technical reader. Sometimes, particularly when they are given over to ferocious (and well-deserved) denunciations of the ecological policies of the Trump regime, these entries rise to the level of polemic. For the most part, however, they read like lectures aimed at undergraduates, particularly given their frequent and extensive quotes from academic texts on the subject, most consistently Limnology by Robert G, Wetzel (2001).
Typically, as we begin to suspect that Hilde’s actions might be giving the book a belated plot, the diary comes to an abrupt end and the scene jumps forwards decades to when a blue-skinned, four-armed girl who may be Hilde’s descendant is reading the diary. What happened in the interim, and how a blue-skinned, four-armed girl modelled on a Hindu deity is supposed to be the answer to surviving the environmental collapse caused by the loss of water is never made clear.
Ursula Le Guin talked about the lure of the pulpit, the writers who were more interested in expounding their ideas than in exploring them. Munteanu has succumbed to the lure of the lectern. She is so intent on layout out her scientific ideas about water that these ideas never acquire the novelistic weight of metaphor. They seem, therefore, divorced from the polemical aspects of the book. While the polemic, focused as it is upon the Trump presidency, a quarter of a century or more before the setting of the book, is similarly divorced from what passes for story here. There are interesting and important ideas underpinning the book, something that we should be paying urgent attention to. But the structure, a series of technical lectures pretending to be a polemic disguised as a novel, is not the best way to convey these ideas.
As 2020 recedes from us, we look forward to the world opening up and restarting from lockdown safely. While 2020 was obviously the year of Covid-19, it was also a year of community and solidarity. I hope that readers had those experiences as well.
Friend to Focus and writer, Leigh Kennedy, described the grip of Covid-19 as eerie and familiar, like “being in a science fiction novel we all read long ago.”
On top of the pandemic, 2020 was a year packed with political drama. The year started a month after a significant general election in December 2019 in the UK. By the end of 2020, the US had had one of its most important and defining presidential elections ever (where the election of a Black and Asian American woman as Vice President was one of many significant moments). And that’s without us even commenting on the death of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, the drone assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, major conflicts in Armenia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Ethiopia and elsewhere, wildfires across Australia, the attempted violent overthrow in the US on 6 January 2021, and the ongoing fight to vaccinate the planet.
That’s a lot to process and a tough year for writers and artists to make their voices heard and their work noticed. For readers, the challenge was possibly to concentrate long enough to fully enjoy the fiction and art available. A further struggle for writers and artists was to create art in the first place. Despite these challenges there were many successes to celebrate.
There is no particular issue with the timeline of the original 1973 film, Westworld, written and directed by Michael Crichton. It is set in the then near future, 1983, and the linear action takes place entirely within the Delos theme park. But when the film became the basis for the television series created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, Westworld (2016-present), time became a complex and confusing issue.
Nolan had already displayed a rather cavalier attitude towards time in his earlier television series, Person of Interest (2011-2016). The first series, first broadcast in the autumn of 2011, was set in 2012, but contained multiple flashbacks to events over the previous decade. Although these flashbacks are often dated, it can be difficult to construct a coherent timeline for the two principal characters, Harold Finch (Michael Emerson) and John Reese (Jim Caviezel). But when it came to Westworld, that tendency to play fast and loose with chronology became an often understated but defining characteristic of the series.
To date there have been three series of Westworld (it has subsequently been renewed for a fourth season). For convenience I will refer to Westworld Season One: The Maze as WW1 (2016), Westworld Season Two: The Door as WW2 (2018), and Westworld Season Three: The New World as WW3 (2020), each of which presents time in a different way, even though theoretically each is a direct sequel to the series before.
Reviewed by Paul Kincaid. This review first appeared in The BSFA Review.
History is, as the word tells us, a story. It is the narrative of the events that created our present compiled from whatever accounts, records and other documents may be available, and that are, inevitably, partial, generally incomplete, and often unreliable. History is not a science, since it is not open to empirical examination and cannot be repeated, and as any criminal lawyer will tell you, no two witnesses of the same event will agree on every detail. The relationship between history and fiction, therefore, is intimate and inescapable. The best historical fictions will attempt to use psychological insight and imagination to fill in the gaps in any historical record (for example, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel); or to tell a story about those people who are largely absent from the historical record (for the same historical period we might consider, for example, the Shardlake novels of C.J. Sansom).
The relationship between history and the literature of the fantastic (in which we might include fantasy, horror and science fiction) is perhaps rather less obvious, but it is there nonetheless. For the sake of this discussion we will exclude time travel stories, which might be considered a special case of the historical fiction already discussed (although time travel can often play a key role in alternate histories, as for instance in Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore or The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove). Even so, there are several different ways in which history plays a part in the fantastic. I use the following terms simply to help me distinguish one form from another: there are apocryphal histories, in which legends and stories from the past are assumed to be true accounts; secret histories, in which major events are said to have been deliberately or inadvertently expunged from the historical record; revisionist histories, in which shameful or unfortunate events are recast in a more positive light; literary histories, in which characters from fiction are presented as being real historical figures (Sherlock Holmes being probably the most popular); and alternate histories, in which the consequences of one historical change are played out. For the record, the term “counterfactual” is often used as a synonym for alternate history, though I tend to see counterfactuals as dealing with the moment of change while alternate histories deal with the future consequences of that change. None of these divisions is hermetically sealed, the borders between them are inevitably porous, but these are, in broad terms, the most familiar ways in which science fiction imaginatively engages with history.
These ways of playing with history vary from thought experiments that are perhaps as close as we might come to scientific testing of history, to linking history to the more fantastic reaches of the human imagination. All have played their part in science fiction pretty well for as long as we have had science fiction, though, apart from periodic upsurges in time travel stories, they have never really been the most fashionable form of the literature. The occasional classics – Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp, The Sound of His Horn by Sarban, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, Pavane by Keith Roberts – always seem detached from what else is happening in science fiction at the time, and rarely if ever generate anything that might pass for a movement. There are repeated tropes – the South wins the American Civil War, Hitler wins the Second World War – but really any study of alternate histories is going to look at a series of disconnected moments, of individual exemplars, rather than anything more coherent or overarching. (On a philosophical level, trends in alternate histories and secret histories and revisionist histories might reveal something interesting about the way any particular present regards the past and its study, but that is not an approach I have so far encountered in science fiction scholarship.)
The disjointedness of these engagements with history suggest that a collection of essays, such as the volume in front of us today, is perhaps the best way of approaching the topic. Except that this volume suggests there is a disjointedness also in the approach. Although the subtitle tells us firmly that these are “Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction” (and I am uncomfortable with the need for that final word, since it implies there might be such a thing as alternate history fact), that is not necessarily what we get. Using the terms I have laid out already, there are essays on revisionist history (“Forever Being Yamato: Alternate Pacific War Histories in Japanese Film and Anime” by Jonathan Rayner, which looks at the way recent fictions have revisited the story of the battleship Yamato in order to present the defeat in a more noble and positive light; though Rayner doesn’t really question how much this revisionism chimes with Japan’s pre-War militaristic mythology); literary history (“Weird History/Weird Knowledge: H.P. Lovecraft versus Sherlock Holmes in Shadows Over Baker Street” by Chloé Germaine Buckley, one of the weaker essays which looks at a literary mash-up that hardly seems to warrant the word history); and apocryphal or perhaps secret history (“Between the Alternate and the Apocryphal: Religion and Historic Place in Aguilera’s La locura de Dios” by Derek J. Thiess, one of the better essays in the collection about a novel involving the legend of Prester John). That’s three out of the ten essays that, to me, seem to have nothing to do with the implied subject of alternate history.
And of those that do deal directly with alternate histories there seems to be little agreement on the characteristics of their subject. Take, for example, two of the best essays in the collection: Anna McFarlane, in “Time and Affect After 9/11: Lavie Tidhar’s Osama: A Novel”, presents alternate history as a form of stasis, an inability to deal with the trauma of the present; while Chris Pak, in “‘It Is One Story’: Writing a Global Alternate History in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt”, makes it dynamic, a consistency of development and growth whatever the present may throw at us. What this tells us, of course, is that alternate history is not one thing but rather a concatenation of ways in which we might confront the hopes and terrors of the present.
In their “Introduction” and “Afterword”, the editors attempt, not altogether successfully, to tie all of these different essays into a coherent whole, whereas in many ways it is their very incoherence that is most interesting about them. Here we see alternate histories being used to undermine the “great man” theory of history (Molly Cobb’s account of a couple of Alfred Bester’s short stories in “The Subjective Nature of Time and the Individual’s (in)Ability to Inflict Social Change”) or to extol the “great man” theory (Adam Roberts on what is probably the earliest alternate history in “Napoleon as Dynamite: Geoffroy’s Napoléon Apocryphe and Science Fiction as Alternate History”); to challenge gender assumptions in science fiction (“‘Her Dreams Receding’: Gender, Astronauts, and Alternate Space Ages in Ian Sales’ Apollo Quartet” by Brian Baker) or to play out a slight variation on a conventional Hollywood romance (Andrew M. Butler considering the film version of a John Wyndham story in “Quest for Love: A Cosy Uchronia?”). Leaving aside the revisionist or literary histories, which seem to me more consolatory than disruptive, and therefore do not appear to belong in this volume, alternate histories represent a deliberate disordering of what we understand as the past, and therefore of the present. Since such disordering can take many forms, and play out in so many ways, it is inevitable that a collection such as this can do no more than start to feel out some of the nuances of alternate history. At its best, notably the essays by Roberts, Pak, McFarlane, and Karen Helleckson’s take on the way alternate history is used on television, this volume does the job well and interestingly. Though other essays, including a slick but superficial survey of the field in Stephen Baxter’s “Foreword”, tend to slide past the subject without ever fully engaging. It is, in the main, an interesting book, but we do need many more of them to even hope to cover the field adequately.
This special issue of Vector is all about SFF and contemporary art, guest-edited by Rhona Eve Clews. In this issue, Smin Smith explores transmedia worlding in Marine Serre’s FutureWear, while Alexander Buckley and Hannah Galbraith offer a selection some of the most exciting SFF-themed art from contemporary African artists. Declan Lloyd examines the tempestuous temporalities of the artist Neo Rauch, while Rachel Hill traces the twisting threads of Sinofuturism, cyberpunk, and AI futures in the work of artist Lawrence Lek. Frank L. Cioffi takes us on a tour through the science fictionality of conceptual art, while Alex Butterworth delves into the mysteries of Damien Hirst’s The Wreck of The Unbelievable and conducts his own speculative imaginings about the future of digital curation.
We’re also delighted to include interviews with the incredible artists Julianna Huxtable and Sensory Cartographies (Jonathan Reus and Sissel Marie Tonn). Artist and researcher Stephanie Moran discusses her art practice in ‘Eco-SciFi Art and Interspecies Technology.’
This issue also includes information on the diversity and anti-racism motions passed at the BSFA’s 2020 AGM, and a message from the Chair Allen Stroud about current opportunities for volunteering with the BSFA. In a special editorial, guest editor Rhona Eve Clews explores this issue’s wealth of words in conversation with Stephanie Moran. It’s a bumper issue at 88 pages. To get a copy, join the BSFA.
Front cover by Fabrice Monteiro, back cover by Juliana Huxtable.
In this issue you’ll find several insightful articles: “The Dystopian Narrative: an Analysis of Texts that Portray Nightmarish Futures” by Giovanna Chinellato; “The Needle and the Wedge: Digital Games as a Medium for Science Fiction” by Monica Evans; and “Amazofuturism and Indigenous Futurism in Brazilian Science Fiction” by Gama and Garcia.
There’s also an exciting array of interviews, including “This Is How You Produce The Time War”: Powder Scofield interviews Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone; “Another Kind of Party”: Vector interviews Catherynne M. Valente; “The Science and the Politics”: Vector interviews Nancy Kress; “Actions and Reactions and Ripple Effects”: Liz Lutgendorff interviews Valerie Valdes; “Living among the Leviathans”: Robert S. Malan interviews Stewart Hotston; and “More Politics, More Magic, and More Queer”: Alison Baker interviews Juliet Kemp.
Paul Kincaid‘s regular column, “Kincaid in Short,” is devoted in Vector 291 to a short story by Brian Aldiss, “The Girl and the Robot with Flowers”. There are three highlighted book reviews from The BSFA Review by Andy Sawyer, Maureen Kincaid Speller and Kate Onyett, as well as a special review-essay by Nick Hubble about Sideways in Time: Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction, edited by Glyn Morgan and C. Palmer-Patel. Finally, this issue features a review-essay by Dev Agarwal “Us: A film about ‘Them’?”, a conference report by Jasmine Sharma on “Productive Futures: The Political Economy of Science Fiction,” and several artworks by the artist David Lunt.
What a long strange decade it has been. Ten years ago it looked as if social democracy was in the ascendant around the world; today, populist, nationalist, right-wing governments are in power in Britain, the USA, Australia, Israel, India, Hungary, Italy and elsewhere. The world has become a scary, unwelcoming, unpleasant place to live. Politicians took the voters for granted, and voters became tired and disdainful of the politicians, so real life is coming more and more to resemble the dystopias we used to read. Which may be why there are no dystopias on my list of the ten books that I have chosen as representative of the last ten years in science fiction.
Which is not to suggest that politics is absent from the list. Far from it, in fact I begin with what is, I think, the most politically acute novel science fiction has produced this decade: Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson (2014). Published two years before the Brexit referendum, it captures with uncanny prescience the mood of fragmentation and disintegration that Brexit embodies. Startlingly, the three subsequent volumes, which I don’t think Hutchinson had even conceived at the time he wrote the first book, maintain the awareness and the quality of the first. And in the final volume, Europe at Dawn (2018), there is a passage set among refugees on a Greek island that perfectly encapsulates the damage that fear of the other has done to Europe.
Vector #288 contains Andy Sawyer’s final Foundation Favourites column, as well as our regular columns from Stephen Baxter and Paul Kincaid, plus the BSFA’s Claire Boothby on changes to the BSFA Award.
Lots of extras: a quiz about marvellous money and fantastic finance, economic SF writing prompts, the speculative economist’s scrapbook, recommendations from The BSFA Review, an exploration of Universal Basic Income (expanded version here), snippets from interviews with Dave Hutchinson, Laurie Penny, and Florence Okoye. It’s another bumper issue at 76 pages.
Cover image: Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind from ‘In the Future, They Ate from the Finest Porcelain’
An interview with Larissa Sansour by Polina Levontin and Jo Lindsay Walton, plus a review of Larissa Sansour’s work. TV in 2017 by Molly Cobb and So Mayer.
Film in 2017 by Nick Lowe, Andrew Wallace, Dilman Dila, Cheryl Morgan, Ali Baker, Paul March-Russell, Amy C. Chambers, Lyle Skains, Gary Couzens, and Dev Agarwal.
Ricardo Suazo reflects on SF inspired trends in fashion, and Martin McGrath takes a close look at three panels from Avengers #8.
Games and AR are covered by Erin Horáková, Susan Gray, and Jon Garrad.
With also have an extensive section on audio and podcasts in 2017 with Peter Morrison, Erin Roberts, Laura Pearlman, Victoria Hooper and Tony Jones.
And of course three Recurrent columns with Paul Kincaid, Andy Sawyer and Stephen Baxter, plus the Torque Control editorial by Jo Lindsay Walton.
This one’s a bumper issue — 80 pages! If you are a member of the BSFA, a copy of Vector 287 was mailed to you in March 2018. If you’re not a BSFA member yet, why not sign up now?
Missed this issue? Don’t worry, this one is also available on Lulu.
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