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CULTURAL
HISTORY
OF A HYBRIDGENRE
161
Brooks Landon
A
Cultural
History
of
a
Hybrid
Genre
Roger Luckhurst. Science
Fiction.
CULTURAL
HISTORY
OF
LITERATURE.
Cambridge:
Polity,
2005. vii
+ 305
pp. $24.95
pbk.
Hybridity is a
concept
that has
steadily gained
purchase
in a
wide
range
of
critical
discourses over
the
past
twenty-five
years,
adding
cultural
and
aesthetic
dimensionsto its initially largely biological meanings. In postcolonialstudies,
sociology, political
science, art,
and numerous
other
areas of critical
inquiry,
hybridity
has been accorded more and more
positive
connotations
as
a
transgressive
or
resistant
phenomenon;
he
term itself
has become one of
those
ubiquitous buzzwords whose time has come.
Hybrids
now
also
refers
to
mixed-technology
automobilesand the term has even
become
prominent
n
car
advertising-both
sure
signs
of its
near-meme status and its
appropriationby
some of
the
hegemonic
sources to which it
previously
signaled
resistance.
So
it
should come as no
surprise
that a new
study
of sf
should
be
organized
arnund
thisconcept,as is RogerLuckhurst'sScience Fiction. Indeed,Luckhurst'squiet
but
insistent
argument
s not
only
that
science fiction is an
inherently
hybrid
enterprise,
but
also
that
this has
been the
case since
the
meaningful
codification
of sf
in
the 1880s.
And,
while
hybriditysightings
have
become
something
of
a
critical
commonplace,
Luckhurst's
discussion of the
importance
of
the
concept
to
our
understanding
f sf as a
cultural
orce is as
welcome as it
seems
overdue.
Science Fiction
offers sf
readers and
scholars
a
valuable
culturally
oriented
context in
which to
test and rethink
our
numerous
narrativesof
the
genre.
This
book is
not-nor
was it
intendedto
be-the
definitive
cultural
history sf, but
it
is a fine cornerstoneon whichmuchfuturescholarship houldand will be built.
Science Fiction
continues
the
move
toward a
cultural
history of
sf
suggested
by
a
large
numberof
critical
works
published n the
pastfifteen or
twentyyears,
each of
which
explored
reciprocal
relationships
between
the body
of texts
that
comprises
sf and
the cultural
concerns
shaping and
frequently
shapedby those
texts.
Luckhurst
enters his
focus on
the
cultural
debates
attending
echnological
modernity-as
differently
articulated
n
Great
Britain and
the
US-using the
antique
but
capacious
umbrella term
Mechanism
o
subsume the
impact of
technology
on
cultural life.
Casting sf
as a
literature of
technologically
saturatedsocieties, he offers his study as a culturalhistory ratherthan the
cultural
history
of
sf,
specifying:
A
culturalhistory
of
science fiction
will
situatetexts,
therefore, as part of
a
constantly
shifting network
that
ties together
science,
technology,
social
history
and
cultural
expression with
different
emphases at
different
times. SF
will not
conform
to a
particular
iterary
typology or
formalist
definition:rather,
it
will
be
marked
by
a
sensitivity to
the
ways in
which
Mechanism is
connected into
different
historical
contexts. (6)
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162
SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES,
VOLUME
33
(2006)
Accordingly, Luckhurst sets himself the task of
charting
sfs own kind of
surrogate public history (2)
from 1880
through
the 1990s. As he tracks
the
unfoldingof this surrogatepublic history, he attempts o investigatethe factors
thathave repeatedly
relegated
sf to low cultureand
marginal
status. He
unpacks
and refutes the notion of some aesthetic
given
that
inexorably judged
sf
so
harshly. Instead, he offers an analysis of the misturnsand missed
opportunities
by
sf's advocates, including
the
adoption
of
legitimizing
strategies,
from Wells
through Suvin and
beyond,
that
actually
worked to the
genre's
disadvantage.
Luckhurst offers no brief for overlooked
or
misjudged
aesthetic
quality
in
sf-and even remindsus that the New
Wave, frequently
claimed as an aesthetic
high point, contains some
really
bad
writing. However,
one of
the
many
importantargumentsLuckhurstmakes is that sf's early and long-continuing
relegation
to low statushas little to do with actual aesthetic
quality
and much to
do with the
genre's positions
in
cultural debates over the
implications
of
Mechanism.
At each
period
in
his cultural
history
of the
genre,
Luckhurst ituatessf texts
that
speak
to the concerns of
their
specific
moment
in
history
in
a broad
network of contexts and
disciplinary knowledges
(2) ranging
from
evolutionary/devolutionary heory
and British
literary
debates
through
the
American
engineer paradigm
and the
technological
sublime. He
surveys
the
various exhaustionsof British
imperial
melancholy,
nuclear
malaise,
the dead
ends tied to
genre
forms
rejected by
the New Wave
in
England,
and the
patriarchal
assumptions
rejected
by
women and feminist sf writers
in
America.
The
larger concern
of
this tracking s
always
on
ways
in
which sf
might
be seen
as
contributing
in
a new and
significantway
to the
history
of the constitution
of
the modern
subject
(3)
with
specific
reference to
responses
to and
implications
of
Mechanism-the central
aspect
of
modernity-as it is shunned
by high
culture and
engaged
in
complicated
and ambivalent
ways by sf.
If
there
is a persistent sub-themeor thesis in Luckhurst's fforts to chart the impact of
sf's
metaphors
and
allegories
on
larger
cultural
ormations,
it is
that sf is more
a
voice of the
melancholy
and trauma of
technological
modernity
than a
celebrationof
technological
iberationor
transcendence. n the
significant
strand
of sf
texts
in
which the
human
subject
is
pierced or wounded by invasive
technologies
that
subvert, enslave,
or
ultimately destroy,
Luckhurst hows sf
persistentlyshading
intohorroror
Gothic
writing (5). This is one of the signs
of sf's
hybridity
and an
important ign
of its
ambivalence
toward Mechanism.
Acknowledging
the limitations of his
analysis (little
attention o media, no
global perspective,no engagementwith the discourses of fandom, and no real
attention to
Gothic or
fantasy), Luckhurst
offers his
study not as a new
normative
attempt
o
carve out a respectablecanon but as a
descriptiveeffort to
record
some of the
complicationsand
contractionsof the
relationshipbetween
sf
and culture:
Historiansof SF
need,
in
my view, to be less judgmentaland
prescriptive. We
need to be
just as interested n
how
fantasiesaboutMechanismcan, for instance,
prompteugenicand
proto-fascistscenarios n
the 1910s and 1920s (fantasies hat
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CULTURAL
HISTORY
OF
A HYBRID GENRE
163
periodicallyreturn),or
idolizea
fundamentally
nti-democratic
Technocratic lite
as a solutionto the crisis of liberal democracies
n the 1930s and 1940s.
Cultural
history
needs
to
understand
he
appeal
of
breathlessly paced
interstellar
pulp
fictions as much as the self-consciously Modernistprose adopted by counter-
cultural SF
in the
1960s.
(9)
Of
course Luckhurst
must
single
out some texts as he
goes
about
this
ambitious
task while
ignoring
most
others,
but his
general
approach
s not to lift an
sf
text
or a
writer
out
of
received or
ignored
historical accountsof the
genre
as
it
is to resubmerge a text or writer
in
richly
textured
cultural and
literary
discourses,
characteristically
complicating
our
understanding
of
the
relations
between text and culture.
In
this rhetorical
strategy,
frequently but
not
always)
dialectical, Luckhurstwould seem to be following the originary guide he
attributes o
H.G.
Wells
in
his
writing
before 1900
in
which,
as
John
Huntington
has observed and Luckhurst
underscores,
a
carefully
constructed
architecture
of
ambivalence
ensures that
every
force
has a
counter-force, every
assertion
a
negation, with Wells
delighting
in
'the
irony
of
contradiction
itself
(39).
Luckhurst
onsistently
complicates
received associationsand
oppositions
alike,
as when
he points to affinities
in the
work
of C.
S. Lewis and Arthur
C.
Clarke
or
suggests
a counter
to
cyberpunk
erasure of
embodiment
n the
body
horror
fictions
of
Clive Barker and Octavia Butler.
I
found this one of the
book's
primarydelightsand an important ourceof its value-although it is precisely
what makes the book difficult to
describe
and
almost
impossible
to summarize.
While
the
book
loosely
presents
a
chronological overview of sf
from
1880
through2000,
this
chronology
is
complicated
by
Luckhurst's
need
to
switch
focus
between
English
and American
sf,
and his
double focus
is
further
complicated
by
his
insistent refusal of
both
rupturalhistories
and
narrativesof
genre progress or
maturation. His own
apparent
delight
in
the
irony
of
contradiction
tself
(or
at
least
of
complication)
leads
every chapterthrough
twists,
turns,
and
reversals that
inexorably undercut the
notion
of
strict
chronology: the Luckhurst imemachine s always on the move. At eachturn n
this
cultural
history
that
feels more like
a hypertext, it seems to
me that
Luckhurst
s
interested
n
constructinga culturalhistory
thatcan map
five broad
concerns, althoughthis is
my identification
and not his.
1.
He wants to compare
the codification
and characteristic oncerns of
English
and
American
sf
as
variously shaped by evolutionary,
engineering,
and what
might
be
called
nuclear/cybernetic
paradigms.
2. He
wants
to locate efforts to valorize
or to attack
the genre within larger
culturaldiscussionsanddebates, usuallyrecastingaestheticor literary udgments
as
consequent
to
broader
philosophicalor
ideological concerns.
3. He
wants
to
chart
the genre's
responses-usually ambivalent,
if not
contradictory-to the ever-expandingand
deepening
mplicationsof Mechanism.
4.
He wants
to
resituate he
genre's critical/theoretical
tandingas the
natureof
cultural
critique/theory
changes, so that the cultural
value of sf is
never
monolithic
or intrinsic, but contingenton
extra-literary
actors.
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164
SCIENCE
ICTION
TUDIES,
VOLUME
3
(2006)
5.
He
wants to
complicate
rigid
definitionsof
genre
and
normative/prescriptive
judgments
based
on
well-rehearsed binaries such
as
English/American,
sf/fantasy,
Left/Right,
Modern/Postmodern,
tc.
This
makes Science Fiction a
very busy,
very
ambitious
book that
deserves
and
rewards
very careful
reading.
In
the
context
of
the above
concerns,
Luckhurst's
selection of
authorsand works for extended
analysis
is
not
meant
to
valorize,
much
less
canonize,
as much
as
it is
to
identify
useful
touchstones
for
exploring
the
reciprocal
relations
between
sf
literature and cultural
discussions. There
is
little
effort on
Luckhurst's
part
to
posit
a
literary
history
or to
make qualitative
assessments
of sf
writers and
texts. Not
surprisingly,
however, many of
the
writers and texts
he selects
as
touchstones for cultural
connections turn out to be the same writers and texts frequentlysingledout for
literary
histories
of
sf, yet
his
principle
of
selection does
not
necessarily
imply
that a writer
or text
represents he
genre
or
shouldbe
used
to establishor
extend
genre
boundaries.
His
selections do favor
formal and
ideational
hybridity,
and
the
complicationsLuckhurst
nvariably
ntroduces
n
his
analyses
of writers
and
texts
argue for a
new
understanding
f sf
that
embraces rather han
attempts
o
erase its
essential
hybridity;his cultural
history
may
be
the
main
point
of
his
scholarship, but
it
also
makespoints.
Part
I
of
Science
Fiction consists
of
three
chaptersdevoted
to
the
origins
of
sf, focusingrespectivelyon the social andtechnologicalconditionsnecessaryfor
its
emergence, the
importanceof the
evolutionary
paradigm
o
the
nineteenth-
century
British
codification
of
the
scientific
romance,
and
the
importance
of
the
engineer
paradigm
o
the
development
of
pulp
fiction
in
America. The
purpose
of
this
section is
to
suggest
the
paradigms
hatboth
guided
the
development
of
sf in
England and
in
America and
positioned that
literature
n
larger cultural
debates
occasioned
by
Mechanism,
or
technological
modernity.
The
conditions
makingpossible late
nineteenth-century
cientific fiction are
mass
iteracy;new
vectors; a
coherent
ideology
and
emergent
profession
of science and,
most
important or this
study,
everydayexperience
transformed
by
machines
and
mechanical
processes
(29).
For
Luckhurst,
Wells is
the
embodiment
f
these
conditionsrather
hanthe inventorof
British sf.
Somewhat
paradoxically,
he
is at
once a
source of
the
emerging
genre's
messianic
commitment
to its
ideational
content
(starting
with
the
evolutionary
paradigm),
and a
source of
what
will
emerge again
and again as
the
genre's
self-loathing
over its poor
artistry.Luckhurst
ocuses
on
Wells's
disastrous
misreadingof
and
relation to
an
emerging
literary
establishment,
on
the
separatist
consequences of
his
commitment o evolutionism, andon the ambiguity,contradictions,andformal
hybridityof
his
writing.
Luckhurstuggests
how
theseaspects
of
Wells's writing
led to
his
setting many
of
the agendas
for
British sf and
for its
critical
reception
before
1945;
he even
played a
role
in
structuring
he
claims of a
fall
from
grace
that
insist
on
a
qualitativerupture
between British
and
American sf.
Rather
than
concentrate
on
Wells's
use of
science in
his
fiction,
Luckhurst
details
ways
in
which
Wells
was as
influential n
setting
the cultural
context for
the
devaluing of
sf as he
was for
its
growth-by
initiating ts
impure
or hybrid
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166 SCIENCE ICTION
TUDIES,VOLUME 3
(2006)
In
responding o this
nuclear/cybernetic
paradigm,
Americansf
breaks
into
competing
schools,
some
celebrating
the new
technology
and new technocrats
it
requires, some
criticizing
and
satirizing
the new
technoculture and its
economic implications.Againstthe technocraticboosterism of John
Campbell
and his writers such
as Heinlein and Asimov
stands he criticism of
Vonnegut,
Dick,
Merril,Pohl, and
Kombluth,
and in
these culturaldivides-rather than
n
subject matter-Luckhurst
locates the
beginning
of
the distinction between
hard and
soft sf.
In
England, response to
the
nuclear/cybernetic
paradigm
was
much more
melancholic, as American
atomic
ascendancy
eemed
paralleled
by British
decline,
occasioning
a kind of
double-hiton the valuationof
sf: For
British
intellectualsacross the
spectrum
t was not
just
that SF embodied
mass
culture and crude investmentin technologicalmodernity, it was also that the
genre was American
(123).
At
least
partly
as a
result of this
guilt
by
association
of
sf with
American
technologized
modernity,
Luckhurst
uggests,
fantasy
became the
most notable
form of
writing
in
postwar
England.
But
Luckhurst
mmediately
complicates this
binary, suggesting
ways
in
which the
fantasy
of Lewis and
Tolkien and
particularly
of
Mervyn
Peake
should not be
understood n
rigid
opposition
to
the
concerns and
protocols of
sf,
arguing
that
the writing of
Arthur C.
Clarke is
in
fact
not so
distant from that of
C.S.
Lewis. Once
again,
the key to
understandingBritish
writing of this
period is
hybridity, as it fused fantasy, Gothic and SF elements, offering refracted
meditationson their
historical
moment
124), with both
fantasists uch
as Lewis
and sf
writers such
as John
Wyndham
echoing
Wells.
He
concludes of British
and
American
sf: The
period
between
1945 and
1960 is the
most
complex
and
multi-stranded
eriod
in
science
fiction
history,
the
epoch
in
which
the Golden
Age
was
both
consolidatedand
contested,
when
SF
claimed
scientific, political
and
social-critical
relevance
yet
was
also
condemned as an
examplar
of
detestablemass
culture
(136).
And the
contradictory hematicsof
this
period,
Luckhurst
laims, are
importantbecause
they will
recur
andmodulate
during
the next fourdecades.
Part
III
somewhatdrops
the
alternating
ocus on
British and
American sf to
organize cultural
concerns
around
Decade
Studies,
with
chapters
devoted
to
the
1960s,
the
1970s,
the
1980s,
and the
1990s. This
schema
predictably
organizes
the
1960s
around he New
Wave
and the
1970s
around he
playing out
of
the British
New Wave
and
the
diverse
paths
taken by
the
development
of
feminist sf.
Luckhurst's
analysis
of
the
1980s, again
predictably,
looks at
postmodernism and
cyberpunk,
much
less
predictably
calls
attention to
the
cultural
impact
of New
Right
sf
during
the
decade,
and
closes with
the
unexpectedpairingof the body horrorof splatterpunkwith the body horror of
Octavia
Butler.
Luckhurst hen
closes
his
study
with a
construction
of the
1990s
as
a
consolidationand
rejuvenationof
the
unique focus
of SF:
speculationon
the
diverse
resultsof the
conjuncture f
technologywith
subjectivity 222).
He
locates
this
consolidation
and
rejuvenation n
the
reappearance f
space
opera,
in
the
rearticulation
f
apocalyptic
concerns in
abduction
narratives,
and in
the
genre-morphing
hybridity
of
the New
Weird
and
post-fantastic
writers
such
as M.
John
Harrison,
China
Mieville, and
Jonathan
Lethem.
Possibly
because
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CULTURAL ISTORY
OF
A HYBRID
GENRE 167
the decade
chapters
are more
clearly organized
around delimited
literary
movements such as cyberpunkand
feminist sf, these chapters
do not
feel as
richly or as
deeply
textured
n
their culturalconnections as do those
in
the first
twopartsof thebook, although heycontinueLuckhurst'svaluable nsistenceon
complicating
received
binaries,
whether of
agreement
or
opposition.
As would
be
expected, the
chapter
on the 1960s centers
on
the New
Wave,
although
Luckhurst
trongly
challenges
the idea that the American
New
Wave
shared the ambitions
or the
cohesion
of the British.
In
fact,
Luckhurst's
approach
o the 1960s focuses
more on what the New Wave was not than on
it
was, as
he details ways how the New Worldsproject was
not an
attempt
o raise
the status
of
sf
to
that of
serious
iterature,
but was one manifestation
of
a
wider move to question
the
very categories
and values of
'high'
and 'low'
culture
(146). Nor, according
to
Luckhurst,
was either the British or
the
American
New Wave the
ruptural
moment claimed
in
so
many
accounts of sf.
While the New Wave did
change
the course of
genrehistory,
it
did
not mark
a
clear break
with
genre
concerns.
This is
an
explicit juvenilization
of SF
by
the
blanket
abjection
of the
genre
before it reached
'maturity'
about 1960.
It
sanctions
gnorance
and
produces
a
skewed, largely
ahistorical
onception
of
the
New
Wave, because
it is
only able
to
read
for
discontinuity,
not
the substantial
continuities
within
the
genre
(160).
Luckhurstreadily acknowledges that decade studies can't be rigidly
calendric,
as is
suggested by period
studies that
actually
see the 1960s as
stretching
rom 1959 to
1973,
and,
as he moves on to
the
1970s,
his
initial focus
remainson the New Wave.
Depending
on how we view
it,
he
suggests,
the
New
Wave by the early 1970s could be
seen as having
occasioned
either a
powerful
rebirth of sf
or
as
having signaled
its imminent
disappearance.
It feels
impossible
to make
an
assertion about 1970s
SF,
he
notes,
without
hinking
of
an
immediate
counter-example,
and he
sees
this
contradictory
ituationas
symptomatic
f
a wider set of
confusions over
precisely
what took
place
in
the
decade (169). Incultural erms,theissue was not whetheror notsf had reached
some
kind of an
end,
but that it
became imbricated
n
a much
broadersocietal
experience
of
limits. Science fiction did not
simply
reflect
on
this,
Luckhurst
explains,
but
often
provided
the
very means by which the
consequencesof this
momentcould be
envisaged,
in
forms
of
utopian
or
dystopian
projection
nto the
future
171).
The British
New Wave readthe end
of British
powerwithdegrees
of
post-imperialmelancholy, andfeministsf
readthe end of a
certain social,
economic, political
and
technological)formation
of
the
'patriarchal'West at the
end of
the 1960s
(181).
Luckhurstdoes notconsistentlytrackrace throughhis culturalhistory of sf,
but he does
discuss the
importance
of race in
his overview of
American Pulp
Fictions in
Chapter3,
and his
analysis of the New Wave in the 1970s returns o
a
consideration f this
issue as
part
of
the post-imperial
efiguringof Englishness
in
terms of race rather han of
place. Luckhurstuses
ChristopherPriest and M.
John
Harrison to situate the
British New Wave of the
1970s in the larger
melancholic
structure
of
feeling attending the end of British power. The
appropriation
n
the 1970s of sf
tropes
used
to articulate
feminist concerns by
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168
SCIENCEFICTION STUDIES,
VOLUME
33
(2006)
British women writers more associated
with
the
literary
mainstream-Doris
Lessing,
Emma
Tennant,
Zoe
Fairbairns,
and
Angela
Carter-affords Luckhurst
a cultural ransition romthe New Wave's preoccupationwith national imitsto
feminist
sf's
preoccupation
with
genre
limits:
Questions f sex and
gender
did not
suddenly ppear
within
he
genre
with
the
New
Wave or by feminist intervention. What
the feminist
intervention
n
the
1970s
did effect, though, was a new
reflexivity
about
the
conventions
of
SF,
exposing
how
a
genre that praised
itself for its limitless
imagination
and
its
power to
refuse norms had
largely reproduced 'patriarchal
attitudes'
without
questionfor much of its existence. The New Wave had reached the
exhausted
end of the
form,
but the rubble of
that
tradition could be recombined
in
new
structures.
182)
And the
consequences
of
this
dying
into new
being
were not confined to
feminist issues:
Mega-textual F
elements
hathad
consciously
r not
reproducedatriarchal
r
heterosexist
orms
ouldbe
recomposed
nd
redirected
ornew
political
nds-even
if those
endswere
explicitly
nti-scientific
r
anti-technological,triking
tthe
heart
of
historic
efinitions f
SF. Outof the
seeming
end'of
technological odernity
nd
the ruinsof
genre,
feminist
writers
recomposed
generic
narratives.
(182)
Within this
larger frameworkof
agendas,
Luckhurst s
careful to
delineate
the
diversity
of
'types'
of feminist sf
in
the
1970s,
organizing
them
along
the
waves
suggestedby
Julia
Kristeva
n
her
1979
essay Women'sTime -with
the
understanding
hat hese waves can be
understoodas
simultaneous,rather
han
only
linear.
These
coterminous eminisms
address
equality,difference,
and the
deconstructionof the
man/woman
binary.
Accordingly,
Luckhurst ocates
Le
Guin's The
Left
Hand
of
Darkness
(1969)
as a
first-wave text focused
on
questions
of
equality
(later
reread
by
Le
Guin to
emphasize gender
difference,
thus
moving it toward he
second
wave). Sally Miller
Gearhart'sWanderground
(1979) offers anexampleof a second-wave textplacingtechnology at the center
of
male/female
difference, as do
Suzy McKee Charnas's
Walk o the End of the
World
1974)
and
Motherlines
(1978),
and as does
Marge
Piercy's
Woman
on
the
Edge
of
Time
(1976). Luckhurst's
readings of these
texts remind
us that,
apart
from their
sharing gender
concerns, these
writers
construct and critique
technology
differently,
with
very
different
visions of
its social
uses.
JoannaRuss
is then
identified as an
exemplar of Kristeva's
third wave,
and also as a writer
whose
work
explores
all
three feminisms, with
The
Female Man (1975)
incorporating
all of
these
strands of feminism
into a
collage of competing
voices from parallelworlds (193). SimilarlyAngela Carter's ThePassion of
New
Eve
(1977) represents third-wave
critique,
particularly in the ways it
lampoons
myths of
gender fixity
(194). In
Carter's
brilliantly unsettling
fiction
Luckhurst inds
not
only an instructive
bridge
between the New Wave
and
feminist
sf but also
anotherexemplar
of the
generic hybridityof
sf in her
finding everage for
critique
by disarticulating nd
reorienting he matrixof the
genre-whether
SF,
Gothic,
fairy tale or fantasy
(184-85).
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CULTURAL
HISTORYOF A
HYBRID
GENRE
169
I
began Luckhurst's
chapter
on the 1980s with
something
approaching
dread-or
at
least
anticipatory
atigue,
since this decade
has
already
ent its
most
celebrated
movement,
cyberpunk,
o
endless cultural
studiesof
postmodernism.
If
there's one
thing
sf
criticism
probably
does
not
need,
I
thought,
it's
yet
anothercultural
history
of the 1980s. After
the
inevitable
but
mercifully concise
overview
of
postmodernism,
however,
Luckhurst
oes
delightfully
offroad
from
the
high-traffic critical
highway
to
discuss 1980s sf
and the
New
Right.
Somewhat
mpishly,
he
suggests
that-instead of the
cyberpunks-the
sf
writers
associated with the
Right
in
general
and
with
the Star
Wars
(SDI)-friendly
Citizen's
Advisory
Panel
on
National
Space
Policy
in
particular
might
have
provided
the
most
representative f of the
1980s.
Against
the well-known
roster
of cyberpunks,Luckhurstwants us to rememberthe quitedifferentagendasof
Jerry
Pournelle,
Larry Niven,
Gregory
Benford,
Robert
Heinlein,
and Ben
Bova.
Reminding
us that SF
was
as
ideologically
riven
as
any
other
field
of
cultural
production
n
the
1980s
(202),
Luckhurst
not
only
uses this
chapter
o
relocate
cyberpunkin
the
shadow
of the New
Right, but also
complicates
cyberpunk's
emblematic
association
with
virtual
disembodiment
by reading
it
dialectically
with
body
horror
fiction,
as
represented
by
the
splatterpunk
f
Clive
Barker and
by
the
more
oblique
body
horror
writing
of
Octavia Butler.
And,
in
a
by-now-familiar
and
increasingly
persuasive
refrain for
this
study,
Luckhurst bserves thatthis hybridof sf andhorrorwas not atall new, butpart
of a
long
tradition that
stretches back to Verne
and
Wells of
what
has been
called
'the
science-fiction
grotesque '
(214).
For
obvious
reasons,
the
chapter
on
the
1990s
seems to
be the
most
provisional of
Luckhurst's
decade
studies. Homi
Bhabha
and
Manuel
Castells
provide
theoretical
overviews
of
this
period,
focusing
respectivelyon
accelerated
globalization
and the
technological
productionof
Informational
Capitalism.
In
Luckhurst'sview,
what
characterizes
sf in the
1990s is that
it
responds
to
the
intensification
and global
extension of
technological
modernity
not
with new
forms, but ratherwith ones lifted from the genre's venerablepast (221). He
then
organizes
his
discussion
of
1990s sf
around the
New
Space
Opera,
the
revival of
apocalyptic
visions
under he
prospectof the
Vingean
Singularity,and
the
New
Weird,
which
Luckhurst
ees
as a kind
of
apotheosis
of
the
hybridity
that
has
always
characterized
sf- a
final
instance
of
uncanny
return:to
the
conditionsof
writing that
dominated he
emergence of
SF
in the late
nineteenth
century
(243). Dan
Simmons's
Hyperion
(1989) and
Ken
MacLeod's
FALL
REVOLUTION
uartet(The
Star
Fraction
[1995], The
Stone
Canal
[1996], The
Cassini
Division
[1998], and
The
Sky
Road [1999])
limn the
ironizing and
subvertingreflections of globalization hatmaketheNew SpaceOperanew, but
Luckhurst lso
suggests an
experiential
agendafor
the
form, as
its
characteristic
heft of
pages
carves
out a
large chunk
of
narrative
ime
that acts as
a
bulwark
against
the
depredationsof
identity in
the
late
modern
world
(230).
While
frequently
positing
in
its
semblances
erosions
of the
idea
of
progressive
developmentalism
and of
monolithic
empire,
New
Space
Opera
occupies
such
a
complexly
structured
hunkof
its
reader's
time
that t
actually
serves as
a
kind
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CULTURAL
HISTORY
OF A
HYBRID
GENRE
171
doesn't mention
enough
sf
texts-particularly
not
enough
by
writers
of
interest
to
Mendlesohn,
and so on. Mendlesohn
eems more interested
n
labeling,
as
she
charges
that Luckhurst's
tudy
is not
a
real
culturalhistory(or atleast notthe
one she
wanted)
and that it is
a
sexist
book
(16).
I
think she's
quite
wrong
on
both
counts,
but
hope
that
readers
will
decide
for
themselves,
on the basis
of
reading Science Fiction
itself rather han
accepting
either
Mendlesohn's ow
or
my high
opinion
of the
book.
To
Mendlesohn's
credit she
acknowledges
that hers
is
an
angry
review,
and
even goes so far as to
admit that her
reading
made her too
angry
to
be
fair,
immediately
offering
the
justification:
but
then this isn't a fair
book
(18). I'm not
sure
where such a convenient
scruple
takes
us,
but I'm
pretty
sure
it's not someplace sf scholarshipshouldgo. Nor shouldrigorous scholarship
make
the
kinds of factual mistakes that
pepper Mendlesohn's review.
Most are
small, but
telling. For
instance, one
superficial
example
of
hasty
reading
s her
claim
in
her
discussion of
Chapter
6
that
Tolkien is
referred to as
sword and
sorcery,
a traditionof which he
is not a
part
and that
he
overwhelms
(18).
What
Luckhurst
actually
writes is that
Suvinian sf
scholarship
has charged
Tolkien not
only
with
abandoning
critical
cognition
for conservative
myth-
creation,
but with
doing
so to
such
annoyingly
influential
effect. The
true
path
of SF has
been
perverted since
The
Lord
of
the
Rings
became
a
mass-market
success in the mid-1960s, resultingin a streamof imitativesword-and-sorcery
sub-creations drained
of critical
effect
(128)
(emphasis
mine).
If
anyone
is
guilty
of
imprecision
here,
it
is
not
Luckhurst.
A
much
more
significant
misreading
or
misrepresentation
underlies
Mendlesohn's
claimed
anger at
Luckhurst's
ailure
to live up
to
his own
stated
aims,
particularly
is
desire to
'think
harder
about the
way certain
agentsof
history
(for
example
the
masses,
women,
colonized,
marginal or
subaltern
peoples)
had been
erased
or
rendered
anonymous
n
history-writing '
16).
The
problem
here is
that this
quotation
s not
one of
Luckhurst's stated
aims. It is
insteadMarkPoster'sdetailingof some of thecharacteristics f culturalhistory,
and
this is
presented
by Luckhurstas
part
of
a broad
summary
of
suggestions,
offered
by
several
different
critics, of the
things
culturalhistory
can
do:
Mark
Poster
agreed
that
culturalhistory
challengedthe
older
social history
by
questioningnarrative
n
History, but
also
by forcing
it to
deal with
low as
well
as
high
cultural
sources
and,
in a
related
way, to think
harder
about the
way
certain
agents
of
history (for
example
the masses,
women,
colonized,
marginal
or
subaltern
peoples)had been
erased or
rendered
anonymous n
history-writing.
(1-2)
While I
agree with
Mendlesohn's
apparentbelief
that
these are
indeed
worthy
goals of
cultural
history, I
must note that
this
was
Poster's list
of
desiderata
and
not
advanced
by
Luckhurst
as his
stated
aims,
and certainly
not
as a kind
of
contract
by which he
intended
his
book to be
judged. Nor is it
reasonable,
much
less
fair,
to expect
that
Luckhurst's
book-or
any other
cultural
history-could
do all
of
the
admirable
hings
suggested
by
these critics.
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172
SCIENCE
FICTION
STUDIES,
VOLUME 33
(2006)
As it
happens,
however,
I
share a number
of Mendlesohn's
local
reactions
to this
book, just
not her
global
conclusions. Luckhurst ould
have used
more
sociological evidence to
strengthen
his
cultural
analysis
and
he could
have
used
differentsf writers to supporthis culturalanalysis.The more
culturally
ocused
Cecilia
Tichi strikes me as
a
better
guide
to constructions of
American
technologythandoes the more
literary
orientedLeo
Marx,
and consideration
of
technocultural
phenomena
such as Worlds
Fairs
and
Coney
Island-even
advertising-would
strengthen
Luckhurst'sdiscussionof the American
Engineer
paradigm.
Like
Mendlesohn,
I
found the absence
of sustaineddiscussion
of
Gwyneth Jones
curious,
and
I
think Joanna
Russ should
figure
much
more
prominently
n
a
cultural
history
of
sf, but,
unlike
Mendlesohn,
I
don't see
the
choice of discussingLe Guin over Russ as a suresign of sexism. Infact, I think
what
Luckhurstdoes
say
about Russ
argues
much more
persuasively
against
Mendlesohn's
charge
that the book is sexist than
her
page-counting
and author-
counting
calculus arguesfor it.
Considerwhat
Mendlesohn erms
pushing
Russ's
Female
Man
to
one side or
abandoning ts
discussion in the
following passage
from Science
Fiction:
The Female
Man has
proved so difficult to read
because it
incorporates
all of
these
strands
of
feminism
into
a
collage of
competing
voices from
parallel
worlds. Russ's four
women
protagonists, Janet,
Jeanine,
Joanna
and
Jael,
are
elements of the same personality,constitutedaccordingto the social reality in
which
they
are
imagined, whether this is two
versions of
America
in
1969,
the
feminist
utopia
Whileaway
or a
future
of
perpetualgenderwar. The
inter-cutting
is brutal
and
refuses
the reader
any comfort in
identification,
as Russ insists on
the
simultaneity of these
temporal
and
generational
signifying spaces. The
Female
Man
resembles the
French
feminist
statements being
written
contemporaneously.Helene Cixous's
TheLaughof
the
Medusa, for
instance,
embracesboth a
thoroughgoingessentialism
( Womanmust
write woman.
And
man,
man ), andyet
advocates
an
ecriture
feminine. This can
never be
reduced
to
women's
writing,
but aims to
subvert the
mythical
category
of
Woman.
Cixous's tactic of contradictoryassertions is deliberate, the text enactingthe
subversive
potential
of
the
feminine,
which
becomes
a
deconstructive
ever
that worms
its
way
inside
all
systems
of
binarythought.
In a
similarway, when
Russ
writes
You cannot
unite woman
and humanany
more
than you can
unite
matter
and
anti-matter;
hey are
designed not to
be
stabletogether,
it can
be
read
simultaneouslyas both
a
despairingcry of
exclusion
and a
recognitionof
the
chance,
as
Amanda
Boulter
puts it, to
transcendthe
category of
Woman
altogether.
Because The
FemaleMan
overdetermines
meanings like
this andis
a
compendium
of
feminist
strategy
n
the
mid-1970s, it
is still one of
the
central
texts of feministSF. (193-94)
That's the way
things
go in
this sexist
book.
Speaking
as one
who has
hazarded
a literary
history of
twentieth-century f,
I
see
Luckhurst's
Science Fiction as
an
incredibly
valuable
complementary-and
not
competitive-effort. His
culturalhistory
makes
me realize how
much
I got
wrongon
my
own
or
some of
the
errors of
others I
blithelypassed
along. It
also
makes me
realize
how much
more
effective
any parts I may
have
gotten right
might
have
been
had they
been
writtenwith the
benefit
of the many
insights and
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CULTURAL
HISTORY OF A HYBRID GENRE
173
specifications
of this
fme
book.
There
will be other and
undoubtedly
more
thorough
culturalhistories
of sf
in
general
and
of its
specific
cultural
moments
in particular,but manyof those works maybe inspiredby thispioneeringbook
and all will be informed by it.
NOTES
1. Were it not for S.I. Hayakawa's
Language
n
Thought
nd
Action
(1941),
sf
might
be seenas the most effective
advertising
arm
for Alfred
Korzybski's
General
Semantics,
a
totalizing system
of belief and
theory
of humanbehavior hatbased its
assumptions
and
programon interrogatingandunderstanding
he distinctionbetween
map
and
territory.
By understanding nd rigorously
maintainingmap/territory
distinctions
n
language
and
in
action, Korzybskibelieved that most humanproblemscould be avoided.
Korzybski's
best-knownbook, Science and Sanity:An Introduction o Non-AristotelianSystemsand
General Semantics 1933), was the obvious source for A.E. van
Vogt's concept
of null-
A
thinking, and Korzybski was championedby Heinlein and Campbell.
While L. Ron
Hubbardclaimed that his Dianetics was
inspired by General Semantics,
proponentsof
Korzybski'sprogramargued hatDianetics was pseudoscientificmumbo-jumbo.
n recent
years, Korzybski's thinking
has been invoked
by proponents of the whole
systems
approachchampionedby StewartBrand and Kevin Kelly and explicitly or
implicitly
drawn from
by numerous
sf
writers. The Institute of General Semantics,
founded by
Korzybski
in
1938, remains
active
() and
describes the General Semanticslanguage-based pistemology as the studyof how we
perceive, construct, evaluate, and communicateour
life experiences.
WORKS
CITED
Kristeva, Julia. Women's Time.
T7heKristevaReader. Trans.
Seain
Hand
and Leon S.
Roudiez.
Ed. Toril Moi. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1986. 187-213.
Mendlesohn, Farah. Science
Fiction by Roger Luckhurst. New YorkReview
of Science
Fiction 18.1
(Sept. 2005): 16-19.
Wolfe, Gary
K.
Malebolge, or the Ordnanceof Genre. Conjunctions39
(2002): 405-
19.
Recommended