Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays by Mark Rose, ed

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For anyone new or fairly new to the serious study of science fiction, this volume would be one of the best of all possible introductions. For anyone who has been in the field for some time, all but two or three of the essays will already be familiar, the two or three varying with the individual. The Conquest, the Holquist, and the Huntington are new to me.

In each of the essays in this new volume of the Twentieth Century Views series we have a sharp mind focused on science fiction as literature (or, in one case, as film): Kingsley Amis, "Starting Points" (1963); Robert Conquest, "Science Fiction and Literature" (1963); Robert Scholes, "The Roots of Science Fiction" (1975); Darko Suvin, "On The Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre" (1972); Stanislaw Lem, "The Time Travel Story and Related Matters of SF Structuring" (1974); Eric S. Rabkin, "Genre Criticism: Science Fiction and the Fantastic" (1976); C.S. Lewis, "On Science Fiction" (written 1955); Susan Sontag, "The Imagination of Disaster" (1965); Michael Holquist, "How to Play Utopia: Some Brief Notes on the Distinctiveness of Utopian Fiction" (1968); David Ketterer, "The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature" (1974); John Huntington, "Science Fiction and the Future" (1975).
For anyone new or fairly new to the serious study of science fiction, this volume would be one of the best of all possible introductions. For anyone who has been in the field for some time, all but two or three of the essays will already be familiar, the two or three varying with the individual. The Conquest, the Holquist, and the Huntington are new to me.
C.S. Lewis, Kingsley Amis, and Robert Conquest have in common the fact that each had made his mark in what anyone would regard as serious literature before turning his critical attention to science fiction, even though he had been a life-long addict. They were all pioneers (albeit with the sharpest of tools) in bringing SF to the attention of the literary world by distinguishing the ways in which it is like and unlike the fiction conventionally regarded as serious, and thus in fitting it into the overall literary scheme (something Robert Scholes was to do even more effectively, at least from a structuralist point of view, at a much later date). Like Amis (but unlike Lewis) Conquest seems to me to insist too much of the newness of SF as a genre, too much on the supposed absence of links between "modern SF" and such SF as was prior to or even contemporary with Verne and Wells. But since Conquest is primarily concerned with other things, this is a matter best discussed in another place.
Analogies such as the one Michael Holquist sets up in his essay--utopia is to society as chess is to war--have been made before for SF but never worked out in such exquisite detail, and I can't imagine any article that would serve better as a basis for discussion and argument, in the classroom or out. Although the argument overall is quite persuasive, I am worried by some of the details, and feel that there is a contradiction between, on the one hand, "This society is by definition perfect, so that any changes in it can result only in a falling away, a decline. Thus innovation is a crime in utopia, a sin against perfection" (p 139), and on the other hand, "the best examples of the genre are arranged in such a way that they may be played again as often as they are read. That is, most utopias have open endings," with More's Utopia cited as an example (pp 143-44). If the perfection of the society is so defined that innovation is a crime, then the game will be lost by the author whenever the reader decides that objectionable detail is either unnecessary to the structure of the society or so objectionable that if it is necessary the whole society must be rejected. But if the perfection of the society allows for such innovations as are made necessary by outside pressures like war, or such as simply become desirable because of growth in knowledge or wisdom, then the game in rereadings becomes one in which victory or defeat may alternate between author and reader. The citizens of More's republic recognize that their society has not been perfected beyond possible change for the better, especially in religious practices, and the "visitors" to Utopia (Hythloday, "More," and many readers) have found a number of the details questionable or even absurd, so that the perfection of the eponymic Utopia depends on there being an orderly process for change, which is allowed for in the governing bodies. Having said this, one hardly needs to mention Wells's A Modern Utopia, which is called "modern" because it expressly recognizes and makes provision for the inevitability of change.
John Huntington's essay provides the best answer I have yet seen to the contention that the function of SF is to prepare us for the future, arguing that SF holds its readers by "answer[ing] a craving...for a science which will mediate between a conviction of the necessity of events--that is, a strict determinism--and a belief in creative freedom" (p 159). Mr Huntington has published two essays in SFS; I wish he had sent this one to us instead of to College English.
I have singled out these three essays not as the best but only as the ones new to me. Many would say, and I would not disagree, that the most important essay in the book is the one by my co-editor, Darko Suvin, which was published in the December 1972 College English and has since set what is perhaps a record for frequency of citation by SF scholars.


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