Abstract
Locating Science Fiction, that is, surveying, mapping, taking stock of the vast field of SF, raises a series of questions, which provide the structure and focus of Andrew Milner’s engagement with the theoretical literature and some of the key debates around the field. First and chief among these questions is the identification of the object in itself and in relation to its history. To define is to locate: definitions of SF necessarily operate with what Milner calls a ‘selective tradition’ (Raymond Williams), which is elucidated in terms of alternative genealogies of the genre. In turn, giving SF a history involves a definite stance in relation to the present. Where is SF to be located in the context of the cultural field (Pierre Bourdieu) and its different media? Are we talking about one object distributed across different media, as the many cases of cross-media adaptations, typically from print to drama and film, suggest? Or do these adaptations underscore the intrinsically hybrid nature of the genre as evidenced in the mass media? The question of location past and present depends crucially on definition, and here the leading issue for Milner is that of delimiting SF in relation to the genres of fantasy, utopia and dystopia. This becomes the key question since it not only determines definition and genealogy but also offers a way to tackle the tricky problem of hybridization – SF and/as horror, thriller, action, adventure, apocalypse, western, mystery, etc. The questions that follow: when was SF? where was SF? and why SF? (Chapters 7–9) depend on the answer to what was SF (Chapters 1–6).
The first chapter sets out the theoretical parameters of the enquiry. Milner positions himself between the less inclusive and more prescriptive North American critical tradition, represented by Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson, and the more inclusive and less prescriptive European tradition, represented by Williams and Bourdieu. Two main issues of theoretical definition and dispute are identified; on the one hand, the division between advocates of SF as essentially cognitive in intent and those who emphasize its ‘wondrous core’, and second, as already indicated, the question of SF and its relation to fantasy and utopia. Is SF in its wondrous mode continuous with the older tradition of fantasy, or does its cognitive interest make it continuous with the older tradition of utopia?
Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) remains the founding text of SF studies in the academy. Suvin, who started as a Brecht scholar, took the Brechtian technique of estrangement as the key to defining the cognitive interest of the genre: SF is … a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.
This ‘foundational definition’ is not as straightforward as it seems. Suvin subordinates imagination to cognition but reverses the hierarchical emphasis in his supplementary definition (as supplements tend to do) when he further states: ‘SF is distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional “novum” (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic’ (in Milner, p. 23). Is ‘the imaginative framework, alternative to the author’s empirical environment’ narratively hegemonic or merely a formal device? Or is the novum, as the pivot on which definitions of SF turn, only understandable in terms of the interaction of estrangement and cognition, that is, in terms of the inextricable combination of content and form, cognition and wonder, science and fiction? Suvin’s definitional emphasis on cognition, which underpins the fundamentally utopian purpose of the genre, draws back from the double inspiration of SF, captured in H. G. Wells’s description of his own SF writings as ‘scientific romance’, and conceived by Milner as reflecting a foundational dialectic between the Enlightenment and the counter-movement of Romanticism: In the sense in which we now understand the terms, both science and SF emerge, not from the culture wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, but from those of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The genre’s foundational dialectic is therefore not that between Catholicism and Protestantism, but rather between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. (p. 143)
Wells’s scientific romance plays nicely to Arthur C. Clarke’s famous third law, which states that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’, just as magic in turn, if defined in sufficiently rigorous fashion, is indistinguishable from science (p. 103). The novum, for all Suvin’s insistence on its cognitive function, works as much through our emotions as through reason. Whether it operates as hypothetical construct or incursion of the monstrous, the novum appeals to our oldest fears and newest fascinations. And from the beginning the literary sources of the genre called forth techniques of visualization that translated wonder and amazement, terror and horror into the ever more amazing and magical powers of illusion and special effects, above all because the novum that manifests itself through its affects and effects always implies unknown powers. Thus Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, a text that has as good a claim as any to be foundational, owes its enduring popularity both to the reworking of Greek myth and to the novelty of its fiction, generated by ghost stories, ‘however impossible as physical fact’, but appealing to the unknown ‘working of some powerful machine’. As Milner shows, Frankenstein has enjoyed a continuous second life through endless stage and film adaptations, all striving to realize the workings of the machine.
This basic configuration of SF provides a vehicle for the recurrent themes of the genre. To remain with Frankenstein, it has spawned innumerable variations on man’s usurpation of God’s powers, on the reconstruction of the human body and human being in the quest for the principle of life, on the revenge of violated nature against the infernal machines of science, on the rebellion of technology that destroys its maker and threatens mankind. Not to forget the uncanny fascination of the living-dead monster that announces the breakdown of the barriers separating nature and artifice, biology and technology, and will generate the robots, cyborgs and androids to come. The scientific experiment that triggers unknown powers, with unknown effects, is the stuff of which SF’s experimental fictions are made.
Frankenstein was written against the background of public interest in experimental science and the industrial revolution driven by machine technology but also the Romantic revolt against the reduction of nature to the workings of mechanism. Milner’s scepticism towards the long genealogies of SF springs precisely from this novel consciousness of human capacities to remake the world as well as its Romantic critique at the dawn of the 19th century. SF’s futurism, whether optimistic or fearful, expressed ‘the spirit of the age’ (Hazlitt) and its ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams). There is therefore a fundamental discontinuity, Milner argues, between the genre as it is generally recognized and the enumeration of its supposed antecedents, reaching back to the Greeks. The precondition of these long histories of SF, typified by Suvin, is an understanding of the genre’s cognitive interest as quite distinct from the modern understandings of science and technology (p. 138). By bracketing science in the modern sense, SF since the late 18th century is simply conceived as a new stage in the long history of hypothetical fictions (utopian, fantastic, comic or satiric in intent). Thus, for Suvin and Jameson, utopian fictions since the Greeks and the Renaissance define the core of the genre. For Adam Roberts, fabulous voyages under their dual aspect of travels through time and technologies of travel displace utopias to claim pole position. When Suvin treats science as cognition and Roberts as philosophical outlook, both overlook the fundamental historical difference between contemporary understandings of science and those of antiquity and early modernity, that the Industrial Revolution decisively and definitively redefined science as an intensely practical activity inextricably productive of new technologies. (p. 139)
Milner’s short history – when was SF? (Chapter 7) – is predicated on delimiting the genre – what SF wasn’t (Chapter 5). He works with SF’s own (changing) selective tradition, the history of the genre as generally understood by writers and readers. And here the distinction between SF and utopia and fantasy is crucial. Jameson’s argument for utopia as a subgenre of SF, that is, social-science fiction, is fatally flawed by his ideological commitment to upholding the cause of anti-anti-utopianism (along the lines of anti-anti-communism) in a supposedly ‘late’ capitalism. European critics, notably Williams and Baudrillard, treat SF and utopia as cognate but distinct genres. Baudrillard confines utopias to the first, ‘natural’ stage of simulation in the Renaissance and SF to the second, ‘productive stage’ of industrialization (p. 96). But, as Milner reminds us, utopias don’t simply disappear after the rise of historicism in the 18th century, as Wells’s Modern Utopia or Huxley’s Island testify. The defining difference between SF and utopia lies rather in the parallel take off of science and technology and SF writing around 1800.
The obverse of treating utopia as a subgenre of SF is to treat SF as a subgenre of fantasy, giving the long history, in which Lucian’s True History and Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyage to the Moon figure prominently. Thus the English SF writer China Miéville declares that SF is best understood as ‘a subset of a broader fantastic mode’ (p. 103). Miéville makes a strong case for the cognitive effects of fantastic estrangement, such that SF and fantasy converge around the presentation of the ‘impossible’, renewing the 18th-century discussions around fiction’s ‘possible worlds’, where the novel as form can be thought of as itself the novum. SF, utopia, and fantasy have in common the presentation of alternative, impossible worlds. That is to say, they are cognate genres, whose distinction is complicated by the multiple generic hybrids they are capable of generating. Milner registers the unmistakeable convergence of SF and fantasy in contemporary culture, matched we may add by a similar convergence of historical fiction and fantasy. Here Milner’s recourse to Venn diagrams (pp. 104–5) is very helpful in clarifying the possible combinations and overlaps not only between SF, utopia, and fantasy, but between other genres. When we turn to the distinct but cognate genres of dystopia and SF, it is a moot point whether such famous examples as Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four or Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange are regarded as SF. Milner is content to locate these famous dystopias in the ‘generic context’ of SF while insisting, against Suvin, Jameson, and Williams, that dystopia as practised by Zamyatin or Orwell is not to be dismissed as merely anti-utopian.
Having located and delimited SF in terms of genre, the question of the location of SF in the wider cultural field remains to be mapped. Let me quote from Milner’s two SF axioms in order to introduce his discussion. First: ‘SF is a selective tradition, continuously reinvented in the present through which the boundaries of the genre are continuously policed, challenged and disrupted’ (p. 39). The second axiom specifies that SF is a ‘subfield of the general literary field, with a structure homologous to that of the wider field, which simultaneously constructs and is constructed by, produces and reproduces, the SF selective tradition’ (p. 67). The subfield replicates at the same time within its own borders the contestations which determine the changing division of the literary field as a whole between the poles of heteronomous, market-driven forces and of autonomous aesthetic criteria. From Frankenstein on, successful science fictions were quickly transferred and adapted to the theatre, foreshadowing the expansion of SF from its literary origins across the market media of cinema, radio, and television, propelled by the new technologies of re/production and diffusion, complemented on the one hand by pulp fiction’s conquest after the First World War of a mass reading market (pp. 154–9) and on the other by the development of avant-gardist dramatic and prose forms (pp. 159–67). Even though SF originated as a literary genre and literary production remains the creative lifeblood of the genre, it is nevertheless the case that SF is now largely perceived and received by consumers through the optic of its translation into the visual media. This calls into question both the literary bias of SF studies and the insistence on SF’s cognitive essence as an experiment with ideas.
To repeat, the novum is also and perhaps primarily visual in its impact. Milner discerns ‘a certain necessary tension between the novum as imaginative idea and its representation as spectacle’ (p. 49), but is there any greater tension at work here than that between Suvin’s interaction of estrangement and cognition? Why cannot spectacle function as estrangement? It is too easy to dismiss special effects as nothing but ‘effect without cause’ when such effects form an essential ingredient of a genre comprising tales of resonance and wonder that constantly deploy the resources of the marvellous. The necessary tension between science and magic is rendered ambiguous in a genre that exhibits the workings of mysterious forces. And just as SF, whatever its cognitive intent, is tied to unknown forces, so these occult forces (the ghost in the machine) call for special effects, from the stage machinery of the past to the digital technology of today. We could reverse Suvin’s canonical definition by arguing that science and fiction, cognition and estrangement have always sought their union, indeed fusion in special effects. Such is the hold of Suvin’s foregrounding of cognition that we ignore cognition’s blind spot, the failure to recognize the ubiquity of unknown and usually lethal forces in SF, which is symptomatic of the failure to thematize and theorize the politics of power in definitions of the genre.
The take-off of the genre derives, as we have seen, from the conjunction of the technological and industrial breakthroughs (but also the political revolutions) of the late 18th century. The diffusion of the genre in the 19th and 20th centuries thus not surprisingly largely correlates with the spread of modernization from Britain to continental Europe and North America and then globally. In Chapter 8 Milner sketches the cultural geography of SF. Postcolonialist theory has little to contribute for the very good reason that industrialization rather than imperialism is the best indicator of the geographical reach of the genre. Franco Moretti’s application of world-systems theory to the spread of the novel in the 19th century is given a more favourable reception. The market dominance of British and French novelists across Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries as evidenced by translations applies also to SF. The influence of Jules Verne and Wells is demonstrated by translations. However, Moretti manages to argue both that the metropolitan publishing centres of London and Paris ‘deprive most of Europe of all creative autonomy’ (p. 165) and that Europe’s semi-periphery is the site of new creative possibilities, as Milner amply demonstrates in his survey of SF in the 20th century from Weimar Germany to the Soviet Union, interwar Czechoslovakia and postwar Poland (pp. 166–73). The most significant developments globally come from the rise of North America and Japan to the position of cultural core of the SF world-system after the Second World War, a rise that is closely linked to the rise of film and of Japan’s special contribution to the development of SF animation.
The ultimate question – why and whither SF? – is given all too brief attention in the last chapter, where the question of the uses of SF as negative or positive predictor of possible future developments serves to introduce a discussion of postwar Australian utopias and dystopias. Nuclear catastrophe in Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) or ecological disaster in George Turner’s The Sea and Summer (1987) illustrate but scarcely exhaust the issues surrounding the techno-scientific core of the genre, which are central to the uses of SF. The frequently registered convergence of science and fiction in contemporary technology is paralleled by the convergence of art and media technology in the contemporary global cultural field. SF has become simultaneously the exemplar of and commentator on what Steven Best and Douglas Kellner have termed the postmodern co-evolution and co-construction of science, technology, capital, the military, and markets: ‘Recent scientific and technological breakthroughs demonstrate that the gap is being bridged between science fiction and scientific fact, between literary imagination and mind-boggling technoscientific realities’ (Best and Kellner, 2001: 103). As technology increasingly appears as the next accelerating stage of evolution, SF’s perennial fascination with the symbiosis of man and machine, adumbrated in Frankenstein, expands into the posthuman visions of the transformation of human being into a higher or lower species or of the supersession of humans by intelligent machines, figured in the robots, cyborgs and androids that haunt SF. The genre as the vehicle of our deep-seated ambivalence to the forces unleashed by the Enlightenment has moved from the Romantic margins to the mainstream of contemporary concerns. The novum that defines the genre is tied to the translation into the possible worlds of the imagination of our fears and fascination in relation to the seemingly unlimited possibilities of technoscience.
Locating Science Fiction’s great merit is to have charted a clear path through the thickets of theoretical debates and to have brought conceptual clarity to the vexed questions of definition and of SF’s place in the larger context of hypothetical fictions by tying the historical trajectory of the genre to the conjoined dynamics of industrialization and the technologization of science. SF thereby assumes its place as a genre in its own right, that is, as an Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment genre, related to but at the same time quite distinct from the older traditions of utopia and fantasy. Above all perhaps, as Milner shows, SF is a genre that crosses the boundaries between high and mass culture in both directions, a sure sign of its ongoing vitality. The same can hardly be expected of academic writing on SF, but the present study can be confidently recommended not only as an introductory text to students of SF but equally as an introduction to the cognitive advantages of a historically informed sociology of literature. Locating Science Fiction sums up Andrew Milner’s long interest and distinguished contributions to the field of SF studies.