Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk
(Soft Skull Press, 2022)
Reviewed by Niall Harrison
In 1998, Jonathan Lethem published an essay, ‘The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction’, which imagined that Gravity’s Rainbow won the 1973 Nebula Award and that subsequently, as a positive consequence, both the term ‘science fiction’ and the separate science fiction community gradually withered away. The essay was knowingly provocative, albeit with a sincere desire behind it for a less territorial literary ecology. It came to mind while reading Elvia Wilk’s essay collection because Lethem has lavishly blurbed it, and because I suspect part of the reason he did is Wilk’s total comfort in segueing from Margaret Atwood to Kathe Koja to Daisy Hildyard to Tricia Sullivan, or between solarpunk and 19th-century poetry and vampire LARPing. Death by Landscape is a lively, wide-ranging demonstration of how far and how fast the borders have fallen: the back cover even describes the contents as ‘fan non-fiction’.
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Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.
Arab and Muslim Science Fiction: Critical Essays edited by Hosam A. Ibrahim Elzembely and Emad El-Din Aysha
(McFarland, 2022)
Reviewed by Andy Sawyer
This baggy (43 essays, plus introductory and concluding material over nearly 400 pages) but important book is the brainchild of the Egyptian Society for Science Fiction (ESSF), an organisation established in 2012 with ambitions to reach out to and showcase the Arab/Muslim sf world. It has published a number of anthologies, but this seems to be the first major English-language publication attributed to the group. As such, it’s a work of amazing ambition and energy, some frustration, and great dedication.
Constellations: Minority Report by D. Harlan Wilson
(Auteur, 2022)
Reviewed by Graham Andrews
Of the making of films based upon the works of Philip K. Dick, there has been…well, not so many, of late. I know their titles, as do you, you, and especially you. For the purposes of this review, however, it would be hard not to reference Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990), and—has it really been twenty years?—Minority Report (2002). And the literature about PDK (for short) threatens to overwhelm the literature by PDK, if it has not already done so. This Liverpool University Press monograph (C: MR ditto) by Professor D. Harlan Wilson (Professor of English at Wright State University-Lake Campus) considers the Steven Spielberg film version of MR, in depth, width, and not-inordinate length (128 pages).
Alfred Bester’s ‘The Stars My Destination’: A Critical Companion by D. Harlan Wilson
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
Reviewed by L.J. Hurst
How important is Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination in the history of sf? A couple of months ago I had the chance to find out when I thought that my hardback copy was lost and went online to buy another. That copy—fortunately found before I began reading D. Harlan Wilson’s Critical Companion—would have cost a fortune to replace. In money terms Stars (to abbreviate it) is very important. It is also not inappropriate a way to consider the book because one of the themes of the novel—and it has a number—is the persistence of finance capitalism. Money—or resources and what they can buy—is an engine of the story.
Story Matrices by Gillian Polack
(Luna Press, 2022)
Reviewed by Dan Hartland
In this short book, Gillian Polack seeks to demonstrate how, and to what effects, novels act as transmitters of culture. To do so, she focuses specifically on science fiction and fantasy as instructive generic examples of the processes she identifies.
This is a work of cultural, not literary, criticism: Polack is not interested in what makes a novel ‘good’ from a technical perspective, but rather in ‘novels as artefacts of culture’ (p. 39), by which rubric there is no qualitative difference between one or another example of the form. She ‘does not question their separate literary value’; she simply finds it irrelevant to her purposes (p. 203).
Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of the Imagination edited by Glyn Morgan
(Science Museum/Thames & Hudson, 2022)
Reviewed by Nick Hubble
Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of the Imagination is the companion book to the exhibition of the same name that opened at the Science Museum on 6 October 2022 and continues until (of course) 4 May 2023. There is also a programme of accompanying events, which included hosting the ceremony for the 36th annual edition of the Arthur C. Clarke Award on 26 October. That particular event, which saw copies of the shortlist on sale in the exhibition shop alongside a pretty decent range of fiction from across the field, complemented the exhibition’s understandable visual focus on juxtaposing iconic material from SF film and television, such as Iron Man’s armour suit and Hal 9000 from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with space and cybernetic technology. This book, however, manages to combine fully the visual impact of the exhibition (by including over 200 colour illustrations) with an impressive survey of both media and books. Aside from the excellent design standards, the extent and quality of the analysis suggest that Science Fiction should appeal to an audience beyond those who’ve been to the exhibition, and remain of value for the foreseeable future.
The Flicker Against the Light and Writing the Contemporary Uncanny by Jane Alexander
(Luna Press Publishing, 2021)
Reviewed by Ksenia Shcherbino
The Flicker Against the Light and Writing the Contemporary Uncanny is a collection of strange and haunting stories. Or, giving word to Jane Alexander herself, these stories ‘are specific to the technologies of our age, and simultaneously recognisable as instances of the uncanny…with doubles, hauntings, confusions of the living and the dead, the return of the repressed and many other uncanny tropes and topos given contemporary expression.’
Strange Relics: Stories of Archaeology and the Supernatural, 1895–1954 edited by Amara Thornton & Kay Soar
(Handheld Press, 2022)
Much supernatural or ‘weird’ fiction goes something like this: antiquarian digs up relic from the past: something horrible happens. Thornton and Soar, themselves archaeologists, have curated a collection that specifically focuses upon how weird fiction engages with archaeology, and the book has already caused something of a stir in the archaeological community. While the dozen stories here are (mostly) within that reductive summary, this is a well put-together volume combining familiar favourites with lesser-known works.
Lesbian Potentiality & Feminist Media in the 1970s by Rox Samer
(Duke University Press, 2022)
The central argument of Samer’s excellent book is that ‘more than a simple identity category’, ‘lesbian’ in the 1970s signified ‘the potential that gendered and sexual life could and would someday be substantially different, the heteropatriarchy may topple, and that women would be the ones to topple it’. The way to reconfigure society would be by erasing compulsory heterosexuality and in such a ‘lesbian future’, ‘the meaning of lesbian existence would not cease but would look, sound, and feel entirely different than it did in the 1970s present’. On one level, therefore, Lesbian Potentiality & Feminist Media in the 1970s is relevant to contemporary 21C debates on who may and who may not claim to be a lesbian but, more significantly, the range of its scope, imagination, and ambition far exceeds the narrow and prescriptive terms in which such debates are framed by the British media.
From The Abyss: Weird Fiction, 1907–1945 by D.K. Broster
One of the first historical novels I ever read, back in my dim-and-distant childhood, was The Flight of the Heron (1925), by D.K. (Dorothy Kathleen) Broster (1877-1950). Along with The Gleam in the North (1927) and The Dark Mile (1929), Heron makes up the classic Jacobean Trilogy. The editor, Melissa Edmondson, covers the bio-bibliographic ground in her cogent introductory material. Notes on the eleven stories have been provided by Kate Macdonald. All in all, a neat little package from the enterprising Handheld Press.
We are on firm ground with the ‘1907–1945’ part of the subtitle, but ‘Weird Fiction’ is a misleading misnomer. ‘Unique fiction’ would have been more like it, coincidentally raising the spectre of Weird Tales—once billed as the ‘unique’ magazine. Each-and-every Broster story is different from each and-every other Broster story, so there is really no such thing as a typical Broster story. Apart from ‘The Taste of Pomegranates’ (see below), these selections are from A Fire of Driftwood (1932) and Couching at the Door (1942).
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