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Another Dimension
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February 2018
Title: The Astounding Illustrated History of Science Fiction
Author: Dave Golder, Jess Nevins, Russ Thorne, Sarah Dobbs
Publisher: Flame Tree Publishing
This
book certainly can’t be faulted for lack of ambition. As the
first of its eight chapters and the corresponding timeline make
clear, nothing related to science fiction is outside of its intended
purview. That means we should expect coverage not only of books and
magazines, and TV and movies and video games, but also radio serials,
stage plays, comic books, and so on. The idea of condensing the key
works of all these media into some one-hundred-and-ninety lavishly
illustrated pages of cohesive and critical commentary on genre
history is a captivating one, and someday someone will perhaps
attempt such a quixotic task. This tome is not that.
I
appreciate the chronological approach, and I think the eight time
period divisions work well, for reasons elucidated in the text
itself. Dave Golder kicks us off with “Science Fiction Unbound”
(pre-1500 to 1894) and “New Frontiers” (1895-1925); next
Jess Nevins discusses “The Rise of the Pulps” (1926-1942)
and “A Time of Transition” (1943-1959); Nevins is
followed by Russ Thorne’s “Reinventing the Genre”
(1960-1976) and “Back to the Future” (1977-1989);
finally, Sarah Dobbs brings the proceedings to a close with “The
Information Age” (1990-2008) and “The Future is Now”
(2009-2020).
Golder’s
two starting chapters are really strong, and provide an excellent
proof-of-concept for the book’s theoretical remit. Golder has a
knack for being simultaneously thorough and fun to read, and his
chronicle of the early days of science fiction is jam-packed with
fascinating tidbits and insights, sprinkled with clever comments and
punning titles. Even readers familiar with science fiction history in
a general way, who will surely be aware of key literary works by Mary
Shelley, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Cummings
and other pioneers, will likely encounter a whole catalog of other
writers they’ve never heard of before, such as Adam Seaborn,
Percy Greg, Albert Robida, Anna Bowman Dodd, Gustavus W. Pope, Arthur
C. Train, E. V. Odle, and so on. One of my favorite discoveries from
these pages is Edward Page Mitchell, who anticipated many of Wells’s
key ideas and explored, for example, scientific invisibility, a time
travel machine, faster-than-light travel, thinking computers, matter
transmission and mind transfer—all before the year 1900. Golder
reveals the first use of the words “science fiction,”
“astronaut” and other terms most of us take for granted.
His chapters should also be praised for explicitly tracing the
connection between proto-instances of now-assumed concepts and their
later incarnations in works of pop culture, as well as for his
inclusion of non-Anglo works. I’d be surprised if these two
chapters didn’t send readers scurrying off on bibliographic
quests.
The
text becomes noticeably drier and more sober in Chapters 3 and 4,
which contain a great deal of interesting information about the
growth of the pulp magazines, alas not rendered in a particularly
compelling way. Nevins’s focus here is on lists and statistics,
on economic and publishing trends, on differences of genre and market
appreciation, rather than cultural insights or memorable nuggets
about selected works. His observation, for example, that the science
fiction that appeared in slick magazines and genre non-SF magazines
outnumbered that which appeared in dedicated SF pulp magazines, while
intriguing, is somewhat arcane and probably doesn’t merit being
repeated several times. And while we are told what the differences
between these types of science fiction are at a high level, a few
illustrative quotes would have been nice. I was disappointed to come
away from these chapters, which span critical decades, without a real
sense of the works discussed.
Russ
Thorne picks up the pace again in Chapters 5 and 6, providing solid
reportage on 1960 through 1989, but at this point the book starts to
emphasize movies and TV shows more and more, neglecting other forms
like comic books or video games almost completely. (The timeline for
1990 through 2016, for instance, only contains one graphic novel.)
It’s a trend that worsens in the last two chapters by Sarah
Dobbs. Novels and short stories are hardly treated, which is a shame,
as it’s one of the discussions I was most looking forward to,
particularly considering the renaissance of short stories, the birth
of new literary subgenres and the reinvention of old ones (e.g. new
space opera) since the year 2000. Overall, many important writers are
at least name-checked, but there are surprising omissions too, like
Andre Norton or Connie Willis, to name two random examples. Meanwhile
we get long lists of superhero films, and almost no lesser-known
movies. The text tries to justify this change in approach by arguing
that science fiction itself has primarily become visual spectacle,
but I’m not convinced.
These
shifts in tone and depth make this book a bit of a bumpy road if one
reads through it sequentially. Patt Mills’s “Foreword”
talks about the role of science fiction in taking us out of our
comfort zone and challenging “fake realities,” but the
history that follows only does so about half the time. There are also
signs of hurried production or insufficient editorial oversight. For
example, the blue color coding of comic book titles in the timelines
is so dark as to make them illegible. There are typos, like “colck”
for “clock” in the caption at the bottom of page 33. On
page 90 the book title is changed from “astounding” to
“astonishing”. The illustration on page 109 supposedly
shows novels from the 1960s and 1970s but mixes in reprints of
earlier works with originals from that time period. On page 169 The Last Jedi
should be listed as Chapter VIII in the Star Wars saga and dated
2017, rather than appearing as Chapter IX and being listed for 2019,
and so on. Finally, I wish all the illustrations were credited. Which
Frankenstein film adaptation is the source of the still on the top
right hand corner of page 15, and who is the artist behind the
imagined city of the future on page 28? I have other questions.
Despite
these grumbles, I think this book may be diverting and possibly
inspiring to the casual reader with little or no knowledge of science
fiction. As more of an occasional coffee-table volume rather than a
dedicated history or reference work, its cool art and solid recap of
basic concepts and genre milestones will reward browsing. For those
looking for more in-depth material in a similar heavily visual
format, I’d recommend John Clute’s Science
Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia.
It’s over two decades out of date, but retains its charm.
Title: Elysium Fire
Author: Alastair Reynolds
Publisher: Orbit
Alastair
Reynolds’s latest folds into his Revelation Space series, is
technically a prequel to Chasm City (2001), and also a sequel to The Prefect
(2007)—recently republished as Aurora Rising (2017)—but
can be enjoyed as a standalone. The novel’s setting rivals its
characters for appeal: the Glitter Band is a “circling river of
worlds,” a system of ten thousand artificial habitats that
orbits the planet Yellowstone, and at the time of this story is home
to one hundred million descendants from Earth. Each of these ten
thousand worlds is self-governing, bound to the whole only by “the
iron rule of universal suffrage,” as every citizen everywhere
is polled on all matters of import via instant neural implants: “Our
demarchist system is as perfect as it can ever be. Flawless,
instantaneous mass democratic participation. The will of the people,
without interference. No government, no hierarchies, no vested
interests, no possibility of bias or corruption.”
But
of course flawless is precisely what it isn’t, and Elysium Fire
sets one of its central imperfections beautifully aflame. The
Panoply—the taskforce that oversees the integrity of the
democratic polling process—is made up of so-called prefects.
Enter three of our five main point-of-view characters: prefects Tom
Dreyfus, Thalia Ng, and Sparver Bancal. “You don’t have
to like us to count on us,” says Thalia, and that could serve
as the Panoply’s motto. A nice Panoply PR line: “We are
the servants of democracy, not its masters.”
Plot
wheels are rapidly set in motion for the three prefects within the
first few chapters, all connected through the “wildfire”
epidemic. Thalia retrieves the head of a man who’s suffered a
neural implant overload and partners with Sparver in the search for
connections with similar victims; Dreyfus finds himself provoked by a
separatist with an army of followers, and sets out to interview the
simulated copies of those who have died, while also bargaining with a
god-like intelligence named Aurora. As if all this wasn’t
enough, we’re introduced to twins, Julius and Caleb, whose
unique environment and training aren’t connected in any obvious
way to the other stories until much later in the book.
Reynolds
has demonstrated a mastery of balancing exposition with action in
previous novels, and he continues to do so smoothly here. Each
individual plot thread is suspenseful while providing plenty of
moments for character reflection. As with other off-world science
fiction novels set centuries in the future, part of the story’s
fun is figuring out new concepts and technologies. There’s no
shortage of them: we’re treated to whiphounds, painflowers,
quick matter, hyperpigs, beta-level instantiations and much else
besides. Some of these terms—like hyperpig—are obvious in
context and have direct twenty-first century analogues, but others
come loaded with intriguing philosophical implications. The story
itself combines as much super-science as it does whodunit elements,
and some developments easily double as political commentary on
current issues. Consider the following as it applies to Brexit or the
2016 U.S. presidential election: “True democracy embodies the
possibility of its own dissolution. If a ballot were put to the
people to abandon our demarchist principles, and the votes carried
the day. . . what then? You may say that no such vote would ever be
cast. But that is to neglect the pressures that may apply during
times of crisis, during emergencies and times of economic hardship,
or when wild and seductive new ideas run rife.”
For
all this, the story’s central philosophical preoccupations are
a pretty straightforward discussion of ends vs means, at times
sidestepped by plot reveals, and more compellingly, meditations on
the nature of consciousness and memory. I enjoyed how all this arises
organically from the specific story of the wildfire epidemic and its
genesis, but I’m not sure characters were delineated as
sharply—or perhaps profoundly—as they could have been. If
pressed, for instance, I couldn’t give you much besides key
backstory events that set Sparver apart from Dreyfus. Characters are
given to musings such as “how curious it was that the universe
could make any prior situation seem only mildly troublesome, when at
the time it had seemed to encompass all conceivable woes,”
which fit in perfectly with the book’s tone but at times feel
interchangeable from one character to another. Ironically, the
character I enjoyed most was the non-human Aurora, whose unique voice
and observations consistently entertained: “I can read you like
a book. A very simple book containing mostly pictures.”
Fans
of Reynolds’s work and anyone seeking a well-plotted,
tightly-paced, multi-layered space-opera-ish police procedural won’t
be disappointed, but readers expecting to find humanity radically
reimagined may be underwhelmed. When the final plot twist is exposed,
in a Hercule Poirot-style monologue, it reveals that the motivations
of Glitter Band humans—at least the ones we meet in Elysium Fire—remain
on a par with those in Agatha Christie stories, albeit written on a
grander technological scale. Still, I think there’s plenty of
the Glitter Band we haven’t yet seen, and I wouldn’t mind
another go-around. The line, “There are always more holes. If
there weren’t, we’d be out of a job,” certainly
hints at sequels.
Read more by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro