Skip to main content

Science Fiction - Glyn Morgan (Ed.) ***

There are two ways to write a non-fiction book on science fiction - for the fans, or for those who don't currently read SF. Being as big science fiction fan I’m not sure I’m the ideal audience for this book, which is very much aimed at persuading those who think they don’t like SF that it’s actually acceptably cool. It's technically an accompaniment to an exhibition at London's Science Museum, though I believe it takes a different and more sophisticated tack.

We get a bit of introduction, including an essay on 'What is science fiction for?' - this only briefly touches on the usual spiel that it's not about predicting the future, and rather sadly never says it's for enjoyment, or getting insights into people and their response to changes in their world and worldview - in fact, it's quite difficult to elicit anything from this rather obscure piece of writing.

Editor Glyn Morgan then divides the SF writing-scape into five areas: people and machines, travelling the cosmos, communication and language, aliens and alienation and somewhat vaguely, anxieties and hopes, which proves to be primarily about nuclear war and climate change. This means there's not much feel of a contiguous structure to the book, which has a multiplicity of authors. Each section darts around in time, trying to get across the message the author of that segment feels is important, rather than the perhaps more enlightening approach of systematically telling us the history of science fiction and how it has developed.

There are certainly some serious gaps here. Although we get an image from Doctor Who (the pictures here, in typical museum style, don't really illustrate the text but give us sometimes relevant, sometimes confusing, imagery that often wastes about three quarters of the space available for text), there is pretty much nothing about time travel, or about the Brandon Sanderson-style military SF that follows in the tradition of Heinlein and was so successfully countered by Joe Haldeman. There is a real problem with the approach, which is driven by the authors' pet topics, rather than what real world SF has been about.

Equally, some big names in science fiction history either get a one line mention or nothing at all - names such as John Wyndham, Ray Bradbury, Fred Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, Brian Aldiss, Iain M. Banks or Alastair Reynolds. Even Adam Roberts, who should be more to the taste of these authors, only gets a reference to one novel. Instead, I think the person who gets most coverage is 'Sun Ra', apparently an experimental musician and hardly a significant contributor to the SF canon. This reflects a relentless 'right on' attitude, which results, for example, in far too much weight being given to twenty-first century authors.

I presume the way the book seems aimed at a certain segment of potential readership is why it never explores the literary elite's habitual disdain for science fiction. They don't mention that a certain author (who amusingly they label as an SF writer) claimed she didn't write science fiction, as it was limited to 'talking squids from outer space.' Although the contributors rightly celebrate Ursula K. LeGuin, they don't point out that LeGuin commented that the aforementioned author's rejection of SF was 'designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders.'

Overall then, a nicely produced book, with some interesting material - but distinctly flawed in the balance of content, and in not mentioning the disdain of many in the literary world.

Hardback:   

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Premonitions Bureau - Sam Knight ****

Not everyone would class this as popular science, but it concerns an attempt to take a scientific approach to paranormal abilities - notably premonitions (aka clairvoyance) and as such, it fits the category. Writing in the typical dramatic storytelling style of a US magazine, Sam Knight brings to life the remarkable tale of the work of two British figures from the 1960s. The central one is psychiatrist John Barker, with a supporting role given to newspaper and TV science reporter Peter Fairley. Barker had a long interest in extra sensory phenomena - the story takes off when he was inspired by a number of people claiming to have foreseen the Aberfan disaster (which terrible tragedy Knight covers movingly). As a result of the Aberfan premonitions, the pair were responsible for London's Evening Standard newspaper setting up a long-running experiment in the form of 'The Premonitions Bureau.' Aware that the Aberfan predictions were only reported after the event, and hence flawe...
Post a Comment
Read more