New Adam Roberts Book on SF/F?
Interesting review of a new book by Adam Roberts I didn’t know existed. The reviewer is not entirely sympathetic, writing, in part:
But the problem with governing concepts is that they can become prisons. As the book progresses Roberts continually modifies and cavils, eventually conceding that there might indeed be such creatures as “Catholic SF” and “Protestant fantasy”. What’s more, it becomes increasingly difficult for him to demonstrate any influence or articulation between the various sub-genres he defines to prove those early origins of science fictional and fantastical writing: for example, moon fiction and utopian fiction.
His historical overview suffers most from its neglect of the Renaissance. A careful reading of Mary Gentle (ignored) would open a window on the world view, both fantastical and science fictional, of memory theatres. His contemporary survey is patchy: the writer CJ Cherryh, for example, is cynically dismissed (“her only innovations are innovations of scale”) on the basis of an unrepresentative selection from her work.
Writers such as Ken Macleod, Liz Williams and Charles Stross merit terse mentions or none at all; Jeff Vandermeer’s complex commentary on the genre is compressed into a couple of tiny website-culled quotes.
I’ll have to read the book first, but there is a kind of insularity
June 15, 2008 at 11:25 pm
Wait, Mary Gentle was a Renaissance writer?
June 15, 2008 at 11:43 pm
And it’s certainly one concept that directs the discourse of Roberts’s massive (370+ finely printed, minutely annotated pages) Palgrave history of the genre. The concept, articulated boldly in the preface, is that in inspiration science fiction is “Protestant” (rationalist and individualistic), while fantasy is “Catholic” (superstitious and dependent on unknowable higher powers).
This is ringing all sorts of warning bells for me right now. Not another tired recapitulation of Max Weber’s theories, please! But I’ll probably place an order in the next few weeks for it. This is the sort of thing that I live to critique, sadly.
June 16, 2008 at 2:45 am
Well, “new” in the sense that it was published in 2006. I think insularity is an odd charge to throw at the book; whatever its flaws, it has a broader frame of reference than any other history of sf that I’ve read.
June 16, 2008 at 6:41 am
Niall: I’m lazy right now but will track it down eventually, then. Maybe I was just busy when it came out, but I don’t recall seeing any other mention of it. Thanks for commenting.
Jeff
June 16, 2008 at 7:44 am
Thanks for noting the review — as much for the second half on Chimurenga as on the Roberts book. Chimurenga is a really awesome magazine, but I haven’t followed them recently, so didn’t know about the SF issue, but will track it down.
I’ve read the Roberts book, and it’s worth looking at for, if nothing else, the breadth Niall cites. I think he’s the best theorist of SF out there other than Delany, even if sometimes that means I disagree with him profoundly — heck, because that means I disagree with him profoundly. SF is now something much too big and diverse to be able to be reduced to one book of history, but Roberts gives it a good shot. It’s almost 400 pages and it felt to me about 1/4 as long as it could have (perhaps should have) been, because once the book moved much into the 20th century, it lost, I thought, the argumentative focus that made the first few chapters compelling. (And this coming from somebody who strongly disagrees with calling stuff from before the 20th century “science fiction”. Roberts makes as powerful a case for doing so as anybody I’ve read.) And there are individual moments in every chapter of great insight and interest. Without some sort of grand unifying theory, literary history becomes tough to read, chaotic and slapdash, so I didn’t mind Roberts’s theorizing, even though, soon afterwards, I’d forgotten what it was in favor of some of his more specific insights. That, too, seems to me a perfectly good and even admirable effect.
June 16, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Sounds like the sort of frustratingly engaging book that I like to read, Matt. I’ll go ahead and buy it for review purposes next month. I seem to recall Kincaid touches upon Roberts’ arguments in his recent book and I believe he too had problems with extending SF back so far into the past.
Tangent: If literary theories prove to be problematic, would a cultural history be more suitable for addressing such a topic?
June 17, 2008 at 6:51 am
Larry: I reviewed the Roberts in Foundation some time last year. I don’t have a problem with his extending sf so far into the past (I tend to date sf from More’s Utopia), but I do have problems with some of his cultural history. Most particularly his underlying argument that sf is Protestant and fantasy is Catholic. Superficially I find this a very attractive position, and certainly it is easy to see sf developing out of the cultural changes (the spread of education, the rise of experimental science) brought about by the Protestant Reformation. But there is also an awful lot of good Catholic sf, and I don’t think Roberts argues the case strongly enough to make it hold up.
I began my review by criticising his title. It is certainly A history of science fiction, but it is not The history; there are many other ways of looking at the genre.
And picking up your tangent, I totally agree about the need for a cultural historical approach to sf. I have done fairly extensive work on the history of British sf, and you cannot separate the literature from the political, religious, scientific, cultural, social thinking from which it emerged. Any history of sf that looks at it in isolation from everything else going on around it is missing the main part of the story.
June 17, 2008 at 4:59 pm
I knew it was from somewhere, Paul, so thanks for clarifying the time and place. I have some problems with dating things before the Scientific Revolution due to questions of mentalité, especially in regards to the Protestant/Catholic (and no Orthodox, Jewish, or other religious traditions?) issue that note is problematic. And I do agree that one cannot remove the literature from the time and locale of its origin, but it’s difficult finding SF studies that address this to my satisfaction. Did place an order for Roberts’ book and hopefully I’ll have a chance this weekend or next to read it.