Neil Barron (Editor), Anatomy of Wonder -- A Critical Guide to Science Fiction
(Libraries Unlimited, 2004)
Years ago, I listened in as Iain MacKenzie, our Librarian here at Green Man, told a staffer where to find something here: 'Ahhh, been muckin' 'bout the Green Man library? What were you looking for? Guides to fantastic literature? Go left by the card catalog, turn down the stone stairs to the right, and you should find the cases that have all of 'em . . . or at least the ones not elsewhere in use by staffers.' (Actually he used much stronger language to describe staffers who 'borrowed' library material without signing it out!) It just happened that the staffer was looking for Neil Barron's Fantasy and Horror, a fine work that still gets heavy usage here as a way of deciding what's worth reading. And it is also true that Iain and I were just discussing Neil Barron's latest publication, Anatomy of Wonder -- A Critical Guide to Science Fiction, which arrived from the publisher a fortnight or so ago.
So let me toss out a few comments on what makes a great reference work as a way of looking at Anatomy of Wonder. First, it must be as current as possible, preferably covering material released within the past year, as any reference guide covering contemporary literature must be current. This is usually the case, but I've seen some works get delayed a few years after they were written, and you can see, particularly with writers that are prolific, that this is a problem. Anatomy of Wonder was published in the last quarter of 2004 and looks to be current through 2002. Given that it generally takes a year after a manuscript is turned for any reputably published manuscript to become a published work, that's about as good as it can possibly be! I spot checked writers with whom I was familiar with as a reader -- Neil Asher, Kage Baker, Richard Morgan, and Alastair Reynolds -- and all had works published in '02 which are noted here.
Next is the matter of what I call The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy question -- how comprehensive is it? In that Douglas Adams series, the digital guide used by veteran galactic hitchhikers like Ford Prefect could tell you everything about a subject. (Earth being a notable exception as Ford was just completing his update when it was destroyed.) While not quite as detailed as John Clute's two seminal works in this reference field -- Encyclopedia of Fantasy at 1049 pages (!) and the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction at an awesome 1369 pages, Anatomy of Wonder packs a lot in its 996 pages. (A quick note about the library binding on it -- I expect it will hold up much better than the bindings are holding up on the Clute books, as Libraries Unlimited did a far better job with binding it than did St. Martin's. If you plan on using this for years to come -- and you will, as I expect it to be at least another decade before it's updated (the fourth edition was done a decade ago) -- rest assured the dust jacket-free cover will not deteriorate with heavy usage. The third and fourth editions here in the Green Man are still in splendid condition!
The core of Anatomy of Wonder is the annotated bibliography of primary literature. Without reading every entry -- a task left to others -- I can say that it has many of the early writers in the genre, from Jonathan Swift (Travels into Several Remote Nations of the Earth), Jules Verne (including several I'd never heard of, such as a 1910 novella called 'The Eternal Adam'), Arthur Conan Doyle (The Lost World), to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly (for rather obviously, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus). The Golden Age is well covered, as are the other movements in Science Fiction, such as New Wave and Cyberpunk. Any librarian working in a library that has a good SF collection, say the West Hartford Public Library whose patron for their collection is SF writer par excellence Ben Bova, will want this at hand, and any librarian working in a university with a better than decent English department will be well advised to also have a copy, even if simply for the notes on which other works should be compared and contrasted with a given work. Take Bova's Mars, which the commentator says should be compared with Kim Stanley Robin's Red Mars (a thesis I agree with fully) and contrasted with Terry Bisson's Voyage to the Red Planet (which I have not read, but will seek out) for its satirical approach.
Ahhh, that raises very nicely why a general reader of SF would want this book. That's simple: it is the best, up-to-date, all-in-one reference guide to what's available for pleasure reading in the market today. Let's say that you're a fan of Roger Zelazny (which I am) but have read everything that he did in his lifetime (which I have, as far as I can tell from the detailed Zelazny bibliographies here at Green Man). What next for reading? Hmmmm. . . . Let's see . . . the annotator for Zelazny suggests that if I read his This Immortal that I should read Samuel Delany's The Einstein Intersection, or Gene Wolf's Book of the New Sun, if I've enjoyed his Lord of the Light novel. Likewise The Dreamaster (originally published as the 'He Who Shapes' novella) is correctly compared to LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven novel. With the Anatomy of Wonder at hand, a reader will have much to look for! And with the Internet fully in bloom these days, finding the most obscure book is no longer as impossible as it was a decade or so ago!
For both the librarian and the reader, there are myriad other goodies here. Want an essay on the history of SF from the earliest days (Francis Bacon's early sixteenth century New Atlantis) to the present day? It's here in a splendid form by Brian Stableford, whose Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction has been reviewed by Green Man. There's also a thorough look at other resources for truly serious researchers, be it other reference works (both author-specific and more general in nature), encyclopedias (including, rather not surprisingly, both the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, as well as a few others I must get our Librarian to order), online resources (good essay, but lacking in breadth of Web sites noted), an essay by Gary Wolfe on the the extensive corpus of SF criticism and history, and a look at SF in film, television, and radio (The latter essay is sadly skimpy on audio recordings, which I think have produced some amazing works, including the spin-offs from the Dr. Who television series). And that's just skimming the resources that you'll find here. It's that comprehensive!
Oh, I should mention the chapter on author studies. As a rule, we do not, in the Green Man library, collect these wee beasties, as they are some of the hardest fugitive literature to find. But we do have what I think is everything done on Roger Zelazny, as many of our staffers are diehard fans. So I looked to see what they thought was available -- both biographies, the Krulik and Lindskold ones, are listed, but the various bibliographies which have been done for him are not listed. (Sadly, none have been updated since his untimely demise.) I know it would have been difficult to incorporate such literature into this tome, so this will be only a minor kvetch. Other than that very minor complaint, Anatomy of Wonder comes as close to a perfect reference work as I've ever seen!
At eighty dollars, it's not all that cheap. But viewed as costing no more than three SF hardback novels, and less than many collectible publications, it's a real bargain. I'd certainly say without hesitaion that it's an essential acquisition for librarians and serious readers of this genre. I've no doubt that our Librarian will have great difficulty keeping it in its proper place in the Green Man here as many a staffer will need to borrow it!
