M. Keith Booker and Anne-Marie Thomas, The Science
Fiction Handbook (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
Science fiction has been an important force in English-language literature and publishing for well over one hundred years. The task of adequately summarizing it -- as a whole and in its component parts -- would seem daunting. Doing it adequately and in a manner that is both understandable to the lay reader and even at times entertaining might seem an impossibility. And doing all that in fewer than 350 pages . . . forget it. But Booker and Thomas have succeeded. Bravo.
These writers must have brave hearts, indeed, to undertake the task, knowing as they must the sometimes fanatical and obsessive nature of the science fiction fan community. Any work that attempts, as this one does, to select a few works as representative of the major trends in sf since its inception, and to place those works within the confines of a double handful of subgenres, could be asking for trouble.
I've been reading sf since about 1965, and have seen the genre go through many of the trends the authors cite. I've read a good many of the books they discuss, but I've also overlooked quite a few of them. This handbook has given me a solid list of books to track down and read, thus filling in some gaps in my personal experience of this exciting and vital genre.
The book is laid out in four sections: a brief overview, brief historical surveys of the subgenres, brief biographies of representative authors and discussions of individual texts. In other words, brief reviews, really, of what the authors deem representative sf works. Of these there are 20, from H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898) to Ian McDonald's River of Gods (2005), which, coincidentally, I reviewed for GMR. The author section covers 19 authors, alphabetically from Isaac Asimov to Wells. And it separates the subgenres into 10, which seem fairly logical to me. Acknowledging Wells as the accepted father of the genre, it makes sense to begin the discussion with time-travel narrative and alien invasion narrative, followed by space opera, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, dystopian science fiction, utopian fiction, feminism and gender in sf, satire, cyberpunk/posthuman, and multicultural science fiction.
The book is of necessity somewhat academic in tone, but for the most part not overly laden with academic jargon. There's a brief glossary that explains some of the terms, such as post-modernism, which is bound to be helpful to many readers.
It tends to lean a bit heavily to the liberal end of the spectrum in its views, delving pretty deeply into some of the more Marxist and feminist examples of the genre and left-leaning authors such as Margaret Atwood and China Miéville while denigrating the more right-wing works and authors such as early Robert H. Heinlein, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and Orson Scott Card. With the exception of Heinlein, who was one of the founders of modern science fiction and a key figure in the Golden Age, the more conservative authors merit brief mention in the genre overviews but little other attention.
This text also pays quite a bit of attention to British authors and their contributions, which is valuable in these parochial times. We Americans tend to forget that many of the greatest sf books have been written by British authors, so it's good to help us see beyond our borders with greater clarity. The authors are, apparently, both Americans, though: Booker a widely published professor of literature and cultural studies at the University of Arkansas, Thomas professor of English at Austin Community College in Texas. The book itself, like many these days, is a truly global production, typeset in India and printed in Singapore, by a British publisher. As Mr. Spock might say, with the lift of an eyebrow, "Fascinating." As is this handbook. Every decent library should have it, and every good sf fan should refer to it. I guarantee you'll learn something and have your horizons expanded.
