Gothic Science Fiction, 1980-2010

It's about time that there was a publication such as this, which explores this relationship between the two genres - and the often hybrid nature of that relationship - in a manner that is timely, relevant, and generally, very interesting indeed. This is a valuable collection which should appeal to scholars working in the growing fields of Gothic and SF studies. Two well known descriptions of the relationship between science fiction and the Gothic are referenced several times in this collection of eleven articles. Darko Suvin sees science fiction and the Gothic (including horror and fantasy) in opposition to each other: science fiction is rational, critical, active, and forward thinking-a flying DeLorean-while the Gothic is somewhat of a clunker, struggling under its burden of the past and intermittently sputtering about things that go bump in the night. Brian W. Aldiss argues for a more familial relation between the two: the extraterrestrial realms explored in sf are outcroppings of the sublime landscapes traversed in the Gothic. This collection shows that Gothic science fiction is a hybrid formed by the tensions, anxieties, and strange bonds that develop when past and future, superstition and reason, nature and science are grafted together. The essays collected in Gothic Science Fiction investigate the horrors of globalized capitalism, the threat of technology to human subjectivity, the uncanny doubling of human and posthuman bodies, and the hybrid places and histories found in works of this genre. There are several standout essays, but the quality of the articles is rather uneven, so the reader is sometimes taken on a meandering voyage to nowhere in particular. The volume is divided into three sections: "Redefining Genres," "Biopower and Capital," and "Gender and Genre." There is also a phantom fourth section, "Strange Cities, Strange Temporalities," mentioned in Wasson and Alder's excellent introduction but absent from the collection. Was there some last-minute shuffling around of essays? The main lines of inquiry engage texts that look, Janus-like, to the future and to the past, with Gothic science fiction expressing the magnetism that unites these opposing poles. One must think Gothic sf in terms of zones of contact between genres, Roger Luckhurst argues in the first essay of the collection. A zone defies the type of borders prescribed by Suvin's understanding of the Gothic: it is a dynamic space where generic interpenetration and hybridity reign. (Nickianne Moody describes the Gothic punk milieu in similar terms: it is a "narrative environment" characterized by an openness and flexibility in form.) The articles contained in the volume's first section, written by Luckhurst and Fred Botting, are comprehensive and extremely engaging. Combined with the editors' introduction, they effectively map out the zones, bodies, corpus, and concerns of Gothic sf, laying sturdy foundations for understanding the genre. Some articles later in the collection undertake the same task but with less elegance. The volume frankly becomes quite repetitive if the articles are read in succession. For this reason, the collection is probably at its most enjoyable when one dips in and out of it on a need-to-know basis. Many essays investigate the problematic bodies that abound in Gothic science fiction. Some address connections to the field of medical humanities (Wasson and Alder), others explore Foucault's biopower in relation to the Gothic sf body (Aris Mousoutzanis and Gwyneth Peaty), and others study how archetypal Gothic or sf figures break through generic borders (Botting and Laura Hilton). Zombies ungainly stumble into the forward-moving path of posthumanism and thus participate in a "questioning of the limits of modern humanity" (Botting 38). But when the living dead are figured within a medical framework, they become the unlikely star of a biotechnological discourse seeking to extend and augment life (Peaty). Reading the Borg of Star Trek within the context of the cyber-vampire, Mousoutzanis shows that the Gothic blurring of self and other reads as ambivalence towards the imperialism of the Federation and that of the Borg-good and evil are not always clear-cut. What is exciting about many of the essays in this collection is the rigorous questioning of the divergent drives that are inherent to Gothic sf and that constantly twist and turn and unsettle expectations. For example, the generic instability of David Conway's "Metal Sushi" (2006) is thematized through the gender instability of the protagonist, who embodies both the hyper-masculine private eye and the femme fatale of hard-boiled detective novels (Mark P. Williams). Even more fascinating are the various avatars of the Gothic double, addressed in several essays. The human clone bred for organ harvesting, Wasson shows, is an eerie scientific form of doubling, questioning the relationship of the harvester to the harvested. What is monstrous is not the double but the organ harvester who hushes the suffering of the abject body of the harvested. In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999- ), Dr. Jekyll's iconic double is no longer shorthand for pure evil; he is a nuanced anti-hero (Hilton). The genetic engineering perpetrated by the Amnion in Stephen R. Donaldson's THE GAP CYCLE suggests that our identity as human both can and cannot be encased and encoded in our skin and genes-our corporeality is both meaningful and meaningless (Alder). These are examples of essays that demonstrate that the "dark futures" of the texts studied in this collection have the "greatest value" in what they reveal about our "dark present," as the editors say at the end of their introduction (16). As a whole this is a successful volume that will appeal to students and scholars of English-language sf (Fritz Lang's Metropolis [1927] and Guillermo del Toro's film Cronos [1993] are the only non-Anglophone works studied). Many of the articles are excellent and will prove to be essential for scholars researching Gothic sf. There are, however, a few missteps. In certain articles, less emphasis should be placed on codification; such gestures are often made without reflecting on what is to be gained (by the text, by the reader, by critical discourse) in rigidly defining a genre and arguing a particular text is of that genre. For example, does not attempting to uncover "traces" of science fiction in Toni Morrison's works undermine the cultural specificity of her decision to use "enchantment" instead of scientific rationalization in her fiction? Are we not at our best when we are concerned with what a text does, rather than in which pigeonhole it belongs? This is a successful volume that will appeal to students and scholars of English-language sf. Many of the articles are excellent and will prove to be essential for scholars researching Gothic sf.