Solar Flares

The author's knowledge of the science fiction texts of the 1970s is absolutely compendious, covering not only the more mainstream sf writers of the 1970s but also some of the less well-known byways. Solar Flares constitutes a significant addition to sf scholarship. ... a superb work of narrative reference. Solar Flares is an unusual book that offers a virtual encyclopedia of 1970s science fiction. When one reads an academic monograph, one usually expects to encounter a thesis-driven analysis that makes some central claim about its object of study; but the opening argument in Andrew Butler's Prologue- that the "metaphor of the Invisible Enemy [can be used] to describe the ideological battlegrounds of the 1970s" (1)-is really more of a broad conceptual framework that allows him to map the sf of the period in wide-ranging strokes. After an overview of the existing scholarship on the subject (basically, there is not much), he suggests that early 1970s sf reflects cynicism and pessimism regarding the invisible and uncontrollable forces that seem to have cast Western societies into chaos; by the end of the 1970s, however, blockbuster films such as Star Wars (1977) exemplify a more optimistic attitude, emphasizing heroes who are able to triumph over these unseen forces. Butler asserts that his study "offers readings of how the real-world politics of ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, class struggles, environmental [sic] and imperialism encourage certain narratives and downplay others" in order to show how "sf addresses the issues of these invisible enemies as litmus tests of the time" (7). He suggests that much of the period's sf is "radical," though there is also "a strain of conservatism and anxiety" (7). This focus on "invisible forces" suggests an alignment with Timothy Melley's Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (2000), an excellent literary analysis that investigates a similar trend. Yet it quickly becomes apparent that the critical apparatus cobbled together in the Prologue exists merely to satisfy the generic demands of an academic monograph, rather than providing a consistent analytic lens to be developed throughout the book. Indeed, Butler cheerfully abandons this framework in order to offer a more general survey of the breadth of 1970s science fiction. Each chapter of Solar Flares follows an identical template: Butler first introduces an issue or topic (imperialism, feminism, postmodernism, etc.), then offers a concise snapshot of the cultural history and theoretical context of this issue or topic, then dives into an exhaustive catalogue of seemingly every sf text during the period that reflected this issue or topic (with examples ranging from literature and film to music and fan fiction). The final result, as I observed at the outset, is more like a narrative encyclopedia than a cohesive study-in essence, this is a comprehensive reference volume masquerading as a topical analysis, and each chapter feels like a long encyclopedia entry. On the one hand, such an approach has extraordinary breadth: if you are researching environmentalism and science fiction, for example, Butler's chapter on this topic provides a detailed catalogue of how environmental concerns are reflected in different ways within sf imaginings during the period, attending to both popular and neglected texts. On the other hand, the chapters offer little more than voluminous plot summaries, along with very brief reviews of the notable critical perspectives brought to bear on these texts. Like most reference works, there are few (if any) original insights about the primary sources-or, indeed, 1970s SF as a whole-and the reading experience can be a bit dry, depending on one's interest in the topics. This critique aside, Solar Flares functions as a superb work of narrative reference. Following the Prologue, Butler offers a chapter examining early sf pioneers (such as Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke) who were still publishing in the 1970s, a chapter on the impact of the New Wave on 1970s SF, a chapter on sf following the moon landing, a chapter on sf as self-parody, and a chapter on science-fantasy. Each of these is extremely knowledgeable, packed with useful information conveyed by a critic well-grounded in sf history. Butler then proceeds to offer a series of chapters centered on how 1970s sf reflected dominant critical themes or trends of the period, such as race, the Vietnam war, postwar countercultures, imperialism, environmentalism, feminism, gay liberation, the emergence of children's literature, the emergence of cinematic blockbusters, pseudoscience and the paranormal, architecture, and postmodernism. Butler's use of critical theory to frame each chapter is solid, coherent, and appropriate. In sum, I do not feel that I have learned very much about 1970s science fiction other than the fact that there was a lot of it, and this actually seems to be one of Butler's goals: his central task seems to be to correct an erroneous notion that nothing much really happened in 1970s sf, that it was a fallow period lying between the respective ferments of the New Wave and cyberpunk. Butler's accomplishment is to show the sheer volume of work produced during the period and the range of diverse and relevant topics upon which it focused. Other studies delving deeper into the period's sf remain to be undertaken, but Butler's book serves as a useful launching point. Andrew M. Butler's exploration of 1970s sf is a must for anyone interested in the history of the field and the myriad ways it has been shaped by, and has recorded, that decade's major social and political upheavals. As Butler points out in the prologue, the motivation for such a book is straightforward enough. Most histories of the genre tend to associate the 1960s with the New Wave and the 1980s with cyberpunk, thus omitting specific commentary on the 1970s. The middle of this sandwich tends to be seen as mostly filler, and is typically lumped in with the end of the 1960s, as though it represents little more than the waning and eventual decline of the New Wave. Butler's book makes a strong case for reevaluating this attitude and proves the usefulness of considering the 1970s in its own right. The decade was rife with shifts in the perception and politics of ethnicity, gender, sexual identity and orientation, class, environmentalism and imperialism, and these shifts influenced sf in complex, sometimes contradictory, ways. They deserve our full attention. As Butler is quick to point out, his approach consists of breaking down the decade into 'various clusters of events, and a series of micronarratives' (7). What this means is that each of his sixteen chapters begins with a brief statement of the socio-cultural phenomenon under consideration, a list of the key representative works selected, and then proceeds with detailed discussions of each. The chapters may therefore be read out of order without significant loss to the reader. There are some obvious advantages to such a strategy. It helps unravel key tangles in the skein of 1970s forces. For example, by studying feminism and gay liberation separately, Butler can illustrate how some feminist texts are problematic from an LGBT perspective, and some LGBT texts problematic from a feminist perspective, a task whose difficulty would be compounded by examining both simultaneously. Another benefit is that some works are afforded more than one reading. The original Star Wars film trilogy, for example, is discussed in detail both in the chapter on Vietnam and in the chapter on blockbusters. Needless to say, there are some drawbacks to Butler's attempt at parsing. One is that, particularly during the second half of the book, it becomes easy to lose a sense of the staggering accretion of the decade's changes, and the multiple directions in which they pushed sf. One tends, instead, to become absorbed with nuanced interpretations of individual works. One also suspects a certain level of arbitrariness in the organizing schema that may undermine their enduring academic value. Who is to say, for example, that architecture deserves its own section while Cold War tensions (they crop up regularly throughout the text) don't? It may be unfair to Butler to focus so much on his chapter criteria which are, after all, simply pragmatic separating categories. His book is woven together with a sort of through-line, comprised of fundamentally two ideas: one, that the prevalent mode of 1970s fiction is ambiguity (and more specifically, amphicatastrophe, which avoids the happy endings typical of eucatastrophes and the failure-cumcatharses of dyscatastrophes), and two, the recurring notion of 'invisible enemies', normative assumptions like 'heterosexuality, patriarchy, capitalism' (237) and so on. Said less technically, 1970s narratives are deeply conflicted, and offer no easy answers to the question of what to substitute for the familiar. The testing search for these answers is fascinating to read about. In some cases it led artists to innovative approaches and visionary techniques such as fragmentation, self-parody, or meta-fiction. The record of key 1970s works that 'pushed the envelope' is quite an astonishing one. Every time I remember that Samuel R. Delany's massive Dhalgren (1975) was not only well-received but also became a bestseller (!), I shake my head in disbelief. Many writers, such as John Brunner, Thomas M. Disch, Barry N. Malzberg, Joe Haldeman, Ursula Le Guin, Kate Wilhelm, Joanna Russ, Kit Reed, James Tiptree Jr., Pamela Sargent and Angela Carter, arguably produced their finest works during this decade. On the other hand, the decade's profound instability and exhaustion sent other creators (and audiences) flocking back towards comfort and escapism at unprecedented rates: witness the rise of sword-and-planetary romances, Tolkien imitators, fantasy role-playing games, the aforementioned Star Wars films, the first two Superman movies, or series like Battlestar Galactica and Flash Gordon. Finally, poised somewhere between those trying to break the mould and those seeking solace within its confines, were veteran 'first sf' writers like Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Clifford D. Simak and Leigh Brackett, from whose 1970s works one cannot easily infer heightened artistic ambitions, but who nevertheless reaped many of the decade's top awards. One of the things I enjoyed most about Butler's study was the cross-media range of works discussed (albeit with an acknowledged Anglophone bent), and the inclusion of authors whose works have been neglected, for example, D.G. Compton, Michael Coney, Richard Cowper and Sue Payer. (Some of these authors will shortly be made available by a series of Gollancz omnibus reprints.) This is both exhilarating and a trifle daunting. I also found much value in individual discussions and comparisons, for example the concept of 'surplus repression' in horror works or some of the less obvious differences between Star Trek and Blake's 7. Butler also adds his own speculation in places. He wonders, for example, whether Payer, author of Second Body (1979), wasn't really the pseudonym of a male writer. (At the time of writing this review I have contacted Carrie O'Maley Voliva, who in a Goodreads review of Payer's novel identifies herself as the author's granddaughter, but have not yet received confirmation one way or another.) On the flipside, I did discover a few omissions which, in a book otherwise systematically thorough and generously broad, ought to be noted. Poul Anderson is named only twice, although Tau Zero was a Hugo nominee in 1971, and he won Hugos for 'The Queen of Air and Darkness' (1971), 'Goat Song' (1972) and 'Hunter's Moon' (1978). Though at least four of Robert Silverberg's novels are discussed, there is no mention of Son of Man (1971), A Time of Changes (1971), Dying Inside (1972) or The Book of Skulls (1972). George Alec Effinger is referenced, but his Nebula-nominated novel What Entropy Means to Me (1972), and his strong body of short fiction is elided. Michael Bishop, who was repeatedly a Hugo and Nebula nominee, is absent from this history. Perhaps more egregious is the surface treatment of Norman Spinrad, who is name-checked three times, but none of whose works - ground-breaking novels like The Iron Dream (1972) or major collections such as The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde (1970) and No Direction Home (1975) - are even referenced. Then, too, in the case of works such as J.G. Ballard's Crash (1973), I occasionally found that some of Butler's observations gave me pause. Consider: 'With Ballard, it is never quite clear whether he is critiquing or celebrating the excessive behaviour of his characters' (212). Why, I wonder, must he be doing one or the other? Can the 'excessive behaviour' not exist for its own aesthetic reasons without requiring the author's judgment? In an earlier discussion of Ballard's work, Butler astutely points out that 'homosexual acts are another form of paraphilia alongside many behaviours' (164), suggesting that we should not read much into them. A similar case, I think, can be made for the above character behaviour. That said, I did find Butler's take of Crash as a work of Swiftian satire intriguing. Another item on my wish-list would be Butler's engagement with previous works of scholarship that directly overlap or anticipate some of his schema. Gary K. Wolfe's The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (1979), for example, contains lengthy analyses of 'The City' and 'The Wasteland' as prevalent icons in sf, which would be relevant to Butler's treatments of sf in terms of architecture and environment. Still, I would not want the reader to glean from these comments that I found the work lacking in any serious way. As a onestop record of 1970s sf in print, film, television, music and games, Solar Flares is indispensable and remedies a long-standing gap in historical scholarship. At times Butler's descriptions and summaries may feel a tad familiar, but his knack for even-handed synthesis, and the enormous specificity of cultural and historical detail that he provides as context for his discussions, are to be heartily applauded. As Andrew Butler points out in the prologue to his new book, Solar Flares, studies of sf often tend to neglect the 1970s in favour of the loud and colourful controversies surrounding the New Wave and cyberpunk that historically bookend this decade. The 1970s tend to be seen either as the period when '1960s projects failed' or else a time of stale tedium preceding the emergence of the mirrorshades crew (3). Yet as Butler shows, it was also an era of immense expansion during which the genre burgeoned across a range of media - especially film, thanks to the blockbuster success of Star Wars (Lucas US 1977) - and engaged forcefully with a range of social and ideological issues. Many important new writers, such as Octavia E. Butler and C.J. Cherryh, published their first works, while others - Joe Haldeman, Christopher Priest, James Tiptree, Jr (a.k.a. Alice Sheldon) - came forcefully into their own as major talents. Meanwhile, the academic study of sf blossomed with the appearance of new critical journals such as Science-Fiction Studies and Foundation and an explosion of college courses on the subject. As Solar Flares amply displays, the 1970s was far from being a mere doldrums sandwiched between two major storms. Butler's volume covers what he calls 'the long 1970s', extending from the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick US/UK) in 1968 to the appearance of the first Star Wars sequels in the early 1980s. As these examples make plain, the book - despite being dominated by discussions of literary texts - makes a significant place for sf in mass media and popular culture generally. A chapter on 'Blockbusters' canvasses the runaway success of George Lucas's and Steven Spielberg's sf films, while other chapters integrate treatments of television series such as UFO (UK 1969-73) and Blake's 7 (UK 1978-81), musical groups such as Hawkwind and Parliament, and role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons (1974) into their thematic webs. There are 16 chapters in all, most organised around specific themes that cross-section the decade: this is thus a topical, not a chronological survey. The number of works covered is impressively large; clearly, a great deal of concentrated reading and research went into the production of this volume. Yet these strengths have corresponding weaknesses: the thematic anatomy attenuates and dissipates any general argument, while the virtually encyclopaedic citation of texts militates against deeply analytical readings. Butler attempts to give the work a cohesive centre by deploying 'the metaphor of the Invisible Enemy' as a way to 'describe the ideological battlegrounds of the 1970s' (1), but this idea never really gels into a structural backbone for the chapters, which come across as mini-essays rather than discrete moments in an unfolding thesis. This lack of an argumentative centre is not necessarily a bad thing since one of its chief effects is to communicate the extraordinary diversity of sf during the decade - indeed, virtually every chapter could sustain a book-length study of its own. Some of Butler's early thematic chapters have a historical animus (e.g. scanning the legacy of the New Wave and the Apollo Moon landings), while others, such as those on the 'Rise of Fantasy' or on 'Children's Fiction', focus on the consolidation of new forms; but the vast majority of chapters deal with sociopolitical concerns: Vietnam, Ecology, Race, Feminism, Gay Liberation. Clearly, the decade was one during which the genre was increasingly politicised, building on the New Wave's demand that sf engage boldly with the contemporary world. Each of the chapters begins with a brief summary of major socio-political developments relating to the topic, then proceeds to their reverberations within sf, usually in a way that suggests the genre was merely reflecting the prevailing social climate. Thus, the chapter on Ecology and Environmentalism opens with a paragraph discussing Earth Day, the Gaia Hypothesis and the work of Barry Commoner, moving to the treatment of ecological issues in novels such as John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up (1972) and films such as Soylent Green (Fleischer US 1973). Few texts get more than a paragraph of summary and analysis, most much less than that. While this brevity militates against the usefulness of the volume as a critical study, Butler deserves praise for his generous inclusion of a range of 1970s talents who were once widely celebrated but are now in danger of lapsing into obscurity: Barry N. Malzberg, Pamela Sargent, Ian Watson, Kate Wilhelm. If the book does nothing more than revive interest in these 'minor' figures of sf history, it will have achieved a laudable goal. Indeed, Solar Flares can especially be recommended to teachers and students seeking more 'off-trail' fare than they will find on the shelves at Barnes. Solar Flares can especially be recommended to teachers and students seeking more 'off-trail' fare than they will find on the shelves at Barnes.