A Cultural History of a Hybrid Genre

WORKING

Landon, Brooks. "A Cultural History of a Hybrid Genre." Review of Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction, CULTURAL HISTORY OF LITERATURE[1][2] (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2005), in Science Fiction Studies #98 = 33.1 (March 2006): 161-73. As of November 2022, on-line here.[3]

A substantial and important review by an important scholar of a well-received book of interest to users of this Wiki — including in the review an argument with the equally important Farah Mendlesohn concerning her charges of sexism in Science Fiction in her coverage of it in The New York Review of Science Fiction 18.1 (Sept. 2005): 16-19.

One key statement by Landon on Mechanism, going on to quote Luckhurst:

Science Fiction continues the move toward a cultural history of sf suggested by a large number of critical works published in the past fifteen or twenty years, each of which explored reciprocal relationships between the body of texts that comprises sf and the cultural concerns shaping and frequently shaped by those texts. Luckhurst centers his focus on the cultural debates attending technological modernity — as differently articulated in Great Britain and the US — using the antique but capacious umbrella term “Mechanism” to subsume the impact of technology on cultural life. Casting sf as “a literature of technologically saturated societies,” he offers his study as a cultural history rather than the cultural history of sf, specifying:

A cultural history of science fiction will situate texts, therefore, as part of a constantly shifting network that ties together science, technology, social history and cultural expression with different emphases at different times. SF will not conform to a particular literary typology or formalist definition: rather, it will be marked by a sensitivity to the ways in which Mechanism is connected into different historical contexts. ([Luckhurst] 6) (Landon, in print version p. 161)

A bit later, Landon notes that "[...] one of the many important arguments Luckhurst makes is that sf’s early and long-continuing relegation to low status has little to do with actual aesthetic quality and much to do with the genre’s positions in cultural debates over the implications of Mechanism." Landon sees Luckhurst carefully tracking "ways in which sf might be seen as contributing “in a new and significant way to the history of the constitution of the modern subject” ([Luckhurst] 3) with specific reference to responses to and implications of Mechanism — the central aspect of modernity — as it is shunned by high culture and engaged in complicated and ambivalent ways by sf" (Landon p. 162 [our emphasis with boldface]).

Moving through Luckkhurst on Hugo Gernsback on technocracy and the American paradigm of engineering in SF vs. the British of evolution, gets to Part II of Science Fiction and "the elaboration of the initially artifactual concerns of Mechanism into the cybernetic control systems developed in conjunction with the nuclear age and its attendant technocratic networking"; and, covering 1939-1959, war, "the Military-Industrial Complex, and the "nuclear age" as concentrated (our term) in the atomic bomb (Landon p. 165).

On Luckhurst on Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Sally Miller's The Wanderground, Suzy McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines, and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time: "Luckhurst’s readings of these texts remind us that, apart from their sharing gender concerns, these writers construct and critique technology differently, with very different visions of its social uses. Joanna Russ is then identified as an exemplar of Kristeva’s third wave, and also as a writer whose work explores all three feminisms, with The Female Man (1975) incorporating 'all of these strands of feminism into a collage of competing voices from parallel worlds' (193)" (Landon p. 168).

RDE, finishing, 8Nov22