Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon, eds. Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation

Utopian Studies, Spring, 2002 by Marleen S. Barr

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. vii 278 pp. $59.95.

AT THE CONCLUSION of their introduction to Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation, Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon position themselves as hosts. "Welcome to the chatroom" (8), they announce. It is important to look who's talking in Edging. Exactly who is welcome to participate in Hollinger's and Gordon's chatroom? Although a critical anthology which includes (in order of appearance) Gary K. Wolfe, Lance Olsen, Brooks Landon, Jenny Wolmark, Brian Attebery, Wendy Pearson, Rob Latham, Roger Luckhurst, Veronica Hollinger, Gwyneth Jones, Brian Stableford, Joan Gordon, and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. is most certainly welcome, one aspect of the answer to my question puts me on edge.

In order best to articulate my notion of this answer, I turn to Olsen's personal understanding of Raymond Federman's term "critification." Olsen explains that "I have increasingly conceptualized my own criticism as a mode of speculative fiction, my own speculative fiction as a mode of criticism.... My criticism, then, speaks from within my sf, my sf from within my criticism" (47). I appropriate what Olsen calls the "post genre composition" and "post critical writing" which begins "to question the need for discriminating between such apparently singular species as theory and fiction" (55) to respond to Edging in terms of criticism as a mode of speculative fiction. Taking a cue from Olsen, my criticism will speak from within my science fiction. In other words, without further ado, I perform genre fission as I incorporate a short story within this review.

The Flying Saucers Which Ate Numerous Science Fiction Critics

Once upon a time, on a dark and stormy night, ominous flying saucers suddenly appeared over many Earth cities. In Derrick Bell's "The Space Traders" all American black people are forced to enter spaceships; these ships returned to "snarf up" many science fiction critics. Light beams emanating from the saucers' posteriors served as a means to enable aliens to transport numerous science fiction critics to the saucers' interiors. Because so many science fiction critics were sucked into the saucers' hulls, Hollinger and Gordon understandably had a very limited population from which to choose contributors to Edging. Hence, it is perfectly reasonable that within a volume consisting of thirteen essays, four of the essays just happen to have been written by Science Fiction Studies editors. The upshot of a situation in which so many science fiction critics have been lost in space: the current great science fiction critic shortage is so severe that, instead of giving a junior scholar the chance to speak in their "chat room" via a new essay, Science Fiction Studies editors Hollinger and Gordon choose to include material excerpted from their fellow Science Fiction Studies editor Rob Latham's 2002 book.

The missing critic situation might also explain why so much plot summary and inclusion of known information appears in the volume: hardly anyone is left on Earth who knows about science fiction and its criticism. And, last but not least, the alien abductors placed the whole anthology in a parallel universe. No wonder there are so many references to a title for the volume which no longer exists in the reality we know. But all is not lost. Readers of this review can rest assured with the knowledge that the whole matter of the missing science fiction critics has been placed under the purview of President Bush's Office of Homeland Security.

To Be Continued ...

It would be appropriate to place Edging under the purview of the Post Office. Hollinger's and Gordon's anthology was originally called Going Postal. Annoyingly, even though the volume's title has been changed, many allusions to Going Postal appear--especially within the introduction. In light of the title change, Brian Stableford's article title "Dead Letters and Their Inheritors" has become a dead reference to a nonexistent titular estate and Roger Luckhurst's title "Going Postal" cries out for a change of address form. Allusions of this sort, which absolutely should have been edited out, are symptomatic of the poor editing which characterizes Edging. Interesting articles appear within a volume whose structural presentation as a whole is not well conceived.

For example, some of the articles, which are very strong as individual entities, do not coincide with the anthology's subtitle "Science Fiction and Contemporary Social Transformation." There is nothing contemporary about Wolfe's informative commentary about the history of science fiction publishing from the 1930s through the 1950s. Ditto for Olsen's interesting reminiscences about his response to the first appearance of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. Need I say that in 2002 events which ensued during the 1960s and before simply fail to qualify as examples of contemporary cultural transformation?

Hollinger and Gordon do not firmly establish the anthology's intended audience. Do readers of sophisticated science fiction criticism really need to be told that James Gunn is "a noted science fiction writer and scholar" (Csicsery-Ronay Jr. 218)? And do these readers really need to be told that Jameson's "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" is "another extremely influential mid-1980's document that helped to map our theoretical ideas about postmodernity" (Hollinger 166)? Is there any science fiction critic on Earth (or, for that matter, hovering above Earth in a flying saucer) who does not know that "Haraway develops her `Manifesto' around the cyborg-product of both science fiction and the military-industrial complex" (Hollinger 162). Well, oddly enough, Csicsery-Ronay Jr. believes that the anthology's readers are not familiar with cyborgs: "The cyborg is, as Donna Haraway has written, not a creature of nature" (233), he explains within a volume which contains no less than nine direct references to Haraway.