Freedman - Critical Theory and Science Fiction

Critical Theory and Science Fiction

Critical Theory and Science Fiction

Carl Freedman

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown, Connecticut

Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

2000 by Carl Freedman
All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3 2
CIP data appear at the end of the book

ISBNs for the paperback edition:

ISBN-13: 9780819563996

ISBN-10: 0819563994

Cover photograph by Piotr Uklanski, Untitled (Queens), 1998, the artist. Courtesy Gavin Browns enterprise, New York.

To my mother and father

And to the memory of Lev Davidovich Bronstein

To change the world is not to explore the moon. It is to make the revolution and build socialism without regressing back to capitalism.

The rest, including the moon, will be given to us in addition.

LOUIS ALTHUSSER

Se vuol ballare,
Signor Contino,
Il chitarrino
Le suoner.

LORENZO DA PONTE

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

OSCAR WILDE

Acknowledgments

I have been working on this essay, in one way or another, for a long time. Indeed, in composing and revising the text I have often been struck by how much preparation was accomplished on occasions when I had no conscious notion that any such project was under way. Inevitably, then, I have incurred many debts, to institutions, and to individuals. All I can do here is discuss, very briefly, some of the more obvious ones and extend my apologies to those who have accidentally gone unmentioned.

My institutional obligations are relatively straightforward. Various sorts of financial or other support have been provided by the following: the Marxist Literary Group at Yale University from 1977 to 1984; the Center for the Humanities of Wesleyan University; the Department of English, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Office of Research, all of Louisiana State University; the Eaton Science Fiction Collection at the University of California at Riverside, and the annual conferences and critical anthologies sponsored by the Eaton Collection; the journal Science-Fiction Studies; and, last but certainly not least, the Wesleyan University Press. To all, my thanks.

My debts to individuals are far more numerous and more difficult to keep track of; the following account is doubtless highly selective.

In a sense, my first debt is to my father for introducing me to science fiction. When I was in my early teens, he recommended Isaac Asimovs I, Robot, which I read at once and enjoyed hugely. I proceeded to read through most of the rest of Asimovs science fiction (and much of his nonfiction), and have preserved a special fondness for Asimov ever since. Relatively little is said about Asimovs work in the main text, and he certainly does not loom nearly so large in my conception of science fiction as he once did; nonetheless I am glad of the chance to record my admiration for him.

My adolescent enthusiasm for science fiction lasted only a few years. I returned to SF during my graduate student years, when I first began to think systematically about both critical theory and science fiction. My chief mentor in both instances was Fredric Jameson, to whose teaching and writing I am even more indebted than my frequent references to him will probably indicate.

I am no less grateful to many graduate school colleagues with whom I discussed critical theory and science fiction almost endlessly. I have especially vivid memories of valuable conversations with the late Rena Grant, with Jonathan Haynes, with John Rieder, with Steven Shaviro, and, above all, with Christopher Kendrick, my old theoretical alter ego. More recently, Chris Kendrick provided me with a complete set of critical annotations of the manuscript as it was being produced; his comments were invariably intelligent and interesting, usually of direct use, and occasionally legible as well.

Another complete set of annotations was provided by Carl Gardner, my friend of more than three decades, who read the manuscript not only as a lifelong aficionado of science fiction but also as a professional physicist and applied mathematician. Yet another complete set of comments on the manuscript was provided by Robin Roberts, my colleague at LSU, from whom I have also learned much in the undergraduate courses on science fiction that we have taught together.

I have, indeed, taught many courses, graduate and undergraduate, on both critical theory and science fiction, and a huge collective debt is owed to my students. Special recognition is due the members of the best class I have ever seen: the students of my graduate seminar Critical Theory and Science Fiction, taught in the LSU English Department during the spring semester of 1997.

Khachig Tllyan has done me so many personal and professional good turns over the years that I have almost come to take his consistent generosity and support for granted. He has been important to my academic endeavors in more ways than I could particularize here.

I mentioned the journal Science-Fiction Studies above. Although I have the highest praise for the members of its current collective editorship, I must here single out the former editor, Robert Philmus, during whose tenure I became formally associated with the journal. It was while working with Robert that I became a professional critic of science fiction; among many other good turns, he commissioned me to write the article Science Fiction and Critical Theory, out of which this book grew.

Somewhat similarly, I must single out George Slusser as the curator of the Eaton Collection and the first guiding genius of the Eaton conferences; his support over the years is an instance of that disinterested academic integrity that leads him to sponsor and subsidize the expression of views (like mine) with which he strongly disagrees.

My LSU colleague John Lowe read a draft of the concluding section on the postmodern, and contributed many careful and useful comments

Suzanna Tamminen, the editor-in-chief of the Wesleyan University Press, has been a source of help and good humor, and her enthusiasm for this project from manuscript to hard covers has been a real inspiration to me. If Robert Philmus first taught me how much good editors of scholarly journals contribute to our intellectual culture, Suzanna taught me the same about good editors at university presses.

Alcena Rogan has consistently provided astute criticism, generous support, and love. Of all the things she has done for me, I will mention only her most tangible contribution to this volume, namely, the preparation of the index. An index of concepts as well as of proper names can be vital to the reader of an essay like this, and it is brilliantly presented here.

My greatest of all debts, however, is to someone too young to have made any direct contribution to this project: my daughter Rosa. Both critical theory and science fiction are ultimately oriented toward the future, as I will argue at some length, and Rosa is my main personal reason for being interested in the future. She will live to see the second half of the twenty-first century, by which time, I hope, the world will be more like what most of the theorists and novelists discussed in this volume would desire than like the late twentieth-century world into which Rosa was born.