Brave New World Revisited

Brave New World Revisited
By Aldous Huxley

Judging the SF of the past on what they managed to get “right,” as though its main function was prediction, is a mug’s game. All the more remarkable then to have this look back by Aldous Huxley himself on the classic novel he’d written over 25 years earlier with that judgment of history in mind.

Not surprisingly, he thinks he got things mostly right. Indeed, it seemed to him that his dystopian projections were actually being realized sooner than he anticipated, driven by the twin banes of overpopulation and over-organization (increased centralization of political control and bureaucracy). The end result was, in his estimation, going to be a new kind of “soft” tyranny or neofeudalism, presided over by a technocratic elite.

There’s a lot here that rings as true, or even truer, than ever. (Much the same can be said for Neil Postman, whose Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) leaned heavily on Huxley’s speculations.) What Huxley gets right, at least to my eyes, are operations of timeless social and political dilemmas, particularly as concerns democracy vs. oligarchy. His thoughts on technology have aged less well, as hypnopaedia and subliminal projection turned out to be fads. Instead, of speaker pillows we came up with social media, which does an even better job of doing the same sort of thing.

Extraterrestrials

Extraterrestrials
By Wade Roush

The Fermi paradox asks why we haven’t any evidence of extraterrestrial life when it seems likely that we’re not alone in the universe. Or, as the physicist Enrico Fermi is reported to have blurted out to a group of fellow scientists at Los Alamos: “Where is everybody?”

Assigning a number to just how likely it is that we have company is the work of the Drake equation, but both the Fermi paradox and Drake equation are just conversation starters. Given that we don’t have any evidence to work with, and that we can’t even be sure what sort of evidence we should be looking for, speculation is free to get highly creative and imaginative. Fertile ground for science and science fiction then.

Wade Roush keep the discussion on the level while at the same time communicating a sense of wonder when considering how Fermi’s question and Drake’s equation may be solved. My own sense of what’s going on is that the distances involved are so great that we might as well be alone, and any message we get is likely to only be a dead letter. But just imagine!

Alien Invasions!

Alien Invasions! The History of Aliens in Pop Culture
Ed. by Michael Stein

Coffee-table books like this one are all about the pictures, so it’s not surprising that the emphasis in this one is on the history of the appearance of aliens in SF. Are they basically humanoid, but with green skin and pointed ears? Are they tentacled, bug-eyed monsters? Or do they have no shape of their own, but only imitate or possess human forms?

The text here is barely worth skimming, and I found myself frequently wishing more time had been spent on subjects like the roots of alien iconography in classical and medieval sources, the genesis of archetypes like aliens with giant heads, or the gender politics behind fears of alien rape/abduction and allied fantasies of Amazon planets.

That said, it’s a great collection of art drawn from classic paperback covers, comic books, films, and playing cards. The pictures alone tell quite a story.

The Young H. G. Wells: Changing the World

The Young H. G. Wells: Changing the World
By Claire Tomalin

Herbert George Wells may not have been the father of science fiction, but he was probably its single most influential practitioner, inventing types of stories that have gone on to become standards of the genre, from time travel to alien invasion. It’s also noteworthy that he did this in just a decade’s flurry of activity, from 1895 to 1905, before gradually moving on to other interests like politics and writing a history of the world.

A creative run that lasts for about ten years is typical of most authors, and veteran biographer Claire Tomalin has wisely written a short book focusing on this hyper-productive period in Wells’s life, which was fueled by his passion for sex, socialism and science (in that order). It’s better to give us Wells at his most vital and just skim over the long decline that followed.

Lost Transmissions

Lost Transmissions: The Secret History of Science Fiction and Fantasy
By Desirina Boskovich

The mission statement for this colourful casebook is to provide a “secret history” of science fiction and fantasy by cataloguing some lost, overlooked, or uncompleted works. That second adjective, however, is made to do a lot of work. What counts as overlooked? What makes a book or film obscure or underappreciated? I think it’s great to want to “uncover the work of artists who, for whatever reason, did not receive their due.” But what is any creator due? How much recognition or reward? It’s hard to quantify these things, but I wouldn’t have thought Angela Carter or Mervyn Peake overlooked.

What we have here then is more in the way of a grab-bag, with brief articles mixed in with introductions, interviews, and essays on subjects ranging from books and films to architecture, fashion, and video games. It doesn’t add up to a coherent account of anything in particular – lost, secret or otherwise – but there are some interesting stops along the way and even fans will likely be alerted to some items in the great SF&F tradition that they’ve missed.

Chariots of the Gods

Chariots of the Gods
By Erich von Däniken

Non-fiction? Well, I had to stick it in some category.

The great ur-text of the “ancient aliens” thesis hasn’t aged a bit since its first publication in 1968. Meaning it doesn’t make any more sense now than it did then, while maintaining its infectiously optimistic vision of new frontiers. “Once the improbable things that we cannot even conceive of today are shown to be true, as they will be, barriers will fall, allowing free access to the impossibilities the cosmos still conceals.” Who wouldn’t want to sign on to that?

Being picky, what I find most puzzling is the chronology. When, exactly, were our alien forefathers visiting Earth? Von Däniken can’t say. “Thousands of years ago.” Or maybe tens, or hundreds of thousands of years ago. And they kept coming back, at different times, to check on our progress, at various locations all over the world; seeding technologies, and our women. The sons of God or Ancient Ones being predominantly male.

“Certainly the Ark [of the Covenant] was electrically charged!” That exclamatory assuredness is the book’s signature style. What keeps it all going is Von Däniken’s enthusiasm, which has him leaping from scattered evidence to wild conclusions with the energy and nimbleness of a mountain goat. Because references to giants “haunt the pages of almost all ancient books,” for example, that means “they must have existed.” “So let us enter the new world of the improbable with an open mind and bursting with curiosity!” After all, can you prove that ancient aliens didn’t visit Earth?

Science Fiction

Science Fiction
By Sheryl Vint

This is the second pocket overview of science fiction I’ve looked at recently, the other being David Sneed’s Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction. Sheryl Vint’s book is part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series (basically the same sort of thing as the Very Short Introductions) and goes in a slightly different direction while covering many of the same basic tropes and themes.

As one would expect, definitions are front and center. For Vint SF is a genre driven by “engagement with how science and technology change the world, and imagining different worlds in response to social and political issues.” From here things get mushier, as she sees SF as “a way of thinking and perceiving, a toolbox of methods for conceptualizing, intervening in, and living through rapid and widespread sociotechnical change.” She’s less concerned with compiling a catalogue of important authors and titles (though there’s some of that) and more with looking at SF as a “tool for thinking about and intervening in the world” and trying to see “what science fiction can do.”

That’s a big ask for any genre, but Vint took me along with many of her arguments. Her focus is on contemporary SF and its relations to various current anxieties over things like genetic modification, AI, economic change, and even post-colonial theory. Less an introduction and history than an appreciation of the state of science fiction today, including the growing amount of critical writing on it, I found this to be a nice complement to Sneed’s book and one that does a good job covering the essentials.

How To Invent Everything

How To Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler
By Ryan North

Given the popularity of apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenarios in today’s SF and speculative fiction, it’s not too surprising that there has been a corresponding interest in how to survive such catastrophes as environmental collapse, alien invasion, and zombie plagues.

Ryan North’s How To Invent Everything is a work that takes a similar staring point to Sam Sheridan’s The Disaster Diaries, this time imagining the reader as a time traveler whose FC3000 personal time travel device has malfunctioned, stranding them in the past. Since the FC3000 cannot be repaired, this user’s guide suggests ways for the chrononaut to nudge scientific progress along, or even “build a civilization from the ground up.”

What this is then is an entertaining and informative survey of Big History, taking us through the essential highlights of human invention from agriculture and writing to buttons and baby forceps. And as a guidebook it may be worth holding on to even if we never do figure out time travel. There may be another dark age ahead, requiring us to build our civilization from scratch all over again.

Sci-Fi Chronicles

Sci-Fi Chronicles
Ed. by Guy Haley

Reference books are a tough market in the days of Google and Wikipedia, but Sci-Fi Chronicles is one worth checking out. A combination timeline and encyclopedia of the genre, it’s a terrific compilation of information that’s lavishly illustrated and surprisingly well written. Covering fiction, film, television, and videogames, it’s the kind of guide that invites a browsing frenzy. One can quibble over some of the selections (I would have left out the superheroes), and biases (Asian SF isn’t well represented), but overall the coverage is excellent, ranging from the giant franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars to entries on leading authors of the golden age.