My Critical Reading List

While I'm list-making, I thought that I might also make a post detailing the critical works related to genre that I've read and still need to read. Lists like these definitely seem to help me focus when I'm staring at my to-read piles and asking myself, "What should I read next?" I hope that other folks will find them useful too. (The dates on many of these may be inaccurate--in some cases I may have dates from a later edition instead of original publication.) In the comments, feel free to suggest works to add or works that can be skipped. I've marked the ones I think (or suspect) are especially useful/important with **.

To Read

• Pilgrims Through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction, J. O. Bailey [1947]
• Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science Fiction Writing, ed. Lloyd Arthur Eshbach [1947]
• Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and its Future, ed. Reginald Bretnor [1953]
• The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism [1959]
• **In Search of Wonder: Essays on Science Fiction, Damon Knight [1960]
• Heinlein in Dimension: A Critical Analysis, Alexei Panshin [1968]
• Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow, ed. Reginald Bretnor [1974]
• The Craft of Science Fiction, ed. Reginald Bretnor [1976]
• **The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Samuel R. Delany [1977]
• Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction, H. Bruce Franklin [1980]
• Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, Ursula K. LeGuin [1982]
• David Lindsay, Gary K. Wolfe [1982]
• **How to Suppress Women's Writing, Joanna Russ [1983]
• The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth [1983]
• Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf, Algis Budrys [1985]
• **Trillion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss [1986]
• The John W. Campbell Letters, John W. Campbell [1986]
• The Tale that Wags the God, James Blish [1987]
• The Motion of Light in Water, Samuel R. Delany [1988]
• Grumbles from the Grave, Robert A. Heinlein [1989]
• Strategies of Fantasy, Brian Attebery [1992]
• Reading by Starlight, Damien Broderick [1995]
• Outposts: Literatures of Milieux, Algis Budrys [1996]
• The Dreams our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World, Thomas Disch [1998]
• Critical Theory and Science Fiction, Carl Freedman [2000]
• Concordance to Cordwainer Smith, Anthony R. Lewis [2000]
• The Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith, Karen L. Hellekson [2001]
• Decoding Gender in Science Fiction, Brian Attebery [2002]
• Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space, De Witt Douglas Kilgore [2003]
• **x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction, Damien Broderick [2004]
• Finding Serenity: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon's Firefly, ed. Jane Espenson [2004]
• A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference, Jeffrey Allen Tucker [2004]
• Bound to Please, Michael Dirda [2005]
• Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life, Michael Dirda [2005]
• My Mother was a Computer, N. Katherine Hayles [2005]
• Daughters of the Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, Justine Larbalestier [2006]
• Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, John C. Rieder [2008]
• The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem, Peter Swirski [2008]
• On Joanna Russ, ed. Farah Mendlesohn [2009]
• A Short History of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn [2009]
• The Secret Feminist Cabal, ed. Helen Merrick [2009]
• Chicks Dig Timelords, ed. Lynne Thomas and Tara O'Shea [2010]
• The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism [2010]
• Twenty-First Century Gothic, ed. Daniel Olson [2010]
• Pardon this Intrusion, John Clute [2011]
• **The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn [2011, pending]

Already Read

• Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom, Sam Moskowitz [1954]
• New Maps of Hell, Kingsley Amis [1960]
• **The Issue at Hand: Studies in Contemporary Magazine Science Fiction, William Atheling, Jr. (James Blish) [1964]
• More Issues at Hand: Critical Studies in Contemporary Science Fiction, William Atheling, Jr. (James Blish) [1970]
• The Futurians, Damon Knight [1970]
• **The Known and the Unknown: the Iconography of Science Fiction, Gary K. Wolfe [1979]
• Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Darko Suvin [1979]
• Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction, James Gunn [1982]
• **Starboard Wine, Samuel R. Delany [1984]
• Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Gary K. Wolfe [1986]
• The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest of Transcendence, Alexei Panshin [1989]
• I. Asimov, Isaac Asimov [1995]
• Age of Wonders: Exploring the Worlds of Science Fiction, David Hartwell [1996]
• Literary Theory, Terry Eagleton [1997]
• **How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, N. Katherine Hayles [1999]
• Edging into the Future, ed. Veronica Hollinger [2002]
• **The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, Justine Larbalestier [2002]
• **Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer, Riki Wilchins [2004]
• Soundings: Reviews 1992 - 1996, Gary K. Wolfe [2005]
• The SEX Column and Other Misprints, David Langford [2005]
• Polder: A Festschrift for John Clute and Judith Clute, ed. Farah Mendlesohn [2006]
• **About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters and Five Interviews, Samuel R. Delany [2006]
• **James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, Julie Philips [2006]
• **The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn [2006]
• **The Country You Have Never Seen, Joanna Russ [2007]
• Writing the Other, Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward [2008]
• The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. [2008]
• What it is We Do When We Read Science Fiction, Paul Kincaid [2008]
• **Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn [2008]
• A Companion to Science Fiction, ed. David Seed [2008]
• How Fiction Works, James Wood [2009]
• Hope-in-the-Mist, Michael Swanwick [2009]
• The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children's and Teens' Science Fiction, Farah Mendlesohn [2009]
• Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, Michael Chabon [2009]
• Canary Fever: Reviews, John Clute [2009]
• Bearings: Reviews 1997 - 2001, Gary K. Wolfe [2010]
• **Evaporating Genres, Gary K. Wolfe [2011]

Ancient Greek Folly?

I'm still having fun reading the ancient Greeks. I'm about a third of the way through Thucydides, so I've been learning a lot about ancient warfare, and modern and ancient rhetoric. When it comes to war and politics, I think my favorite thing about the classical Greeks is their deep and abiding cynicism.

Which brings me to Plato's Republic. It provides one of the early selections in the Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism that I've also been working through at odd hours. I remember reading the Republic for the first time, and thinking that when Socrates (or Plato) talked about literature, he must have been having a little fun at the expense of his interlocutor. After all, he proposes throwing out huge amounts of literature that we consider treasures of the Western world, including large chunks of Homer. Considering that even back then Homeric poetry was revered, I thought he must have had his tongue at least partly in cheek.

Coming across these arguments again in the Norton Anthology, I'm trying to give them their due. But is there any reason not to throw out all of his points? Is there any value in insisting that fiction literature be only upstanding, moral, virtuous, and educational; encouraging only right behavior and never giving examples of wrong action? I understand that there are probably still some folks who think this way--and any form of entertainment aimed at children will always be under a lot more scrutiny (see the cyclic uproars about: rap lyrics, video games, LGBT-positive children's stories, etc). But it seems both futile & silly.

Reading some of the Great Classics of Western Literature, I've noticed that some of them, especially those stemming from the oral tradition, probably survived partly because of their appeal to children. And in the same way that kids can watch a funny car-crash scene from Toy Story 2 twenty times in succession without any diminishing enjoyment, I can imagine some child from 2000 years ago saying "Tell it again, tell it again, Grandpa! Tell how the hero hit the bad guy so hard that his EYES flew out!" (from the Iliad). Or 1000 years ago: "Tell how Beowulf tore the monster's ARM off and BEAT him with it!" And let's not even get started on the Canterbury Tales. If you applied Socrates' standard to all literature, you'd have to throw out so much of what we now consider classic. Midsummer Night's Dream--gone!

Is there any defense of this approach today, or can I put it out of my mind? I don't want to dismiss it out of hand if there's something I'm missing, but I can't see it having much value in my own approach to literary criticism.

When it comes to the Norton Anthology, I'm looking forward to getting into Aristotle, who comes next. I haven't read Poetics or On Rhetoric before, and suspect that I'll find something that, if not more useful, will at least be new (to me).

Extra Musing on "The Love We Share"

I've got a review of Christopher Barzak's The Love We Share Without Knowing up at SFSignal today. It's a lovely book, and you should definitely read it, but I'd also like to do some extra musing on this book, Nicholas Royle's The Enigma of Departure, and Samuel Delany's Starboard Wine (a review of which may appear in the next issue of Fruitless Recursion).

In Starboard Wine, Samuel Delany lays out a theory of how Literature differs from Paraliterature (his term for genre fiction in this context), and why they need to be judged differently. He includes some fascinating historical and theoretical background, but for my purposes his main point boils down to this: Literature focuses on the 'subject,' the subjective experience of the world, where 'the world' is taken as given and more or less immutable; whereas Paraliterature focuses on the 'object,' i.e. the world built specifically for the story.

Now, we can see that not everything called Literature fits this mold. Especially before the reigns were tightened post-Henry James, books like Les Miserables have characters interacting rather vigourously with their world. And of course, in Paraliterature, we can see some deep and rich subjective experiences of these made-up worlds. However, this argument overall struck me as quite convincing, and it helped crystalize something that always bothered me about so much modern Literature: character actions can only affect themselves and their relationships; not the world around them. Thus when reading things like Catcher in the Rye, the 'protagonists' may strike the reader as insufferably passive (at least, if you're used to the conventions of Paraliterature). Likewise, if you're used to the conventions/protocols of Literature, you may wonder why the heck you have to wade through all the 'irrelevant' world-building/info-dumping to get to the 'important' stuff, i.e. the character's inner state.

OK, so now I'd like to use this position to examine two books, Love We Share and Enigma of Departure. If you look at my reviews, you can see that I quite like the former and didn't like the latter at all. Now, there are reasons of craft that influence thoses stances, but I think that the core of the matter may come down to the fact that I approached them both as Paraliterature, but Enigma may in fact be Literature.

Prima facie, that doesn't have to be true. Both books partake only lightly of the fantastic, and both focus strongly on the emotional states of their characters. However, Barzak is constructing a world for us, and that world is explored with depth. It's just that instead of a made-up world, he's showing us modern-day Japan. Perhaps for a Japanese reader this would be closer to Literature, but given that Barzak is clearly writing for a Western/American audience, he engages in world-building with his foreign country just as much as any sf author must build a future. We read Love We Share as much to experience a world that is fundamentally different from our own as we do to engage with the characters.

In contrast, Enigma does not engage in world-building, even when it travels to foreign lands. Venice in this novella is strange, but it is strange atmospherically, not concretely. We can't be sure how much of the strangeness comes from its foreignness, how much from the intrusion of the fantastic, and how much from the protagonist's messed-up mental state. We're never grounded in the world that the protagonist moves through, because the story isn't in any way about the world (i.e. the object); instead it is completely about the subject and how he relates to death and art. While I found that to be annoying, I think that's probably at least in part due to my incorrect expectations (although I think that the Paraliterary expectation is forgivable: the book is published by PS Publishing and was sent to SFSignal for review). Not to say that the book is perfect as Literature; I still think it has some issues, especially in its own expectation of its audience. However, I think I may have judged it unfairly by standards that weren't appropriate to it.

I have to say, so far I've found Delany's Literature/Paraliterature stance to be very useful in examining what and how I read. It also seems to be less prescriptive, and doesn't weigh down its arguments with value judgements about which one is 'better.' However, I'm aware that this is new only to me; Starboard Wine came out in 1984. I'd be curious to hear the perspectives of people who dealt with it much earlier; I wonder how it's standing the test of time.

"The Country You Have Never Seen" by Joanna Russ

I've had some massive writer's block trying to write this review. I think it's keeping me from writing other reviews, so I'd better get past it. It's down to a combination of factors that are making me extraordinarily nervous about writing about this book.

For one, there's my enormous respect for Joanna Russ. The Female Man was a revelation to me—not 100% in touch with the GenX female experience, but some of what she said still rings incredibly true. And her writing is so visceral! I've also appreciated all of her short fiction that I've read.

Next there's the success of my review of the James Blish/"William Atheling, Jr." critical collection The Issue At Hand. I got a lot out of that book, and several people told me how much they appreciated the review. Considering that Atheling and Russ are often mentioned in the same breath as being part of a better, truer tradition of reviewing—people who used reviews to profitably further an agenda—I expected this collection to be equally inspiring.

But The Country You Have Never Seen is significantly different. For one, it's less focused than the Atheling collection. It's a collection of reviews, essays and letters spanning twenty years or more. It includes reviews written for outlets as diverse as F&SF, the Village Voice and College English. The essays mostly involve feminism and history. The letters are great, I'm glad they're included, but they're mostly reactions to things she feels are stupid (and in the letters she doesn't pull any punches).

So this isn't a collection of her feminist criticism, or her genre criticism, it's a collection of a lot of different kinds of non-fiction writing. That's nice, but not quite what I was expecting. Her reviews of genre materials, mostly done for F&SF, don't differ markedly from what Liz Hand writes nowadays. (Liz is one of my favorite dead-tree fiction magazine reviewers, but her place in history will be for her fiction, not for her magazine reviews.) Basically, when she mentions feminist themes in her genre reviews, I barely notice—what she's saying is completely uncontroversial to me, and some authors still have these sorts of problems today. E.g. Her review of “Options” by John Varley, part of Terry Carr’s Universe 9:

“Options” seems to maintain that even in a sexually egalitarian society the only people who can really treat the sexes equally are those who’ve experienced life as both—though at the same time the convincing, mildly drab lunar society Varley describes is clearly not egalitarian, a contradiction with which the author doesn’t fully deal. Biology matters, or should, but it doesn’t, or shouldn’t—Varley’s metaphor of androgyny brings with it hidden assumptions that the problem is a physical problem. Varley has been admired for his female characters and “Options” is very well written (there are details that are a real tour-de-force for a male writer), yet the story is really the fearful husband’s, not the serene and informative wife’s, as its lack of emotional involvement and its summaries of what should be dramatized make clear.

One could easily read or write that today. It was interesting to note, in passing, that it wasn’t her feminism that generated the most angry letters at F&SF. The opinion that caused her to have to write a Defense of Reviewing (every word of which is as true today as the day she wrote it) was when she dissed heroic/epic fantasy as both bad and bad for you. Oh, the outcry! The outraged fans! No matter how things change, some things seem eternal.

Of course, she has an amazing talent for getting exactly to the point of something. Consider this review of a Harry Harrison edited anthology:

Harry Harrison’s One Step From Earth is a collection of nine stories bound together loosely (and not altogether truthfully) by the idea of matter transmission. There is another hypertrophied introduction, hypertrophied in this case because it has nothing to do with the stories; in fact the matter transmitter described in the introduction is of the kind used in only on the nine. Two of the tales don’t really need matter transmission at all. The stories are routine, unoriginal, mildly interesting, and readable.

That’s the whole review, and that last sentence probably describes at least 75% of everything published in the short fiction magazines, even today. I’m thinking of abbreviating it RUMIR to save myself the trouble of writing variations on that sentiment over and over.

Then consider the opening of her review of Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism:

That’s not an issue.
That’s not an issue any more.
Then why do you keep on bringing it up?
You keep on bringing it up because you’re crazy.
You keep on bringing it up because you’re hostile.
You keep on bringing it up because you are intellectually irresponsible.
You keep on bringing it up because you are shrill, strident, and self-indulgent.
How can I possibly listen to anyone as crazy, hostile, intellectually irresponsible, shrill, strident, and self-indulgent as you are?
Especially since what you’re talking about is simply not an issue.
(Any more.)

Here you can see the style that also informs works like The Female Man applied in a non-fiction milieu. This also is a perfect example of the sort of thing I’m ambivalent about. This sequence rings absolutely true, and is still used to get folks of differing opinions to shut up. However, it can also be used to calcify one’s thinking. If circumstances change, and people are trying to get you to update your thinking, you may think you’re being attacked like this. For instance, in my view workplace harassment has changed drastically over the last generation. The law is now firm, and the culture has changed. There are still issues about women in the workplace, but they’re more subtle now. Sometimes though, it seems like people want to refight old battles, insisting that the problems they used to fight are still the Big problems—that may be easier than admitting that you’ve won and moving on to the next annoying thing that seems to defy solution. However, when other forces are saying “Look, you’ve got sexual harassment laws. Ipso facto, there are no problems facing women in the workforce and if only 10% of your engineers are women that must be the chick’s fault,” the fact that the folks who should be trying to move forward seem to be stuck in the past isn’t helpful. So when the person in the middle (me) tries to say to them, “Look, physical groping just isn’t the central problem anymore” the old-guard can assume I’m using the tactic Russ laid out above, and keep from changing.

Now, feminist criticism is not one of my main concerns as a reviewer, and it's not likely to become a focus for me. Certainly I notice when authors get weird or particularly old-fashioned about gender (I'm looking at you, Joe Haldeman's Marsbound!) and I don't hesitate (too much) to point it out. However, gender weirdness can come from any direction these days (see my review of Sarah Hall's Carhullan's Army), and generally the problems are more subtle than what so often pissed Russ off. So from this collection I learned more about reviewing for the mainstream, reviewing non-fiction, and some of the discourse surrounding the feminist movement of the 70s and early 80s. It's valuable, and interesting, but not as directly relevant to my current endeavors as the Atheling collection.

This is no fault of Russ', and I hear little voices in my head shrieking about my provincialism. I rebut the little voices! I'm not dissing or ignoring mainstream literature; in fact my various genre readings have several times prompted me to go out and find "mainstream" titles so I get a more complete background. (Ian McDonald's Brasyl finally inspired me to read Heart of Darkness, for instance.) I am well aware of the fact that genre literature does not and should not exist in a vacuum, or in its own ghetto.

Instead it's a combination of what I'm looking for right now, which is help in becoming a better reviewer/critic of specifically genre literature, my ambivalence with old-school feminism, and the wide-ranging nature of the collection as a whole that have led to my trepidation about writing about it.

Bottom line: this is a good collection. It showcases many facets of Russ' non-fictional writings. She had a phenomenal range of topics and styles that is admirable. It is a particularly valuable window into the feminist movement of the 70s and the frustrations they faced from within and without. However, it's not quite what I’m looking for right now. I think I'll wait a few years, then get a copy of How to Suppress Women's Writing. Being more focused, I’ll probably get more out of it.

Ugh. This review is crap, but I’ve got to get it off my plate now. Apparently, for whatever reason, I am not capable of writing a good review of this book right now. This is a shame, because it deserves better than this. To Joanna- my hearty apologies. I’ll be better the next time I review one of your books, I promise!

Neat Concept: Fantatwee

Courtesy of Andrew Wheeler, I found this post by Nick Mamatas quite enlightening. I'm including a reference here so that if I ever have to use the word "fantatwee" (though fate willing, it shouldn't come up), you'll know where it comes from.

Fantatwee leaves out the shell shock. In the fairy tale mode, the jagged edges of fairy tales are filed off, and replaced with a faux threat — Snow White with fangs, a few more mentions of blood, that sort of thing. But there's no terror, no threat of the horrid arbitrariness that lies at the intersection of fairyland and early modernity. The story isn't renovated or explored or undermined. Instead, what enjoyment there is in the reading of it is the stuff of bedtime: "One upon a time...the end." "Read it again, mama!" Nothing drives the story but the prior existence of the story; the new version's theme is nothing more than "Hey, remember this old story that used to mean something? Well, it still used to."

I know I've read some of these. They can be well crafted and enjoyable, but it's the literary equivalent of empty calories.