Science Fiction and the Future of CriticismAuthor(s): Eric S. RabkinSource: PMLA, Vol. 119, No. 3, Special Topic: Science Fiction and Literary Studies: The NextMillennium (May, 2004), pp. 457-473Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25486061 .Accessed: 20/09/2011 18:56

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i i9-3 j

Science Fiction and the Future of Criticism

ERIC S. RABKIN

Eric S. Rabkin, professor of English at

the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,

writes on literary theory, cultural stud

ies, and popular culture topics such as

science fiction and fantasy. He also

leads pedagogical and administrative

efforts to integrate information tech

nology in the academy.

THERE IS AN EXTRAORDINARY, EXHILARATING MOMENT IN Maureen F. McHugh's novel China Mountain Zhang (1992) in

which Zhang, at that point a "daoist engineer" in training (232),

experiences what is to him a fundamentally new way of thinking. He is a

student at China's?and the world's?leading technological institute.

The institute's vast computer system is pervasive. Once one truly jacks

in, to inquire is to learn, to think is to do, to play is to create. Or so he is

told, for Zhang, born and raised in America, cannot lose himself enough to experience the system fully. To get Zhang there, his mentor sets him

the task of designing doors. By focusing on doors without number, doors

of every shape and size and material and use and mechanism, Zhang

comes to see the doors around him more vividly than ever before. There

is an overwhelming power in the multiplication of perspectives. He no

tices that "China is obsessed with walls. The university is walled, every

factory, every school, every office complex or hotel is surrounded by a

wall. And so doors are very important because they represent vulnerabil

ity but also opportunity, which is a great metaphor for every endeavor"

(228). But that realization is not the exhilarating moment, merely prepa

ration for it. Zhang's unwitting submission to the minds of a thousand

others (door designers), and to the necessities of materials and to the re

alities of human needs, trains his mind so that when his mentor allows

Zhang to design a beach house, suddenly something new happens.

And I reach. For a moment there is no perspective and I am on the edge

of panic, but instead I give in, I let myself be swallowed by the emptiness and instead I expand, the system becomes my own memory. I fall

through. I feel my mind's boundaries, I know how little I can think about

at one time, and then those boundaries become unimaginably huge and I

? 2004 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA 457

458 Science Fiction and the Future of Criticism PMLA

am myself, myself, but able to think and have

the thing I think in my mind without holding it, without concentrating, because I am using the

system to concentrate for me. The system is

there for me, a part of me.... I feel whole, and

now it is time to go home. (234)

What Zhang feared, as we Westerners so

often do, was losing his self through submersion

in the system, dissolution in the mass. But the

immense system becomes part of him, and he

becomes more capable than ever.

Carl Freedman wrote that his "thesis about

critical theory and science fiction is that each is

a version of the other" (xv). In the voice of sci

ence fiction, McHugh urges us as readers to

make ourselves something more capable than

any individual can be alone. In the voice of crit

ical theory, she asks us as critics, as she asks

Zhang as designer, to make qualitatively more

informed, imaginative, capacious judgments,

judgments that in their formation draw on a

vast, technologically mediated set of collective

knowledge and experience?that is, on a sys

tem. This goal, nearly Utopian to Zhang, is one

we may never fully reach, but in my view it is

the future of criticism.

Science fiction has the oldest active fandom

of any literary genre. Hugo Gernsback, that hun

gry immigrant visionary, wrote and edited mag

azines, like Modern Electrics, that had some

science fiction content even before the genre had

a name. When he founded Amazing, the first sci

ence fiction magazine, in 1926, he sought to en

gage his readers in a community so that they would want to buy his magazine in order to dis

cuss its contents. He promised, and delivered,

active letters columns. In 1934 he and Charles

Hornig used Wonder Stories to launch the Sci

ence Fiction League (Clute and Nicholls), a

more and less successful attempt to give struc

ture to that community. While the league ulti

mately failed as a commercial proposition for

Gernsback and Hornig, fan clubs proliferated. Science fiction fandom runs over two hundred

conventions a year in the United States alone;

publishes fanzines, supports small presses; is

sues critical judgments in many forms, in

cluding the commercially crucial annual Hugo

Awards; and generally enters into a compelling conversation with professional writers and edi

tors even as it functions as a farm club for their

ranks. In these regards, science fiction fandom is

the exemplar for all later fandoms.

Among its many activities, science fiction

fandom began to build resources for criticism.

Pioneering fan enterprises, such as Advent Pub

lishers, based in Chicago, brought out not only criticism by readers, writers, and editors in book

form but also such groundbreaking works as

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fan

tasy (1974-82), by Donald Tuck, an Australian

science fiction aficionado. If one is to do science

fiction criticism as fully as possible, like Zhang told to study doors, one must expand oneself by

giving oneself up to these resources. The old

model of literary criticism, in which the critic

reads everything and issues a personal assess

ment, eventually had to contend with the collec

tivity of fan critics wielding fan resources, and it

still does.

Just as the World Wide Web was born at

CERN to serve the obvious collaborative needs

of worldwide science, so the first extrascientific

appropriations of the power of the Web served

the obvious collaborative needs of worldwide

science fiction. When the Web became avail

able, the encyclopedic efforts of fandom were

ready to be ported to digital form, the communi

ties of collaborators extended, and the results

made widely available. A fine current example is the Internet Speculative Fiction DataBase

(von Ruff), a work dependent on volunteer labor

that grew from earlier efforts of the New En

gland Science Fiction Association to become a

valuable scholarly tool.

The Web provided us not only with re

sources for science fiction criticism but also with

new fields for science fiction play. The same

technology that supports democratic collabora

tion supports multiplayer gaming. Long before

i 19 3 ]

Eric S. Rabkin 459

the Internet spawned the Web, text-based games flourished. And most of these were marked by the same tropes and elements that publishers as

sociate with science fiction?techno-wizardry fantastic adventure, and, as Edgar Allan Poe

called it, "ratiocination" (299): figure out where

you are in an abandoned spaceship, collect

strange and sometimes helpful objects, and

think your way to safety. When computer games became more visual, and bloody, they by and

large continued to feature science fiction ele

ments, although now a twitching thumb is often

more valuable than a throbbing brain.

If we ask what science fiction is, we may find many answers. One that I have promulgated, in The Fantastic in Literature, is that it is the

branch of fantastic literature that claims plausi

bility against a background of science. But that is

a narrow definition, quite workable for the text

minded but inadequate to a broader criticism, the

sort of criticism that science fiction invites, be

cause science fiction is not limited to texts.

In December 2001, the University of Mich

igan hosted the fourth international Wiesner

Symposium on science and policy. These sym

posia honor and were inspired by Jerome B.

Wiesner, a University of Michigan alumnus, a

physicist, an adviser to United States presidents, and president of perhaps the most prestigious technical institute in the real world, the Massa

chusetts Institute of Technology, which is, not

coincidentally, the home of the New England Science Fiction Association. In 2001, a year with literary and filmic resonances around the

work of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, the year in which the human genome was de

clared known territory, the Wiesner Symposium theme was "Braving the New World: Benefits

and Challenges of Genetic Knowledge." All the

speakers save one, the kickoff speaker, were

renowned scientists. I was the kickoff speaker. The organizers asked me to introduce a

showing of the film Gattaca (1997). Their no

tion of beginning the symposium with science

fiction criticism and then with science fiction

was not only appealing to the public but also re

flective of the modes of modern science, which, unlike those of traditional criticism, are funda

mentally networked and collaborative. They

hoped, like Zhang, to develop more fully their

ideas by opening a door to another system. In ti

tling the conference, the organizers alluded to

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), rec

ognizing that one person's Utopia (unlimited

sex) is another's hell (love is forbidden). But did

they recall that Aldous Huxley was a grandson of T. H. Huxley, Charles Darwin's most famous

contemporary adherent? Did they know that

T. H. Huxley, that great promoter of evolution

ary thought, had for nearly two years a young lab assistant named Herbert George Wells? Did

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Eric S. Rabkin 461

they notice that Huxley's title in turn alluded to

William Shakespeare's The Tempest, in which

social order can be restored only after Prospero drowns his books (5.1.57)? And did they recall

that Shakespeare and Aldous Huxley each used

the term "brave new world" with both irony and

hope? The conference subtitle suggests that they were mindful of the ambiguity. But I know from

conversation with them that they did not con

sider that the object of science fiction criticism

might be not only film and novel and play but

also nonfiction (like James D. Watson's The

Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Dis

covery of the Structure of DNA [1968]), biogra

phy (like Paul de Kruif's The Microbe Hunters

[1926]), policy studies (like Vannevar Bush's

Science, the Endless Frontier: A Report to the

President [1945]), and even science itself (like

Einstein's famous gedankenexperiments). To

this list we should add science fiction poetry,

music, industrial design, city planning, architec

ture, politics, fashion, and world's fairs. Science

fiction, in other words, is no more limited to sci

ence fiction literature than love is limited to love

letters. Science fiction is what I would call,

adapting McHugh's term, a cultural system, and

the future of criticism lies in exploring cultural

systems. Toward this future, science fiction

should lead the way. To suggest that science fiction is a system,

something much larger than a genre, merely

acknowledges that it fulfills an Oxford English

Dictionary definition of system: "A set or as

semblage of things connected, associated, or in

terdependent, so as to form a complex unity."

We recognize that assembled unity when we

Fie. 5 Catacomb nest

in Them!

..<Ee .e i

462 Science Fiction and the Future of Criticism PMLA

speak of Faustian bargains, Frankenstein ex

periments, Star Wars weaponry, and aliens who

move faster than a speeding bullet. The stream

lining of house trailers may have made some

practical sense, although it smacks more of ex

oticism than of fuel conservation. The streamlin

ing of dinky outboard motors makes no practical sense at all (fig. 1), unless one considers the de

sign part of a cultural system in which the motor

housing represents the fulfillment of a fantasy of

speed in an alien element (water) and the practi cal impact of such streamlining is thus measured

by the bottom line of the manufacturer.

A cultural system, as I mean the term, may coordinate a set of typical dramatic situations,

recurring elements, even themes and styles, as

science fiction does by including, for example, the encounter with the alien, time machines,

wonderment about the definition of the human, and streamlining. Science fiction is quite natu

rally the most influential cultural system in a

time like ours, in which dominant technological

change constantly provokes hope, fear, guilt, and glory. But science fiction is not our only cultural system. The western offers us another, with its typical story so well articulated by John

Cawelti and its characteristic landscape so well

presented by Hollywood. Its typical values are

embodied in figures fictional, semifictional, and

more or less real, like Paul Bunyan, Davy

Crockett, and John Wayne; in western clothing, western type fonts, western novels, and western

movies; in country-and-western music; in west

ern cooking; and in western customs, like ro

deos, which attract camp followers during the

rodeo season the same way science fiction con

Fig. 4 Charlie Chaplin in

Modern Times.

i i 9.3 Eric S. Rabkin 463

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ventions attract fans. Rock and roll is yet an

other cultural system, with its great attempt to

capture its history, politics, music, and legends in its own hall of fame in Cleveland.

When we deal with a cultural system, even

if we believe we are dealing only with a novel or

a film, we must look widely. In a post-9/11 issue

of the New York Times, Rick Lyman wrote about

the way horror films deal with the fears of their

ages. Here is his first example: "In [the] climac

tic scene from Them! (1954), the seminal giant

bug movie from the age of post-atomic anxiety, Dr. Medford ... becomes the symbolic spokes man for all of the vague unease felt by a prosper ous and complacent American public wrapping its mind around the new, terrifying concept of

nuclear radiation" (fig. 2). It is true that America

in 1954 was afraid of atomic radiation, but, more to the point, America was afraid of the

bomb in the hands of the Soviet Union. Com

mies were everywhere, fifth columnists living

among us, each one mindlessly following im

placable orders from Moscow. It is no accident

that the movie chose ants to be enlarged by radi

ation or that they nest underground. The movie

poster's term "catacombs" refers to the ants'

nest (fig. 3). Life for the ants is death for Ameri

cans. The poster makes clear that the conflict is a

military one. The cultural system of science fic

tion here coordinates politics, technology, and

more enduring symbolic concerns about gender

(ants are female, nests are evil, but men have

flamethrowers) and poetic space (aboveground is good; belowground is bad).

Fie. 5 Early telephone

operators.

464 Science Fiction and the Future of Criticism PMLA

Fig. 6

Long-distance

switchboard at Bell

Telephone Co.,

Ottawa, 1961 (Chris

Lund / National Film

Board ofCanada/

National Archives

ofCanada/PA-).

The image of the ant is worth considera

tion. In the Bible (Prov. 6.1: "Go to the ant, thou

sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise") and

in Aesop, the industry of the ant is extolled. In

science fiction, the ant represents one unit of a

hive mind. Such minds, of which there are

countless science fiction examples, such as the

Martians in Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men

(1930), are typically anathema: antihuman, evil.

But if the minds, such as the symbionts in Sta

pledon's Star Maker (1937), allow those in

volved with them to remain individuals, they are glorious, superhuman, good. To the extent

that machine minds mimic this distinction?as

with the vicious emergent consciousness in Har

lan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must

Scream" (1967), contrasting the computer sys tem in McHugh's novel?the distinction carries

' s ...... ... .. . te ,1 l| _ i

i 19.3 Eric S. Rabkin 465

Fig. 7 Aerial view of

Levittown, PA,

c. 1959 (Ed

Latcham / National

Archives and

Records

Administration).

across from the realm of the biological to the

realm of the mechanical. We come to under

stand that in the science fiction system, individ

uality in community is to be prized, but

unalloyed individuality or unalloyed community is wanting. The system supports an articulable

ideology from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

(1818) to the present. Few of us would suggest that Charlie Chap

lin was a science fiction auteur, but his Modern

Times (1936) certainly participates in the cul

tural system of science fiction (fig. 4). The ma

chine processes us, threatening to turn us into

generalized pulp, the way telephone lines line

us up (fig. 5) and eventually turn us into clones

(fig. 6). In architecture, the homogenized repro duction of homes (fig. 7) homogenizes the re

production of the family (fig. 8). More recently, the recognition that decoding our DNA is an

important step toward controlling us suggests that heroism may lie in a paraplegic's struggle to climb the double helix, as Eugene does in

Gattaca (figs. 9 and 10). As we become ever more connected, the

cultural system that is science fiction will pro duce a criticism that is ever more collaborative,

crossing the boundaries of individual contribu

tors just as it crosses productive domains from

household appliance to political debate. As the

number of contributors increases, and as the

body of shareable knowledge increases, criti

cism will inevitably add quantitative methods to

its ever-more-capacious qualitative methods.

At the University of Michigan, Carl Simon, a mathematician; Bobbi Low, a population biol

ogist; and I, working with about fifteen student

researchers each semester since January 1998, have taken a combined qualitative-quantitative

466 Science Fiction and the Future of Criticism I PMLA

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NY, 1950 (Bernard

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approach to science fiction as part of our Genre

Evolution Project (Rabkin and Simon). Allow

me to give one result of this collaborative work.

We have been reading a representative sam

ple of American science fiction magazine short

stories. In developing categories for the genres

(or subgenres) into which they fell, we found

it indispensable to distinguish between genre form and genre content. With fourteen genre forms and sixteen genre contents, we were able

to code at least ninety-seven percent of all sto

ries encountered.

The initial examinations by the student re

searchers Adrienne Heckler and Zachary Wright of the possible associations between genre forms

and genre contents led to provocative results that

prompted Simon and me to explore further.

When we consider all the stories (fig. 11), certain

combinations of genre form and genre content

stand out, particularly that of alien contact and

i 19.3 Eric S. Rabkin 467

_________________________________________________________________________

Fig. 9 Jude Law in

Gattaca.

Fig. 10

Jude Law in

Gattaca.

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468 Science Fiction and the Future of Criticism PMLA

FlG. 11

Number of Each Combination of Genre Form and Genre Content in a Representative Sample of 1,959 Science Fiction Short Stories Published in American Science Fiction Magazines during 1926-2000

Number of Stories 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100

Alien contact ?F^ h .

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h Invention

i Mad scientist

j ! i Monster

k Postapocalypse I Psi powers

m Surreal novum

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p ii Utopia

i 19 3 Eric S. Rabkin 469

Number of Stories 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100

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contact-alien, exploration-exploration, and domestic-surreal novum occur very far more often than they would in a

random distribution and that alien contact-invention occurs very far less often (p ? 0.0001).

47? Science Fiction and the Future of Criticism PMLA

FlG. 12

Number of Each Combination of Genre Form and Genre Content for the 159 Stories from the Set in Fig. 11 That Were

Reprinted More Than Twice

Number of Stories 012345678

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Genre Contents a Alien

b Alternative history c Capability shift, mental

d Capability shift, physical

e Dystopia f Eutopia

g Exploration

h Invention

i Mad scientist

j Monster

k Postapocalypse I Psi powers

m Surreal novum

n Sword and sorcery

o Time travel

p Utopia

i 19 3 Eric S. Rabkin 471

Number of Stories 012345678

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A x2 test of these data shows that the combinations satire-dystopia; philosophical tale-capability shift, mental; and

philosophical tale-exploration occur far more often than they would in a random distribution (p < 0.005).

472 Science Fiction and the Future of Criticism PMLA

alien. But when we consider the stories that re

ceived substantial reprinting (fig. 12)?a clear

measure of marketplace success over time?

other combinations thrive, such as satire and

dystopia. It seems as if, to get a science fiction

story printed at all, one is best advised to write

an alien contact-alien story; however, if one

hopes to make a lasting contribution, one is best

advised to write a dystopian satire. Why is that?

I cannot in the scope of this argument pur sue a detailed answer to that question, but I can

suggest that the answer will lie neither in some

quality of each story's style or execution nor

directly in what people like to read, since alien

contact-alien first publications occur at the

same time as satire-dystopia republications. We

clearly need to know much more about the

times, about what different modes of distribu

tion and consumption mean, and in general

about the cultural system of science fiction.

We do know this about the cultural system of science fiction: it is rich, broadly useful, and

apparently self-contradictory, just as the God of

the Bible sends both the flood and the rainbow

covenant. Science fiction was born in part out

of distrust of science, a distrust it continues to

manifest in works like Gattaca, but it also bol

sters a faith. As the pioneer editor F. Orlin Tre

maine said, "We must so plan that twenty years

hence it will be said that Astounding Stories has

served as the cradle of modern science" (Carter

16). Science fiction text, in other words, con

sciously has been part of a larger cultural system almost from the moment in the early twentieth

century when the genre was first named.

I believe that ultimately, as we see by com

parison with critical writing about the western

and about rock and roll, science fiction criticism,

like one of Zhang's doors, will open us to a

more expansive criticism, one that will be more

systemic, more collaborative, and more quanti

tative. Just as science fiction showed the way in

almost every application of new cinema technol

ogy, and just as it has again shown the way in

exfoliating many of the possibilities of the

World Wide Web, it will show the way in criti

cism. This leadership is already apparent in the

new attempt by the Oxford English Dictionary to use the Web to enlist readers in its citation re

search. In what field did the lexicographers

begin this new sort of word study? Science fic

tion (Prucher and Farmer). Science fiction right now is the cultural system from which systemic criticism is being born (fig. 13).

Works Cited Carter, Paul A. The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Mag

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Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: For

mula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of

Chicago P, 1976.

Clute, John, and Peter Nicholls. The Encyclopedia of Sci

ence Fiction. New York: St. Martin's, 1993.

Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Hano

ver: Wesleyan UP, 2000.

Lyman, Rick. "Horrors! Time for an Attack of the Meta

phors? From Bug Movies to Bioterrorism." New York

Times 23 Oct. 2001: El.

McHugh, Maureen F. China Mountain Zhang. New York:

Tor, 1992.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Rev. of Twice-Told Tales, by Nathaniel

Hawthorne. Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Maga

zine May 1842:298-300.

Prucher, Jeff, and Malcolm Farmer. Science Fiction Cita

tions for the OED. 30 Jan. 2004 <http://www.jessesword

.com/SF/sf_citations.shtml>.

Rabkin, Eric S. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton:

Princeton UP, 1976.

Rabkin, Eric S., and Carl Simon. Genre Evolution Proj

ect. 2 Oct. 2003. 30 Jan. 2004 <http://www.umich.edu/

~genreevo/>.

"System." Def. 1. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed.

1989.

von Ruff, Al, ed. Internet Speculative Fiction DataBase.

11 Jan. 2004. Cushing Lib. Science Fiction and Fantasy

Research Collection and Inst, for Scientific Computation,

Texas A&M U. 30 Jan. 2004 <http://isfdb.tamu.edu/>.

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1950 (NASA).