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BREAKING OUT OF THE SF BOX: RECENT STUDIES OF JAMES BUSH AND URSULA K. LE GUIN

1990; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3138/cras-021-01-11

1710-114X

Nicholas Ruddick,

Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

David Ketterer. Imprisoned in a Tesseract: The Life and Work of James Blish. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1987. xvi + 410 pp. Illus. Bernard Selinger. Le Guin and Identity in Contemporary Fiction. Ann Arbor UMI Research Press, 1988. xii + 183 pp. In Robert Heinlein's story "-And He Built a Crooked House-," a group of Californians explore a real-estate developer's dream-come-true, an eight- room hypercuboid structure that occupies only as much space as one ordinary room. This is the tesseract of Ketterer's title: a four-dimensional analogue of a cube. The tesseract is a topological metaphor for science fiction itself, a place that seems to offer a heady freedom inaccessible to dwellers in the three-dimensional world of the terrestrial, the mundane, the "mainstream." Tesseract was a natural title for the 1936 fanzine in which the fifteen-year-old James Blish published some of his earliest work.1 Yet, as in the Heinlein story, what seems to be a gateway to the new world can rapidly mutate into a prison. For Blish, as Ketterer reveals in this major new critical biography, science fiction itself became the box he felt he was trapped in. The fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin seems to have escaped the prison-house of generic categorization. Yet the portrait Bernard Selinger draws in his monograph is of an author hurling herself again and again at the wall of différance that at once bounds and constitutes the world.