An Encyclopedia of Futurity
2020; Volume: 47; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5621/sciefictstud.47.3.0511
ISSN2327-6207
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
Resumo511 BOOKS IN REVIEW a strong draw for readers. This produced, Roberts asserts, a shift towards more varied and visually denser imagetexts (“a swarm of visual images” [55]), which became a normative mode of nineteenth-century biblioculture. This effect was particularly felt, he argues, in “non-mimetic” genres like sf, where artistic license and the power of the image to establish and sustain the mood of the text were strongly foregrounded. The 48 volumes of Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages include nearly 4700 illustrations. The whimsical, “manifestly non-mimetic cartoonery” (58) of Albert Robida’s novels is more memorable than his scattershot plots and undistinguished prose. Sf’s fixations on distant landscapes, tele– and microscopic views, and matryoshka-like nested spaces begins in this era. “To look again at those Henrique Alvim Corrêa’s 1906 illustrations for Wells’s The War of the Worlds”—Wells preferred Corrêa’s googly-eyed, biologically articulated Martian tripods over those of all other illustrators of the novel—“is to be struck [by] how forcefully they emphasize as well as embody the ocular” (71). Thisforegrounding of visual imaginaries, Roberts concludes, proved decisive for the romance’s most direct descendant. Steampunk’s nostalgia for the trappings of the late nineteenth century, he writes, signals a yearning for a mood linked with the earlier genre’s imagetexts and a notionally correlate world “more elegant, more mannerly and—inevitably—more ideologically conservative” (17) than the present. Steampunk’s retro-futurism, in this sense, is a deeper expression of its cosplay sensibilities; it “offers a return to the base of which the superstructure of contemporary SF is an expression” (76): a material-culturalvisual primal scene that privileges visual expression and recursion over textualliterary games. The affection of contemporary sf fiction and film for the late Victorian and Edwardian periods signals a yearning for “that historical moment when the genre ... went from being a small-scale minority interest and began its expansion to its present-day status, as dominant world culture” (76). At least a portion of the affection we continue to feel for the romance is, to be sure, a remnant longing for the once-upon-a-time-and-again charms of its props, its stylistic wheels and pinions, and its moods. Another, under-appreciated portion, this engaging little book affirms, is aligned with the genre’s historical imagination and the novelty of the situations in which those charms were staged.—Terry Harpold, University of Florida An Encyclopedia of Futurity. Max Saunders. Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923-31. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019. xiii+423pp. $80 hc. On 4 February 1923, the biologist J.B.S. Haldane read a paper on “ectogenesis” (reproduction outside the body) to the Heretics Society in Cambridge, England. Haldane’s paper was published under the title Daedalus; or, Science and the Future and became the first of the “To-Day and ToMorrow ” book series edited by the polymath C.K. Ogden, which eventually ran to 110 volumes. Six years after Haldane, another young scientist read a Cambridge paper which would become one of the most famous “To-Day and 512 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) To-Morrow” volumes, J.D. Bernal’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929) with its vision of the human race turning into posthuman cyborgs. The influence of these two books on mid-century British and American sf is well-known. Arthur C. Clarke, for example, became a close friend of Haldane and described The World, the Flesh and the Devil as “the most brilliant attempt at scientific prediction ever made” (qtd. Saunders 77). In Imagined Futures, Max Saunders has produced what will surely be the definitive study of “To-Day and To-Morrow” (though his own claims for his book are rather more modest). Necessarily this is also a kind of manifesto, a demand for recognition of a series whose exceptional significance and impact has been very largely forgotten. Saunders writes from the standpoint of modernist literary studies, and he is probably best known as the biographer of Ford Madox Ford. He notes in his Preface that “bizarrely little trace” of the “To-Day and...
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