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James Gunn Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction. 3rd ed.

2019; Volume: 46; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sfs.2019.0048

2327-6207

Chad Andrews,

Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life

627 BOOKS IN REVIEW explore this subject further. The book is highly recommended, because, as Grant himself notes, our survival depends on understanding monsters—in other words, on understanding ourselves. —David Hollands, Trent University Consensus Future History. James Gunn. Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction. 3rd ed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018. vii+304 pp. $49.95 pbk. The history of science fiction is the history of its megatext. Labelled a “shared subcultural thesaurus” (275) by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. in The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (2008), the megatext is that conceptual reservoir of character types, locales, technologies, neologisms, themes, and iconographies that readers and writers consult when they engage with the genre. In sf and elsewhere, a megatext develops as new narratives add to its depth and complexity over time, modifying and building on top of established reading protocols. First published in 1975, Gunn’s illustrated history of the genre, revised and released as a third edition, makes a strong case for a megatextual reading of the history of sf literature. He charts the emergence of the genre’s narrative and thematic archetypes, first in a chapter titled “In the Beginning,” where he discusses sf progenitors such as the “first great scientist-engineer,” Daedalus, who built the Minotaur’s labyrinth (24), and Plato’s Atlantis, the moment when the “great lost civilization entered the science fiction repertoire” (25). He moves from there to discuss Lucian of Samosata, Jonathan Swift, and Mary Shelley’s pinnacle of gothic romance and industrial anxiety, Frankenstein (1818), which brought to sf “the theme of man’s creation of artificial life” (31)—these are the usual suspects in a history of sf, but Gunn details them with rigor and traces their origins and contexts with aplomb. Unsurprisingly, the book advances chronologically from there. Gunn provides chapters such as “Toward Verne: 1800-1885,” covering proto-sf authors Hawthorne, Balzac, Poe, and others, as well as two author-centric chapters, “A Victorian Engineer: 1828-1905” (Verne) and “Prophet of Progress: 1866-1946” (Wells), and several chapters on the pulp and slick magazines. These latter sections are the most exhaustive and stand out as favorite subjects for Gunn, himself an author who got his start in the pulps—what he lovingly calls a “golden ghetto” (127). Interspersed throughout the book—also unsurprisingly, since this is an “illustrated history”—are images of authors, book and magazine covers, meetings of various kinds, film stills, and more, all providing a rich, visual anchor for Gunn’s history of the genre. I particularly appreciated the lavish sixteen-page spread of magazine covers from the 1940s and 1950s, since this is a period of sf visual history that garners less attention than the genre’s early pulp existence in the 1920s and 1930s, with covers often illustrated by the pervasive Frank R. Paul. In each chapter of Alternate Worlds, Gunn emphasizes the ideas of sf (as opposed to style or technique), especially how they coalesce to create a kind of shared, megatextual backdrop for other authors. In a section retained from the 1975 edition, “The Shape of Things to Come,” he anticipates the megatext concept, which would not be conceptualized in relation to sf until the early 90s, 628 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) by suggesting that authors are building a “consensus future history.” As he sees it, “The construction—or foreseeing—of himanity’s [sic] future history continues; fragments still are being written; stories and novels are being fitted into the framework, filling it in, expanding its concepts, sometimes illuminating its assumptions or extending its conclusions” (214). And this is indeed how sf is presented in Gunn’s history: as a series of thematic and conceptual explorations of the future that build on one another in a largely linear and logical fashion, so that “fans grow into new writers, authors stand on each other’s shoulders” (214). This was especially the case in the magazines, he argues, with their vigorous communities and visionary editors, though he worries, from the perspective of 1975, that “The unity of science fiction … will begin to disintegrate without the magazines as a focus; the new wave is a portent” (230). The linear progress of...