Jesse Weiner Benjamin Eldon Stevens Brett M. Rogers Frankenstein and Its Classics: The Modern Prometheus from Antiquity to Science Fiction
2019; Volume: 46; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/sfs.2019.0075
ISSN2327-6207
Autores Tópico(s)Science Education and Perceptions
Resumo659 BOOKS IN REVIEW fiction” [Ants and Men: An Entomological Journey to the Heart of Proto-Science Fiction]. Part IV, titled simply “Journaux, revues et cinéma” [Newspapers, Journals, and Cinema], is by far the shortest section of the book, with three essays about sf in the three media listed. Jean-Luc Buard discusses the often unremarked sf published in feuilleton [serial] format in newspapers and magazines from the 1820s to the 1950s, calling it la science-fiction invisible [invisible sf]. Claire Barel-Moisan examines the romans d’anticipation [anticipation novels] and other sf stories by authors such as Jules Verne, Henri de Parville, Louis Boussenard, and Albert Robida that appeared in the weekly periodical journal La Science illustrée from 1887 to 1905. In the book’s last essay, Patricia Crouan-Véron explicitly links this collection to its predecessor by explaining how the fantastic cinéma of Georges Mélies—and especially his iconic Voyage à la lune [Trip to the Moon, 1902]—identifies him as another “dieu caché de la sciencefiction ”[hidden god of sf, 391]. Finally, similar to its “sister volume,” the appendix of C’était demain also offers a selected primary and secondary bibliography and two handy indexes, an index nominum (of proper names) and an index rerum (of things). Readers who are newcomers to the study of French sf may be puzzled by the variety of terms used in this collection to identify pre-modern works in the genre: e.g., littérature d’imagination scientifique, romans d’anticipation, le merveilleuxscientifique , la première science-fiction, etc. The useful catch-all acronym of “SF” or “sf” has not (yet) caught on with any consistency in France; but, thankfully, neither has the atrocious “sci-fi.” And even the hyphenated version la sciencefiction —once championed by prominent Francophone sf historians such as Pierre Versins, Jacques van Herp, and Jacques Sadoul—has now been increasingly limited by younger French scholars to refer to those sf texts published only after 1945. For better or for worse, the expression la proto-science-fiction appears destined to replace all the others. Although inherently biased, implying that no true sf existed in the US before the pulp era or in France before the end of World War II, la proto-science-fiction has the indisputable advantage of simplicity. —Arthur B. Evans, DePauw University Frankenstein between Us and the Ancients. Jesse Weiner, Benjamin Eldon Stevens, and Brett M. Rogers, eds. Frankenstein and Its Classics: The Modern Prometheus from Antiquity to Science Fiction. London: Bloomsbury, BLOOMSBURY STUDIES IN CLASSICAL RECEPTION, 2018. vii+273 pp. $88.00 hc, $29.95 pbk. This edited collection, published in time for the two-hundredth anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), focuses on the sometimes overlooked subtitle of the classic novel: The Modern Prometheus. The collection presents essays that explore how Shelley’s novel “transmits and transmutes classical, Greco-Roman materials” (10). The essays featured not only look back to Shelley’s source materials, but also forward to how sf following Frankenstein continues to engage with ideas from the ancient world. In short, the editors and contributors see Shelley’s novel as a vital link between the past and the present. By emphasizing this link, they underscore the persistence of certain “big ideas” and moral 660 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) quandaries about human and artificial life. Weiner, Stevens, and Rogers write in their introduction that Shelley’s Frankenstein serves as a mediating prism for many issues that were articulated in the ancient world, that were of concern in [Shelley’s] time, and that remain of urgent interest today. Not coincidentally these sorts of issues are also of great interest to ancient literature and modern SF alike, both of which probe many of the same fundamental questions of boundaries: between human and monster, between inclusion and exclusion, between licit and illicit knowledge. (13-14) Because the collection stresses Shelley’s use of ancient materials, many of the essays spend time establishing Shelley’s familiarity with Greco-Roman texts. As such, they generally take, at least in part, a biographical approach to their analysis of Frankenstein. Genevieve Lively’s chapter, “Patchwork Paratexts and Monstrous Metaphysics: ‘After tea M...
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