Gwen Ansell reviews The Palgrave History of Science Fiction by Adam Roberts and Chimurenga 12 &13: Dr Satan’s Echo Chamber (Kalakuta Trust)
A critic once called Adam Roberts ”the master of high-concept SF”. Contrary to the belief of the publisher who pillaged it for a book-jacket, that phrase may not have implied unalloyed praise.
And it’s certainly one concept that directs the discourse of Roberts’s massive (370+ finely printed, minutely annotated pages) Palgrave history of the genre. The concept, articulated boldly in the preface, is that in inspiration science fiction is ”Protestant” (rationalist and individualistic), while fantasy is ”Catholic” (superstitious and dependent on unknowable higher powers).
This is a convenient device, since it allows Roberts to come at the topic from a fresh angle, rather than wasting many words on the tired angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin debate about genre definitions, or starting where Brian Aldiss’s earlier history did, with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
For Roberts, science fiction as a genre began its development in Ancient Greece — the phrase ”the ancient Greek novel”, which appears on line 17 of the preface, may disconcert some classical scholars. In the modern era SF was then suppressed by Catholic belief systems until the rise of scientific rationalism in the 17th century. Roberts himself has a refreshingly catholic (with the small ”c”) view of the genre, extending his survey to cover films, comic-books, music and graphics and his chapter dealing with those areas certainly breaks new ground and usefully breaks down barriers of genre snobbery.
But the problem with governing concepts is that they can become prisons. As the book progresses Roberts continually modifies and cavils, eventually conceding that there might indeed be such creatures as ”Catholic SF” and ”Protestant fantasy”. What’s more, it becomes increasingly difficult for him to demonstrate any influence or articulation between the various sub-genres he defines to prove those early origins of science fictional and fantastical writing: for example, moon fiction and utopian fiction.
His historical overview suffers most from its neglect of the Renaissance. A careful reading of Mary Gentle (ignored) would open a window on the world view, both fantastical and science fictional, of memory theatres. His contemporary survey is patchy: the writer CJ Cherryh, for example, is cynically dismissed (”her only innovations are innovations of scale”) on the basis of an unrepresentative selection from her work.
Writers such as Ken Macleod, Liz Williams and Charles Stross merit terse mentions or none at all; Jeff Vandermeer’s complex commentary on the genre is compressed into a couple of tiny website-culled quotes.
In the end Roberts’s conclusion is a banal if true one: that science-fictional and fantastical writing are normal varieties of fiction that have existed for a very long time. And the ”Catholic”/”Protestant” dichotomy narrows the book’s view to an intensely Eurocentric one.
Yet the features that make the genre compelling — a propensity to ask ”What if … ?” and displacements of time, place and role — have been the focus of brilliantly innovative writing in Asia, Latin America and Africa. And the latest double issue of homegrown literary magazine Chimurenga, Dr Satan’s Echo Chamber, is devoted entirely to that type of speculative work, both literary and graphic.
In a hundred pages plus (page numbering was never the magazine’s strong-point) Chimurenga gives us, among much else, John Ankomah’s wonderful piece of black futurology, The Last Angel of History, with its tale of magical, musical data theft invoking the work of Samuel P Delaney, Octavia Butler, Greg Tate and more. Joao Barreiros (author of the Portuguese science-fiction work, The Terrarium) presents medical-academic surrealism in The Test.
Caine Prize finalist Doreen Baingana recounts the allegory of Kazi the Fire-woman. In between the stories the images reflect futuristic architecture, baroque imaginary machines, such as Sierra Leonean Abu Bakarr Mansaray’s Metal Falcon and cartoons. Egyptian Hassan Khan’s graphic, Read Fanon You Fucking Bastards, maps co/nections and dis/placements between Islamic iconography and imperialism.
The periodical sustains its regular theme of musical history, with pieces on Festac 77 and the making of Abdullah Ibrahim’s Mannenberg, both presented as journeys of consciousness. Jazz musician Sun Ra, of course, was the father of black futurology, with George Clinton boogieing along in his wake. And in Chimurenga‘s music of the spheres you’ll hear a far clearer lyric about what both science fiction and fantasy are, and why they continue to fascinate, more than in any history, however carefully researched.
Roberts does devote a dozen lines to Africa, but spends them forcing Anglophone West African writing into the rationalism/superstition mould: a somewhat reductionist survey of the territory.
The colonised world really did experience the landing of strange aliens with incomprehensible ways, who kidnapped and farmed the indigenes, making them the subjects of brutal social and scientific experiments. Fantasy, in this context, might not be entirely fantasy — and the invasions wore both Catholic and Protestant faces.