Gothic Science Fiction: 1980–2010

Author:   Sara Wasson ,  Emily Alder (Edinburgh Napier University (United Kingdom))
Publisher:   Liverpool University Press
Volume:   41
ISBN:  

9781781380031


Pages:   219
Publication Date:   03 April 2014
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
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Gothic Science Fiction: 1980–2010


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Overview

This timely book explores what might be termed ‘Gothic science fiction’ from 1980 to 2010. This designation may at first appear contradictory, as the Gothic’s connotations of the irrational and supernatural seem to conflict with the rational foundations of science fiction. However, this collection demonstrates that the two categories in fact overlap and intersect in creatively and critically fruitful ways. Understanding texts of this period by means of this hybrid category allows a fresh examination of their engagement with the dramatic socio-economic changes – in communication technology, medical science, globalization, and global politics – that have transformed the way we live, and for which Gothic science fiction texts provide compelling narrative modes. The essays in this collection reflect the current willingness among researchers to explore interpretations across genre, form, and discipline, as well as revealing a buoyant field of research in contemporary Gothic and science fiction studies. The collection ranges across narrative media (including literature, film, graphic novels and trading card games) and across genres, taking in horror, science fiction, the Gothic, the New Weird and more. The essays explore questions of genre, medical science, gender, biopower and capitalism, demonstrating the ways in which Gothic science fiction texts stage contemporary concerns around power, anxiety, resistance and capital.

Full Product Details

Author:   Sara Wasson ,  Emily Alder (Edinburgh Napier University (United Kingdom))
Publisher:   Liverpool University Press
Imprint:   Liverpool University Press
Volume:   41
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 1.50cm , Length: 23.40cm
Weight:   0.272kg
ISBN:  

9781781380031


ISBN 10:   1781380031
Pages:   219
Publication Date:   03 April 2014
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements List of illustrations Foreword - Adam Roberts Notes on contributors Introduction - Sara Wasson and Emily Alder Part I: Redefining Genres 1. In the Zone: Topologies of Genre Weirdness - Roger Luckhurst 2. Zombie Death Drive: Between Gothic and Science Fiction - Fred Botting Part II: Biopower Capital 3. ‘Death is Irrelevant’: Gothic Science Fiction and the Biopolitics of Empire - Aris Mousoutzanis 4. ‘A Butcher’s Shop where the Meat Still Moved’: Gothic Doubles, Organ Harvesting and Human Cloning - Sara Wasson 5. Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos, or the Pleasures of Impurity - Laurence Davies 6. Infected with Life: Neo-Supernaturalism and the Gothic Zombie - Gwyneth Peaty 7. Ruined Skin: Gothic Genetics and Human Identity in Stephen Donaldson’s Gap Cycle - Emily Alder Part III: Gender and Genre 8. The Superheated, Superdense Prose of David Conway: Gender and Subjectivity Beyond The Starry Wisdom - Mark P. Williams 9. Spatialized Ontologies: Toni Morrison’s Science Fiction Traces in Gothic Spaces - Jerrilyn McGregory 10. The Gothic Punk Milieu in Popular Narrative Fictions - Nickianne Moody 11. Gothic Science Fiction in the Steampunk Graphic Novel: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Laura Hilton Index

Reviews

It's about time that there was a publication such as this, which explores this relationship between the two genres - and the often hybrid nature of that relationship - in a manner that is timely, relevant, and generally, very interesting indeed. This is a valuable collection which should appeal to scholars working in the growing fields of Gothic and SF studies. Two well known descriptions of the relationship between science fiction and the Gothic are referenced several times in this collection of eleven articles. Darko Suvin sees science fiction and the Gothic (including horror and fantasy) in opposition to each other: science fiction is rational, critical, active, and forward thinking-a flying DeLorean-while the Gothic is somewhat of a clunker, struggling under its burden of the past and intermittently sputtering about things that go bump in the night. Brian W. Aldiss argues for a more familial relation between the two: the extraterrestrial realms explored in sf are outcroppings of the sublime landscapes traversed in the Gothic. This collection shows that Gothic science fiction is a hybrid formed by the tensions, anxieties, and strange bonds that develop when past and future, superstition and reason, nature and science are grafted together. The essays collected in Gothic Science Fiction investigate the horrors of globalized capitalism, the threat of technology to human subjectivity, the uncanny doubling of human and posthuman bodies, and the hybrid places and histories found in works of this genre. There are several standout essays, but the quality of the articles is rather uneven, so the reader is sometimes taken on a meandering voyage to nowhere in particular. The volume is divided into three sections: ""Redefining Genres,"" ""Biopower and Capital,"" and ""Gender and Genre."" There is also a phantom fourth section, ""Strange Cities, Strange Temporalities,"" mentioned in Wasson and Alder's excellent introduction but absent from the collection. Was there some last-minute shuffling around of essays? The main lines of inquiry engage texts that look, Janus-like, to the future and to the past, with Gothic science fiction expressing the magnetism that unites these opposing poles. One must think Gothic sf in terms of zones of contact between genres, Roger Luckhurst argues in the first essay of the collection. A zone defies the type of borders prescribed by Suvin's understanding of the Gothic: it is a dynamic space where generic interpenetration and hybridity reign. (Nickianne Moody describes the Gothic punk milieu in similar terms: it is a ""narrative environment"" characterized by an openness and flexibility in form.) The articles contained in the volume's first section, written by Luckhurst and Fred Botting, are comprehensive and extremely engaging. Combined with the editors' introduction, they effectively map out the zones, bodies, corpus, and concerns of Gothic sf, laying sturdy foundations for understanding the genre. Some articles later in the collection undertake the same task but with less elegance. The volume frankly becomes quite repetitive if the articles are read in succession. For this reason, the collection is probably at its most enjoyable when one dips in and out of it on a need-to-know basis. Many essays investigate the problematic bodies that abound in Gothic science fiction. Some address connections to the field of medical humanities (Wasson and Alder), others explore Foucault's biopower in relation to the Gothic sf body (Aris Mousoutzanis and Gwyneth Peaty), and others study how archetypal Gothic or sf figures break through generic borders (Botting and Laura Hilton). Zombies ungainly stumble into the forward-moving path of posthumanism and thus participate in a ""questioning of the limits of modern humanity"" (Botting 38). But when the living dead are figured within a medical framework, they become the unlikely star of a biotechnological discourse seeking to extend and augment life (Peaty). Reading the Borg of Star Trek within the context of the cyber-vampire, Mousoutzanis shows that the Gothic blurring of self and other reads as ambivalence towards the imperialism of the Federation and that of the Borg-good and evil are not always clear-cut. What is exciting about many of the essays in this collection is the rigorous questioning of the divergent drives that are inherent to Gothic sf and that constantly twist and turn and unsettle expectations. For example, the generic instability of David Conway's ""Metal Sushi"" (2006) is thematized through the gender instability of the protagonist, who embodies both the hyper-masculine private eye and the femme fatale of hard-boiled detective novels (Mark P. Williams). Even more fascinating are the various avatars of the Gothic double, addressed in several essays. The human clone bred for organ harvesting, Wasson shows, is an eerie scientific form of doubling, questioning the relationship of the harvester to the harvested. What is monstrous is not the double but the organ harvester who hushes the suffering of the abject body of the harvested. In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999- ), Dr. Jekyll's iconic double is no longer shorthand for pure evil; he is a nuanced anti-hero (Hilton). The genetic engineering perpetrated by the Amnion in Stephen R. Donaldson's THE GAP CYCLE suggests that our identity as human both can and cannot be encased and encoded in our skin and genes-our corporeality is both meaningful and meaningless (Alder). These are examples of essays that demonstrate that the ""dark futures"" of the texts studied in this collection have the ""greatest value"" in what they reveal about our ""dark present,"" as the editors say at the end of their introduction (16). As a whole this is a successful volume that will appeal to students and scholars of English-language sf (Fritz Lang's Metropolis [1927] and Guillermo del Toro's film Cronos [1993] are the only non-Anglophone works studied). Many of the articles are excellent and will prove to be essential for scholars researching Gothic sf. There are, however, a few missteps. In certain articles, less emphasis should be placed on codification; such gestures are often made without reflecting on what is to be gained (by the text, by the reader, by critical discourse) in rigidly defining a genre and arguing a particular text is of that genre. For example, does not attempting to uncover ""traces"" of science fiction in Toni Morrison's works undermine the cultural specificity of her decision to use ""enchantment"" instead of scientific rationalization in her fiction? Are we not at our best when we are concerned with what a text does, rather than in which pigeonhole it belongs? This is a successful volume that will appeal to students and scholars of English-language sf. Many of the articles are excellent and will prove to be essential for scholars researching Gothic sf.


It's about time that there was a publication such as this, which explores this relationship between the two genres - and the often hybrid nature of that relationship - in a manner that is timely, relevant, and generally, very interesting indeed. This is a valuable collection which should appeal to scholars working in the growing fields of Gothic and SF studies. Two well known descriptions of the relationship between science fiction and the Gothic are referenced several times in this collection of eleven articles. Darko Suvin sees science fiction and the Gothic (including horror and fantasy) in opposition to each other: science fiction is rational, critical, active, and forward thinking-a flying DeLorean-while the Gothic is somewhat of a clunker, struggling under its burden of the past and intermittently sputtering about things that go bump in the night. Brian W. Aldiss argues for a more familial relation between the two: the extraterrestrial realms explored in sf are outcroppings of the sublime landscapes traversed in the Gothic. This collection shows that Gothic science fiction is a hybrid formed by the tensions, anxieties, and strange bonds that develop when past and future, superstition and reason, nature and science are grafted together. The essays collected in Gothic Science Fiction investigate the horrors of globalized capitalism, the threat of technology to human subjectivity, the uncanny doubling of human and posthuman bodies, and the hybrid places and histories found in works of this genre. There are several standout essays, but the quality of the articles is rather uneven, so the reader is sometimes taken on a meandering voyage to nowhere in particular. The volume is divided into three sections: Redefining Genres, Biopower and Capital, and Gender and Genre. There is also a phantom fourth section, Strange Cities, Strange Temporalities, mentioned in Wasson and Alder's excellent introduction but absent from the collection. Was there some last-minute shuffling around of essays? The main lines of inquiry engage texts that look, Janus-like, to the future and to the past, with Gothic science fiction expressing the magnetism that unites these opposing poles. One must think Gothic sf in terms of zones of contact between genres, Roger Luckhurst argues in the first essay of the collection. A zone defies the type of borders prescribed by Suvin's understanding of the Gothic: it is a dynamic space where generic interpenetration and hybridity reign. (Nickianne Moody describes the Gothic punk milieu in similar terms: it is a narrative environment characterized by an openness and flexibility in form.) The articles contained in the volume's first section, written by Luckhurst and Fred Botting, are comprehensive and extremely engaging. Combined with the editors' introduction, they effectively map out the zones, bodies, corpus, and concerns of Gothic sf, laying sturdy foundations for understanding the genre. Some articles later in the collection undertake the same task but with less elegance. The volume frankly becomes quite repetitive if the articles are read in succession. For this reason, the collection is probably at its most enjoyable when one dips in and out of it on a need-to-know basis. Many essays investigate the problematic bodies that abound in Gothic science fiction. Some address connections to the field of medical humanities (Wasson and Alder), others explore Foucault's biopower in relation to the Gothic sf body (Aris Mousoutzanis and Gwyneth Peaty), and others study how archetypal Gothic or sf figures break through generic borders (Botting and Laura Hilton). Zombies ungainly stumble into the forward-moving path of posthumanism and thus participate in a questioning of the limits of modern humanity (Botting 38). But when the living dead are figured within a medical framework, they become the unlikely star of a biotechnological discourse seeking to extend and augment life (Peaty). Reading the Borg of Star Trek within the context of the cyber-vampire, Mousoutzanis shows that the Gothic blurring of self and other reads as ambivalence towards the imperialism of the Federation and that of the Borg-good and evil are not always clear-cut. What is exciting about many of the essays in this collection is the rigorous questioning of the divergent drives that are inherent to Gothic sf and that constantly twist and turn and unsettle expectations. For example, the generic instability of David Conway's Metal Sushi (2006) is thematized through the gender instability of the protagonist, who embodies both the hyper-masculine private eye and the femme fatale of hard-boiled detective novels (Mark P. Williams). Even more fascinating are the various avatars of the Gothic double, addressed in several essays. The human clone bred for organ harvesting, Wasson shows, is an eerie scientific form of doubling, questioning the relationship of the harvester to the harvested. What is monstrous is not the double but the organ harvester who hushes the suffering of the abject body of the harvested. In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999- ), Dr. Jekyll's iconic double is no longer shorthand for pure evil; he is a nuanced anti-hero (Hilton). The genetic engineering perpetrated by the Amnion in Stephen R. Donaldson's THE GAP CYCLE suggests that our identity as human both can and cannot be encased and encoded in our skin and genes-our corporeality is both meaningful and meaningless (Alder). These are examples of essays that demonstrate that the dark futures of the texts studied in this collection have the greatest value in what they reveal about our dark present, as the editors say at the end of their introduction (16). As a whole this is a successful volume that will appeal to students and scholars of English-language sf (Fritz Lang's Metropolis [1927] and Guillermo del Toro's film Cronos [1993] are the only non-Anglophone works studied). Many of the articles are excellent and will prove to be essential for scholars researching Gothic sf. There are, however, a few missteps. In certain articles, less emphasis should be placed on codification; such gestures are often made without reflecting on what is to be gained (by the text, by the reader, by critical discourse) in rigidly defining a genre and arguing a particular text is of that genre. For example, does not attempting to uncover traces of science fiction in Toni Morrison's works undermine the cultural specificity of her decision to use enchantment instead of scientific rationalization in her fiction? Are we not at our best when we are concerned with what a text does, rather than in which pigeonhole it belongs? This is a successful volume that will appeal to students and scholars of English-language sf. Many of the articles are excellent and will prove to be essential for scholars researching Gothic sf.


It's about time that there was a publication such as this, which explores this relationship between the two genres - and the often hybrid nature of that relationship - in a manner that is timely, relevant, and generally, very interesting indeed. This is a valuable collection which should appeal to scholars working in the growing fields of Gothic and SF studies. -- Bernice Murphy Two well known descriptions of the relationship between science fiction and the Gothic are referenced several times in this collection of eleven articles. Darko Suvin sees science fiction and the Gothic (including horror and fantasy) in opposition to each other: science fiction is rational, critical, active, and forward thinking-a flying DeLorean-while the Gothic is somewhat of a clunker, struggling under its burden of the past and intermittently sputtering about things that go bump in the night. Brian W. Aldiss argues for a more familial relation between the two: the extraterrestrial realms explored in sf are outcroppings of the sublime landscapes traversed in the Gothic. This collection shows that Gothic science fiction is a hybrid formed by the tensions, anxieties, and strange bonds that develop when past and future, superstition and reason, nature and science are grafted together. The essays collected in Gothic Science Fiction investigate the horrors of globalized capitalism, the threat of technology to human subjectivity, the uncanny doubling of human and posthuman bodies, and the hybrid places and histories found in works of this genre. There are several standout essays, but the quality of the articles is rather uneven, so the reader is sometimes taken on a meandering voyage to nowhere in particular. The volume is divided into three sections: Redefining Genres, Biopower and Capital, and Gender and Genre. There is also a phantom fourth section, Strange Cities, Strange Temporalities, mentioned in Wasson and Alder's excellent introduction but absent from the collection. Was there some last-minute shuffling around of essays? The main lines of inquiry engage texts that look, Janus-like, to the future and to the past, with Gothic science fiction expressing the magnetism that unites these opposing poles. One must think Gothic sf in terms of zones of contact between genres, Roger Luckhurst argues in the first essay of the collection. A zone defies the type of borders prescribed by Suvin's understanding of the Gothic: it is a dynamic space where generic interpenetration and hybridity reign. (Nickianne Moody describes the Gothic punk milieu in similar terms: it is a narrative environment characterized by an openness and flexibility in form.) The articles contained in the volume's first section, written by Luckhurst and Fred Botting, are comprehensive and extremely engaging. Combined with the editors' introduction, they effectively map out the zones, bodies, corpus, and concerns of Gothic sf, laying sturdy foundations for understanding the genre. Some articles later in the collection undertake the same task but with less elegance. The volume frankly becomes quite repetitive if the articles are read in succession. For this reason, the collection is probably at its most enjoyable when one dips in and out of it on a need-to-know basis. Many essays investigate the problematic bodies that abound in Gothic science fiction. Some address connections to the field of medical humanities (Wasson and Alder), others explore Foucault's biopower in relation to the Gothic sf body (Aris Mousoutzanis and Gwyneth Peaty), and others study how archetypal Gothic or sf figures break through generic borders (Botting and Laura Hilton). Zombies ungainly stumble into the forward-moving path of posthumanism and thus participate in a questioning of the limits of modern humanity (Botting 38). But when the living dead are figured within a medical framework, they become the unlikely star of a biotechnological discourse seeking to extend and augment life (Peaty). Reading the Borg of Star Trek within the context of the cyber-vampire, Mousoutzanis shows that the Gothic blurring of self and other reads as ambivalence towards the imperialism of the Federation and that of the Borg-good and evil are not always clear-cut. What is exciting about many of the essays in this collection is the rigorous questioning of the divergent drives that are inherent to Gothic sf and that constantly twist and turn and unsettle expectations. For example, the generic instability of David Conway's Metal Sushi (2006) is thematized through the gender instability of the protagonist, who embodies both the hyper-masculine private eye and the femme fatale of hard-boiled detective novels (Mark P. Williams). Even more fascinating are the various avatars of the Gothic double, addressed in several essays. The human clone bred for organ harvesting, Wasson shows, is an eerie scientific form of doubling, questioning the relationship of the harvester to the harvested. What is monstrous is not the double but the organ harvester who hushes the suffering of the abject body of the harvested. In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999- ), Dr. Jekyll's iconic double is no longer shorthand for pure evil; he is a nuanced anti-hero (Hilton). The genetic engineering perpetrated by the Amnion in Stephen R. Donaldson's THE GAP CYCLE suggests that our identity as human both can and cannot be encased and encoded in our skin and genes-our corporeality is both meaningful and meaningless (Alder). These are examples of essays that demonstrate that the dark futures of the texts studied in this collection have the greatest value in what they reveal about our dark present, as the editors say at the end of their introduction (16). As a whole this is a successful volume that will appeal to students and scholars of English-language sf (Fritz Lang's Metropolis [1927] and Guillermo del Toro's film Cronos [1993] are the only non-Anglophone works studied). Many of the articles are excellent and will prove to be essential for scholars researching Gothic sf. There are, however, a few missteps. In certain articles, less emphasis should be placed on codification; such gestures are often made without reflecting on what is to be gained (by the text, by the reader, by critical discourse) in rigidly defining a genre and arguing a particular text is of that genre. For example, does not attempting to uncover traces of science fiction in Toni Morrison's works undermine the cultural specificity of her decision to use enchantment instead of scientific rationalization in her fiction? Are we not at our best when we are concerned with what a text does, rather than in which pigeonhole it belongs? -- Elizabeth Berkebile McManus Science Fiction Studies, Volume 39 2012 This is a successful volume that will appeal to students and scholars of English-language sf. Many of the articles are excellent and will prove to be essential for scholars researching Gothic sf. -- Elizabeth Berkebile McManus Science Fiction Studies, vol 39 2012


Author Information

Sara Wasson is Lecturer in Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University and author of 'Urban Gothic of the Second World War: Dark London' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Emily Alder is Lecturer in Literature at Edinburgh Napier University.

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