Science Fiction and Narrative Form by David Roberts, Andrew Milner, and Peter Murphy (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Science Fiction and Narrative Form by David Roberts, Andrew Milner, and Peter Murphy Rjurik Davidson When Lukács Advocates for SF. David Roberts, Andrew Milner, and Peter Murphy. Science Fiction and Narrative Form. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 231 pp. $159.95 hc, $115.16 ebk. [End Page 492] For fifty years intellectuals and scholars have grappled with the question of science fiction as form (including its component parts of genre and definition). The earliest significant scholarly intervention was Darko Suvin’s 1972 definition of sf as a literature of “cognitive estrangement.” Since then, each critic of sf has had in some way to define the genre, if only implicitly to distinguish the boundaries of their subject. Following Suvin, significant reflections on sf’s formal components and definition have been offered by Samuel R. Delany, Robert Scholes, Brian Aldiss, Carl Freedman, Frederic Jameson, and many others. Science Fiction and Narrative Form enters this field as an original, idiosyncratic, and essential intervention. As David Roberts states in the Introduction, “The aim of this book is to situate science fiction among the great narrative forms” (1). Divided into three parts by the individual authors, the book makes an argument for situating sf in Georg Lukács’s typology of the “epic” and the “novel” (The Theory of the Novel [1920]. In this model, the epic is an organic and collective form in which meaning is immanent. In contrast, the modern novel, which chronologically follows the epic and is bound closely to the concerns of modernity, conventionally focuses on problematic individuals and their “alienation from society and nature” (Roberts 1); meaning is the very thing in question in the “godforsaken world” (3). Sf, the authors assert, is a companion form to the novel but transcends it by returning to the existential questions familiar to the epic, including those of humanity and history, technology and ontology, collectivity and destiny. This approach results in a more organic conception of the world, in “comprehensive world pictures” (1). Roberts’s Introduction and opening section establish many of the theoretical foundations of the book. As might be expected from an argument based in Lukács’s Hegelianism and specifically his The Theory of the Novel (1916), it is made in a literary-philosophical register that cleaves to the kind of German romanticist heritage that it is deploying. Roberts makes the compelling argument that sf has returned to the theological concerns of the epic, later abandoned by the novel for illusions of the free-floating individual. Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised (Les Particules élémentaires [1998]) is a pertinent example of the transcendence of individualism through the symbol of the clone and in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) through the usurpation of divine powers, most particularly that of creating life. In sf, technology provides the metaphors for the “perennial problems of human nature and humanity’s destiny” (58). In the book’s second part, Andrew Milner develops the argument using Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1937) which, though it left romanticism behind, held fast to the Hegelian conceptual structure and methodology, and might be read as more positive in its judgment of the novel form (in this historical subcategory at least). Making an argument that recalls Brian Aldiss’s from Billion Year Spree (1973), Milner dates the emergence of sf to the modern attitude toward science as “cognitive logic” and finds its fictional founders in Mary Shelley and Jules Verne. Its historical conditions of emergence are thus the scientific and industrial revolutions shortly before and [End Page 493] following the turn of the nineteenth century. As with any discussion of sf’s temporality, debates about utopia and dystopia must be engaged. Milner takes a relatively ecumenical approach: sf can be utopian or dystopian and thus he challenges (with reference to Kim Stanley Robinson as both commentator and practitioner) Fredric Jameson’s argument that it is congenitally incapable of imagining “utopia.” Milner traces sf’s commonalities with the historical novel: they each “take human historicity as their central subject matter” (97). Houellebecq’s novels stand as examples, but Milner’s chief evidence for his argument is climate fiction and its “future histories.” Here Milner focusses especially...