Transitional Demands

Abstract

Transitional Demands Mark Bould (bio) John Rieder. Speculative Epistemologies: An Eccentric Account of SF from the 1960s to the Present. Liverpool UP, 2021. vii+ 183 pp. $137.50 hc, $47.99 pbk. In Speculative Epistemologies, the author of the justly influential Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008) and Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (2017) continues to destabilize and reorient our understanding of sf. And once more, he displays his uncanny knack for spotting those things bobbing and flickering in the corner of sf studies' eye, of gathering them together and placing them center stage, and of saying things about sf that immediately strike you as obvious and true—but only after he has said them. Rieder's new book is concerned with "truth effects in sf" (1). It explores the interrelation of mimesis and rhetoric, of representation and persuasion, in sf works that "challenge dominant assumptions about the normal, the possible, and the real"—hence, "speculative epistemologies"—but that have occupied the edges or, rather, some of the multiple "epicenters" of sf—hence, "eccentric"—since the 1960s (2). His six key examples, to each of which he devotes a chapter, are Pamela Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe" (1967), Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977), Samuel R. Delany's "The Tale of Plague and Carnivals" (1985), Theodore Roszak's The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (1995), Albert Wendt's The Adventures of Vela (2009), and Donna Haraway's "The Camille Stories" (2016). Clearly, then, what is on offer is not, as the subtitle of Brian Aldiss's Billion Year Spree (1973) was sometimes rendered, the true history of sf, or even just the history of sf. Instead, Rieder navigates the last half century of sf, which he understands both as a "fluid, historically malleable" discursive object and as many often interweaving and overlapping communities of knowledge and practice (3). His six exemplary texts do not merely "flirt with generic boundaries"—they are "boundary objects" that "draw together" these subcultures and thus "foreground social struggles against the maintenance of dominant knowledge systems" (3). At the same time, they express the "marginalized and alternative ways of knowing" associated with women (Zoline, Roszak), Indigenous communities (Silko, Wendt) and queer communities (Delany, Haraway) (4), and because the period that interests Rieder also features the rise of sf studies and its associated subculture(s), two of his authors are also career academics (Roszak, Haraway) (19). Moreover, all six texts are rooted in "the civil rights and women's movements of the 1950s and 1960s and their legacy in the ongoing struggle against institutional [End Page 271] racism and sexism, and in the allied pursuit of environmental activism"; they are "positioned at the prolific intersections of multiple histories, communities and discourses" (152). Consequently, in addition to providing detailed close readings, Rieder traces each text through its circuits of production, circulation, and reception, activating its relationship(s) with the different communities that (came to) understand it as sf. Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe," for example, was first published in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds magazine and then promptly anthologized in both his Best S.F. Stories from New Worlds 3 (1968) and Judith Merril's England Swings SF (1968). Thus, it was first understood as exemplifying the way the New Wave "challenged and modified previously accepted meanings of" sf (21). It was subsequently anthologized, with an introduction by Brian Aldiss, in Robert Silverberg's The Mirror of Infinity: A Critics' Anthology of Science Fiction (1970), a story collection that also included commentary by both author-critics and scholar-critics (Kingsley Amis, Algis Budrys, James Blish, Thomas Clareson, H. Bruce Franklin, Damon Knight) and then, perhaps surprisingly, rejected from the sf canon in David Ketterer's scholarly New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature (1974). These moves resituated Zoline's story in relation to different communities and contexts, where the wider literary significance of sf was being debated. Its anthologization in Pamela Sargent's The New Women of Wonder (1978) resituated it once more and much more explicitly in relation to second-wave feminism and feminist sf—a position reinforced, for example...