This summer, it was my privilege to get to read Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by my former colleague Jordan S. Carroll. I reviewed the book for the academic journal that I am associate editor for, Studies in the Fantastic.
After I read and reviewed the book, the book won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work—which I think was well-deserved, and I think I would think that even if I didn't know Jordan!
Jordan cites the idea of the "modal imagination" that he gets from Mark Jerng (who in turn got it from the philosopher Adrian M.S. Piper), which I have found really useful in articulating what makes science fiction what it is—I used it in my sf class this semester, and I suspect it might even find its way into a book project I've been contemplating.
The full review can be read here if you have access to Project MUSE, but here are the first couple paragraphs:
As Jordan Carroll discusses in the introduction to this slim volume from the University of Minnesota Press’s “Forerunners: Ideas First” series, “[s]cience fiction thinking turns out to be surprisingly prevalent in the alt-right and antecedent white nationalist movements” (5). Many like to think of science fiction as an inherently progressive genre: its urtext, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), is after all the work of the daughter of one of the founding thinkers of feminism, and early sf writers like H. G. Wells used the genre to criticize imperialism and nationalism. Science fiction allows us to imagine a better world.
How, then, could the genre attract those who want to take society backward in some kind of way? This is a question often expressed by baffled fans and critics alike, but as Carroll demonstrates, there have long been racist undercurrents in sf and its fandom, as evidenced by controversies such as 2009’s “Racefail,” when authors of color critiqued the field (17), and the “Sad” and “Rabid Puppies” movements (2013–17), when right-wing fans attempted to pack the fan-voted Hugo Awards with their chosen finalists, many of them racist and homophobic (47–8). Prominent racist thinkers such as Richard Spencer and Nick Land are science fiction fans, and adherents of President Donald Trump sometimes refer to him as the “God Emperor,” drawing on a term from Frank Herbert’s Dune novels (1963–85) and the sf wargame Warhammer 40,000. How can all of this happen, given the genre’s supposed leanings and origins? As Pamela Bedore says (drawing on Carolyn Miller), we should “ask not what various genres or subgenres look like, but rather, what they accomplish rhetorically” (9). Is there something about the rhetoric of science fiction itself as a genre that allows it to be a breeding ground for racism?
The review works in a couple of my own obsessions: Pam Bedore's features/project distinction for articulating genre and Isaac Asimov's definition of sf.
But probably the thing I am most proud of is the title, which is a reference to a classic Internet meme, and somehow neither of the two editors I worked with on the review put the kibosh on that... which I totally expected them to do: "Racism? In My Science Fiction? It’s More Likely than You Think."
No comments:
Post a Comment