Histories of science fiction are not rare, from the personal (Thomas Disch) to the epic (the Panshins). This may the the rightest--how's that for a word?--but it's also probably not worth reading.
As I read him, Cheng makes two claims, one hoary but necessary, the other fascinating but not developed beyond the existing literature on the history of the science fiction. The first argument is that science fiction was created, as a genre, in the interwar periods, and reflected the concerns of the era. The main tendency to this point has been to root the genre in the historical romances of the 19th century (including the Gothic ones by Poe). Cheng notes that these are certainly antecedents to the form, but were fulfilling other roles. Science fiction came about as a way for Americans--that's his focus, America--to interact with science, to imagine and even practice it. The first section (two chapters) called circulation develops this claim--in length. He traces the rise of pulp magazines, the creation of science fiction ones, and the creation of a fan community from those pulps that then extended beyond them with the creation of clubs and correspondence between each other. (It was the fan community, imagining itself into being, that created a different history, in which science fiction had earlier examples.)
The second section then draws out how the new genre of science fiction responded to the cultural currents of the time--thus how science fiction has a history and is not a transcendent category as some of its promoters seem to insist. The first chapter focuses on the importance of 'facts' to the first science fiction fans. Facts sat on a fault line within the community, a fault line that brought together two opposed traditions, one that emphasized the democracy of the fan-base, the other that emphasized authority--those who _knew_ should be given deference. Bringing the facts, as one might say, allowed even amateurs to interact with and counteract authors and other experts. Mastery of facts was also a way to prove competence. And facts shaped the way fans read the magazines--they actually liked the long, interrupting disquisitions of science that, to the modern reader, seem digressive and tiresome. Ultimately, though, facts acted to constrain science fiction--the idea of the time was that science fiction should not violate known facts, however outrageous it might otherwise be. This conservative stance prevented writers from really exploring the way facts were social creations, and so, in the end, authority was valued over democracy.
The next chapter discusses the role of gender in these stories. Women, he argues, were central to the narrative functions of science fiction, although they were rarely characterized and almost always stereotyped. Their role was to coat outlandish stories with the veneer of domesticity, so that in the end, when the hero got the girl, conventional morality came back in to play, and the outlandish was banished. This sense of domesticity, he further argues reasonably, was extended to the state and government, so that these often came to be valued as assurances of order, just as family was.
The third chapter of the section discusses race, especially the way monsters were so often created to reflect Orientalist fears. (He makes the interesting pint that these were monsters, until after World War II, when the idea of aliens really became established.)
In the section's final chapter, he considers the conservative interpretation of Einstein's laws in the pulps, which insisted upon time being linear. That meant progress was part of the fabric of the universe, and satisfied the interest of the fans in science as a modernizing force.
The final section, on practice, turns to the second, and more interesting, thesis, that science fiction was a means of science practice. (He touches on this in places earlier, such as P. Schuyler Miller deriving Einstein's famous E=mc^2 equation in the pages of a pulp letter section.) Some fans, of course, though of their interest in science as merely a hobby. But others built their lives around it. Some read through the scientific literature based on their fascination with the subject, and others joined interest groups. Chief among the interest groups favored by science fiction fans were those that promoted the idea of interplanetary travel and rocketry--ideas that were, for much of the interwar years, seen by the establishment as pie-in-the-sky dreaming (imagination!), but, as we all know, turned out to be an important area of technological development during World War II and in the years after.
The problems with this book are many. On the most basic level,Chen is not a trustworthy writer. His sentences often make no sense; the examples he gives to support his claims don't do that work; he mostly avoids jargon, but his meaning remains obscure. And when he tries to drop technical terms into the discussion, these feel like the old pulp method of introducing science merely for the sake of discussing it, not because it aids comprehension or is needed. He overwrites badly--each chapter is easily a third too long--but even so is not always persuasive. He convinced me because his claims made sense of other evidence I have studied, not because of what he marshaled.
On a larger scale, either he did not read widely in the history of science fiction and the pulps, or is he not a very generous writer. His references tend to go to literary theorists, but not (say) Mike Ashley or Erin Smith, though his ideas are often very similar. He reads historians of science in odd ways, and don't always trust what he has to say about them--a summary of the many problems in the book, I think.
And that is what makes his claims about science fiction being a form of science practice so disappointing. It's a great claim, and something others have eluded to for a long time, but it is never fleshed out anymore than it is in the existing literature. Yes, we already know science fiction fans held the torch for rocketry. But what else did they do? That's the question that's dying to be answered.
Along those same lines, even in earlier chapters, Cheng never breaks new ground. His bit on the creation of pulps and pulp writers is interesting, but Smith go there first; his work on Gernsback is good, but Ashley got there first; his parallels between monsters and the 'other' was already central to Disch. Even if his interpretation is right, rehashing all the seem material in such excruciating detail seems overkill.
Most problematic, for me at least, he never offered a rich discussion of imagination--it was merely conceptualizing what did not exist, but this seems pale and misses a lot of the different ways imagination might work with science.
An example of right answer, wrong method.
As I read him, Cheng makes two claims, one hoary but necessary, the other fascinating but not developed beyond the existing literature on the history of the science fiction. The first argument is that science fiction was created, as a genre, in the interwar periods, and reflected the concerns of the era. The main tendency to this point has been to root the genre in the historical romances of the 19th century (including the Gothic ones by Poe). Cheng notes that these are certainly antecedents to the form, but were fulfilling other roles. Science fiction came about as a way for Americans--that's his focus, America--to interact with science, to imagine and even practice it. The first section (two chapters) called circulation develops this claim--in length. He traces the rise of pulp magazines, the creation of science fiction ones, and the creation of a fan community from those pulps that then extended beyond them with the creation of clubs and correspondence between each other. (It was the fan community, imagining itself into being, that created a different history, in which science fiction had earlier examples.)
The second section then draws out how the new genre of science fiction responded to the cultural currents of the time--thus how science fiction has a history and is not a transcendent category as some of its promoters seem to insist. The first chapter focuses on the importance of 'facts' to the first science fiction fans. Facts sat on a fault line within the community, a fault line that brought together two opposed traditions, one that emphasized the democracy of the fan-base, the other that emphasized authority--those who _knew_ should be given deference. Bringing the facts, as one might say, allowed even amateurs to interact with and counteract authors and other experts. Mastery of facts was also a way to prove competence. And facts shaped the way fans read the magazines--they actually liked the long, interrupting disquisitions of science that, to the modern reader, seem digressive and tiresome. Ultimately, though, facts acted to constrain science fiction--the idea of the time was that science fiction should not violate known facts, however outrageous it might otherwise be. This conservative stance prevented writers from really exploring the way facts were social creations, and so, in the end, authority was valued over democracy.
The next chapter discusses the role of gender in these stories. Women, he argues, were central to the narrative functions of science fiction, although they were rarely characterized and almost always stereotyped. Their role was to coat outlandish stories with the veneer of domesticity, so that in the end, when the hero got the girl, conventional morality came back in to play, and the outlandish was banished. This sense of domesticity, he further argues reasonably, was extended to the state and government, so that these often came to be valued as assurances of order, just as family was.
The third chapter of the section discusses race, especially the way monsters were so often created to reflect Orientalist fears. (He makes the interesting pint that these were monsters, until after World War II, when the idea of aliens really became established.)
In the section's final chapter, he considers the conservative interpretation of Einstein's laws in the pulps, which insisted upon time being linear. That meant progress was part of the fabric of the universe, and satisfied the interest of the fans in science as a modernizing force.
The final section, on practice, turns to the second, and more interesting, thesis, that science fiction was a means of science practice. (He touches on this in places earlier, such as P. Schuyler Miller deriving Einstein's famous E=mc^2 equation in the pages of a pulp letter section.) Some fans, of course, though of their interest in science as merely a hobby. But others built their lives around it. Some read through the scientific literature based on their fascination with the subject, and others joined interest groups. Chief among the interest groups favored by science fiction fans were those that promoted the idea of interplanetary travel and rocketry--ideas that were, for much of the interwar years, seen by the establishment as pie-in-the-sky dreaming (imagination!), but, as we all know, turned out to be an important area of technological development during World War II and in the years after.
The problems with this book are many. On the most basic level,Chen is not a trustworthy writer. His sentences often make no sense; the examples he gives to support his claims don't do that work; he mostly avoids jargon, but his meaning remains obscure. And when he tries to drop technical terms into the discussion, these feel like the old pulp method of introducing science merely for the sake of discussing it, not because it aids comprehension or is needed. He overwrites badly--each chapter is easily a third too long--but even so is not always persuasive. He convinced me because his claims made sense of other evidence I have studied, not because of what he marshaled.
On a larger scale, either he did not read widely in the history of science fiction and the pulps, or is he not a very generous writer. His references tend to go to literary theorists, but not (say) Mike Ashley or Erin Smith, though his ideas are often very similar. He reads historians of science in odd ways, and don't always trust what he has to say about them--a summary of the many problems in the book, I think.
And that is what makes his claims about science fiction being a form of science practice so disappointing. It's a great claim, and something others have eluded to for a long time, but it is never fleshed out anymore than it is in the existing literature. Yes, we already know science fiction fans held the torch for rocketry. But what else did they do? That's the question that's dying to be answered.
Along those same lines, even in earlier chapters, Cheng never breaks new ground. His bit on the creation of pulps and pulp writers is interesting, but Smith go there first; his work on Gernsback is good, but Ashley got there first; his parallels between monsters and the 'other' was already central to Disch. Even if his interpretation is right, rehashing all the seem material in such excruciating detail seems overkill.
Most problematic, for me at least, he never offered a rich discussion of imagination--it was merely conceptualizing what did not exist, but this seems pale and misses a lot of the different ways imagination might work with science.
An example of right answer, wrong method.
