Jason W. Haslam

Gender & race have always been a crucial part of American SF, and that's led to a pretty diverse body of critical work in response – it's a twofold issue, with SF challenging while also reasserting dominant social norms. You can feel it here in SF's double role as a mainstream, cultural product that exists in service to commercial hegemony paired with SF's subversive nature in Suvin's sense of cognitive estrangement. In a sense, "everyone knows" that SF is where to look for the "new" or for ruptures in how we understand our contemporary social world through popular literature. I also don't think it's hard to argue that "everyone knows" some of the most innovative work in literary studies on race & gender has actually comes from cultural studies paradigms, and studies of SF and SF fandom in particular. What's fascinating is how Haslam fits them together as a single issue.

Haslam gives a lucid and engaging change of direction here, drawing this wide range of arguments together not so much to revise the critics who came before but instead to show how the discussions of race & gender that happened separately really do belong together. That's a bigger deal than I think it sounds like. It means that methodologically Haslam is integrating linguistic and materialist arguments to make them work together around subjectivity while also (I think at least) insisting on how they intersect in the construction of identity.

The analyses of Samuel Delany, Frank Herbert, Octavia Butler, William Gibson, and China Miéville are excellent, and I wish I'd had this book a few years ago during a course that put half of them together. My students would have benefited from it enormously. But there are also authors I've not read about in as much detail before or at least not in this context: Philip Nowlan, George Schuyler, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, along with a very persuasive reading of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (and a lot of insight inot the Wachowskis – if only Sense8 were finished before Haslam wrote this!).

I was surprised there was only passing reference to Le Guin, whose Left Hand of Darkness is an important text for these topics, although she wouldn't have aligned as well with the other subjects. The "Introduction" could easily stand on its own for student readers, as could the "Afterword."

Haslam also did something uncommon in scholarly studies – he made an academic book fun to read.… (mehr)