The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction
Edward James & Farah Mendlesohn (Editors)
295 pages, including index
published in 2003

Other people's opinions:

Jonathan Cowie
Nicholas Whyte
Adam Roberts

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The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction is a book of essays aimed at an audience aware of and sympathetic towards science fiction, but not very familiar to it. It aims at the same market as Adam Roberts' Science Fiction therefore. Where it differs from Roberts work is in being a collection of essays, twenty-one in total, each written by a different author, with only Farah Mendlesohn writing more than one essay.

This approach has some advantages over Roberts solitary work. Any critical work that is the labour of one author will to some extent partake of their prejudices and beliefs as well as reflect their theories on what science fiction is. With multiple contributors, you get a broader range of views, not so constraint by one person's theories. The danger in such an approach is of course that the resulting book is too fragmented, with each contributor doing their own thing without paying attention to how their individual essay should fit into the whole. Strong editors are needed to prevent this and I feel that Edward James & Farah Mendlesohn have failed in this task, at least partially.

The book is divided into three parts, with the first part giving a quick overview of the history of science fiction as a genre, starting with a look at science fiction before the genre had been defined. There then are three chapters looking at the magazine era (1926-1960), the New Wave and its backlash (1960-1980) and finally the growth of science fiction from 1980 to the present. Two more chapters finish this sequence, the first looking at sf in movies and on tv, the second looking at the influence editors have had on science fiction.

This is the least interesting section of the book for me, mostly because every other book on science fiction has felt the need already to retell this history and I'm intensely familiar with it already. Then again, if this companion is intended for a general audience this section is needed to bring them up to speed, so to speak.

I had higher hopes for the second section, which catalogues critical approaches towards science fiction, with chapters on Marxist, feminist and queer theory, as well as postmodernism. You can roll your eyes now if you want to, but I do believe that looking at science fiction from those perspectives can result in interesting insights into the development of science fiction and its underlying assumptions. Unfortunately however, there was too little room in these essays, each averaging about ten pages, to really go into these approaches in any depth. Again, maybe not surprising in this sort of book, but still disappointing.

This disappoinment is not alleviated by the third section, "sub-genres and themes" a grab bag of various essays which did not fit in the previous two sections. This was the worst section in the book, as there was no real organisation underlying it. Two of the essays, "gender in science fiction" and "race and ethnicity in science fiction" more properly belonged in the second section, with the first of these duplicating much of what was already said in "feminist theory and science fiction". Instead of two weakish essays on virtually the same subject, I'd rather seen one strong essay. Another essay, "the icons of science fiction", was more fitted to the first section, as it was a general essay on some of the more widespread science fiction tropes.

The remainder of this section was filled with essays on subgenres (alternate history, hard science fiction, utopias and anti-utopias). These shared the same handicap with the book as whole, that of only having limited space to introduce quite complex subjects. This was also apparent in the essays on politics and relgion in science fiction and the chapter on how the life sciences are treated in science fiction. This latter is a bit of an odd duck, as it is the only essay in the book that actually looks at the science in science fiction.

What I missed in this all was a master narrative that linked these separate essays together. This link was present in the first two sections, though there was little that connected the two sections together but altogether missing in the last section. It is fine and dandy to look at science fiction from multiple angles, but these individual approaches need to be put in context in order to get a real overview of the genre.

It doesn't help that some of the essays here are decidedly weak; the ones on Marxism and science fiction and religion in science fiction especially, but also the historical overview of the New Wave was lacking. This does not necessarily mean that this is a bad introduction to science fiction, but it is certainly more flawed than Adam Roberts' attempt. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction tries to be all things to all people and would've benefited from more focus on critical approaches towards science fiction as a literary genre, dropping much of the history and looks at related but subsidary subjects (media sf e.g.).

Contents:

• Foreword James Gunn;
• Introduction: reading science fiction Farah Mendlesohn;
• Part I. The History
• • 1. Science fiction before the genre Brian Stableford;
  • 2. The magazine era: 1926-1960 Brian Attebery;
  • 3. New wave and backwash: 1960-1980 Damien Broderick;
  • 4. Science fiction from 1980 to the present John Clute;
  • 5. Film and television Mark Bould;
  • 6. Science fiction and its editors Gary K. Wolfe;
• Part II. Critical Approaches:
• • 7. Marxist theory and science fiction Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr;
  • 8. Feminist theory and science fiction Veronica Hollinger;
  • 9. Postmodernism and science fiction Andrew M. Butler;
  • 10. Science fiction and queer theory Wendy Pearson;
• Part III. Sub-genres and Themes:
• • 11. The icons of science fiction Gwyneth Jones;
  • 12. Science fiction and the life sciences Joan Slonczewski and Michael Levy;
  • 13. Hard science fiction Kathryn Cramer;
  • 14. Space opera Gary Westfahl;
  • 15. Alternate history Andy Duncan;
  • 16. Utopias and anti-utopias Edward James;
  • 17. Politics and science fiction Ken MacLeod;
  • 18. Gender in science fiction Helen Merrick;
  • 19. Race and ethnicity in science fiction Elisabeth Anne Leonard;
  • 20. Religion and science fiction Farah Mendlesohn;