A Critical History of Man in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin by Thomas Connolly – Locus Online

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After Human: A Critical Human History in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin, Thomas Connolly (Liverpool University Press 978-1800348165, $ 130, 240pp, hc) May 2021.

What is meant or assumed to be meant by human, non-human, and whatever the division between them stands up to the test of various philosophical and science fiction thought experiments, falls centrally within the scope of this book. As Thomas Connolly states in the introduction to his dense and thought-provoking study, his aim is “to examine the ‘human’ as it is in the works of the Anglo-American SF of 19.” Therefore, he dedicates part of it Introduces the cultural theoretic basis of his investigation and explains why he sees SF as a posthumanist form of literature – “all SF is posthuman,” he says, “or more precisely, all SF deals with” recognizable posthumanist concerns “- and provides the details of the posthumanist Model, which serves as the basis for his detailed reading of selected texts. Critical posthumanism, he emphasizes, “seeks to question and accelerate the collapse of the monolithic (ie white, male, heterosexual, cis-gender, and fit) ‘people’ of European philosophical and cultural thought and to accelerate the exploration of new ways of thinking about human beings , Identity, technology and nature that result from the “end of man”. In this light, dualisms such as human-non-human, spirit-body and man-woman are viewed as “corrupting” and must be reevaluated; Instead, the emphasis is on a “partiality of identities” that “cannot be resolved into unity or duality”. Connolly refers, among other things, to philosophical works by Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, which comment on, question or convey “the relationship between technology and nature”. He uses the OncoMouse for thisTM as a strong embodiment of the breakdown of the traditional understanding of these two realms, as the tumorigenic mouse is both clearly natural and at the same time the indisputable result of the scientific and technological appropriation of nature that has taken place since the scientific revolution. “Connolly uses ideas from Paul Kincaid and Tom Shippey and understands SF as “something felt and not strictly defined” that habitually engages with technology, which makes it “the ideal genre for studying the human figure and construction in relation to” technological and natural systems. “

After these long introductory topics, the book consists of four central parts: “Worlds Lost and Gained”, “Soma and Skylarks”, “Homo Gestalt” and “Disaster and Redemption”. Using Damien Broderick’s notion of “narrative archetypes”, these four sections examine in a chronological way the “pre-human”, “trans-human”, “superhuman” and examples of classic and postmodern SF that come from inspection through a posthumanistic lens benefit. The anatomical texts come from Arthur Conan Doyleyl The lost world and Jack Londons The iron heel in part one, Aldous Huxleys Beautiful new world and EE “Doc” Smith’s Skylark series in part two, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, and Arthur C. Clarkes The city and the stars in part three and finally JG Ballards The crystal world and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The dispossessed. Thankfully, these aren’t the only titles to consider. Other obvious candidates for Connoly’s study, say Theodore Sturgeons More than human, also receive attention, albeit in a limited way. It is beyond the scope of this review to go into the details of these central chapters, but I will offer a few personal highlights. I appreciate Connolly’s historical pursuit of the “two lineages of man” in Part One, which illustrates how attitudes and philosophical beliefs are embedded in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Jules Vernes Extraordinary trips well-founded works by the following authors. Connolly ingeniously writes two different strands of “human” about the Skylark series: “On the one hand there is the fierce individualism and technological autonomy of Seaton – on the other there is the communalism and universalism of the ‘human’ mind through which all ‘Civilized’ beings march to teleological unity under the flag of intellectual and civilizational progress. ”And one way of reading the crystallization phenomenon in Ballard’s famous novel is, he says,“ as a reflection of the alienating qualities of the scientific imagination ”.

In the final part of the book, Connolly distills two fundamental approaches to the non-human in SF: one assimilative, which essentially incorporates the non-human into human culture, the second transformative, which uses the non-human to reinvent our own and convert presets. He reflects that “the ‘man’ thus does not comprise a coherent figure in the history of SF, not even a number of coherent figures, but rather a discursive place on which any number of hopes and fears can be projected” several enumerated categories, such as “the effects of technological advances”. He himself admits that this can be “something of an excuse”; in view of the SF “mega text”. His conclusion, however, is perhaps inevitable, and intellectually, it did not seem so anti-climatic to this reader. Getting there is what stimulates. This is supplemented by a 20-page list of the works cited and a robust index.

Connolly’s writing style generally defies the exhibitionism sultriness sometimes found in works of this type, but it may still be overloaded with references, quotations, and technical terms for academically allergic readers. In addition to researchers and scientific commentators According to human should appeal to anyone with a continuing interest in the novels mentioned above.

I find that when discussing the Foundation series, Connolly limits herself to the original trilogy which feels like a missed opportunity as sequels like Edge of the foundation and Foundation and earth explicitly develop ideas that were not explored in the trilogy and that are entirely in Connolly’s focus. As mentioned earlier, the core of this study is SF until the 1970s. This is beneficial in the sense that these works have had time to amass abundant critical writings for Connolly to study, but it also makes his study less adventurous and risky than it could have been. Finally, Connolly brings the procedure up to date with coverage of personalities like Joanna Russ, William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg Bear, Ted Chiang, and Jeff VanderMeer, but this is inevitably shortened treatment. I wish an entire chapter had been devoted to a more free-spirited review of contemporary work, and I would have liked to see writers like Charles Stross and Stephen Baxter, who made significant contributions to posthumanist tropes and narratives, in the conclusion. The discussion of Clarke’s work, in my opinion, could have been made by referring to Gary Westfahl’s Arthur C. Clarke in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series. Despite what must have been sharp proofreading, I note that Everett F. Bleiler is misnamed Everett F. Bailer.

Just as critical theorists have challenged us to develop a new framework that incorporates postmodern critical ideas into our understanding of identity, so Connolly’s analysis encourages us to rethink the identity of the SF genre by incorporating terms from posthuman cultural theory into ours Allow readings to flow into it. Your sympathy for this approach will likely depend on your particular attitude or lack of attitude towards these ideas. However, it is hard to deny that Connolly’s astute investigation, in contrast to the cyborg from Donna Haraway’s famous Manifesto – a hybrid creature that defies synthesis and unity – illustrates the already merged nature of SF and posthumanism and shows the rewards of a system of imaginative thinking that recognizes their inherent and fruitful integration.


Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Roundtable Editor, is co-author of a book with interviews with Robert Silverberg, Traveler of the worlds, that was a Hugo and Locus Award finalist in 2017. Alvaros more than 30 stories and 100 reviews, essays and interviews are in magazines like. published Clarkesworld, Asimovs, apex, Analogous, Speed ​​of Light, nature, Strange horizons, Under the incessant sky, Galaxy’s Edge, Lackingtonsand anthologies like The best science fiction & fantasy of 2016, Cyber ​​world, Humanity 2.0, and On this way to the end times.


These and similar reviews in the June 2021 issue of place.

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