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Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life
An examination of science fiction narratives and the light they shed on human life, the unknowable future, and the vagaries of unforeseeable change.
With this book, Steven Shaviro offers a thought experiment. He discusses a number of science fiction three novels, one novella, three short stories, and one musical concept album. Shaviro not only analyzes these works in detail but also uses them to ask questions about human, and more generally, biological about its stubborn insistence and yet fragility; about the possibilities and perils of seeking to control it; about the aesthetic and social dimensions of human existence, in relation to the nonhuman; and about the ethical value of human life under conditions of extreme oppression and devastation.
Shaviro pursues these questions through the medium of science fiction because this form of storytelling offers us a unique way of grappling with issues that deeply and unavoidably concern us but that are intractable to rational argumentation or to empirical verification. The future is unavoidably vague and multifarious; it stubbornly resists our efforts to know it in advance, let alone to guide it or circumscribe it. But science fiction takes up this very vagueness and indeterminacy and renders it into the form of a self-consciously fictional narrative. It gives us characters who experience, and respond to, the vagaries of unforeseeable change.
With this book, Steven Shaviro offers a thought experiment. He discusses a number of science fiction three novels, one novella, three short stories, and one musical concept album. Shaviro not only analyzes these works in detail but also uses them to ask questions about human, and more generally, biological about its stubborn insistence and yet fragility; about the possibilities and perils of seeking to control it; about the aesthetic and social dimensions of human existence, in relation to the nonhuman; and about the ethical value of human life under conditions of extreme oppression and devastation.
Shaviro pursues these questions through the medium of science fiction because this form of storytelling offers us a unique way of grappling with issues that deeply and unavoidably concern us but that are intractable to rational argumentation or to empirical verification. The future is unavoidably vague and multifarious; it stubbornly resists our efforts to know it in advance, let alone to guide it or circumscribe it. But science fiction takes up this very vagueness and indeterminacy and renders it into the form of a self-consciously fictional narrative. It gives us characters who experience, and respond to, the vagaries of unforeseeable change.
192 pages, Hardcover
Published August 3, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 24, 2022
As a friend and colleague of Steve Shaviro, I am favorably inclined to pretty much anything he produces. But what delights me in reading this tightly argued set of analyses is the joy he evidently takes in developing arguments through successive chapters that are loosely connected (through the thematics of sci-fi writing) yet each maintaining its integrity as analysis. The only chapter that didn't work well for me was #7, on a musical Afro-futurist opera of sorts. Yet his enthusiasm and clarity even in this genre shine through, based on lucid scholarly expertise in contemporary philosophy, so the chapter hardly disqualifies the overall beauty of the book.
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February 16, 2023Some books, I have at least a rough idea where I first heard about them. For others, I am genuinely at a loss as to how they came to my attention. It makes perfect sense that I'd be interested in a book which devotes 20-odd pages of critical assessment each to stories by Nalo Hopkinson and Simak, and a concept album by clipping., but how did I learn that such a thing existed? It wasn't even something I thought might, like the family biography of the Herveys for which I occasionally search in vain; it was an unknown unknown.
Still, the important thing is that it does exist, and by whatever means I learned that, and now I have read it. Shockingly enough, it turns out it is not in fact a book expressly aligned with my tastes; the other five chapters include one on Chris Beckett's Dark Eden, a book I had and then got rid of unread, which is really not something I do often, though the assessment here suggests I was correct in estimating that, while it might be well done, its story of how things can always get worse and probably will wasn't one I needed to read on this timeline. Also featured are close readings of work by Charles Harness, a name I know but little more; Adam Roberts, whom I have always thought overrated; and two chapters on Gwyneth Jones, albeit one under her YA alias Ann Halam. Which, to be fair, does sound pretty chewy – a neoliberal tech-bro update of Dr Moreau! Wherein being given the free choice between being turned into a weird hybrid fish-person, or a weird hybrid bird-person, if anything feels a little too kind for the sort of options which we as rational individuals are offered in the wonderful world the economists have made. But more of an issue than what Shaviro chooses to include are the things he leaves out or misses when he discusses them. Lovecraft crops up in most of the chapters – but is weirdly absent from the opening one on Harness' The New Reality, whose core concept of ontological terrorism feels like the most natural match for abominations who shatter the human mind by revealing how fundamentally parochial our assumptions have been. And even once HP is on the scene, I wasn't always convinced by Shaviro's reading of him. I think he's probably right about how intertwined the racism and the cosmic horror are, in a way I don't always get from modern readers and writers attempting to forge a new, inclusive Mythos. But the idea that even the gods and monsters are part of the phenomenal world, not the noumenal world it obscures...well, I can accept that for your common or garden deep ones and sand-dwellers, maybe even Cthulhu, but isn't the whole point of an entity like Azathoth or Yog-Sothoth that they're the vast, inaccessible, awful truth behind the veil of everyday reality?
Still: that's an interesting (to me, at least) argument to be had. Whereas elsewhere there are names I would have thought merited a mention, yet are absent. Still on the Roberts essay: the idea that the story is attempting to reconcile Lovecraft's vision of the apparent and eternal worlds with Shelley's is compelling, and I can forgive not mentioning that this is a very Arthur Machen concern because you need to be quite deep into Machen to be familiar with that bit. And the idea that any AI which is created truly free of pre-existing assumptions will simply abandon this reality altogether; well, OK, that was in Iain M Banks, but it was a passing reference in one book so, for all that it's stayed with me, and precedes the text under discussion here, there's no obligation to reference it. But to talk about a work called The Thing Itself which is set largely in Antarctica, and concerns the nature of a genuinely alien intelligence, yet make no mention of John Carpenter, just feels like the wrong sort of weird.
But if I have my issues with some of the directions Shaviro has taken, the bigger point is that he's embarked on this project at all. I simply don't come across that much thoughtful, readable, insightful SF criticism. Even lengthy pieces which initially seem promising often turn out to collapse into the merely academic, or fannish, or ideological (though on this last count it must be admitted that I found Shaviro's prim insistence on [sic] every single damn time an old story refers to the whole of humanity as Man, or even uses the verb in the sense of manning the battle stations, grew somewhat wearing). To find anyone who can talk about Merleau-Ponty without becoming incoherent, or Kant without becoming insufferable, is rare; to find them doing it while also digging into Clifford bloody Simak, who gets insufficient attention full stop, is remarkable. Yeah, you have to pay the Mark Fisher tax, but when don't you nowadays? It is easier to imagine the end of the world, or capitalism, than the end of people quoting that bloody line. And hey, on the upside, no trace of Zizek! I'm glad this book entered my awareness, and I'd definitely be interested in any companion volumes which may follow.
Still, the important thing is that it does exist, and by whatever means I learned that, and now I have read it. Shockingly enough, it turns out it is not in fact a book expressly aligned with my tastes; the other five chapters include one on Chris Beckett's Dark Eden, a book I had and then got rid of unread, which is really not something I do often, though the assessment here suggests I was correct in estimating that, while it might be well done, its story of how things can always get worse and probably will wasn't one I needed to read on this timeline. Also featured are close readings of work by Charles Harness, a name I know but little more; Adam Roberts, whom I have always thought overrated; and two chapters on Gwyneth Jones, albeit one under her YA alias Ann Halam. Which, to be fair, does sound pretty chewy – a neoliberal tech-bro update of Dr Moreau! Wherein being given the free choice between being turned into a weird hybrid fish-person, or a weird hybrid bird-person, if anything feels a little too kind for the sort of options which we as rational individuals are offered in the wonderful world the economists have made. But more of an issue than what Shaviro chooses to include are the things he leaves out or misses when he discusses them. Lovecraft crops up in most of the chapters – but is weirdly absent from the opening one on Harness' The New Reality, whose core concept of ontological terrorism feels like the most natural match for abominations who shatter the human mind by revealing how fundamentally parochial our assumptions have been. And even once HP is on the scene, I wasn't always convinced by Shaviro's reading of him. I think he's probably right about how intertwined the racism and the cosmic horror are, in a way I don't always get from modern readers and writers attempting to forge a new, inclusive Mythos. But the idea that even the gods and monsters are part of the phenomenal world, not the noumenal world it obscures...well, I can accept that for your common or garden deep ones and sand-dwellers, maybe even Cthulhu, but isn't the whole point of an entity like Azathoth or Yog-Sothoth that they're the vast, inaccessible, awful truth behind the veil of everyday reality?
Still: that's an interesting (to me, at least) argument to be had. Whereas elsewhere there are names I would have thought merited a mention, yet are absent. Still on the Roberts essay: the idea that the story is attempting to reconcile Lovecraft's vision of the apparent and eternal worlds with Shelley's is compelling, and I can forgive not mentioning that this is a very Arthur Machen concern because you need to be quite deep into Machen to be familiar with that bit. And the idea that any AI which is created truly free of pre-existing assumptions will simply abandon this reality altogether; well, OK, that was in Iain M Banks, but it was a passing reference in one book so, for all that it's stayed with me, and precedes the text under discussion here, there's no obligation to reference it. But to talk about a work called The Thing Itself which is set largely in Antarctica, and concerns the nature of a genuinely alien intelligence, yet make no mention of John Carpenter, just feels like the wrong sort of weird.
But if I have my issues with some of the directions Shaviro has taken, the bigger point is that he's embarked on this project at all. I simply don't come across that much thoughtful, readable, insightful SF criticism. Even lengthy pieces which initially seem promising often turn out to collapse into the merely academic, or fannish, or ideological (though on this last count it must be admitted that I found Shaviro's prim insistence on [sic] every single damn time an old story refers to the whole of humanity as Man, or even uses the verb in the sense of manning the battle stations, grew somewhat wearing). To find anyone who can talk about Merleau-Ponty without becoming incoherent, or Kant without becoming insufferable, is rare; to find them doing it while also digging into Clifford bloody Simak, who gets insufficient attention full stop, is remarkable. Yeah, you have to pay the Mark Fisher tax, but when don't you nowadays? It is easier to imagine the end of the world, or capitalism, than the end of people quoting that bloody line. And hey, on the upside, no trace of Zizek! I'm glad this book entered my awareness, and I'd definitely be interested in any companion volumes which may follow.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews