Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System. John Rieder

      

      SCIENCE

      FICTION

      AND THE

      MASS

      CULTURAL

      GENRE

      SYSTEM

      SCIENCE

      FICTION

      AND THE

      MASS

      CULTURAL

      GENRE

      SYSTEM

      JOHN RIEDER

      WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS • MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT

      Wesleyan University Press

      Middletown CT 06459

       www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

      © 2017 John Rieder

      All rights reserved

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      Designed by April Leidig

      Typeset in Garamond by Copperline Book Services

      An earlier version of chapter 1 in this book appeared as an essay by John Rieder, “On Defining Science Fiction, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History,” Science Fiction Studies 37, no. 2 (July 2010).

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request

      5 4 3 2 1

      Cover illustration: Elizabeth LaPensée, “Growth” (2013).

      CONTENTS

       Acknowledgments vii

       INTRODUCTION

       Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System 1

       1

       On Defining Science Fiction, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History 13

       2

       The Mass Cultural Genre System 33

       3

       Genealogies of SF 65

       4

       Philip K. Dick’s Mass Cultural Epistemology 93

       5

       Communities of Interpretation (1): Two Hollywood Films and the Tiptree Award Anthologies 113

       6

       Communities of Interpretation (2): Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism 139

       CONCLUSION

       Periodizing SF 161

       Notes 171

       Works Cited 183

       Index 197

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      I want to thank those generous colleagues who read drafts of sections of this book and made helpful suggestions to me about revision: Cristina Bacchilega, Carl Freedman, Rob Latham, Roger Luckhurst, and Sherryl Vint. Earlier versions of various sections of what ended up being the introduction and the second, fifth, and sixth chapters were presented at the annual Orlando meetings of the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016; at the annual conferences of the Science Fiction Research Association in Lublin, Poland, in 2011 and Madison, Wisconsin, in 2014; at Weird Council: An International Conference on the Writing of China Miéville at the University of London in 2012; and at the Historical Materialism Conference at University of London in 2012. Without risking the inevitable omissions that would come with an attempt to list everyone by name, I want to thank all those who participated in and responded to these sessions. Special thanks to Grace Dillon for introducing me to Helen Haig-Brown’s The Cave and for her helpful response to my reading of it. And thanks to Art Evans for last-minute long-distance help on bibliography.

      The students in my graduate seminars on Science Fiction and Genre Theory at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in spring 2011 and fall 2015 sessions helped me think through my positions on genre theory and widened my knowledge of the range and variety of contemporary SF practices. I want to thank especially my dissertation advisee Ida Yoshinaga for many stimulating conversations about contemporary genre production and reception.

      The research on early periodical fiction that I have incorporated into chapter 3 was carried out at the Maison d’Ailleurs in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, and at the British Library. It is a pleasure to express my gratitude to all those at the Maison d’Ailleurs for their generosity and helpfulness, and to acknowledge my debt to that magnificent and accessible resource, the British Library.

      Thanks to Science Fiction Studies for permission to reuse, with slight revisions, my essay “On Defining Science Fiction, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History” (vol. 37, no. 2, July 2010) as chapter 1. Thank you also to the Dille Family Trust for generously allowing me to use the copyrighted image of the Buck Rogers comic strip reproduced in chapter 3. Finally a major thank you to Elizabeth LaPensée for permission to use her beautiful image, Growth, on the book cover.

      This book is lovingly dedicated to my lifelong partner, Cristina Bacchilega.

      SCIENCE

      FICTION

      AND THE

      MASS

      CULTURAL

      GENRE

      SYSTEM

      INTRODUCTION

      Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System

      The basic premise of this study is that science fiction and the other genres usually associated with so-called genre fiction, such as the detective story, the modern romance, the western, horror, and fantasy, collectively compose a system of genres distinct from the preexisting classical and academic genre system that includes the epic, tragedy, comedy, satire, romance, the lyric, and so on; and that this more recently formed genre system is an important historical phenomenon worthy of, and in need of, further study. Because this newer genre system can be firmly associated with large-scale