What goes around

[faustus]

The story so far: once upon a time sf was a despised genre loved by boys never read by girls, and it was looked down by on everybody with good taste. We would say, Canticle for Leibowitz isn't crap, and then they would say, no, but then it isn't sf. And we would say, what about Gulliver and Thomas More and Lucian of Samosa, lo even unto Plato's Republic and we saw that it was sf and that it was good. Because if we read it, it must be sf and it must be good.

Then Aldiss came unto us and spoke, and said, that's a bit silly really, given they didn't have the idea of science then, but how about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. And we looked and it was good and it was sf, although we didn't like the Branagh movie as much as the James Whale one and some of us had read the book.

And time came and time went, and Gary Westfahl spoke unto us and told us that fans could leave their books to academic libraries and that he was ever so humble, and that Shelley didn't know what she was doing but Gernsback did even if it was pants.

And we looked at sf and we saw it started in 1926 and we saw it was good.

And so to Gresham College, or rather the Royal College of Surgeons, to a half day symposium on Sf as a literary genre - although no one defined genre or literary.

Neal Stephenson was the keynote - after an after dinner style intro with a few odd statements. I missed part of his speech, which seemed fair enough stuff, as I had a sudden attack of tb and had to steal brisingamen's water to choke to death with. The sum of it was the bifurcated career - some actors like Weaving and Weaver can act smart - and we're all geeks now. He closed with some kind of sense of relief that the post-structuralists never got hold of sf - so I must have blinked throughout the careers of Gibson as topic and Delany as writer.

Andy Sawyer talked about the colesence of sf as a genre under Gernsback, with the proviso that it was done earlier but not in English, and done earlier but not in a magazine, and it was done in a magazine earlier but only as a one-off. As always the First turns out to be the third or fourth.

John Clute finished the first session with a talk on horror, and I fear I lost the thread, in part because he was apparently trying to do battle with working out if he had the right draft, a conversation that seemed to be going on in the room and, as always, with the microphone. I think he needs a lapel mic as desk ones are either hit or rebound from the thumped lectern.

Dr Martin Willis took up the second half, and well, treated us to manifest bollocks. Sf studies has neglected the nineteenth century. I have this rather strong feel that early SFS is full of much of this stuff - Art Evans is editing much now - and indeed early SFS endlessly reviewed editions of nineteenth century sf. Darko Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science Fiction hardly get beyond 1900, and there's a book by him on Victorian sf, a good chunk of both Aldiss volumes, Seed's Anticipations, Alkon's Origins of Futuristic Fiction and SF before 1900, Stableford's Scientific Romance in Britain... In fact, as I pored through journals looking for sf crit back in 1990 I really craved some post-1926 stuff. Has Westfahl's championing of 1926 become so canonical?

(The Routledge Companion to SF will make a case for the long history argument, although I still feel as a genre 1926 works as Year Zero.)

Willis also had some odd views of what science is or how it is viewed, and I wondered how Latour and Kuhn would see it. I also wondered where in Frankenstein we are told the creature is animated with electricity' nowhere is my guess. I suspect he also misrepresented fjm's views.

My old colleague Roger Luckhurst finished the day with the twentieth century, and a distinction of modernity, modernism and modernising, a division I've heard him work through for nearly twenty years now. He was interesting on the James/Wells battles, and the snobbery of the modernist, and the attack on mass culture, but it was the end of a hot afternoon, and he needed to feed into a plenary.

I hope I noticed when I first saw the agenda but what was painfully clear was the papers were by white men. There is no woman anywhere in the world who can speak to sf as a literary genre. Of course, if you turn to the fourteen scholars in the directory on the SF-Hub, only two of them are female. Neither of them is fjm. Someone did raise this as a question - and of course it's Gresham College's screw up not the evidentally embarrassed panelists. Clute made some half-hearted attempt to say the history of sf can be told through texts by women, but I don't really think anyone really has. fjm gave us some figures to question the demographics of the audience. Some one asked what would get men to watch female superheroes; I feel the answer is too obvious to spell out.

I think the interesting drowned out the sound of my chin dropping, but next time I'd like to see Justina Robson as keynote, with fjm, Lucie Armit, brisingamen , Jenny Wolmark, Michelle Reid and Joan Gordon talking. They don't especially even need to talk about feminist sf. But it feel as if a pendulum had swung.

Thanks and apologies to brisingamen for the bottle (you know you mustn't cough but it makes it worse), apologies to anyone trampled on my way out (and I panicked because there were no visible doors in the room) and thanks to James for meeting for coffee before and finding us a pub afterwards. That's seventeen years of this now, give or take a summer. Bloody hell, we're old farts.

Comments

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

"Shelley didn't know what she was doing but Gernsback did even if it was pants."

[is dead of indignation]

[fjm.livejournal.com]

The argument actually made by Westfahl, and with which I agree, is about sf as community, "A genre in itself, for itself".

This was utterly mangled by the two speakers who referred to it.

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

you 'splain lter when I'm sober.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

I'm just going to link to this. It sums up what I was muttering to swisstone who had the misfortune to be sitting next to me.

Willis had mentioned he was quoting me and from the tenor of his argument (crap though it was) I was expecting either a bit from the intro to the Cambridge Companion (the Egan bit) or simply pointing out that we had two chapters on science in the book. Instead, it turns out he quoted from a piece so old that I had no memory of writing it. I'd need to check (because he hadn't footnoted his citations), but Andy Sawyer and I both think it was from the article in _Speaking Science Science Fiction_ which was written in *1997*. I was still a grad student for fuck's sake! And that stuff about sf being written by historians? It makes utter sense in the context of the book which is about contestations for authority, but it just sounded arrogant when extracted. Oh, and it also had no relevance to his argument, but then not a lot of his evidence did.

So: which one of us is going to tell him he knows squat about 19th century sf and is attending the wrong conferences?

[brisingamen.livejournal.com]

So: which one of us is going to tell him he knows squat about 19th century sf and is attending the wrong conferences?

For that matter, who is going to tell him he's rehashing an undergraduate course I did at UKC 20 years ago? And not rehashing it very constructively either. I was really quite embarrassed for him.

I nearly died when he drew forth his great European example of ... ta-dah, E.T.A. Hoffmann. The great undiscovered 18/19th century writer of sf-like material. Anyone who recalls me from twenty years ago, when I first started reading Hoffmann, as a result of a different course at UKC, on The Fantastic, will doubtless recall me going round saying 'this is sf, you should read it'.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if she's coined a label for it, but it feels like Oursin's translation of "discovered" which means something like "in the archives if you do about two minute's research and everyone knows about it already."

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

fjm, 'Science Fiction in the Academies of History and Literature; or, History and the Use of Science Fiction', in Gary Westfahl & George Slusser (eds.), Science Fiction, Canonization, marginalization and the Academy (Conneticut: Greenwood Press, 2002).

There were copies of Willis' text (and Connell's introduction) lying around in the reception, so I grabbed them.

[peake.livejournal.com]

Oh lord, that Westfahl/Slusser volume is a dreadful thing to quote from without supporting evidence from elsewhere. The essays were several years old before the book finally saw print, and a lot of their arguments had been superseded. Anyone relying on that as a source really isn't keeping up with contemporary criticism.

[(Anonymous)]

I've seen one review of his book by a historian that suggests that his grasp of the history of science is wobbly. Still, he was *enthusiastic*.
-James Kneale

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Another reason I didn't respond was it would have felt like Bill Sykes and a puppy. I don't know much (although have edited stuff) about history of science, epistemology of science etc but I know there is a raft of Latour, Kuhn, and, well some of the following (ah to have a chapter on Science Studies to hand...):

Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bloor, D. (1991) Knowledge and Social Imagery, 2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Castells, M. (2000a) End of Millennium, 2nd edn, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

—— (2000b) The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd edn, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

—— (2004) The Power of Identity, 2nd edn, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Daston, L. (1999) “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective”, in M. Biagioli (ed.) The Science Studies Reader, New York: Routledge.

Donawerth, J. (1997) Frankenstein’s Daughters: women writing science fiction, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Fox–Keller, E. (1985) Reflections on Gender and Science, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Gieryn, T.F. (1999) Cultural Boundaries of Science: Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Hagstrom, W. (1965) The Scientific Community, New York: Basic Books.

Haraway, D.J. (1989) Primate Visions: gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science, New York: Routledge.

—— (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouseTM: feminism and technoscience, London and New York: Routledge.

Harding, S. (1986) The Science Question in Feminism, New York: Routledge.

Hess, D.J. (1993) Science in the New Age, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.

Hughes, T. (1983) Networks of Power: electrification of Western society 1880–1930, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kittler, F.A. (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 1986, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Knorr–Cetina, K. (1999) Epistemic Cultures: how the sciences make knowledge, Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press.

Kuhn, T. (1962) The Structures of Scientific Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter, Brighton: Harvester.

—— (1999a) “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World”, in M. Biagioli (ed.) The Science Studies Reader, New York: Routledge.

—— (1999b) Pandora’s Hope: essays on the reality of science studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Longino, H. (2001) The Fate of Knowledge, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Luckhurst, R. (2006) “Introduction”, Science Fiction Studies, 33(1): 1–3.

Merrick, H. (2007) “Modest Witnesses?: feminist stories of science in fiction and theory”, in M. Grebowicz (ed.) SciFi in the Mind’s Eye: reading science through science fiction, Chicago: Open Court.

Merton, R. (1973) The Sociology of Science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Penley, C. (1997) NASA/Trek: popular science and sex in America, New York: Verso.

Shapin, S. and Schaffer, S. (1989) Leviathan and the Air–Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the experimental life, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Stengers, I. (1997) Power and Invention: situating science, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Traweek, S.J. (1988) Beamtimes and Lifetimes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[brisingamen.livejournal.com]

enthusiastic

Hmm, and what a multitude of sins that covers.

Though I am quite sure his undergraduates adore him. And, to be fair, I think if I were to encounter him as a young and naive undergraduate, I could be enthused, which is not a bad thing. But I am an old and cynical undergraduate ...

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I was going to raise my hand, but I wasn't sure my voice, nose or lungs were up to it. I believe my notes are "manifest bollocks" and "he's too young to have read the criticism on the nineteenth century."

I always see the literature and science people as being there to do the nineteenth century so we don't have to...

[brisingamen.livejournal.com]

I always see the literature and science people as being there to do the nineteenth century so we don't have to...

Slightly unfair, I think, though when it's handled like that, one does feel that a bit of chicken wire and some fence supports to keep them at bay is not a bad idea.

Then again, how was he to know that a significant part of his audience would be so knowledgeable as to spot that he was reinventing the wheel? So careless of us to have already done the reading.

ps

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Clute was more prepared for the question re female involvement than the rest of the panel because we'd already discussed it.

Re: ps

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Of course this is Gresham's fault not the panelists (the sexism of the SF Hub is less forgivable)

[brisingamen.livejournal.com]

I also wondered where in Frankenstein we are told the creature is animated with electricity' nowhere is my guess.

Now it's funny you should mention that ... I've read Frankenstein a fair few times in the last few years and I rather thought the point was that so far as I can recall Shelley doesn't mention how the Creature was animated, not in the novel. It is widely assumed that the Creature must have been animated with electricity because of Shelley's comments elsewhere on reading about Galvani's experiments and discussing them.

The actual animation with electricity comes from the films, and I'd hazard a guess that the films derived the imagery in turn from some of the melodramas. My sense is that the visual imagery derived from the melodramas has been surprisingly consistently maintained over the years, even to the referencing of the burning windmill in Van Helsing (which still, for my money, has the best summary of all the Gothic/fantastic/horror film tropes; shame the rest of the film, bar Richard Roxburgh, was so bloody awful).

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly sure the Universal films drew on the various nineteenth century play adaptations - Frayling probably deals with this in his Birth of Horror. Galvanism is mentioned, but from memory in a preface, though whether in 1818 version (a preface written by Percy?) or the 1830 I don't recall.

[brisingamen.livejournal.com]

Thanks and apologies to [info]brisingamen for the bottle (you know you mustn't cough but it makes it worse), apologies to anyone trampled on my way out

Not at all; I have been in that position myself so many times in the last few years, which is why I always carry a bottle of water now, for just such emergencies. And usually, now, cough sweets, as I find the action of sucking one is very therapeutic and calming, as I think the sense of rising panic is what makes it worse.

and thanks to James for meeting for coffee before and finding us a pub afterwards.

Was that James from the Academic Network of yore? I knew he looked familiar but I really couldn't place him.

[(Anonymous)]

Hello, yes, that's me. Or it is if the same network... sorry i wasn't very talkative.

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

I don't know enough about the history of the genre to comment, but it would be fascinating to see its development traced through women's writing. Anyone up to working on it? :D

I confess I've never been able to finish "Frankenstein". Ho hum. Those Romantics went way over the top!

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I don't think Larbalestier's book quite does this but Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction is a start. I think you could write a history stressing Lee Hawkins Garby, Leigh Brackett, Leslie Stone, CL Moore, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Tiptree, Le Guin, Russ, Piercy, Cadigan, Jones, Robson, and a hundred other names.

[brisingamen.livejournal.com]

Try the 1818 version of Frankenstein if you've never read it.It's rip-roaring stuff compared to the sobriety of the 1830 version.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I was vaguely tempted to go, but Thursday is a difficult day to schedule to take time off work, and seeing that all the speakers were white males, was not sufficiently enthused to make the effort.

There is also whatsisname (Stone?) on pre 1914 utopian/dystopian/future invasion fiction - once heard him speak and got myself into an interminable and embarrassing rant about gender in the discussion. It was oh so clear that he thought that he was speaking in the confidence that it was an audience in which no-one knew anything at all about the subject.

Copies of (e.g.) Mrs Corbett's New Amazonia and Lady Florence Dixie's Gloriana are probably sufficiently rare that they should not be employed for pelting purposes.

[brisingamen.livejournal.com]

It was oh so clear that he thought that he was speaking in the confidence that it was an audience in which no-one knew anything at all about the subject.

One had more than a vague passing sense of that about one contributor yesterday.

[ohilya.livejournal.com]

Am getting this distinct feeling that Neal Stephenson has started taking himself Very Seriously. Or maybe it's just the way he presents himself lately.