Science Fiction (The New Critical Idiom)

Rating:
Summary: Mediocre at best
Review: Many of the arguments upon which Adam Roberts bases his ideas are specious and undeveloped. More often than not, they are also tenuous, tedious and even ridiculous.

Even as he is conceited enough to describe other author's work as 'clumsy' or 'bathos', with an 'over written excess of bad impressionistic poetry', his own work fails to reach the same heights of which he is so readily critical. Many of his his references are to late 20th century film and novels from the 1990s -a period of science fiction which, although popular, is hardly formulative nor representative of the genre. His criticism is trite and silly. The film 'Lost in Space' he argues, has a hidden 'racial' agenda. The difference of the alien world presented in this film has been reduced to a racial stereotype where the black man represents evil and the 'Aryan family unit' is a force for good. It is quite tiresome. He has also unaware, it seems, that this film is garbage and no one really cares what it says about anything.

Science fiction is predicated on a longing for past, he declares. According to Roberts it is less about 'prediction' than it is 'nostalgia'. There is something to be said for this angle. Roberts, however, doesn't say it. He refers rather to re-runs of 'Star Trek', which by their obviously crude effects, and 'unmistakably quaint 60s fashion...constantly remind us that we are looking backwards, not forwards'. This puerile arguement doesn't even stop to consider than at its time of production it was way 'out there' in an imagined future.

The text is filled with equally uniformed and uninformative 'insights'. Roberts tries to define the genre early in this book. It is indicative of the problems to come later that he fails to manage even this.

Roberts is uniformly pretentious. One particularly revealing moment is when he pauses, using brackets, to deride the literary quality of Frank Herbert's 'Dune'. Referring to Herbert's word choice, '"Cavort" is an especially ugly touch', he snottily remarks. His cliched criticism is present here too. 'Dune', he contends, is notable for its racial, sexual and physical prejudice and its 'crude' and 'lumpish' battle bewteen good and evil. The sand-worms are 'phallic symbols' indicative of the novel's concern with 'power and the institutions of masculinity'. Blah, blah, blah...Post-Modern buzz words that stupid people use to sound intelligent. They struck me, too, as remarkably dated.

It is always interesting to look at the history of the genre. Roberts' chapter on this is no exception. Unfortunately its power is in its absurdity. According to Roberts, the roots of Science Fiction can be found in Milton's 'Paradise Lost'. Satan, he states, 'is the original bug-eyed monster'. This is really just silly. His comments on Well's 'War of the Worlds' are equally uninspired. His ideas reek of undergraduate misappropriation.

References to TV and film seem to dominate and one is left with the impression, ultimately, that Roberts' knowledge and experience with the genre is limited to his exposure to pulp and the television screen.

The Amazon editorial suggests it is a good work for undergrads. Perhaps so...it seems written by one. just be prepared to suspend belief, because the ideas here are often no less 'imaginative', albeit less inspired, than the genre of Sci-Fi itself.