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eBook details
- Title: An Edward Said for SF Criticism? John Rieder. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Book Review)
- Author : Extrapolation
- Release Date : January 22, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 192 KB
Description
An Edward Said for SF Criticism? John Rieder. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. 183 + xii pp. $70.00 hdbk / $24.95 pbk. That there are important filiations between colonialism and the origins of science fiction has often been at least vaguely recognized. Indeed, it would be hard for any moderately well-informed reader not to recognize the connection, at least to some degree. For the explosion of European travel literature between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries is quite obviously a by-product of the contemporaneous project of global exploration whose raison d'etre was the colonizing of non-European lands by the major maritime powers of Europe. And this travel literature, especially in its fantastic variant (of which Swift's Gulliver's Travels [1726] is only the best known among a great many other instances), is one of the clearest predecessors of sf. Moreover, and as John Rieder, in the volume under review, himself notes, the period of most intense imperialist penetration of the non-European world--the later nineteenth century--is also the period that, as most (though not all) sf scholars agree, marks the emergence of science fiction as a clearly distinct and recognizable genre. (I continue to hold, with Brian Aldiss and many others, that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein [1818] has the best claim to be the first genuinely science-fictional text. But it remains a relatively isolated, though not unique, example until about half a century after its initial publication.) As Rieder further points out: "Science fiction comes into visibility first in those countries most heavily involved in imperialist projects--France and England--and then gains popularity in the United States, Germany, and Russia as those countries also enter into more and more serious imperial competition" (3).
 "An Edward Said for SF Criticism? John Rieder. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Book Review)" by Extrapolation # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}