Canavan, Gerry

English

epublications@Marquette

Marquette Universitye-Publications@MarquetteEnglish Faculty Research and Publications English, Department of7-1-2013Keen, Sober, and Smart: Review of Eric Otto'sGreen Speculations: Science Fiction and TransformativeEnvironmentalismGerry CanavanMarquette University, gerard.canavan@marquette.eduPublished version. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 40, No. 2 ( July 2013): 387-389. DOI. © 2013 DePauwUniversity. Used with permission.387BOOKS IN REVIEWfantastical worlds than could be conveyed by sparklers attached to the backsideof toy rocket ships” (xxi). Where Jenkins is right in asserting the continued influence of 1950stelevision on popular culture, I would contest that digital effects technology isnecessarily superior to older techniques in representing the future. While sciencefiction is often considered a visual genre, the power it has to make us dream ofa brighter future lies in the ideas, not the images—the fact that these spacerangers and explorers were out there among the stars was the powerful catalystfor childhood aspirations, not the sparkling toy rockets. An Epilogue,“Confessions of a Commando Cody Addict (or, How the Flying Suit ChangedMy Life)” by Gary Hughes, offers a fan perspective on why Radar Men fromthe Moon (1952) attracted him as a child and still holds him in thrall as an adult.Making videos that honor his childhood hero, Commando Cody, and favoritesf series, is a typical fan practice and offers a modern take on how these seriesstill motivate audiences to explore their own creativity and express their passionfor television.From nostalgic views of space adventure to the cultural importance of 1950ssf TV series, Miller and Van Riper’s anthology is an informative read and amuch-needed work on an often-overlooked period in television history.Understanding the cultural impact of these series—and the symbols of heroismand Americana contained within them—is an important step in learning why wecare at all about sf media and the affective relationship we share with the genre.Yet such a wide-ranging examination of the subject (14 chapters) oftenconcentrates too much on the general and not enough on the particular. Whilethe volume suggests that fans are central to its overall thesis, examples of fanpractices and productivity rarely appear. This collection talks about audiencesand the consumption of “Rocketman” TV series but lacks an appreciation offandom and the fan culture surrounding these kinds of television texts. I agreewith Jenkins’s closing remark in his Foreword, “We still have much to learnfrom the era of the Rocketman” (xxii), and this collection provides the readerwith a wonderful education. With a little more work, however, on thecontemporary fan and how “Rocketman” TV series inform sf fandom and fanculture today (in the vein of Hughes’s Epilogue), it could have taught us somuch more.—Lincoln Geraghty, University of PortsmouthKeen, Sober, and Smart. Eric C. Otto. Green Speculations: Science Fictionand Transformative Environmentalism. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2012. x +152 pp. $44.95 hc.“If you go home, turn on the laptop, the TV,” Kim Stanley Robinson toldthe Guardian in 2009, “almost anything could be reported. The world hasbecome a science fiction novel, everything’s changing so quickly. Sciencefiction turns out to be the realism of our time, which is very satisfying.” Formany people I suspect that satisfying registers a very specific brand ofsatisfaction, something like the sense of “interesting” in that famous Chinesecurse—or the bitter joy Cassandra takes, perhaps, in having at least been rightabout everything all along. From catastrophic oil spills to flooded cities toThis content downloaded from 134.48.29.181 on Wed, 2 Oct 2013 14:45:59 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions388 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 40 (2013)apocalyptic winter superstorms, the world seems every day to become more andmore like some dire sf film of the 1960s or 1970s, a cautionary tale about all thehorrible things that will happen to us if we fail to change our ways in time.In his book Green Speculations: Science Fiction and TransformativeEnvironmentalism, Eric C. Otto taps into this sense that the immediacy andstrangeness of real-life environmental crisis lends new urgency to the writingand study of environmental sf. Despite a still-lingering reputation forunseriouness, Otto argues, sf can successfully intervene in wider discoursesaround the environment because it not only “reflects” and “sometimesprefigures” our new reality of planetary ecological threat, but “in its finestmoments theorizes transformative environmentalism and its assorted targets ofcriticism” (4-5). Otto further argues that the cognitive work required to read andwrite sf—estrangement, extrapolation, and world-building—mirrors the mentallabor necessary for both documentary environmental writing and ecologicallyinfused cultural critique. Via Patrick Murphy’s claim that “extrapolationemphasizes that the present and the future are interconnected,” (qtd. 11), Otto’sbook shows how, in an age of ecological crisis, the border separating “realist”environmental writing from sf becomes ever more porous.The “transformative environmentalism” of Otto’s title refers to that subgenreof radical, subversive, politically leftist ecological writing that is not content toleave science in the laboratory but seeks actively to alter the social conditionsof the material world and our ingrained mental habits. The patron saint oftransformative environmentalism is Rachel Carson, whose work metonymicallystands in on page one of Green Speculations for the entire canon—and who,famously, began her own classic work, Silent Spring (1962), not with facts orfigures but with a science-fictional “Fable for Tomorrow.” The writers Ottotakes up in Green Speculations typically exhibit a similar desire to transform theconditions of the world through the interplay of fact and fancy, choosing agenerally fictional register for their work instead of Carson’s generallynonfictional one. Accordingly, Green Speculations spends quite a bit of timeinvestigating the familiar ground of utopia and dystopia that has been soconstitutive of sf studies since the 1970s. Among Otto’s many keen observationshere is his recognition of the disturbing character of so much ecotopian fantasy:its willingness to take up right-wing framings of overpopulation, excess, waste,and austerity in the name of environmental rationality and desperate bids to savethe future. In environmental discourse, he suggests, dystopia turns out to be thefar richer and far more trustworthy category of the imagination, as dystopia (asexemplified by the ecological disaster novels of John Brunner) can articulateboth the coming apocalyptic disasters we are bringing down upon our heads andthe traumatized, anti-utopian potential for “misanthropic aggression” of so muchecological activism. Dystopia, not utopia, may plot the safer course betweenScylla and Charybdis.A similarly dialectical inversion takes place around the sense of deep ecologyand embeddedness-in-the-world that characterizes so much environmental sf.Embeddedness, Otto argues, is in many ways the crucial antidote to capitalism’srefusal to acknowledge the ultimate necessity of nature—and yet excess fidelityThis content downloaded from 134.48.29.181 on Wed, 2 Oct 2013 14:45:59 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions389BOOKS IN REVIEWto embeddedness risks generating more dystopian misanthropy, the suspicionthat the world might just be better off without us altogether. Reading thistheoretical conundrum through the Fremen of Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965),Otto finds that the both/and of Arrakis offers a correction to deep ecology thatallows it to break free of this paralyzing internal contradiction. “Perhaps toacknowledge and live today our ecological embeddedness is to acknowledge andlive Dune’s implicit, more sobering lesson: we are a part of the bee and theGMO crop, the water cycle and the faucet, the forest and the lumber, the oceanand the oil” (43). Human beings exist precariously between radically nonhumannature and radically unnatural technological artifice—and perhaps better thanany other literary genre, sf has at hand the terms and tools necessary forthinking about how to live in this strange gap.Chapter four, on ecosocialism, takes up most directly the politicalcommitment to anticapitalism that the earlier discussions in the book hadgenerally assumed implicitly, with savvy readings of Fredrick Pohl and C.M.Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants (1953), Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word forWorld Is Forest (1972), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s MARS TRILOGY (1993-96).Here Green Speculations is at its most radical—and indeed at its mosttransformative—seeking to find in science fiction some strategy for endingcapitalism and thereby saving the world (a tall order!). And here the dialecticalinversion of the priority of utopia and dystopia discussed above inverts a secondtime; Otto desires in the end some positive model for what ecotopia might looklike after all. He finds it in Robinson’s MARS TRILOGY, particularly in the books’articulation of an alternative, ecologically rational economics and its celebrationof rational, democratic deliberation as a workable means to get there. In thisregard Green Speculations frames its final intervention in “transformativeecology” in humanistic terms that turn out, unexpectedly, to be quitetraditionally liberal. The fantastic speculations and rigorous scientificextrapolations of sf, the book ultimately argues, can heighten our appreciationof environmental crisis in order to motivate rational action in the present onbehalf of the future; in essence, sf can make us better people, better citizens.Of course, we should not go too far overboard with this: “I do not suppose,”Otto concedes, “that the subgenre itself will save the world.” Not in itself. Butwhat environmental sf can do, Green Speculations insists, is to contribute to thegrowing canon of fictional and nonfictional environmental writing that is alreadygenerating “tools for thinking and building a new way forward,” and to helpmobilize a collective desire for needed change in the face of neoliberalcapitalism’s violent instinct for self-preservation at any cost (126). Sober andsmart, Green Speculations nonetheless sounds an alarm. In a world lookingmore and more like some dark, depressing science fiction, and in a publicsphere casting about for ways to somehow process this terrifying new reality,our expertise as critics is required.—Gerry Canavan, Marquette UniversityWhimsical Avant-Garde Oddball. Paul Scheerbart. Lesabéndio. Trans.Christina Svendsen. Cambridge, MA: Wakefield, 2012. xv +257 pp. $15.95pbk.This content downloaded from 134.48.29.181 on Wed, 2 Oct 2013 14:45:59 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Keen, Sober, and Smart: Review of Eric Otto\u27s \u3cem\u3eGreen Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism\u3c/em\u3e

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Keen, Sober, and Smart: Review of Eric Otto\u27s \u3cem\u3eGreen Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism\u3c/em\u3e

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