How Great Science Fiction Works by Gary K. Wolfe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Lively Historical Overview of SF Yes, as other reviewers have noted, How Great Science Fiction Works (2016) is an inaccurate title, as Professor Gary K. Wolfe really is giving an entertaining survey of the history and nature of sf rather than telling how great sf works. He does sometimes say why less than stellar sf is inferior, as when he criticizes poor plotting or cardboard characters or absurd premises or cheap tricks (I felt sorry for Hugo Gernsback’s early 20th-century novel Ralph 124C41+, which I think is much better than scholars like Wolfe always describe it), so we may infer that great sf avoids such things. But really his emphasis is on telling an interested reader what sf is, where it comes from, how it has changed, and so on, surveying the genre and its major sub-genres, works, authors, and “icons,” as Wolfe calls spaceships, robots, aliens, and artifacts etc. that accrue meaning and appear in multiple works. This is one of the Great Courses series of lectures by professors, Wolfe giving twenty-four roughly half-hour lectures devoted to topics like the Birth of Science fiction, Science Fiction Treatments of History, Utopian Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares, the Golden Age of Science Fiction, the Spaceship, the Robot, the Planet, the Wasteland, Invasions, Religion, the Alien Other, Environmentalism, Gender, Cyberpunk, the New Space Opera, Urban Landscapes, and Science Fiction in the 21st Century. Wolfe is informative and wide-ranging, though probably about 95% of his examples are anglophone SF. I probably learned most from the chapters dealing with more recent sf near the end of his lectures, because about twenty-thirty years ago, I read some histories of the genre, and I have not kept up so much with developments since 2000. Thus, I probably learned more from his late lectures like the ones on Cyberpunk and the 1980s, the 1990s: the New Space Opera, and Science Fiction in the 21st Century (in which he introduces Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, and Lavie Tidhar), than from his other lectures, but it was still good to brush up my partially forgotten awareness of many classic works by the likes of Wells, Heinlein, and Le Guin. He also covers sf works by mainstream authors like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. And neat background details here and there make all the lectures worth listening to even for people quite familiar with the SF genre and its history, like Walter M. Miller’s experience in WWII bombing an Italian monastery inspiring his writing of A Canticle for Leibowitz. And Wolfe helpfully sums up sf trends and motifs in cogent and convincing ways, as when he refers to sf as a family and the classic space opera subgenre as its eccentric and embarrassing old uncle who finally surprises us with something interesting to say, or as when he concludes that “The [sf] artifact embodies three distinct historical systems: the system surrounding its manufacture—who made it and why; the system of its own history—how it got from its point of origin to its point of discovery; and the system of the culture that discovers it—what it means to us.” Or as when he sets forth the basic template of post-apocalypse stories: 1) The first portents of the catastrophe arrive, or the protagonist gradually becomes aware of the extent of it. 2) The protagonist undertakes a journey through the wasteland left behind by the disaster, perhaps finding a few other survivors. 3) The few survivors and, perhaps, their first children establish a kind of stable community. 4) The community is threatened by the reemergence of the wilderness and the problems of establishing a stable home. 5) An antagonist or warlord emerges who challenges the community, leading to a contest over which values will prevail in the new society. Wolfe is not a professional audiobook reader, and I never got used to his habit while lecturing of pausing when no pause is called for by punctuation, rhythm, or emphasis: e.g., “That gave the field [pause] its first [pause] clearly defined markers for writers and readers.” He also often says the wrong word or fuses the present word with the one he’s about to say next and then quickly corrects himself to say the right word clearly. This is to be expected when one is lecturing, but for an “audiobook,” such mistakes should have been edited out. On the plus side, Wolfe is an utterly unpretentious professor, using no jargon, speaking clearly and simply and wittily, and sharing his enthusiasm for his subject. Despite my criticisms, I enjoyed listening to his lectures. As for the audiobook product, each new chapter is introduced by hokey vintage radio space opera music, and, more helpfully, a 200+ page pdf file is available for free download with the audiobook, including most of the key points from the lectures, a pair of discussion/review questions after each lecture, and monochrome illustrations. The pdf file closes with a substantial annotated bibliography of works about sf (mostly histories of the genre) and of key sf works (including representative classics and 21st-century standouts). So if you’d like an interesting overview of the history, sub-genres, motifs (“icons”), and important works and authors, you should give Wolfe’s course a listen. He does a good job of demonstrating the truth of what he says at the end of his last lecture: “At its best, science fiction can be as artful and accomplished as any other kind of fiction, and it can take us places where no other form of fiction can.” View all my reviews
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