A Mixed and Mislabeled Bag

179 BOOKS IN REVIEW other writers encourages us to appreciate and celebrate the artistic coherence and complexity of many works that, when they are examined, are seen primarily in terms of their ideas rather than their aesthetics, as sf seems so often to invite. All told, Waugh’s book offers a rare opportunity to recognize and celebrate a number of neglected works and it brings a mode of criticism from which recent literary studies have moved away to more recognizable works.—Justin Cosner, University of Iowa A Mixed and Mislabeled Bag. Gary Westfahl, Gregory Benford, Howard V. Hendrix, and Jonathan Alexander, eds. Science Fiction and the Dismal Science: Essays on Economics in and of the Genre. McFarland, 2020. 290 pp. $55 pbk. Interrogating the connections between the sf genre and the worldmaking /world-shaking implications of economics has always been a vital part of both sf and sf scholarship. Many of the foundational figures who have shaped sf criticism—Suvin, LeGuin, Russ, Haraway, Jameson, to name only a few—have put the relationship between economic systems and the speculative imagination at the center of their work. Since the 2008 financial crisis, in particular, there has been a new focus on economics in sf criticism. This effervescence of scholarship builds on and extends Marxist, post-Marxist, and “heterodox economic” critiques of late capitalism and thus of mainstream economic thought. Indeed, many of these recent studies dig deep into the arcane minutiae of contemporary finance, marketing, and management science discourse to reveal the inherent science-fictionality of economic world-making. The time is ripe, then, for a measured and scholarly response from the partisans of orthodox economic doctrine. A volume of carefully reasoned essays which argue clearly and in good faith for the analytical power and social utility of mainstream economic approaches to the fantastic would be a welcome addition to this important conversation in the genre. Science Fiction and the Dismal Science is not that volume. Ironically, those looking for careful analysis of economic themes in science fiction will get the least utility out of this book because, despite the claims made by the cover information and the editorial apparatus, only about a quarter (75/273 pages) of this book directly engages with economics in any substantive fashion—and much of that “dismal” material has serious issues that detract from its scholarly value. Underneath this economics-themed wrapper, though, is an eclectic collection of often fine essays, the accurate title for which is Proceedings of the 2018 George Slusser Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy. Those interested in Slusser’s work and legacy have the most to gain from this volume, which offers scholarly engagements with his ideas, hagiographic tributes from his collaborators, and two previously unpublished essays by Slusser himself. Of this wealth of Slusser-focused material (which, at 90 pages, makes up a third of the volume), two pieces stand out. The first is Joey Eschrich’s “Complicating the Frankenstein Barrier: Science Fiction Futures 180 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) and Social Transformation.” In one of the best close readings of the volume, Eschrich explores Slusser’s model of the genre in which sf artists, much like Victor Frankenstein, are engaged in a “Promethean struggle, grappling with seemingly insurmountable obstacles to conjure up radical technological futures,” in order to “implant a wholly new idea into the heads of inventors and bring a technological problem from beyond the horizon into the field of vision” (35-36). But like Victor, Slusser laments, sf too often abandons its radical visions, fleeing back into the “wastes of some blank and mute present” (30). While expressing appreciation for the scholarly breadth and rigor Slusser brings to bear in theorizing this barrier, Eschrich argues that the concept really only applies to “a certain kind of sf” exemplified by the transhumanist technorationalism of hard sf and classical cyberpunk (36). As is often the case in hard sf, Slusser sees humanity’s “inability to imagine a transcendent technological future [as] rooted in a Cartesian duality where pure, rational mind is held back by the flesh” (31), resulting in “a rational future forever held back by an atavistic present” (30). Thus Slusser’s “barrier argument focuses on

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