The Productive Convergence of SF Criticism and Critical Theory

This book has been a long time coming. For those who have read CsicseryRonay' s incisive essays, reviews, and commentaries in Science Fiction Studies and elsewhere for twenty years, this book has been a really long time coming. And, you know, I need to take at least some of the blame for that. I sent my first piece to SFS in 1991 when I was still a blissfully ignorant grad student. Instead of a clip round the ear, as you might reasonably expect, Istvan, one of the new generation of editors, opened a dialogue about an essay that got steadily better with each draft. The time taken over my rookie prose improved my understanding, just of sf or critical theory or postmodernism, but also of the academic profession as a sphere of argument, negotiation, and collaboration. Multiply this engagement with however many contributors over the years and one can soon grasp where the time went: helping to shape a generation of scholars in the sf discipline. Was it worth the wait? The great news is that you can stop struggling with Fredric Jameson's A rchaeologies of the Future (2005), that odd, frustrating, and symptomatically obscure tome. Throw it over your shoulder. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction is instead the apotheosis ofthat influential strand of criticism that examines the convergence of broadly postmodern critical theory with sf. Jameson fluffs his lines, in part because he reads so little in the genre and his critical frameworks have become so inflexible, his prose so tortured by unstated agendas and rigid political demands for art. In place of this murky rhetorical performance, Csicsery-Ronay lucidly reveals the rich and diverse analytic potential of this mode for understanding sf within contemporary technoscientific culture. The book overflows with insights, striking readings, provocative stances, productive ambiguities, and eminently quotable phrases, almost to the extent of losing coherence. The introduction warns early on that the book is not intended to be a systematic exposition of a theory of sf ' (9), that instead it is a constellation or map of suggestions (10). Seven Beauties strains the formal structure of the monograph, reading like a palimpsest of ideas that have been tried out and refined in the essays and reviews produced across the last two decades. The finished product, one suspects, is merely a snapshot that froze a matrix of thought at a certain moment; the kaleidoscope could easily have produced a different pattern. In an era of monographs relentlessly pursuing the single thesis, this overflow of multiple approaches and ideas is to be embraced, even whilst some of its limits are acknowledged. Yet what the book offers is a vindication of the productive convergence of sf criticism and critical theory, once thought so controversial

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Blame · Criticism · Epistemology · Literature · Postmodernism · Sociology · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Modern American Literature Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction