On Science Fiction and Other Cultural Material

291 BOOKS IN REVIEW shifting “from an anthropocentric to a posthuman vision” (173). Such a vision will be the subject of Micali’s last chapter. In chapter five Micali exposes “the social, political, or ethical issues raised by genetic engineering” (184), from Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley—among “the fathers of ‘technocritiquing’” (181)—to Andrew Nichol’s film Gattaca (1997). But the superhuman traits “which are celebrated, feared or regarded as highly problematic by the sf imagination” (195) might be “already lying in our genome as a potential to be fulfilled” (196). Micali claims, supported by Robert Pepperell, that while the fiercest transhumanism still entails the human figure as central, posthumanism focuses precisely on the end of anthropocentrism (197). The posthuman vision, Micali writes, is “the categorical imperative of multiperspectivism” (198), which only finds some constants in the centrality of materialism over transcendence (198-99), in questioning the human/animal divide (200), and in the fluid relation between nature and technology (201-202). The last sections of the chapter return to the origin of Micali’s argument, as she speculates on the possibility of a posthuman subjectivity in narrative (204) and reflects on those works of fiction expressing a post-apocalyptic, post-anthropocentric future, from M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901) to Jeff VanderMeer’s SOUTHERN REACH trilogy (2014). Towards a Posthuman Imagination provides the reader with a solid reflection on the role and evolution of non-human figures in sf, and it constitutes an excellent source for the scholar, a fine manual for the sf devotee, and an ideal textbook for a potential course on science fiction in general and on posthumanism in particular.—Alberto Iozzia, University of Pittsburgh On Science Fiction and Other Cultural Material. Andrew Milner. Again, Dangerous Visions: Essays in Cultural Materialism. Ed. J.R. Burgmann. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 552+xii pp. $156 hc. The full title of Andrew Milner’s valuable new book alludes to one earlier volume and to one whole body of theoretical material. Both have clearly been highly significant for Milner and, taken together, they suggest many of his principal interests. The main title refers to Harlan Ellison’s influential anthology Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), the sequel to Ellison’s even more influential Dangerous Visions (1967), which, like its predecessor, contains a good deal of innovative sf, including such field-(re)defining works as Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed” (1972) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest (1972). The subtitle refers to the mode of analysis associated primarily with Raymond Williams, who is probably the most important, for Milner, of the many theoretical precursors from whom he has learned (Lucien Goldmann and Pierre Bourdieu are also among his most notable influences). Cultural materialism means a way of studying culture that is not only materialist in approach but that also, and accordingly, understands culture to be itself a thoroughly material process. For cultural materialism, the production of sculptures or films or books of poetry is just as integral to a 292 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) social formation’s total apparatus of material production as is the production of clothing or drugs or locomotives. In practice, cultural materialism often tends to operate as a branch of the Marxist analysis of culture—certainly for Williams himself and also, though perhaps somewhat less so, for Milner. But it is important to recognize that there is not necessarily a perfect theoretical congruence here. There can, after all, be materialist approaches to culture (and to other things) that fail to incorporate Marx’s revolutionary understanding of history and, most crucially, his analysis of the creation, extraction, and realization of surplus-value. Marxism is certainly materialist, but not all materialisms are necessarily Marxist—as, indeed, Marx himself pointed out more than once. Again, Dangerous Visions can be described, then, as a wide-ranging and impressively erudite series of materialist studies of culture that proceeds from a consistently left-wing viewpoint and owes much to the Marxist intellectual tradition. The volume takes a special interest in sf, but one that understands sf within the context of the larger literary and cultural field in which it is embedded; Milner

Aesthetics · Anthropocentrism · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Materialism · Posthuman · Posthumanism · Subject (documents) · Transhumanism · Philosophy · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life