Science Fiction

Sherryl Vint

MIT Press 2021

Pb, 207pp, £12.99, ISBN 9780262539999

Science fiction, the cliché states, isn’t about the future, it’s about the present. As Sherryl Vint comments, SF can “help us conceptualise and respond to a world that has begun to resemble SF, in ways both marvellous and malign.”

1984 remains relevant because totalitarian regimes still subjugate their people and because surveillance is more pervasive than Orwell imagined. Wells’s

The Time Machine

remains relevant partly because British society is still riddled with class division; it “combines evolutionary projection with a harsh critique of class division”.

SF, she argues, “adopts a range of æsthetic styles and thematic preoccupations as it explores how the world might be otherwise.” So every age gets the SF it deserves. The Golden Age and cyberpunk reflected on transformative technological innovation. The New Wave examined inner space. SF’s contemporary concerns include speculative design, AI, economics, genomics, transhumanism and climate change. She points out that SF’s current audience and writers include more feminist, LGBTQ+ and global views (China, Latin America and India) than historically. These wider perspectives are “among the most exciting ways the field is changing”.

Vint’s comments are often thought-provoking. In an examination of colonialism’s impact and legacy, she argues that Star Wars

offers “an apt index of how SF responded to shifting values emerging from the counterculture, after which straightforward identification with agents of imperial conquest was no longer feasible”. It’s a typically insightful comment that deepens my appreciation of this classic movie.

Vint eloquently highlights how SF can ask “questions about the impact of science and technology on human experience, values, and ways of living”. To achieve this SF often uses narratives and settings that are scientifically implausible if not impossible. For me, this narrative distance often augments the clarity of the contemporary concerns. The original Star Trek, for example, advocated peaceful co-existence in the time of Vietnam and racial integration at a time of the civil rights movement.

Science Fiction is one of MIT Press’s Essential Knowledge series, which offer “foundational knowledge” on a topic. Vint succeeds admirably. As a summary of the state of SF, this is a pithy, insightful and thought-provoking book that even long-standing fans will enjoy.

Mark Greener

★★★★★