I promised in ‘Eastercon 2023: ‘And now the conversation has ended …’ (er, not quite just yet)’ that there would be a further post ‘about handbooks and my own experiences of editing one’. The context for this was the panel discussion on ‘Rethinking the History of SF’, and indeed discussion in advance of the panel, which was concerned not so much with the content of any such History but the format and structural labels of such history. For example, if two of your key organising categories are the ‘Golden Age’ and the ‘New Wave’, which are both very specifically constructed and geographically located, then there is already a limit on how SF history might be expanded or diversified. Even something as simple as using historical-period descriptors instead, e.g., pre-WW1, interwar, post-WW2, might make it easier to consider texts and writers who are not yet in the conversation. Playing around with categories, maybe thinking in terms of overlapping waves, or taking a multi-dimensional network approach could all contribute to opening up SF. Given that SF is now widely understood as a literature of modernity, a literature of technological and social change, we would expect to find it existing in different forms globally over at least the last century and a half. It doesn’t all have to be traced back to the ‘magazines’.
Cover of The Science Fiction Handbook, eds Hubble and Mousoutzanis, Bloomsbury, 2013. I still think this has the most striking cover of all the handbooks!
As part of the panel, I waved around a copy of The Science Fiction Handbook (2013), which I co-edited with Aris Mousoutzanis for Bloomsbury, and said something along the lines of ‘I think it is now time to consign these single-volume accounts to the bin of history’. This was a slightly performative, melodramatic gesture. I don’t want to disparage the work of Aris and the other contributors or my own work on the book: as a relatively concise single-volume history-cum-theoretical overview, geared towards undergraduates and MA students, I still think it stands up pretty well. Not the least of its virtues is that as a paperback it can be affordably bought and even read through as a book, whereas the much bigger companions are more likely to be used as works of reference and consulted in libraries.
Although having just described the larger companions as reference books, I did read the huge Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (eds. Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint) cover to cover when I reviewed it for Strange Horizons (and enjoyed doing so). Rereading that review, reminds me that the initial flowering of the ‘SF handbook’ genre (I’m here using handbook and companion interchangeably, please don’t @ me) in the first decade of the 2000s marks a certain point in SF’s journey to academic respectability (certainly, in the UK – it already had more of a foothold in the US). One of the reasons for this development was the rise of theory (possibility at the height of its trajectory just after the turn of the millennium). As I noted then (14 years ago!): ‘Reading these sections [of the Routledge Companion], it quickly becomes apparent that not only is theory allowing the full implications of SF to come out, but also that SF is a much more complementary partner for theory than mainstream literature’. Furthermore:
not only has [SF] become increasingly acknowledged to be, as Luckhurst notes, “a literature of modernity” (p. 403), but also it is becoming increasingly clear that it is the literature of postmodernity or globalising hypermodernity, as Csicery-Ronay Jr. describes it. This is the situation that has triggered the current growth in the field in British academia and it is one that impacts on a traditional field of SF scholarship: the history of the genre itself.
I concluded the review by writing:
the appearance of a work of the scope of The Routledge Companion represents confirmation that SF has incontrovertibly established itself within the walls of UK universities. The doors are now open: we can expect more publications, more courses, more conferences, and more full-time SF academics over the coming years.
Those things came to pass as it was clear to me (and presumably the editors of the Companion and others) that they would but that doesn’t make them any less significant. So complete has been the rise of SF, it is difficult to remember quite what it was like twenty to twenty-five years ago (I’ve nearly managed to repress those memories of once being asked by a counsellor who caught me reading a Ken McLeod book, what I was ‘escaping’ from). So, before going on to argue that the moment of the companion is now over, I just want to acknowledge how much volumes like such as the Routledge Companion and the earlier Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (eds. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn) signified at the time and what they meant to people in the field (and people who imagined themselves to be in the field even if there wasn’t too much external evidence of that). And, to be clear, I still use both as works of reference (although a huge amount has been written since).
Anyway, a few years after the appearance of the Routledge Companion, with SF’s star in academia in the ascendent, I was asked by the series editor of Bloomsbury’s Literature and Culture Handbooks to edit a volume on science fiction, and I in turn asked Aris to do it with me. The format for the series was very prescriptive – all the chapters in the book (apart from the film one) were set out with specific word counts in the series template. So, as volume editors we had limited space for action (although in the end we did have to bend the word counts a bit). If it was left to us, it would have been a bit different book (or, certainly, one would do it differently today). Some of the sections were difficult to write in terms of the brief. Furthermore, because it was my first time as an editor, I was insecure and added another layer of prescription for some of the chapters, such as specifying some of the texts for the case studies chapters (so those chapters were especially difficult for the contributors to write, and I can only thank them for sticking with it). The film chapter was added (rightly) at the insistence of the peer reviewers, so that was a deviation from the series template. And could we get someone to write this chapter? No, we couldn’t. So, Aris, who is a film theorist, had to do it himself rather than the Historical Context chapter, which I took over. It is ‘interesting’ to look back at that ‘Historical Context of Science Fiction’ chapter, which I compiled partly from stuff I’d written between five and fifteen years earlier (the ‘Introduction’, which I also wrote, is much closer to where I was at in 2012-13). I won’t go into that any further other than to note that I’ve moved away (or, at least, I’d like to think so) from that kind of compressed style (that was a result of academic writing fashion and the demands of writing a PhD). I look back at it now and it looks like an outline of notes and quotes for a planned book-length account rather than an entirely coherent account.
Contents page of our Science Fiction Handbook.
I’m much happier with the biographical pieces on major SF Authors, which I wrote with Emma Filtness and Joe Norman. I messed them around a bit too (sorry!) because I said 400 words and then rewrote all of the pieces to 800 words because the shorter length just wasn’t enough for much beyond a summary of titles. I found writing in this historical and biographical manner (which would have been derided by some of my academic colleagues at the time – and probably still today in some instances – as ‘too descriptive’ or ‘journalistic’) very enjoyable. It didn’t occur to me at the time, that I could do a whole book in this style, but the seeds of change have gradually been taking root since then. The choice of authors is selective inevitably, but I also wanted to reshape SF a bit. I was particularly keen to include Doris Lessing and Naomi Mitchison. At the same time, I was a bit nervous about doing so because of my experiences of how academic English Literature approaches could trigger resistance in some SF circles. It was interesting therefore when the handbook was reviewed, with a couple of other examples of the genre, by Andy Sawyer for Foundation (‘Handbooked: Review-Essay’, Foundation 120, 2015: 93-104).
It’s indicative of how things had progressed since the early 2000s, that Sawyer begins his review, ‘It is probably a law by now that every major publisher should have a ‘Handbook of Science Fiction’, and it is certainly right that there should be differences – critical and ideological – between and within them’. It is a good review, still well worth reading, overall and a good review of our particular handbook. It’s even complementary about my Historical Contexts chapter, observing astutely that it ‘is less a history of science fiction than a discussion of the context of history in science fiction’. That’s a point I want to bear in mind if I ever get around to upgrading, expanding and developing the piece into something else. In terms of the choice of ‘Major Authors’, Sawyer comments that
Absent are writers who might have been said to have had a claim to have constructed sf (Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke), and while Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood are obvious examples of mainstream writers who have written novels which are clearly sf, many sf readers would argue about the nature of their relationship to the genre. (The summary of Lessing, certainly, is a welcome argument that her comparative neglect within the genre in recent years is misguided.)
He wasn’t quite so impressed by my note in the introduction that this list is not meant to be ‘absolutely the most significant writers in the history of SF’ but rather ‘writers who may be encountered on university courses’, commenting ‘this rather limits the scope of the handbook’. That wasn’t quite the vibe I was aiming for. On the one hand, I was trying to defend myself against hostile commentary on the choice of writers and, on the other, aiming to shift the conversation. I think the conversation has shifted since (not particularly as a result of the handbook!), such that many fewer people would now make a hard division between sf writers and mainstream writers who have written sf novels. An sf novel is now an sf novel whoever has written it. The only point on which I would disagree with Sawyer’s discussion of the ‘Major Authors’ is with his comment that Mitchison only started writing SF long after the middle decades of the 20C when the shape of the genre crystallised. However, this was also what I wrote in the actual biographical piece. If writing it today, I would not just note that her fiction of the 1920s and 1930s ‘contained fantastic elements’, but argue that it was representative of a widespread culture of interwar British fantastika encompassing writers from Olaf Stapledon to Virginia Woolf. And that takes us back to the idea of ‘Rethinking the History of SF’. I was going to say more about Mitchison here but due to length I think that is going to have to be saved for another post sometime in the future.
Sawyer notes that the flaws of the ‘handbook’ (specifically discussing The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, ed. Rob Latham [2014]) ‘are sometimes the flaws of ambition. It is not as diverse as it seems, or wants to be; it is still more or less wedded to a dominant but limited paradigm of sf even as, at its best, it shows ways out of this paradigm.’ This strikes me as one of the key flaws of the genre as a whole: that it can’t in itself shift the existing paradigm because of its own need (in the academic marketplace and in a library reference context) to also cover the existing paradigm. So, therefore handbooks end up reinforcing the history and structures that they are trying to call into question. I think this is because handbooks are the product of a particular academic context – the theoretical, postmodern moment of institutional English Literature, as discussed above – and while useful and productive in many respects, they can’t escape the limitations of that wider ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ which have now been identified as problematic across academic English Literature as a whole. In fact, they demonstrate the basic problem, which is precisely, as Sawyer notes, that this approach often leaves in place the very dominant paradigms that it seeks to question. The initial moment of questioning was undoubtedly a real advance, a heady and exciting development, but there comes a time when we need to move beyond questioning the world and actually start changing it.
In some ways I came to realise this through my own experience of editing an SF handbook, despite not attempting the scope and ambition of the Oxford Handbook. Sawyer does give a very fair evaluation of our handbook’s strengths and is very positive about the other chapters by Chris Daley, Jessica Langer, Andrew M. Butler, Arus Mousoutzanis, Adam Roberts, Pat Wheeler and Sherryl Vint, concluding that the book is overall ‘a useful pointer to the richness and openness of current work on sf’. The book was well reviewed (see excerpts on the Amazon page) including by Ken MacLeod for the Morning Star and I think it probably was useful to those who have consulted it (I’ve certainly found my own copy useful). Therefore, on the whole, I think the volume still stands up fairly well on its own terms. The faults it has are the faults of the ‘SF handbook’ genre as a whole, as implied above and discussed further below. However, that said, I wouldn’t set out to produce this kind of handbook today (and this is not just because I’m tired of editing collections, having co-edited another ten – a couple of which are still in various stages of the production process – since this one, which was my first). I think we need to move on and find new formats that work both in terms of making SF knowledge, concepts and critical tools available to a wide audience, whether in the academy or otherwise, and in terms of expanding the structural framework and categories of SF to widen its net as discussed above.
As I noted in my account of the ‘Rethinking’ panel in my massive Eastercon post, the limitations of handbooks are also well set out in one of the sections, ‘Making a Conversation: Companions’, in Farah Mendlesohn’s excellent article ‘Curating Science Fiction in the “Rainbow Age”: A discussion in several parts: ICFA 43 Guest Scholar Keynote’ (Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 33: 3, 2022). Mendlesohn is concerned with the way that academic historical accounts of the field don’t seem to be progressing in the way we’d like to think they might in the 21C. Contributors often come from the same pool and therefore reappear across companions and edited volumes, and repeatedly cite each other. Some of this is what would be expected from the specialists within a field but some of this also reflects a closed loop. The predominant focus on male writers in texts is stubbornly persistent and when women writers are discussed they ‘are often corralled into chapters on feminism even when their work is tackling issues addressed elsewhere.’ Drawing on the work of Sherryl Vint, Mendlesohn notes that rather than tracing a history, we should think of ourselves as ‘tracing a conversation and making a conversation’. Vint and Mark Bould are also cited for calling the work of gathering what is in the conversation (or the fuzzy set of genre) ‘curation’. Therefore, Mendlesohn’s article is concerned with the process of curating conversations. I recommend people read all of this article because I am only touching on a small part of it here (and even then, quite briefly). The ‘handbook’ examples analysed (in the section on companions) are The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (2003), A Companion to Science Fiction (Ed. David Seed, Blackwell, 2005), The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009), The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (2014), The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (Eds Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan, 2015), and The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (Eds Canavan and Link, 2018):
When I extracted the “history” overviews from the chapters in these books (and I accept this is subjective), fewer than 20% were written by women (the Cambridge History did better). White men are still writing the historical summaries of the field.
So who is invited to write? Who is considered part of the community of conversation curators?
The percentage of female contributors (and again, I need to notethat I have no idea if any would now identify otherwise) has remained depressingly low
The real limitation consists in the fact that:
Companions, handbooks, edited collections are all exercises in nepotism: editors (including myself) invite people to write who we know, who we trust, who are recommended to us. Sometimes we go outside our community, but I suspect not often.
There are, of course, reasons for this. The first is that you want to ask people who will say ‘yes’. I don’t think I’ve ever had more people say ‘no’ to me than with the SF handbook I co-edited, which was partly because they didn’t know who I was. Now, that I am regularly asked to do more things than I could possibly manage to do, I also am, rightly or wrongly, more likely to say yes to someone I’ve met or know. Apart from anything else, academia does have its fair share of sociopaths, pedants, and people-who-for-various-reasons-you’ve-promised-yourself-not-to-work-with-again, who are best avoided. This helps in terms of avoiding the ones you know but you don’t know with people you don’t know, and so you end up doing things with people you know and trust. Does this lead to the best possible collections? Maybe not but I think it often leads to good and decent ones. This sounds like I’m defending the status quo but what I’m trying to suggest is that the format is limited in what it can achieve. Or, rather, in Mendlesohn’s terms, there must be better ways to curate the conversation. Sometimes, things just move beyond your control. For example, I co-edit a series in which I also co-edit a number of volumes (these are not companions but they share some features with those, such as requiring to have chapters on certain topics). Once – in a never-to-be-repeated error of inexperience – I set the same deadline for contributions to two of the volumes. Five contributors across the two volumes dropped out over the course of the final week before the deadline. What did we do? Ask people we knew who could be relied upon to produce something decent relatively quickly (and as a result one of those volumes does have a bit of an imbalance, not in terms of the gender of the contributors but to some extent in terms of the gender of authors discussed because that wasn’t something I checked as rigorously as I might have done on in the rush to get the thing in on time).
Therefore, going forward, I think it would make more sense for companion-type works (if they are still going to happen… and as implied here I think they need to work differently) to be digital, with the idea being that the content can be added to and updated, so that you’re not trapped within the contexts of the deadlines of academic publishing and the default behaviours of the academic world. I should emphasize at this point that this is particularly a problem with companions because there is often a prescriptive format requiring chapters to be written on specific topics, which means that you’re trying to fit pegs to finely engineered holes rather than just sending out a call for interesting articles. While general academic collections may fall into similar problems to those associated here with companions, this is not so inevitable provided editors are thinking clearly about taking the widest possible approach. Therefore, I remain a fan of the general academic collection and agree with Mendlesohn’s argument that an imaginative and wide-ranging approach to these, such as in the example she mentions, Ida Yoshinaga, Sean Guynes, and Gerry Canavan’s Uneven Futures (2022), has the potential to curate new and different communities. (I have this book sitting in a pile to my right as I write and will be reporting when I’ve read it). For that matter, I still think there is a place for the single-author introduction to SF, which doesn’t claim to be completely authoritative, but offers a reflective point of entry into the field and points readers in multiple directions as to where to find out more about various topics.
Prospective Cultures 