Eric S. Rabkin

Science Fiction and the Future of Criticism

Science fiction, ranging from films to industrial design to world’s fairs, is a cultural system no more confined to literature than love is to love letters. From its self-recognition in 1926, science fiction has involved commercial and social realities most obviously visible in fandom and the hundreds of annual science fiction conventions. This system includes many types of consumers and producers, even collaboratively self-correcting volunteer bibliographers. Collectively, science fiction fandom, the first organized fandom, has created vast informational resources that allow not only reference but also statistical inquiry. The Genre Evolution Project (http://www.umich.edu/~genreevo/) shows that these social structures and resources potentiate, in an age of widespread computer networking, the transformation of criticism from acts of isolated scholars working with narrowly defined subjects to collaborative projects drawing on human and informational resources across disciplinary boundaries. Science fiction...

Audience, Purpose, and Medium

The training of students to evaluate resources and compose in new media forces us all to confront the practical pedagogic and theoretical aesthetic issues behind the uses of those media. This has felt true to me from the time I first used electronic discussion boards to augment my lecture classes in literature in 1975 until today when I regularly teach two University of Michigan computer lab courses enrolling undergraduate and graduate students explicitly interested in new media. In English 415/516 Technology and the humanities (usually team-taught with Victor Rosenberg from our School of Information) and English 414 Multimedia Explorations in the humanities, the confrontation of diverse media makes issues vivid that have in more traditional courses too often fallen below consciousness for many people.

Who Really Shaped American Science Fiction

Treating science fiction, critics have taught us to understand that the field shrugged itself out of the swamp of its pulp origins in two great evolutionary metamorphoses, each associated with a uniquely visionary magazine editor: Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell Jr. Paul Carter, to cite one critic among many, makes a case that Hugo Gernsbacks magazines were the first to suggest that science fiction was not only legitimate extrapolation… [but] might even become a positive incentive to discovery, inspiring some engineer or inventor to develop in the laboratory an idea he had first read about in one of the stories. (5) Another, critic and author Isaac Asimov, argues that science fictions fabled Golden Age began in 1938, when John Campbell became editor of Astounding Stories and remolded it, and the whole field, into something closer to his hearts desire. During the Golden Age, he and the magazine he edited so dominated science fiction that to read Astounding was to know the field entire. ( Before the Golden Age , xii) Critics arrive at such understandings not only by surveying the field but also — perhaps more importantly — by studying, accepting, modifying, or even occasionally rejecting the work of other critics. This indirect and many-voiced conversation is usually seen as a self-correcting process, an informal yet public peer review. Such interested scrutiny has driven science fiction (SF) criticism to evolve from the letters to the editor and editorials and mimeographed essays of the past to the nuanced literary history of today, just as, this literary history states, those firm-minded editors helped SF literature evolve from the primordial fictions of Edgar Rice Burroughs into the sophisticated constructs of William S. Burroughs.

The Medical Lessons of Science Fiction

Literature and Medicine 20, no. 1 (Spring 2001) 13–25

Vegetable, animal, human : The perils and powers of transgressing (sociobiological) boundaries in narrative.

Bible myths, fairy tales, and science fictions all offer narratives that imply and sometimes question boundaries for human behavior. By subscription to certain narratives, individuals can enter and leave social groups; by evolving narratives, groups can adjust the realm of the allowable and the realm of the forbidden; and by selective transgression, individuals can gain power beyond that initially granted by the group. All these functions of narrative contribute to the sociobiological vigor of the individuals and groups that subscribe to them, suggesting that the creation and use of narratives has proadaptive functions.