Nicholas Ruddick

Neither Indian Reservation Nor Baboon Patriarchy

Chapter 7, Nicholas Ruddick’s “Neither Indian Reservation Nor Baboon Patriarchy: Science Fiction as Nobrow Phenomenon,” opens with a strange encounter of the third kind between an alien crash-landed in—where else?—Roswell and that eccentric constellation of genres known as science fiction. By way of talking squids of Saturn and other marvels of nature, we map out the history of a genre successively interpreted as highbrow, then lowbrow, then highbrow again, oscillating between the polarities like a quark trapped in competing gravitational fields.