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A review by megapolisomancy
The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World by Thomas M. Disch
1.0
I have so many problems with this stupid book that I think just listing them out is probably the best way to include most of them (and I'll still forget a few, I'm sure). I'll just add more as I think of them.
So:
1. Thomas Disch, who was a lifelong author of science fiction and presumably reader of science fiction and, with this book, "historian" of science fiction, HATES science fiction, and people who write science fiction, and especially people who enjoy reading science fiction.
2. Disch opens with the truism that golden age of science fiction is 12 (specifically 12 year old boys. Not girls. Girls don't belong here, but more on that later. Also, only white boys.) This isn't in order to deconstruct or just laugh at that assertion, though - this is one of Disch's central points.
3. Chapter two deals with the origin of the genre (why not chapter one? I don't know. More on that later also). Many (some? most? I don't know. Aldiss and Luckhurst, at any rate) point to Frankenstein as the first modern science fiction novel. Not Disch. Why? Because even though most people are familiar with the story, not many have read it.* Also no one would have ever taken Mary Shelley seriously if it weren't for her wealthy parents and her husband, who was a superior writer.
...
... You heard me. So who does Disch select instead? Edgar Allen Poe, who is an obvious choice because I (and I'm sure all of you) have read all of his science fiction works, like "The Raven" and "The Telltale Heart" and his one novel, _The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket_. Wait, no, none of those are science fiction. Disch is referring, of course, to the very well-known and widely-read Poe story "Mesmeric Revelation." You've read "Mesmeric Revelation," haven't you? God knows it is not only more popular than _Frankenstein_, but also has infiltrated the popular consciousness more fully. There's also a weird reference to Poe's other immensely popular and widely known "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (1839) and the contemporary event in... Hiroshima? (To be fair, because of his often muddled and confusing prose, he might have meant Hiroshima was contemporary to the 1990s, although...?)
4. "Mesmeric Revelation" brings us to Disch's other main point (and the chief focus of chapter one): Poe was into mesmerism, which was a hoax, and science fiction is therefore the genre most suited to lying (as in "Suvinian novum = a lie" which is just one of many bizarre logical leaps Disch subjects us to), and America is now a nation of liars. Now, you and I might think to point out that fiction is, by definition, not "true," but to be frank this chapter has little to do with science fiction in general other than setting the scene for the rest of this book's kind of rambling non-sequitur presentation, and allowing Disch to spend a lot of time complaining about scientology (which makes some sense) but also Heaven's Gate (which doesn't make a lot of sense) and Aum Shinrikyo (which makes no sense at all given the fact that this is, I think, the only time ANYTHING having to do with a country other than the US or England is mentioned in the whole stupid book).
5. Disch is also pretty sure that books are a dying medium, because at the time of his writing (the late 1990s) special-effects technology was finally (and cost-effectively) catching up with the human imagination, so who would prefer books anymore to films or TV?
6. Disch also takes a certain breed of SF author, starting with Robert Heinlein, to task for promoting libertarianism and acting as shills for the military-industrial complex. This was the only interesting point that Disch had to make.
7. Disch also takes feminist SF authors to task for... being women in a man's game, essentially? Someone else on goodreads writes that "The chapter on feminism would have been offensive if it wasn't so absurd as to be amusing," which is absolutely true - this section really has to be read to be believed. Disch's biggest target in this section is Ursula K. Le Guin, who no one reads for fun (??) and who put together a Norton anthology of science fiction but, because of her RADICAL FEMINIST AGENDA, unfairly stacked the table of contents for her "one-volume affirmative action campaign" so that 26 out of 67 authors were women, "remedying the genre's perceived historical neglect of women and other exemplary victims" (so, just to be clear, Disch thinks that 38% of a volume consisting of stories by women is TOO MANY WOMEN! THOSE RADICAL FEMINISTS!!). Oh also that slim number of stories by men? RADICAL FEMINIST Le Guin made sure to select "relatively feeble or ephemeral stories by older big-name male writers" in order to make the women look better. Disch also mentions on one page that UKL unfairly left out British authors (despite the fact that one of his central arguments is that SF is a definitively American concern) and also some American "fellow-travellers" of the New Wave such as himself. He then, with no apparent hint of shame, reveals a page later that Le Guin solicited one of his stories for the book but that he turned her down. Like, seriously, Disch seems to be honestly aggrieved that he was not included in the anthology but has decided that this was not because he TURNED THEM DOWN but because of an unfair bias against men who write well. This is some MRA bullshit.
8. The chapter on race is mostly about white men writing about the 3rd world, and then we learn that Octavia Butler's "intense conviction coupled with a total lack of humor" allows her to "invent compelling, if implausible, plots." Butler's moral, then (that "miscegenation is a good thing, albeit very unpleasant") is something that Disch thinks should be called out, but, "[a]s SF's only prominent black writer who has chosen to focus on racial concerns, Butler is not about to be challenged for being politically incorrect." This concludes Disch's summation of the life and work of Octavia Butler, which took all of a single paragraph. He then spends two pages talking about Heinlein's _Farnham's Freehold_, which is a novel in which a nuclear war somehow throws a white family forward through time into a future where the Earth is ruled by cannibalistic black folk (this, it bears mentioning, apparently strikes Disch as a much more plausible plot than anything Butler came up with). He does admit that this plot might be just a little bit racist, but he insists that "the enjoyment of witnessing a taboo artfully broken is contagious." This is some reverse-racism bullshit.
Samuel Delany is the only other author of color mentioned, and Disch decides that he's more of an academic than an SF author (and Disch, surprise surprise, despises academics).
9. Speaking of Delany: "One of the genre's many teen prodigies, his first novel appeared in 1960, when he was twenty." [note: not only is 20 not a teenager as far as I am aware, but this novel came out in 1962, not 1960]
Were he alive today I guess Disch would be a big proponent of Jon Stewart's stupid Rally to Restore Sanity or whatever it was called, given his insistence that feminists are as bad as sexists and that African Americans should just, you know, Calm Down about racism and so forth. He comes right out and says, in fact, that "ideology" or political positions have no place in science fiction, which he thinks should be reserved for dumb meaningless escapism - missing the fact, as all good centrist liberals do, that his outlook is just as much an ideology as any other.
This is garbage. Perhaps I should get in the habit of automatically dumping books that use the phrase "politically correct" in earnest.
* An unsubstantiated claim, just like most claims made here. This is what makes reading journalism/popular works of nonfiction kind of frustrating for me sometimes, and is particularly infuriating in this kind of personal-memoir-cum-historical-review-essay.
So:
1. Thomas Disch, who was a lifelong author of science fiction and presumably reader of science fiction and, with this book, "historian" of science fiction, HATES science fiction, and people who write science fiction, and especially people who enjoy reading science fiction.
2. Disch opens with the truism that golden age of science fiction is 12 (specifically 12 year old boys. Not girls. Girls don't belong here, but more on that later. Also, only white boys.) This isn't in order to deconstruct or just laugh at that assertion, though - this is one of Disch's central points.
3. Chapter two deals with the origin of the genre (why not chapter one? I don't know. More on that later also). Many (some? most? I don't know. Aldiss and Luckhurst, at any rate) point to Frankenstein as the first modern science fiction novel. Not Disch. Why? Because even though most people are familiar with the story, not many have read it.* Also no one would have ever taken Mary Shelley seriously if it weren't for her wealthy parents and her husband, who was a superior writer.
...
... You heard me. So who does Disch select instead? Edgar Allen Poe, who is an obvious choice because I (and I'm sure all of you) have read all of his science fiction works, like "The Raven" and "The Telltale Heart" and his one novel, _The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket_. Wait, no, none of those are science fiction. Disch is referring, of course, to the very well-known and widely-read Poe story "Mesmeric Revelation." You've read "Mesmeric Revelation," haven't you? God knows it is not only more popular than _Frankenstein_, but also has infiltrated the popular consciousness more fully. There's also a weird reference to Poe's other immensely popular and widely known "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (1839) and the contemporary event in... Hiroshima? (To be fair, because of his often muddled and confusing prose, he might have meant Hiroshima was contemporary to the 1990s, although...?)
4. "Mesmeric Revelation" brings us to Disch's other main point (and the chief focus of chapter one): Poe was into mesmerism, which was a hoax, and science fiction is therefore the genre most suited to lying (as in "Suvinian novum = a lie" which is just one of many bizarre logical leaps Disch subjects us to), and America is now a nation of liars. Now, you and I might think to point out that fiction is, by definition, not "true," but to be frank this chapter has little to do with science fiction in general other than setting the scene for the rest of this book's kind of rambling non-sequitur presentation, and allowing Disch to spend a lot of time complaining about scientology (which makes some sense) but also Heaven's Gate (which doesn't make a lot of sense) and Aum Shinrikyo (which makes no sense at all given the fact that this is, I think, the only time ANYTHING having to do with a country other than the US or England is mentioned in the whole stupid book).
5. Disch is also pretty sure that books are a dying medium, because at the time of his writing (the late 1990s) special-effects technology was finally (and cost-effectively) catching up with the human imagination, so who would prefer books anymore to films or TV?
6. Disch also takes a certain breed of SF author, starting with Robert Heinlein, to task for promoting libertarianism and acting as shills for the military-industrial complex. This was the only interesting point that Disch had to make.
7. Disch also takes feminist SF authors to task for... being women in a man's game, essentially? Someone else on goodreads writes that "The chapter on feminism would have been offensive if it wasn't so absurd as to be amusing," which is absolutely true - this section really has to be read to be believed. Disch's biggest target in this section is Ursula K. Le Guin, who no one reads for fun (??) and who put together a Norton anthology of science fiction but, because of her RADICAL FEMINIST AGENDA, unfairly stacked the table of contents for her "one-volume affirmative action campaign" so that 26 out of 67 authors were women, "remedying the genre's perceived historical neglect of women and other exemplary victims" (so, just to be clear, Disch thinks that 38% of a volume consisting of stories by women is TOO MANY WOMEN! THOSE RADICAL FEMINISTS!!). Oh also that slim number of stories by men? RADICAL FEMINIST Le Guin made sure to select "relatively feeble or ephemeral stories by older big-name male writers" in order to make the women look better. Disch also mentions on one page that UKL unfairly left out British authors (despite the fact that one of his central arguments is that SF is a definitively American concern) and also some American "fellow-travellers" of the New Wave such as himself. He then, with no apparent hint of shame, reveals a page later that Le Guin solicited one of his stories for the book but that he turned her down. Like, seriously, Disch seems to be honestly aggrieved that he was not included in the anthology but has decided that this was not because he TURNED THEM DOWN but because of an unfair bias against men who write well. This is some MRA bullshit.
8. The chapter on race is mostly about white men writing about the 3rd world, and then we learn that Octavia Butler's "intense conviction coupled with a total lack of humor" allows her to "invent compelling, if implausible, plots." Butler's moral, then (that "miscegenation is a good thing, albeit very unpleasant") is something that Disch thinks should be called out, but, "[a]s SF's only prominent black writer who has chosen to focus on racial concerns, Butler is not about to be challenged for being politically incorrect." This concludes Disch's summation of the life and work of Octavia Butler, which took all of a single paragraph. He then spends two pages talking about Heinlein's _Farnham's Freehold_, which is a novel in which a nuclear war somehow throws a white family forward through time into a future where the Earth is ruled by cannibalistic black folk (this, it bears mentioning, apparently strikes Disch as a much more plausible plot than anything Butler came up with). He does admit that this plot might be just a little bit racist, but he insists that "the enjoyment of witnessing a taboo artfully broken is contagious." This is some reverse-racism bullshit.
Samuel Delany is the only other author of color mentioned, and Disch decides that he's more of an academic than an SF author (and Disch, surprise surprise, despises academics).
9. Speaking of Delany: "One of the genre's many teen prodigies, his first novel appeared in 1960, when he was twenty." [note: not only is 20 not a teenager as far as I am aware, but this novel came out in 1962, not 1960]
Were he alive today I guess Disch would be a big proponent of Jon Stewart's stupid Rally to Restore Sanity or whatever it was called, given his insistence that feminists are as bad as sexists and that African Americans should just, you know, Calm Down about racism and so forth. He comes right out and says, in fact, that "ideology" or political positions have no place in science fiction, which he thinks should be reserved for dumb meaningless escapism - missing the fact, as all good centrist liberals do, that his outlook is just as much an ideology as any other.
This is garbage. Perhaps I should get in the habit of automatically dumping books that use the phrase "politically correct" in earnest.
* An unsubstantiated claim, just like most claims made here. This is what makes reading journalism/popular works of nonfiction kind of frustrating for me sometimes, and is particularly infuriating in this kind of personal-memoir-cum-historical-review-essay.