Book
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This novel sets priorities! If there’s one thing that makes feminist science fiction more interesting than the male-dominated rest, it’s not female protagonists or the depiction of patriarchal violence – a deeper feminist critique starts with the basic structures of the narration, the narratives, and overrides them if necessary (see my review of Joanna Russ).
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If there’s one thing that futuristic novels don’t do, it’s predict the future. Where computerised modulations reach their limits due to the sheer amount of available or unavailable data, a single genius mind is supposed to lift the veil of the future. Admittedly, Octavia Estelle Butler, alarmed by the political climate of the 1990s, has
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At last someone has got it right: the ‘Dark Middle Ages’ never existed, they are still in the future. What serves us in the present as a projection screen for our modern fears and desires – an age of filth, violence, stupidity and barbarism – is relocated to a planet outside the solar system in
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A jellyfish drifts in the ocean. This is how Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Lathe of Heaven begins, but anyone looking forward to post-humanist jellyfish science fiction will be disappointed after one page, because the jellyfish is just a metaphor for the fragile yet powerful subconscious in the sea of dreams. Portland in the
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An astronaut is stranded alone on an alien planet and fights for his survival. With technical know-how, inventiveness and a good portion of colonial power, he finally succeeds in doing what Robinson Crusoe did in Daniel Dafoe’s novel from 1719: the triumph of Homo faber over the uncivilized remaining matter. The End. This is what
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It is the first book to be officially banned in the Soviet Union. Three years previously, Zamyatin had fought on the side of the Bolsheviks in the February and October Revolutions and was considered a harsh critic of the Russian Empire, but the horrors of the revolution soon dashed all illusions of a better future.
Dennis Biba 