Table Of ContentDECONSTRUCTING THE STARSHIPS
Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies
General Editor DAVID SEED
Series Advisers
I.F. Clarke, Edward James, Patrick Parrinder and Brian Stableford
1. Robert Crossley Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future
ISBN 0-85323-388-8 (hardback)
2. David Seed (ed.) Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Precursors
ISBN 0-85323-348-9 (hardback), ISBN 0-85323-418-3 (paperback)
3. Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten (eds) Utopian and Science Fiction by
Women: Worlds of Difference
ISBN 0-85323-269-5 (hardback), ISBN 0-85323-279-2 (paperback)
4. Brian W. Aldiss The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy
ISBN 0-85323-289-X (hardback), ISBN 0-85323-299-7 (paperback)
5. Carol Farley Kessler Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia, with
Selected Writings
ISBN 0-85323-489-2 (hardback), ISBN 0-85323-499-X (paperback)
6. Patrick Parrinder Shadows of the Future: H.G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy
ISBN 0-85323-439-6 (hardback), ISBN 0-85323-449-3 (paperback)
7. I.F. Clarke (ed.) The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914: Fictions of Future
Warfare and of Battles Still-to-come
ISBN 0-85323-269-5 (hardback), ISBN 0-85323-279-2 (paperback)
8. Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford (Foreword by George Hay,
Introduction by David Seed) The Inheritors
ISBN 0-85323-560-0 (hardback)
9. Qingyun Wu Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias
ISBN 0-85323-570-8 (hardback), ISBN 0-85323-449-3 (paperback)
10. John Clute Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews
ISBN 0-85323-820-0 (hardback), ISBN 0-85323-830-8 (paperback)
11. Roger Luckhurst ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard
ISBN 0-85323-821-9 (hardback), ISBN 0-85323-831-6 (paperback)
12. I.F. Clarke (ed.) The Great War with Germany, 1890–1914: Fictions and Fantasies
of the War-to-come
ISBN 0-85323-632-1 (hardback), ISBN 0-85323-642-9 (paperback)
13. Franz Rottensteiner (ed.) View from Another Shore: European Science Fiction
ISBN 0-85323-932-0 (hardback), ISBN 0-85323-942-8 (paperback)
14. Val Gough and Jill Rudd (eds) A Very Different Story: Studies in the Fiction of
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
ISBN 0-85323-591-0 (hardback), ISBN 0-85323-601-1 (paperback)
15. Gary Westfahl The Mechanics of Wonder: the Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction
ISBN 0-85323-563-5 (hardback), ISBN 0-85323-573-2 (paperback)
16. Gwyneth Jones Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction and Reality
ISBN 0-85323-783 2 (hardback) 0-85323-793 X (paperback)
Gwyneth Jones
DECONSTRUCTING THE
STARSHIPS
Science, Fiction and Reality
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published 1999 by
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Liverpool L69 3BX
© 1999 Gwyneth Jones
The right of Gwyneth Jones to be identified
as the author of this work has been asserted
by her in accordance with the Copyright,
Design and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved.
No part of this volume may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise without prior written permission
of the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A British Library CIP record is available
ISBN 0-85323-783-2 (hardback)
ISBN 0-85323-793-X (paperback)
Typeset in 10/12.5pt Meridien by
XL Publishing Services, Lurley, Tiverton
Printed by Bell & Bain Glasgow
Contents
Foreword vii
I All Science is Description
Introduction 3
1: Getting Rid of the Brand Names 9
2: The Lady and the Scientists 22
3: Dreamer: An Exercise in Extrapolation 1989–2019 35
4: My Crazy Uncles: C.S. Lewis and Tolkien as Writers for Children 60
II Science, Fiction and Reality
5: Fools: The Neuroscience of Cyberspace 77
6: Trouble (Living in the Machine) 91
7: Sex: The Brains of Female Hyena Twins 99
8: Aliens in the Fourth Dimension 108
III The Reviews
9: In the Chinks of the World Machine: Sarah Lefanu on Feminist SF 123
10: Consider Her Ways: The Fiction of C.J. Cherryh 131
11: Alien Sex: Ellen Datlow’s Overview of the SF Orgasm 141
12: The Boys Want to be with the Boys: Neal Stephenson’s
Snow Crash 146
13: Glory Season: David Brin’s Feminist Utopia 153
14: Virtual Light: A Shocking Dose of Comfort and Joy from
William Gibson 156
15: Return to the Age of Wonder: John Barnes’s A Million Open Doors161
16: Winterlong: Elizabeth Hand at the End of the World 168
17: Plague of Angels: The Fiction of Sheri Tepper 178
18: The Furies: Suzy Charnas Beyond the End of the World 184
19: Alien Influences: Kristine Kathryn Rusch in the Dark 192
20: No Man’s Land: Feminised Landscapes in the Utopian Fiction
of Ursula Le Guin 199
Notes 209
Bibliography 213
Acknowledgements 215
Index 217
Foreword
These essays and reviews have been produced over a decade during which
the stuff of science fiction became part of everyday life. There have been
other decades in recent memory filled with intense excitement about the
imaginary future: we can see the marks of their passing in city planning,
public architecture, furniture; the streamlining, the monochrome and
chrome of everyday objects first admired, then considered hideous,
eventually fashionable again. But whether or not we consider the Internet
hideous, it is unlikely that telematic networking will be consigned to the
lumber room by the next generation, or that biotechnology will come
totally undone (despite its mixed performance so far on the money
markets); and perhaps equally unlikely that the demographic and
economic changes that have created Girl Power, leaving political and
idealistic feminism stranded and bewildered on the margins, will be
dismantled. Dreams of galactic empire did not come true, the Invaders from
Mars (or from any other alien planet in our locality) are consigned to
fantasy. But a great deal of the future imagined by mygeneration’s sf writers
is actually with us.
William Gibson, the icon of the 1980s, said that science fiction is always
about the present. I could argue that it is the only fiction about the present,
everything else is historical romance. But at this particular moment in time,
reality and science fiction are moving into such close conjunction that
science fiction is no longer the strange reflection and artistic elaboration
of current preoccupations: the mirror and the actuality have almost become
one. Moreover, most of the routes to a new separation (aside from the
colourful fantasies of the ‘science fiction’ entertainment business) might
involve losses considerably more painful than saying goodbye to the
Venusian Swamps and the ancient cities of Mars. Perhaps we should hope
for some kind of catastrophic fusion of future and present, the End of
History as pronounced by Baudrillard: but postponed, from hour to hour,
from sentence to sentence, by this narrative that never reaches closure.
We should remember that though there are tragic science fictions, science
fiction itself is a comedy. Classically, essentially, all true science fiction
stories end at the beginning. We are those who go always a little farther.
The reviews in the last section of this book appeared originally in
Foundation, the journal of the Science Fiction Foundation UK; the New York
Review Of Science Fiction, and in SFEye. Some of the essays were written as
conference papers, false papers concocted by me as a cunning means of
viii DECONSTRUCTING THE STARSHIPS
becoming a fly on the wall at an academic conference where something
science fictional or futuristic was being debated. Others were written for
magazines or journals; ‘Dreamer’ was produced for a BT seminar on future
lifestyle trends a decade ago. One paper reaches back to the roots of my
own imagination and into the realm of British metaphysical fantasy, two
are forays onto the loud and mirror-globe-lit dancefloor of cyberspace. The
majority were written to be read aloud for a live audience, and the presence
of that audience can still be detected. The tone varies from popular
journalism to academic discourse. I haven’t tried to alter that uneven effect,
or remove the traces of the various origins. All the papers have been lightly
revised for this collection, but I have refrained from tampering with the
opinions or predictions of the original writer; and from bringing examplars
or preoccupations up-to-date. Let the changes of the last decade speak for
themselves.
One thing the essays have in common is that they were all written under
some kind of duress. I am by nature idle and sluttish, and left to myself I
would never write anything but fiction and reviews. My head would soon
come to resemble the loft above my office, which is piled so high with the
detritus of previous selves: tattered notebooks, documents, beer mats, old
carrier bags, convention programmes, heaps of typescript, it is almost
impossible to reach the books I keep on the stacks up there. I’d like to
thank particularly George Hay, David Hartwell, Sarah Lefanu, Brian
Loader, Steve Pasechnik, Brian Stableford, Mary Talbot; and Andy Butler,
Mark Bould, and James Kneale of the Academic Fantastic Fiction Network,
for prodding and enticing me into sorting out my ideas from time to time.
The responsibility for the results of this housekeeping is of course all mine.
I
ALL SCIENCE IS DESCRIPTION
