I’ve just received my author’s copy of The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders, edited by Gary Westfahl for Greenwood Press. It comes in three attractively gaudy hardback volumes which contain a total of 600 entries by about a quarter that number of contributors (each entry is 1000 words, including a short bibliography).

The first two volumes cover 400 “themes” (which can also mean icons or plot devices) from “Absurdity” to “Zombies”. Actually, there’s an entry for “Zoos” but it just cross-refers us to “Animals and Zoos”. The third volume contains entries on 200 works or groups of works (e.g. the Terminator movies).

I guess I’ll be dipping into this for the next few days and using it as a reference work from now on. The bibliographies should be especially handy for anybody researching almost any aspect of science fiction or fantasy.

I have a total of 16 entries if I recall correctly (or did it get to 17 in the end?). They include the entries on the Rama novels, the Terminator movies, the Mad Max movies, and Samuel R. Delany’s novel, Triton - plus a whole bunch of theme entries, including Technology, Biology, Mutation, Marriage, Far Future, Nudity, Babies, Clones, etc., etc.

What becomes very apparent when researching topics like these (and an enormous amount of research goes into even a short piece that is meant to survey a theme across an entire field such as science fiction and fantasy) is the suspicion of science and technology that pervades this body of fictional narrative. Naive techno-optimism is not the order of the day in SF, and perhaps it never was. Even writing of the Gernsback era treated science and technology with some measure of ambiguity - among the positive vibes, there was always the fact that the plots were driven by the need to solve problems that technology creates.

At the same time, science fictional works with an overtly antitechnological theme usually end up sending at least an ambiguous message to the reader/viewer. As I remark in my Technology entry, “Seemingly antitechnological narratives frequently show technological products as alluring - as irresistibly [I see there is a typo at this point and the published text says “irrestibly”; God how I hate typos that slip through into my publications!] cool - and they are accommodated within the narratives’ value systems.”

I think I owe that insight partly to the cinema critic J.P. Telotte. Anyway, it seems to me to be true, and it provides a key for analysing much of the way science fiction narrative has worked in printed, cinematic and other forms over the past century and a bit. Science fiction is often strangely ambivalent about the technologies that it depicts, whatever the surface of the narrative seems to suggest.

Back to dipping into the encyclopedia. I’m going to enjoy this new toy ...

Russell Blackford