Book Review: Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction by John Rieder

 

Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction by John Rieder

 200 pages, Paperback
Published May, 2008 by Wesleyan University Press

To be honest, if I had a better idea of what this book was before I ordered I might not have gotten it. Accidentally this became the second book I have read this year about 19th-century SF, that predates the actual invention of the name of the genre itself.  The author is a researcher and scholar I was not familiar with before reading this book. First things first, this is an excellent well well-researched book, that said when I ordered it I thought it was entirely about the early pulps.

There is little coverage of such stuff, but the majority of the book covers the era at the end of the 19th century and how the fantastic literature of the era responded to Colonialism at a time when it was at its nakedly worst phase. Of course, there is a lot of breakdown of HG Wells, including the incredible background on Time Machine, War of the Worlds and I enjoyed the analysis of my favorite Wells novel the Island of Doctor Moreau. Thankfully this book goes deeper and provides insight beyond the classics we remember. 

19th-century pre-SF is not exactly my wheelhouse, I am certainly excited to become more knowledgeable in this area of the genre. One thing this book does is highlight the fiction that was available to most of the Golden Age authors as children. There is no shortage of books that explore Wells or Edgar Rice Burroughs but what this book does well is present an argument for how many of these works interface with 19th-century ideals of Colonial conquest. Often these novels reflect those modes of thinking or are influenced by them.

The lost land narratives of the era, of untouched islands and civilizations often expressed the nasty othering that was inherent to colonial conquest.

Otherwise lost books are what I read books like this for.  Most interesting to me was a popular subgenre at the time that went by the name Future Wars. There were also disaster novels like After London which sounds great to me.   

This is a pretty important work of SF academic research that I think should be in every library for scholars who study or teach the history of Science Fiction. It ends with great takes on Campbell's Who Goes There and CL Moore's Vintage Season, two stories I love and it was a great cap to the entire thing. Big Thumbs up.