I had a few reasons for choosing this book as my critical text for this term. For starters, many previous students discuss it as useful, and since my crit partner was reading it this term as well, I figured it'd be a good choice, since we'd have a chance to discuss it. I was particularly excited when the book arrived and I noticed the various essays listed. This looked like a great choice.

Unfortunately, this book was very difficult to get through. I spent a lot of time thinking about why too, because I enjoy the whole scholarly aspect of the genre and enjoy reading such essays, whereas many genre writers (and readers) do not. Instead, this book sucked my brain dry.

Part of the problem stemmed from the first part of the book, which focused on the genre's history. While I did learn some new tidbits, I found the essays very dry and very laborious, especially in comparison to David Hartwell's Age of Wonders. It's odd I had problems, because Hartwell wrote his entire book, whereas The Cambridge Companion is penned by many different authors. I expected a variety of styles and tones, and yet nearly every essay was very academic, whereas Hartwell's essays spoke in laymen's terms. In both cases, I hadn't read most of the books being discussed, but only in the case of Hartwell's book did I feel that I could understand the point of the essay.

Part one, "The History," left me hungry for parts two and three, "Critical Approaches" and "Sub-Genres and Themes" respectively. And I did find some solace in the various essays in these sections. The essays "Feminist theory and Science Fiction" and "Science fiction and queer theory" really grabbed my interest, as did the essays "Science fiction and the life sciences," "Hard science fiction" (this one surprised me), "Alternate history," "Utopias and anti-utopias," and "Politics and science fiction" also caught my eye. Actually, most every essay in parts two and three offered some interesting insight and angles to the genre and its sub-genres, though in almost every case, I found the essays to be dry and brittle in tone.

Other critical theory and history books, such as Hartwell's, do a good job articulating the content of the examples it pulls from. Since I'm a relative newbie to the SF genre, there's a lot of turf I haven't covered, and when an author of an essay expounds on a story or novel I haven't read yet to make his or her point, I'm very grateful. Here, such explanation was either missing or didn't quite hit the mark, and I think the reason said explanation didn't hit the mark was because in the cases where I had read the material, I didn't see eye-to-eye with the author of the essay, or I felt the author had sidestepped his/her original point.

It's not a bad book by any means, and I don't regret reading it at all. I find that this book would make for a great companion (I mean that literally) in a classroom where the texts discussed are being read in parallel to lectures on the various subjects. In other words, this would make for an interesting textbook. Outside of the classroom, I find this to be a good jumping point, with every essay summarizing its points rather than digging for any depth (which isn't a bad thing: a book with a variety of essays must summarize to an extent, expecting readers to seek out additional material to satisfy their curiosity). The reading list provided is going to be most useful in the future, and there's plenty of resources listed as well, so The Cambridge Companion will likely be the first book I use for a reference when I'm looking for a particular title or essay about a particular subject.

I don't think this is the kind of book meant to be read in one go. It's an essay-by-essay kind of book, something to read a little bit of, then one should read something else before coming back for another essay. I think the individual essays in parts two and three are very beneficial to writers, but some writers may simply want to focus on these individual essays rather than reading the book as a whole. ( )

http://home.earthlink.net/~karen20000... ( )

http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/sf/camb...

We are all waiting for the third edition of the Clute/Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction to appear. In the meantime, this volume of 21 essays on various aspects of sf fulfills the two things I really want from a critical survey: it helps me better understand the sf I have already read, and gives me pointers to writers and books that I might enjoy.

Highlights for me: the sequence of five historical essays about the development of science fiction; the three essays basically about sf and sex (dressed up as "feminist theory", "queer theory" and "gender"); and Ken MacLeod's broad survey of sf and politics. I also felt that Andrew Butler's essay on "post-modernism and science fiction" succeeded by critically examining postmodernism as a concept, so that I felt I had learnt something at the end of it. Mark Bould's essay on sf in films and TV is also very good but runs out of steam in about 1970.

Two assertions that made me think: Ken MacLeod - a writer with things to say about religion? Alien - like "Bloodchild", a pregnant man story?

Low points: Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's essay on Marxist theory and science fiction is without redeeming features. The only interesting bit, his discussion of Jameson, is covered much better by Butler two chapters on. Several of the other chapters spurred me to think that had I the time and library resources I would have liked to try and do a better job.

General bias: Well, one can quibble about the omissions (graphic novels; Christopher Priest) but the top four names in the index, ranked by numbers of cross-references, are Heinlein, Le Guin, Wells and Asimov, which seems to me pretty fair. Given the collection's emphasis on issues of sex and sexuality, it's not so very surprising to find Joanna Russ in fifth place, but she is followed by the firmly traditional choices of John W. Campbell, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, and E.E. "Doc" Smith. I would have thought that fans who want to read more broadly about sf, but feel alienated by the Clute lit-crit stuff (as I saw it referred to somewhere; I am not among this number), will find enough in this book to make them feel they got their money's worth. ( )