Science Fiction Studies

This short survey of sf as it deals with the mind/brain and consciousness is appealing in its breadth and beguiling in its surprising depth. Matthews begins his journey with a plea: "It should be more widely appreciated that literature is a kind of scientific tool that can be used to shed light on consciousness" (1). With this opening move he deftly stitches together the literary mainstream with sf in a novel way: by claiming literature itself for science, or the scientific. If literature functions as "a kind of scientific tool" for prying open consciousness, sf is the primo tool for the task.

There are familiar distinctions and hierarchies baked into Matthews's discussion of the relation between science and literature. In the final chapter of the book Matthews comments on the prevalence of inspiration from the biological sciences among his featured sf writers: "If this tradition of following the science continues, it should be assumed that speculation will continue to be built on new cores of truth and hence constantly renewed" (106). Here at least, science is in the driver's seat. In fact, Matthews claims this is truer now than it used to be: "While science makes discoveries at a steady state, technology seems to escalate, and the SF genre no longer has exclusive or even innovation rights over grand visions as to how technology will be incorporated into society" (106). Put that way it sounds like the situation is for the best, but I cannot imagine that the realization of grand technological visions for the future really motivates contemporary sf writers so much anyway.

Transparent Minds establishes from the start that the science (and technology) in sf demands our attention. Thus, the first body chapter, "Authorial Approaches," assumes a focus on narrative art and craft so that the reader can chew on it the rest of the way, and so that the book can develop and sustain an unbroken, sequential treatment of the various kinds of minds and varieties of sf consciousness it will investigate thereafter. This chapter features many excerpts from sf author interviews, so that we get to hear directly from the likes of (in no special order) William Gibson, Doris Lessing, Kazuo Ishiguro, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Becky Chambers, Kim Stanley Robinson, Vernor Vinge, Ann Leckie, N.K. Jemisin, Greg Egan, and others about how they write sf and how they understand the genre. This is an enlightening and entertaining chapter, and if you are not used to reading author interviews it should be a treat. The final paragraph of this chapter lays out the plan for the remainder of the book: [End Page 477]

I will be considering any non-standard consciousness as useful to the picture, so will include accounts of superhumans, sentient earth species as well as human-created AIs that have been created in fiction. From individual minds, we will progress to depictions of many minds in union or widely distributed. We will then visit ways in which we ourselves might escape the current limits of consciousness through posthuman enhancement or transcendence of our 'wetware' limits.

(26)

I will pause here to observe two things: first, the book is remarkably inclusive; second, it is wildly unguarded in the sheer scope of its project. Given its broad scope and short length, no single literary work gets more than a page of sustained attention at a time, and often considerably less. But the mosaic that Matthews creates through this method of assemblage is satisfying partly because it seems often on the verge of tipping over into something more like stream of consciousness. The momentum is driven by associative thinking, though this does not preclude the use of structuring devices such as the frequent return to key sf texts, frequent juxtaposition and comparison of sf works, and frequent jump-cuts to relevant science for illumination and extra texture. The writing is rich, lumpy, fast-moving, always unpredictable as to where it is going next, and exuberant in its uninhibitedness. It...