Science Fiction Studies

Celebrated critic Gary Westfahl has published countless influential articles and reviews about science fiction for almost two decades and thus has arguably earned the informal, conversational tone that characterizes this recent study. In his introduction, Westfahl explains how The Stuff of Science Fiction is intended to be a follow-up to a teaching packet he put together titled Wonderful Worlds: The Tropes of Science Fiction and, while pedagogically oriented, should not solely be treated as a textbook. Westfahl hopes to appeal to both general and non-expert readers, exchanging "academic" prose for a more free-form discussion of his key areas of sf.

As the subtitle suggests, the book is split into three subsections, with each chapter tackling a different topic. These vary considerably in both depth and length of analysis. Many familiar tropes are covered—robots, aliens, spaceships, and the like—while other, more niche, subjects discuss everything from Future Earths to Mars and Venus (why not the other planets, though?)

The first section, "The Hardware of Science Fiction," is focused on tech: machines, weapons, vehicles, and other constructs. Westfahl sets an informal, conversational tone that smacks of "common sense" discussions of popular culture. Here, as in other chapters, Westfahl makes general pronouncements about a particular topic (e.g., "the vast majority of people prefer phone calls to video calls …" [4]) and ranges widely across texts that span an impressively diverse time period. One paragraph alone threads together Lucian's The True History (second century CE) and the 2013 film Gravity to introduce the concept of the spaceship in science fiction. What is less impressive is the surprisingly prescriptive definition of science fiction Westfahl provides, emphasizing its appeal to "juveniles," its foregrounding of "technology," and its narratives that thrive on "conflict" (although authors such as C.L. Moore were already pushing the genre into more introspective, [End Page 509] character-driven modes as early as 1944). The conversational tone also lets through some unfortunate, outdated language; throwaway statements such as "most would agree that a propensity to violence is a trait of savages, not civilized people" (12) pop up uncritically and mar proceedings.

That said, one of the most delightful (and educational) aspects of the book is Westfahl's peppering of contextual anecdotes to break up chapters that sometimes feel like annotated bibliographies. Examples include the naming of Star Trek's "phasers" (14), the history of aviation via the Wright Brothers (sensibly located in a chapter on "vehicles"), and historical context about Russian exploration of Venus (173), to name a few. These moments in which Westfahl takes his time to introduce and expand upon the themes of each chapter are some of the most effective of the book. Section one finishes with a slightly idiosyncratic, US-focused chapter on "monuments and memorabilia" (which, while mentioning music, unforgivably omits that staple of sf songwriting, Chris de Burgh's "A Spaceman Came Traveling" [1975]).

Things become a little more rigorous in the second section, "The Settings of Science Fiction," but a new issue arises: the same text is discussed multiple times across the chapters, making for a somewhat disjointed and repetitive read. While it is understandable that texts may have multiple points of connection to the organizational themes, a few are relied upon to do the heavy lifting in Westfahl's analysis—mostly from familiar genre heavyweights such as Jules Verne and Arthur C. Clarke. A chapter on time travel nicely frames Dickens's A Christmas Carol as an sf narrative and ends with a genuinely illuminating discussion of film budgets in sf cinema, while a chapter on "Future Earths" offers a disappointingly shallow treatment of climate change that, unfortunately, does not engage with any texts from the global south or with writers from regions within the US that are most affected by catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina. The moments where Westfahl does range outside of his geographical comfort zone of the US and UK are few and far between, and typically occur in discussions on sf films such as the Czech film Ikarie XB-1...