Title Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction Series The Oxford Very Short Introduction Series Author David Seed Cover Art --- Publisher Oxford University Press - 2011 First Printing Oxford University Press - 2011 Category Non-Fiction Warnings None Main Characters N/A Main Elements Science Fictiony

Science Fiction has proved notoriously difficult to define. It has been explained as a combination of romance, science and prophecy; as a genre based on an imagined alternative to the reader's environment; and as a form of fantastic fiction and historical literature. It has also been argued that science fiction narratives are the most engaged, socially relevant, and responsive to the modern technological environment. This Very Short Introduction doesn't offer a history of science fiction, but instead ties examples of science fiction to different historical moments, in order to demonstrate how science fiction has evolved over time. David Seed looks not only at literature, but also at drama and poetry, as well as film. Examining recurrent themes in science fiction he looks at voyages into space, the concept of the alien and alternative social identities, the role of technology in science fiction, and its relation to time - in the past, present, and future

I've been reading science fiction all year and when the library had this, I thought it was perfect. I'd learn about the history of SF, the key novels and movies, the trailblazing authors. What I got though wasn't quite what I was hoping for, though it did a good job of listing a whole bunch of books that I put on a Goodreads to-read shelf for later investigation.

The first issue was that there were blatant errors. Like mixing up Kim Newman with Kim Stanley Robinson (yes, both are men with a traditionally female name but totally not the same person). Or saying that in the Orson Scott Card novel Xenocide that the humans "overlords" have the aliens corraled behind a fence, when it was the human colonists that were behind the fence, partly to keep the aliens out, and partly to stop humans from affecting the alien's natural development (kind of a Star Trek Prime Directive). But who was inside the fence was kind of important and getting that wrong changes the tone of the book. I'd only actually read maybe a dozen at most of the books listed, and that I could pick out an error in a summary of one made me distrust everything else.

A second problem was not making clear what was a book and what was a movie, maybe bothered me more since I was tracking those books on Goodreads and got confused when some were missing. That's the third problem, some of them were books but so obscure that they were either missing, or maybe only a dozen people on Goodreads had read it. I mean it's great to dig out stuff that would be otherwise lost, or to try to figure out which book really did it first but when a good portion of the books mentioned are practically unknown now (or actually bad...I'm reading one, The Girl in the Golden Atom by Ray Cummings right now, and he must have been paid by the word it is sooooo drawn out, I'm a 100 pages in, a quarter of the way through, and getting seriously bored). On the positive, most of those older books can probably be found for free online! And of course just because something is old doesn't mean it's bad, I thought Wells' The War of the Worlds was amazing for example.

Talking of War of the Worlds, where do you think the author would discuss it? Maybe in the section Alien Encounters perhaps? Nope. It went under "Fictions of Time". Huh? It's an alien invasion, not a time travel tale. Yeah he was "predicting the future" but then so does the vast majority of SF. Thus I found the author's categorizing of SF to be confusing at best.

And while I was shelving those books, I would see the "Readers also enjoyed" section of the page and would think, now those books I've heard of, but this one here, with 20 reviews and all of them 3 stars or less is the one referenced in the Introduction. As a game I picked out some like Lucifer's Hammer or Dune just to see if he would eventually mention them (he does, though Dune took till page 123 out of 130 but maybe because it doesn't really fit into any of the chapters...I think as he got close to the end of his intro he went Whoops, forgot these, let's stick them in the last two chapters...) He would also mention an author like J.G. Ballard throughout, but only mention the books he wrote at the very end.

To be honest, I'm not sure I much feel like I learned anything about the evolution of SF, maybe a little in the intro and a little in the last chapter. I did fill up yet another to-read shelf on Goodreads (like I needed more suggestions!!!) and discovered that I had already put eight free books on my eReader that were referenced here, so that can help me pick what to read next off that device. But at the same time I wouldn't use this for "where to start in SF" exactly because the stuff is obscure, and obscure for good reasons, when there are a lot of really good SF, that maybe sure, weren't the first to delve into a particular concept, but did it far better than what got referenced in the Introduction.