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19th-Century Sf and the Discourses of Science.

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19th-century Sf and the Discourses of Science. Martin Willis. Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century. Kent: The Kent State UP, 2006. 272 pp. $29 pbk

I hate to sound like Robin Williams in Dead Poet's Society, but 1 want you all to tear out the introduction to this book. Or at least ignore it. Especially pages 1-3, 11-19, 21-22 and 24-26. It will just annoy you (and get in the way of all the good stuff that follows). A charitable reader might call its description of sf studies 'provocative'. A less generous person might use words like 'misleadingly selective' or 'tendentious'. But I will stick with 'displaying its own ignorance'--and point to the general absence from the bibliography of articles, let alone articles from the sf journals (a piece from a 1983 Science Fiction Studies and an essay by Willis himself from a 1994 Extrapolation were all I could find), as evidence of the author's relative unfamiliarity with a field upon whose reform he spends parts of his introduction insisting. Of course, it is entirely possible that sf scholars are not Willis' primary audience. He describes himself as "writing as a 'nineteenth-century scholar1 rather than as a 'science fiction critic"' so as to "promote the genre of...

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