Carl Kears and James Paz, eds. Medieval Science Fiction. KCLMS XXIV. London: Centre for Late
Antique & Medieval Studies/Boydell & Brewer, 2016.
Reviewed by Annie Heckel (nancy.heckel@mycampus.apus.edu)
Medieval
Science Fiction is a lovely anthology not only for the
thoughtful scholarship of its contributors, but also for the sheer breadth of
texts and other materials that those contributors discuss. With works ranging
from Beowulf to Star Trek, and authors from Conrad Kyeser to Edwin Morgan, the
juxtapositions set out in the anthology are thought-provoking, and give a good
sense of the wide range of materials available for study under the umbrellas of
both science fiction and medievalism. The volume contains a total of fourteen essays
including the foreword and introduction; the essays are sorted into six
sections: “Science & Fiction in the ‘Dark Ages’”; “Time & Space
Travel”; “The Alien”; “Technologies & Manmade Marvels”; “Distant Planets,
Distant Futures”; and “Making Medieval Science Fiction.”
The book begins with James Hannam’s foreword, “Medieval
Science and Fiction.” In the foreword, Hannam reviews the problem that we all
encounter whenever someone outside the field hears the word “science” in close
proximity to “medieval,” and scoffs that “everyone knows there was no science
in the Middle Ages” (xv). He provides a quick, useful summary of what we do know about science in the European
Middle ages, giving overviews of different cosmologies, the Quadrivium, travel literature, treatises
on flora and fauna (including bestiaries), medical texts, and texts on
astronomy. Hannam’s foreword on its own could be a wonderful addition to an
introductory medieval studies course, as it gives readers a solid catalog of both
major pre-modern scientific concepts and authors (e.g., Macrobius, Martianus
Cappella, Dante, and Boethius).
In the introduction to the volume, “Medieval Science Fiction:
An Impossible Fantasy?,” Carl Kears and James Paz build on Hannam’s engagement
with the popular belief in the incompatibility of science and the Middle Ages, particularly
the idea that “the terms ‘medieval’ and ‘science fiction’ do not belong
together” (3), before briefly discussing the disagreements in the field about
when, exactly, science fiction seems to have originated. In addition to
summarizing the essays contained in the anthology, Kears and Paz focus quite a
bit on defining the characteristics of science fiction, considering the ways in
which those characteristics do apply quite appropriately to a range of medieval
works, and going over the uses acknowledged science fiction makes of medieval
settings and characteristics.
The first sub-section of the volume, “Science & Fiction
in the ‘Dark Ages’,” contains one essay, “Is Beowulf Science Fiction?” by Daniel Anzelark, which establishes the
strength of a claim for Beowulf as
medieval science fiction by contrasting the way that Bede and Ælfric describe
the creation of the earth, highlighting Ælfric’s focus on the spiritual
importance, and Bede’s focus on the scientific characteristics. Anzelark’s
point is that the Beowulf author’s
description of the creation of the earth in lines 90-98 of the poem are much
closer to Bede than to Ælfric, an argument that helps to solidly establish the
idea that medieval authors, too, drew contrasts between spiritual and
scientific understandings of the world around them.
“Time & Space Travel” is the second section, and it
examines a variety of journeys between temporal settings. In “The Future is a
Foreign Country: The Legend of the Seven Sleepers and the Anglo-Saxon Sense of
the Past,” R. M. Liuzza provides strong follow-up to Anzelark’s essay on Beowulf, making an argument for seeing
the stories of displacing sleep as a variety of time travel that “folds” past
and present as neatly and bewilderingly as any time machine. Patricia Clare
Ingham shifts to modern science fiction featuring time travel back to the
middle ages in “Untimely Travel: Living and Dying in Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book.” Ingham’s essay examines
Willis’ use of a historically medieval setting to draw together the past and
future, highlighting the similarities of human experience during parallel
events in two times that initially seem to have more differences than
commonalities. While all three essays in this section were strong, Jeff
Massey’s “‘On Second Thought, Let’ Not Go To Camelot . . . ’Tis a Silly Space’:
Star Trek and the Inconsequence of SF Medievalism” deals with a sore spot that
can be particularly annoying to those who love both the medieval and science
fiction. Massey explores the rather obnoxious disdain with which a variety of Star Trek series (mis)treat not only
medieval narratives, but even the very concept of medieval culture, exposing a
weakness in Gene Rodenberry’s generally strong series.
The volume’s third section is titled “The Alien,” and
includes one essay that examines medieval aliens in the form of the Green
Children of Woolpit, and one that discusses modern aliens with Anglo-Saxon
connections. The legend of the Green Children is examined at length in Mary
Baine Campbell’s essay “‘Those two green children which Nubrigensis speaks of
in his time, that fell from heaven’, or the Origins of Science Fiction”; Campbell
makes an admirable effort to sort out the singular and confusing story of the
Green Children of Woolpit by looking at the accounts of Ralph of Coggeshall and
William of Newbury, as well as their literary inheritors. While Campbell’s
argument does not clarify how we should understand the story, she makes a strong
point that in both accounts, we can see clear use of scientific information to
try and understand the children’s origin and meaning. Campbell’s discussion of
terrestrial aliens is followed by “Aliens and Anglo-Saxons in Edwin Morgan’s
‘The First Men on Mercury’” by Denis Ferhatović, which introduces the fascinating
language play and linguistic creep that Morgan uses as a theme in a range of
his poems. Morgan’s deconstruction and reconstruction of language dramatizes
not only the way that languages and people mix and change one another in
“alien” encounters, but also the way in which our experience of works from the
past change us more than we know or may want them to.
The discussion of little green men is followed by a section
titled “Technologies & Manmade Marvels,” which begins with Andy Sawyer’s
essay “The Riddle of Medieval Technology.” Sawyer opens his essay with the
Discworld novels of the greatly missed Terry Pratchett, highlighting one of
Pratchett’s main strategies for humor: the juxtaposition of what “everybody
knows” with what actually is. Sawyer
uses Pratchett as a model, comparing “the medieval worlds depicted in SF with
the actuality of so-called non-technological societies,” which leads him to the
conclusion, explored through the rest of the essay, that the resulting
“disjunct . . . can only be solved by questioning our assumptions about these
societies and what ‘technology’ and ‘science’ meant to them” (153). He also
asks the question, prompted by the work of historians like Lynn White and Jean
Gimpel, of what science fiction might result from regarding “the medieval
period as one which creatively and speculatively embraced technology” (153), answering that question with an
examination of Terry Pratchett’s depiction of technological advances in the
Discworld novels.
The second essay of this section, “Dreams of War, Dreams of
Dragons’ Fire: Conrad Kyeser’s Bellifortis”
by Alison Harthill, discusses military devices and strategies that seem more
suited to Pratchett’s fantasy world than to the 15th century
audience for whom it was written. Harthill’s analysis of Kyeser’s fantastic
manual is a fascinating examination of the way that medieval treatises on
warfare could move beyond realistic strategy into a fantastic realm of imagined
technologies. Harthill focuses on a range of weapons from the text, including
automata, fireworks, and magic, arguing that the text is meant less as a
practical handbook—though it can function as such for some elements—and more as
a work meant to “provide the reader with material for dreams which go beyond
the bounds of what is known, what is reality” (191), helping to create the sort
of strong leader of whom Kyeser himself dreamed.
The fifth section of the anthology, “Distant Planets,
Distant Futures,” contains two essays that make strong cases for the clear
continuation of medieval literary traditions in science fiction as a genre.
This part of the book begins with “Courtly Love on Mars: E. R. Burroughs and
the Medieval Lineage of Planetary Romance” by Andrew Scheil. Edgar Rice
Burroughs’ Barsoom series, a science
fiction classic, must make its way into any anthology dealing broadly with
science fiction; here, Scheil links Burroughs’ series in for the distinct way
in which it brings science fiction and courtly love together. Scheil’s main
argument is that the Barsoom series
needs to have “a place in the study of early twentieth-century medievalism”
(201), and also that planetary romance as a genre needs to be considered as a
form of neomedieval romance.
In “The Medieval Dying Earth,” James Paz switches to an
earlier time, pointing out the resurgence of elegy in science fiction. Paz
opens his essay by juxtaposing a passage from Jack Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth (a collection of linked stories) with a
passage from the Old English elegy The
Wanderer, using the striking similarities to argue for the importance of
looking at new apocalyptic fiction in relation to old apocalyptic works. In
addition to the texts with which the essay begins, Paz discusses Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun and another Exeter
Book elegy, The Ruin, highlighting
the way all four works make use of what Kathleen Davis termed “multiple
temporalities” (qtd. in Paz 222).
The final section of the volume, “Making Medieval Science
Fiction,” changes from establishing a space
for the medieval elements we see in science fiction to discussing how to
actively distinguish, develop, and promote a realistic medieval aesthetic in
science fiction. Minsoo Kang begins this last piece of the book with “Catapunk:
Toward a Medieval Aesthetic of Science Fiction.” Kang approaches the problem of
medieval science fiction from a very different direction than most essays in
the anthology. He begins by analyzing how the medieval has been re-envisioned
in science fiction, then shifts from what is to what could be, determining what
characteristics would need to be present in a truly “medieval science fiction,”
coining the term “catapunk” (the catapult being a “quintessentially medieval
device” in the way that steam was central to the 19th century in
which steampunk is set) as a genre term for works that fit this definition
(257).
Kang’s definition is followed by Guy Consolmagno’s “Medieval
Cosmology and World Building,” which makes an argument that could be very
helpful to any author interested in experimenting with “catapunk,” and expands
nicely on James Hannam’s foreword with a careful and thoughtful look at the
range of cosmologies available to the well-read student of religion and
philosophy, both in our time and the Middle Ages. Consolmagno highlights the
way that many different cosmologies overlap and interact within individual eras
(not only the medieval, but our own as well), pointing out the importance of
recognizing how each cosmology has a foundation of assumptions that may not
align with other cosmologies. This point is particularly significant when he
examines the lack of alignment between our current requirements for high
standards of proof as a reason for the difficulty we have understanding
pre-Enlightenment cosmologies.
The final essay, “Discovering Eifelheim” by Michael F. Flynn, fits well into the “Making Medieval
Science Fiction” section, but is also quite different from the rest of the
essays in the book. It is a discussion of process by Flynn, a writer of what we
can, by this point in the anthology, term “medieval science fiction.” It’s a
nice inclusion to have in an anthology mostly focused on scholarly analysis,
and adds a perspective on the issue that is different but no less thought-provoking
and rigorous than the essays by scholars of literature and history.
Overall, this volume should be a welcome addition to any
library frequented by scholars of medieval studies or science fiction; the
essays included all rise admirably to the challenge of creating a space in
which the concept of medieval science fiction not only makes sense, but also helps
us to consider old and new texts from different angles. The choice to bring in
scientific, historic, and philosophical texts as well as literary works is a
strength of this anthology, giving it a breadth that is sometimes lacking in
academic anthologies even in a diverse field like medieval studies. Paz and
Kears have put together an excellent, interdisciplinary volume that emphasizes
the wide range of approaches we can take as the study of medievalism continues
to develop.
Annie
Heckel
Independent
Scholar
