On Speculative Modernism

Speculative Modernism is a really interesting book that situates science fiction, fantasy, and horror within the larger movement of literary modernism. It studies major works of speculative fiction from roughly 1880 to 1940, leaning heavily toward science fiction over the other genres. It’s organized into thematic chapters that look for overlaps between the emerging speculative fiction and the modernists — T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Hemingway, and so on — and the authors find that speculative fiction was addressing the same questions the modernists were: what does it mean to live in the early twentieth century? how do we cope with the rapid transformation of technology and social relations? at what point must we break from established custom and become our own individual selves? The chapters take up these themes:

• Utopia and dystopia
• Shadows, the Other, ghosts
• The natural world and ecology
• Colonialism and race
• The machine
• Mysticism and religion
• Interiority and the self, individualism, rationality

The specific works are too many to name, but they range from Wells’s The Time Machine to Tolkien’s “Leaf by Niggle,” Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Buck Rogers, and the work of Lovecraft, with plenty of room given to Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood as well. I hadn’t read most of these, but the authors did them justice; despite the gaps in my own knowledge, the book stayed comprehensible and avoided meaningless academic jargon. It probably shouldn’t be the first thing you read on the history of speculative fiction or its criticism — better to read some synthetic overview first, to place the arguments — and because I don’t know the academic debates it’s responding to, I didn’t get as much from it as I might have. Still, a really interesting book.