| Book Review | Oregon Historical Quarterly, 107.4

Reviews

FRONTIERS PAST AND FUTURE: SCIENCE FICTION AND THE AMERICAN WEST

by Carl Abbott

Kansas University Press, Lawrence, 2006. Notes, index.
240 pages. $29.95 cloth.

To anyone familiar with the Star Trek slogan of space as the "final frontier" or with the "console cowboys" populating cyberpunk novels, the suggestion that U.S. science fiction has been shaped by narratives about the exploration and colonization of the American West will hardly come as a surprise. Carl Abbott traces the influence of such narratives in science fiction from the 1940s to the present, examining the landscapes, land uses, characters, scientific perspectives, political projects, and urban and technological scenarios that relate either to the American West in its historical and political reality or to cultural imaginations of the region. "The western stories that animate science fiction ... come from grade-school history classes and sophisticated historical scholarship, from detailed empirical accounts and cherished national myths, from mass-market fictions, films, and television shows — all of which are embroiled with the ideology and metaphor of the frontier and with the imaginative function of the West as a last, best place," Abbott argues (p. 19). This claim is obviously true, but it would seem to point to a rather derivative and unreflective genre, as Abbott himself recognizes. The gist of his analysis, therefore, lies in showing how science fiction over time reworks and complicates simple stories about Western expansion as an epic conquest to provide a more nuanced portrayal of the frontier experience, as well as to acknowledge that there is not one but multiple stories about the West. In this respect, Abbott argues, the development of science fiction parallels increasingly complex and multi-perspectival historiographical accounts of the West. In presenting these more complex views, not only has science fiction itself become more interesting, but it also contributes to a relegitimation of some of the foundational stories of U.S. nationhood. Abbott concludes:

If science fiction is a guide, we do not have to repudiate the narratives that have been such powerful nation-builders. Americans — that is, white middle-class Americans like me and many science fiction writers — have not been telling stories that are wrong, just overly simple. We need to understand how to adapt and enrich our western-national stories for new centuries, how to maintain their virtues while making them more inclusive and careful of people and places. In this way, science fiction may offer ideas for recasting historical questions about borderlands, wilderness, and community (p. 187).

When Abbott refers to "science fiction," he means mostly novels and stories by U.S. writers. Science fiction outside the United States, whether it be British, German, Polish, Russian, Australian, Japanese, or Latin American, is never so much as mentioned, and science fiction in cartoon format or film is only occasionally alluded to. These may be justified choices, though one might wish, in the context of the strongly nationalist narratives that Abbott traces, that the focus on the United States was more clearly articulated as a methodological choice. It is likely that Abbott's analysis would have considerably gained in depth through a comparison with texts from other national traditions. Within his chosen framework, however, Abbott covers a great deal of ground, basing himself on an encyclopedic knowledge of science fiction in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that one cannot but admire. It is the merit of Frontiers Past and Future to have assembled a valuable archive of science fiction literature that engages with the imagination of the American West; each chapter clearly marks two or three dominant trends in fiction that address a particular aspect of the West, and thereby establish a useful taxonomy of the wealth of material Abbot addresses. For the science fiction novice in particular, this survey will prove engaging and functional in the materials and categories it provides.

For those acquainted with science fiction, the book makes for somewhat less interesting reading, especially since many of its chapters indulge in rather tedious serial plot summaries, while the analysis that frames and links them sometimes remains rather thin. Abbott observes correctly that science fiction writers incorporate both facts and fictions about the West into their stories, but he seems less interested in showing what difference it might make to build on one or the other. In the chapter on the role of Western cities in science fiction, for example, Abbott points out that Los Angeles is usually represented as a faceless, generic, and abstract grid, large in scale and dedicated to the pursuit of commerce, while San Francisco is imagined as small-scale, organic, authentic, and infused with bohemian spirit, a contrast that, as he shrewdly notes, may have little basis in reality given Los Angeles's important cultural institutions and production. But he seems unwilling to investigate why science fiction writers would want to perpetuate this particular stereotype: "It may not be the real San Francisco, but it's fun to imagine," he comments (p. 138). Certainly, but for a cultural and historical analysis, the question must arise why it wouldn't be equal or more fun to imagine a bohemian Los Angeles, Las Vegas, or Salt Lake City. The underlying literary, cultural, and ideological investments of this kind of urban imagination, in other words, go unexamined.

This reluctance to push beyond taxonomy toward critical analysis also surfaces in other ways. In a chapter that examines the mix of digital technologies and the focus on East Asia that characterizes much cyberpunk fiction, Abbott argues that such texts foreground American ambivalence about Asia through two kinds of plots: one that portrays Asia as the next target area for American expansion, and a different one in which Asia becomes an economic, cultural, technological, or political threat to the United States. This analysis is broadly accurate, though one might want to say a good deal more about the way in which digital networks in cyberpunk reconfigure such national and regional oppositions. More crucially, one would like to see Abbott investigate to what extent fictions that see the next wave of technological innovation or political power as emerging from Asia really still fit into any expanded U.S. imagination of the American West, and to what extent they cross the threshold into a different kind of cultural imaginary in which the West becomes an expansion of the Asian rather than the American East. Indeed, one may wonder whether such texts do in fact reaffirm American national narratives in quite the way Abbott claims in his conclusion. Such questions about the reach of Abbott's analytical framework accompany his study throughout; it is the merit of his rich textual archive, however, to have made these queries possible.

Ursula K. Heise

Stanford University

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