Critical evaluation of Stephen King’s work is far from unanimous, with a handful of scholars producing monographs devoted to his fiction, while others dismiss him as a peddler of poorly written popular narratives motivated only by commercial success. King himself acknowledges that he is as much a brand name as an author, and that he might be considered “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonalds.” Anxieties related to the aesthetic value of prolifically produced popular fiction appear to be validated by King’s novel, The Institute (2019), which treads the familiar terrain of the King brand by utilizing the genre of speculative fiction and focusing on a child with paranormal powers. Nevertheless, although The Institute repeats many of King’s abiding concerns and tropes, it represents a significant development in his work. Less a reiteration of King’s earlier speculative fiction depicting children with telekinetic, telepathic, and pyrokinetic powers, The Institute demonstrates significant complexity and nuance in its representation of power, good and evil, and the ethics underpinning American life in the twenty-first century. In addition to critiquing corrupt social structures, The Institute interrogates the assumed powerlessness of children and condemns the commodification of the human subject by late capitalist society and its militarized forms of order. In his novel, King proves his detractors wrong by not simply reproducing his particular brand of fiction but revising its previous representations in order to meaningfully engage with a rapidly changing world.
{"title":"“In America?”","authors":"E. Mercer","doi":"10.3828/extr.2021.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2021.11","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Critical evaluation of Stephen King’s work is far from unanimous, with a handful of scholars producing monographs devoted to his fiction, while others dismiss him as a peddler of poorly written popular narratives motivated only by commercial success. King himself acknowledges that he is as much a brand name as an author, and that he might be considered “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonalds.” Anxieties related to the aesthetic value of prolifically produced popular fiction appear to be validated by King’s novel, The Institute (2019), which treads the familiar terrain of the King brand by utilizing the genre of speculative fiction and focusing on a child with paranormal powers. Nevertheless, although The Institute repeats many of King’s abiding concerns and tropes, it represents a significant development in his work. Less a reiteration of King’s earlier speculative fiction depicting children with telekinetic, telepathic, and pyrokinetic powers, The Institute demonstrates significant complexity and nuance in its representation of power, good and evil, and the ethics underpinning American life in the twenty-first century. In addition to critiquing corrupt social structures, The Institute interrogates the assumed powerlessness of children and condemns the commodification of the human subject by late capitalist society and its militarized forms of order. In his novel, King proves his detractors wrong by not simply reproducing his particular brand of fiction but revising its previous representations in order to meaningfully engage with a rapidly changing world.","PeriodicalId":253997,"journal":{"name":"Extrapolation: Volume 62, Issue 2","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122635260","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Iain M. Banks’s The Algebraist (2004), a Hugo Award nominee for Best Novel in 2005, has attracted far less critical attention than his Culture novels despite being a remarkable work. Born of the author’s wish to develop his science fiction beyond the Culture’s universe, The Algebraist is a complex novel displaying in its dense pages Banks’s wondrous imagination. Here I consider the ways in which the main civilizations he depicts in it, the Mercatoria and the Dwellers, connect with key issues raised in the Culture novels: the ethics of intervention in other civilizations, the use of AIs, and the nature of utopia. The Culture, as I argue, casts a long shadow but Banks’s decision to explore another narrative universe allows him to examine these fundamental issues from a different angle. The Algebraist complements, nonetheless, his main tenets in the Culture series.
{"title":"In the Shadow of the Culture","authors":"Sara Martín","doi":"10.3828/extr.2021.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2021.10","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Iain M. Banks’s The Algebraist (2004), a Hugo Award nominee for Best Novel in 2005, has attracted far less critical attention than his Culture novels despite being a remarkable work. Born of the author’s wish to develop his science fiction beyond the Culture’s universe, The Algebraist is a complex novel displaying in its dense pages Banks’s wondrous imagination. Here I consider the ways in which the main civilizations he depicts in it, the Mercatoria and the Dwellers, connect with key issues raised in the Culture novels: the ethics of intervention in other civilizations, the use of AIs, and the nature of utopia. The Culture, as I argue, casts a long shadow but Banks’s decision to explore another narrative universe allows him to examine these fundamental issues from a different angle. The Algebraist complements, nonetheless, his main tenets in the Culture series.","PeriodicalId":253997,"journal":{"name":"Extrapolation: Volume 62, Issue 2","volume":"61 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127433944","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Although Poul Anderson is best known for his prose, he dabbled in poetry all his life, and his historical interests led him to become a major—if unacknowledged— contributor to the twentieth-century alliterative revival. This revival, most often associated with British poets such as W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis, attempted to adapt medieval Germanic alliterative meter into modern English. Yet Anderson, a firmly libertarian Enlightenment-style writer, imbued his alliterative poetry with a rationalistic spirit that implicitly accepted (with appropriate qualifications) a narrative of historical progress. This article analyzes the alliterative verse that Anderson wrote and uncovers how the demands of the pulp market shaped what poetry he could produce.
{"title":"Poul Anderson and the American Alliterative Revival","authors":"D. Wise","doi":"10.3828/extr.2021.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2021.9","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Although Poul Anderson is best known for his prose, he dabbled in poetry all his life, and his historical interests led him to become a major—if unacknowledged— contributor to the twentieth-century alliterative revival. This revival, most often associated with British poets such as W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis, attempted to adapt medieval Germanic alliterative meter into modern English. Yet Anderson, a firmly libertarian Enlightenment-style writer, imbued his alliterative poetry with a rationalistic spirit that implicitly accepted (with appropriate qualifications) a narrative of historical progress. This article analyzes the alliterative verse that Anderson wrote and uncovers how the demands of the pulp market shaped what poetry he could produce.","PeriodicalId":253997,"journal":{"name":"Extrapolation: Volume 62, Issue 2","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127043407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
J. R. R. Tolkien’s representation of women in his fiction has generated a number of controversies since its original publication. This essay examines two major issues: an evasiveness in Tolkien’s treatment of sexual violence against women that is not disconnected from a gendered terror that underlies several moments in his works and functions to link women’s sexuality and desiring with death. Specifically, we read the author’s depiction of Shelob and her appetitive, arachnoid monstrosity as at once displacing sexual violence onto the monstrous feminine and evoking a revulsion at the aging female body. We next explore the consequences of the author’s depictions of women and his handling of sexual violence in close connection with his own 1939 public performance of Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale, a comic narrative turning on two rapes that Tolkien nevertheless conceals in a comparable fashion to his elision of sexual violence in Middle-earth.
{"title":"Tolkien and Rape","authors":"T. S. Miller, Elizabeth Miller","doi":"10.3828/extr.2021.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2021.8","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000J. R. R. Tolkien’s representation of women in his fiction has generated a number of controversies since its original publication. This essay examines two major issues: an evasiveness in Tolkien’s treatment of sexual violence against women that is not disconnected from a gendered terror that underlies several moments in his works and functions to link women’s sexuality and desiring with death. Specifically, we read the author’s depiction of Shelob and her appetitive, arachnoid monstrosity as at once displacing sexual violence onto the monstrous feminine and evoking a revulsion at the aging female body. We next explore the consequences of the author’s depictions of women and his handling of sexual violence in close connection with his own 1939 public performance of Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale, a comic narrative turning on two rapes that Tolkien nevertheless conceals in a comparable fashion to his elision of sexual violence in Middle-earth.","PeriodicalId":253997,"journal":{"name":"Extrapolation: Volume 62, Issue 2","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132393067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay focuses on Asimov’s The Caves of Steel and Clarke’s The City and the Stars, two works published during the 1950s that both largely abolish the automobile as a stern rebuke to that decade’s enthusiastic acceptance of the car. However, these works hold differing ideas regarding desirable and effective alternatives to cars, for Caves of Steel favors machine-enhanced transportation in the form of slidewalks (a vast network of moving sidewalks), whereas City and the Stars privileges the simple act of walking. This essay demonstrates, therefore, how Asimov’s and Clarke’s privileging of different alternatives to automobility also reveals disagreements on two important questions: to what degree technology and human bodies should intertwine, and whether collectivism or individualism should hold greater priority.
{"title":"Better to Move by Foot or Slidewalk","authors":"J. Withers","doi":"10.3828/extr.2021.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2021.7","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This essay focuses on Asimov’s The Caves of Steel and Clarke’s The City and the Stars, two works published during the 1950s that both largely abolish the automobile as a stern rebuke to that decade’s enthusiastic acceptance of the car. However, these works hold differing ideas regarding desirable and effective alternatives to cars, for Caves of Steel favors machine-enhanced transportation in the form of slidewalks (a vast network of moving sidewalks), whereas City and the Stars privileges the simple act of walking. This essay demonstrates, therefore, how Asimov’s and Clarke’s privileging of different alternatives to automobility also reveals disagreements on two important questions: to what degree technology and human bodies should intertwine, and whether collectivism or individualism should hold greater priority.","PeriodicalId":253997,"journal":{"name":"Extrapolation: Volume 62, Issue 2","volume":"81 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122543738","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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