Gerhard's Reviews > The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction

Welcome update of the 2009 Routledge Companion, which did not even have a chapter on afrofuturism. Interestingly, the 2024 edition starts with ‘North African, Middle Eastern, Arabic and diasporic science fiction’ by Sinéad Murphy, as opposed to ‘The Copernican revolution’ by Adam Roberts. This indicates the growing importance of indigenous futurisms. The editors write in their Introduction:

We all live in science fiction times.
The genre is everywhere, even as it bleeds into all other kinds of cultural production. At the same time, the border between reality and sf grows increasingly porous, a tenuous proposition at best.

It is hard to believe it, but way back in 2009, the world was grappling with social media. I did not even know this, but at the time the Routledge Companion went online to enable easy updating and expansion.

Its hyperlinks make for a pleasurable dérive through the genre, but it remains a little atomised and, inevitably, in a constant race to keep up. The fixed parameters of a physical book exacerbate these problems even as they relieve its editors of much of that burden.

The significance, and prescience, of the original Routledge Companion can be gauged by the editors’ 2009 sentiment that sf scholarship has embraced “the genre as a global phenomenon, not merely in terms of the consumption of texts and practices produced in or by the First World, but also in its ability to express the experience of modernity among peoples excluded from the economic and geopolitical core.”

From the 2024 Introduction:

Indigenous sf and sf from the Global South have been major success stories in the 15 years since we wrote those words, even if far too little of it is available in translation and the examples written in English tend to be published only by small presses.
Much of this sf challenges our ideas about the nature and shape of the field, rewiring cyberpunk, planetary romance, space opera, utopia, dystopia, the technothriller and so on, or doing its own beautiful, exciting and exhilarating thing.

Unsurprisingly, the editors remain committed to being “unable and unwilling” to offer a definition of sf. Their argument is that: “Any attempts at definition have more to do with various commentators establishing their relationships to others within the conversation than with a serious attempt to delimit a mode.”

Fair enough, but pity the poor reader trying to keep up with literary scholarship and popular culture, especially when Gary K. Wolfe states baldly that American SF no longer exists. “But nonetheless, there are works that look like sf, swim like sf and quack like sf – and it is helpful to consider them in the company of whatever we might just about agree upon as being sf.”

It is sobering to consider that, since the 2009 Routledge Companion, there has been a new generation of critics and readers (while those of us who are, er, older are grappling with the changes in approach and consumerism.) One comment I do agree with – and it is a contentious debate, especially in the context of afrofuturism – is that the genre has never been interested in prediction or prognostication:

...we are not convinced that the genre has ever had much to say seriously about the future. It has always, via estrangement, allegory, metaphor or whatever, been more about the situation in which its creators have found themselves themselves in – environmental geopolitics, personal identity, new technologies, scientific developments, and so on.

Apparently, the revised edition was nearly derailed by Covid-19 – Adam Roberts stepped down as an editor – but the work trundled along. Readers, scholars, and the simply curious can only be deeply thankful for this. The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction remains an indispensable resource and fascinating barometer of global sf scholarship and fandom.