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Are you a fan of science fiction? A space enthusiast? A historian of technology? All three? Chances are you may have seen this image:

In the 1970s, NASA commissioned a number of hypothetical images to help determine what space colonies might look like. In 1977, NASA sponsored the NASA Ames 1977 Summer Study, where space colony inventor Gerard K. O’Neill and colleagues worked together to determine if space colonies could feasibly be created in the near future. O’Neill had already confidently asserted that the large habitats, meant to hold up to 10,000 people, could be built if not immediately using current technology, then in the near future. But despite NASA’s serious interest and the support of many enthusiasts, ranging from experts to hippies, space colonies never came to be.

Though certain groups, like the National Space Society, still actively pursue the building of space colonies, when the ubiquitous image above flashes around the internet, it is usually attached to nostalgia and gentle amusement. So why would historians like W. Patrick McCray, De Witt Douglass Kilgore, and myself, choose to make space colonies a topic of study? Why do historians study things that fail?

In history, sometimes the end of the story is far less important than the process. The study of space colonies reveals a process or way of imagining the world. Not only that, plans for space colonies and images like the imagined rendering above can teach us about the way our historical actors thought the world should be. And the historical moments they lived in always shaped these imaginings of the future.

For example, we’ll deconstruct our image to demonstrate the process historians use to read texts, as well as what can be extricated from this text about the way our space colonists imagined the future. Knowing the shape of that future can tell us about how our historical actors conceived of their present.

On the most basic level, what we see is an image of a space colony shaped like a torus, or wheel. The artist has rendered it so that we can see it arc through space, but has also cut away the colony’s hull to reveal its interior, placing it in the foreground. This emphasizes to us that this image is about the way space colonies look on the inside. In other words, this is the way life looks when it is situated in space.

Even upon first glance it is clear that life in space looks a lot like life on Earth. The two most dominant images are greenery and trees, and those of houses. Both of these images tell us important things about the way space colonists envisioned the future.

Firstly, the abundance of plant life indicates that space colonists envisioned habitats as resembling forested or landscaped places on earth. Specifically, they imagined green spaces, not arid or arctic or other landscapes. Though some space colonists envisioned habitats large enough to hold mountain ranges and have their own weather systems, this artist has chosen to emphasize a less extreme environment.

The absolute control over the environment in this habitat is made clear when coupled with the carefully arranged houses. These houses are much remarked upon by historians of space colonies, mainly because they bear a striking resemblance to an idealized middle-class, suburban American landscape. Just glancing over this image we have learned the type of economic class that space colonists value – the suburbs and the middle class are what’s worth saving along with all the shrubbery.

We can also learn about how race played a role in space. In the most immediate foreground of the image are the only people visible in the illustration. Looking very affluent as they lounge on their patio, they are all white. Because we cannot see inside the other houses, it is impossible to know what their inhabitants look like. But we do know that among all the images generated of space colonies, only one includes an African American. No other minorities are represented.

Gerard K. O’Neill believed there would be diversity among the stars. But De Witt Douglass Kilgore has rightly pointed out that O’Neill’s vision amounted to a homogenization of space, as O’Neill believed groups would separate from each other based on their differences, living like with like.

So now that we have done a basic deconstruction of this image, what does all this information amount to? This is where we must put on our historian’s cap and remember that this image has a historical context. That means this historical context influenced the illustrator’s vision of the future. And this is why we can read imagined futures to learn about the historical time periods in which they were created.

Let’s take the issue of homogeneous suburbanization for example. The ideal of a middle-class suburb had been a part of the American Dream for decades by the 1970s, and Americas were just beginning to recognize that this dream might include people other than whites. It’s also true, however, that the social movements of the 1960s powerfully questioned the validity or even attainability of this ideal. So why would Gerard O’Neill in his writings and these artists in their drawings imagine the suburban ideal to be worth preserving in the future?

Remember, space colonists tried to sell these plans not only to the public, but also to Congress. Someone had to fund their dreams. That means they thought their ideas about the future and what to preserve in it had to have cache, and so they chose images that appealed to them personally and that they also hoped appealed to a wider audience.

But we still haven’t answered our question. What’s the appeal of saving white, middle-class suburbs while life on earth goes to rot? This is the exact question I hope to answer as I begin work on my dissertation. It will mean reaching back into cultural sources to examine the changing role of the American Dream and its orientation in the 1970s. It might also mean doing oral histories with members of the community who supported space colonies or created these images. In short, it will mean putting the image above in particular, and space colonies in general, back into their historical context. It means seeing them as important and instructive historical texts as opposed to interesting but quaint relics of a goal still not obtained. It means bringing them back down to earth.

History can hide in the most surprising of places. This time it was hiding in the future. Who knows where it will be next.

Sometimes, when I am taking pages of notes on a book or a primary source, or when I browse and organize my many bookshelves full of historical monographs, I wonder what would happen if my home froze in time and remained undisturbed for a 100 years or more before humans stepped foot in it again. Because I’m a historian, whatever future archaeologist or other wayward explorer who stumbled into my library would find is a wealth of information about the past. What would the books and notes tell future historians, not only about the history of mankind (more specifically American history), but about me?

To pursue this thought experiment further, we have to lay some ground rules in order to allow it to function without too many distracting technical questions. We’ll assume our hypothetical historians are fluent and literate in English (whether or not it’s their native language), so therefore they can read any written texts they find. For the sake of imagination, let’s assume that large parts of American history have been lost or are obscured, so they’re encountering some of the ideas contained in my library, if not for the first time, then rarely. Obviously these historians are bringing their own cultural biases with them, so to keep the experience simple we will not assume race, gender, or any other categories of identity – maybe these historians are even aliens from another planet seeking to learn more about the human race who have very different cultural assumptions from our own, so different we can’t imagine them. While hoping this isn’t a cop-out on my part, we’ll just assume our intrepid explorers have a cursory familiarity with but a healthy interest in the history they have found without complicating their assumptions by trying to determine imaginary bias.

One question I’ve purposefully left dangling is how these people or beings know what history is, or if they even conceive of it in the same way that we do. Let’s assume they too record facts about their past, and so, in the most basic sense, practice history. The first thing that our future historians may have to decipher is the way in which we write about the past and how we conceive of modalities of time (whatever time happens to be). If we assume they our familiar with our linear concept of time, simply looking at the way my books are arranged wouldn’t offer them any help in determining chronology, seeing as my books are all alphabetized. That means they’d have to figure out how to read our time line on their own. Different cultures conceive of time differently, so this may prove to be a challenge to them.

Let’s assume our explorers have managed to decipher our way of cataloging time, which in and of itself would teach them about how a western historian conceives of history and how westerners conceive of the structure of time. What else could they learn from my particular collection of books? I’m a 20^th century American cultural historian who attends an institution that also requires me to be well-versed in all periods of American history. As an undergraduate I focused mainly on East Asian history, a fact which also informs the content of my bookshelves. With these broad categories now delineated, what kind of topics would our future historians learn about from my books?

They might first note a particular obsession with identity. From my books a future historian would learn at least a perfunctory history of race and gender in America (though, regretfully not nearly as much about class or sexuality). My books and notes would provide them with definitions of the concept of race and stories about how it operated in society. Future historians would also learn about gender, competing definitions of it, and also many books about how gender operates as a category of assessment in the historical field. Luckily for our future historians, my bookshelves contain many volumes on historical methodology, especially concerning gender. Learning the historiography of a subject would do a great deal to teach future historians about how our ideas about ourselves and how we deconstructed them changed over time as influenced by surrounding circumstances. Study changes in methodology also means they would study the changing circumstances that inform it.

Learning about identity through history opens a door for both future and current historians to examine all other aspects of society, culture, and politics. A book like Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound is a great example. Through May’s focus on gender constructs in the home in the 1950s, she is able to demonstrate how the Cold War state entered the home and helped shape family roles in order to guarantee the continuation of the national security state. May links identity formation to the policies and formation of the state. As our future historians journey from identity formation to political projects when they read my books, they would learn not only about culture and society but also about the way our government is structured, and the way it operated both inside and outside the halls of power. They would be exposed to the names of laws and policies these authors considered important and related to their topics, which, while informative, would still leave out a wealth of information. How would future historians decide which narrative focus to pursue? And what would they think informed my choices?

There are hundreds, thousands of years of history on my bookshelves. And these bookshelves display only a tiny fraction of what has been written by historians since the just the professionalization of the field in the 19^th century. Say our future historians found a book from the Dunning School and Hannah Rosen’s Terror in the Heart of Freedom in my collection. How would they know which one to privilege when trying to construct an accurate picture of Reconstruction? Would they think that my passionate interest in culture and popular culture was a reflection of larger trends in historical inquiry at the time I was studying? In other words, would Karal Ann Marling’s As Seen on TV take precedence over Steven Casey’s Selling the Korean War in their understanding of our culture?

Perhaps the larger question here for historians is, how do we understand the historical worlds we construct for ourselves, and how does our work and study interact with those of our colleagues and peers? As I prepare for my comprehensive oral exams, I keep finding books to add to my list that seem just as compelling as the ones I’ve already read. Despite the daunting task of memorizing so many books, it seems I can never read enough to understand not only the multifaceted subject that is American history, but also to understand the workings of the discipline itself, the way through collective endeavor we all work to change it over time.

When I consider our future historians, I cannot help but picture them as frustrated with the lack of clear narrative my books would provide when taken in alphabetized pieces. Instead they’d find a mishmash of books covering a range of different but intimately interrelated interests. Having them sit for something like my comprehensive oral exams would perhaps be one of the best ways to help them understand the connection between William Cronon’s Changes in the Land and De Witt Douglas Kilgore’s Astrofuturism. Finding a historian’s treasure trove of books must be celebrated not only for the blanks that it might fill in, but for the incredible complexity of material that it would provide to someone trying to understand past cultures. How we think of the past both informs and is informed by the present. I would hope our future historians would keep this in mind as they browsed my bookshelves to learn about the past.

I thought I would come out of my long slumber to make a post about research that may prove helpful to some of my colleagues as we begin work on dissertations that will monopolize years of our lives.

Historians like Warren Susman constantly remind us that history does not take place in a vacuum – it is not solely the province of historians locked away in our ivory tower writing for a limited audience but instead suffuses the cultures we live in and therefore affects all our daily lives. Just as historians must remember that historical narratives do no arise in a vacuum, we must also remember that, as historians, we do not research and write in a vacuum either.

I am currently working on the prospectus for my dissertation, and at times have been overcome by feelings of inadequacy about my topic and my research. But, as I always tell my students, learning is not a solitary process. We often have our greatest breakthroughs when we overcome our anxieties and reach out to others for help.

For example, after a recent discussion with my advisor, I found the direction of my research completely changed. Simply put, she suggested a new way of searching for sources and source repositories that immediately led me to a new body of sources I’d never even considered before that will be crucial to my project. I felt excited and rejuvenated by this discovery.

Forming bonds with our colleagues and peers and reaching out to them, whether we feel confident or lost, is an important and perhaps understated part of the academic process. I would encourage all academics, from college freshmen to tenured professors, to remember and explore this important facet of our work as historians. History does not occur in a vacuum. Neither do historians.

So far when researching my dissertation I’ve spent most of my time with secondary sources, trying to get an idea of where the scholarship in the field stands and what kinds of questions other historians are asking of science fiction, as well as what kinds of sources they’re using. But I think most historians will agree that the real fun is in working with the primary sources themselves.

That said, trying to find the right primary sources is just as challenging as it is exciting, and raises a whole host of questions. Today I found The Visual Index of Science Fiction Cover Art. I haven’t spent much time poking around yet, but already I’ve found some great material:

It’s hard to know the story behind this image without knowing the actual, well, story behind this image.  But it demonstrates how complex of a resource visual sources are to understanding science fiction. Getting my hands on these visual sources will be interesting enough; it will be another challenge all together to see if I can pair the text with the visuals, or find accounts from the artists about their creations. As the entire archive of Analog covers is available to me, I’ll also have to situate this image in the context of the other illustrations that appeared on the cover.

It’s not clear is there is a existent archive of the magazines themselves, which demonstrates both the value and limitations of digital research. But this is a great starting point, and I can’t wait to find more gems.

Post card from Coney Island

All of our authors this week tackle the changing cultural landscape of turn-of-the-century America, which witnesses the emergence of a mass culture that often superseded older cultural forms. In particular, each author is concerned with whether or not these changes in the way culture was produced and consumed were democratic in nature. Larry Levine in Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, sees a transformation from the heterogeneous audiences of American theater in the 19^th century to the tightly controlled highbrow entertainments of the elites, saying, “Art was becoming a one-way process: the artist communicating and the audience receiving” (195). No longer did audiences participate in the performances of material such as Shakespeare or operas, but instead, as dictated by elite tastes, sat in silent reverence to watch inflexible performances of these now-dubbed classics. For Levine, the elites responded to the disorder of urbanization and massive immigration by placing strict controls on cultural forms.

            But culture and art did not transform into a one-way process of creation and reception as Levine claims. It’s true that cultural categories are contingent upon their historical context, and Levine does a convincing jobs of tracing the movement of cultural forms from one category to another. But culture did not completely lose its democratic nature, and other authors trace the dialectic between cultural forms and cultural receivers by studying the new forms of mass amusement that emerged at the turn-of-the-century. Most interesting is the tension between Progressive reformers’ impulse to educate the immigrant and working classes and these same group’s wholesale embrace of new cultural forms. In his study of Coney Island, Amusing the Island: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century, John Kasson begins by examining the City Beautiful Movement and the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893. Planners intended Central Park and the White City to pastoralize and instill awe in their visitors, but the Midway Plaisance, harbinger of Coney Island, overflowed with visitors.

Luna Park, one of Coney Island’s most popular amusement parks. The park’s electric illumination could be seen from miles away.

Indeed, these new amusements, like Coney Island, brought heterogeneous groups of Americans together at the same time that Levine observes a cultural bifurcation. Mass amusements may have controlled and guided visitors through the walls of their amusement parks and the mores of social behavior, but Americans, especially the working class, voted with their pockets and their feet as to which cultural forms they enjoyed most. Further, Coney Island and other new public spaces of amusement allowed Americans to mix with each other and create new heterosocial spaces. The argument can validly be made that vendors programmed leisure time just as readily as employers programmed work time, but at least the illusion of choice existed for those seeking pleasure in Coney Island and other public amusements.

Kathy Piess captures the dichotomy between freedom of choice and oppression in her book Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York. As wage earners, working class (immigrant) women found themselves with the capital to participate in the new culture of mass amusements and mass production. Women used their newfound economic freedom (or semi-freedom, depending on whether or not part of their wages went to their families) to purchase fashionable clothing or take part in new social amusements, like dance halls and movies. This allowed them a new freedom in leisure time, a relative social autonomy that they had not experienced when cultural and economic norms dictated they work and socialize in the private sphere. The so-called freedom came with a price, however, as the ability to participate in these new social forms did not prove to be as affordable as at first appeared. Often women starved themselves to save enough money to enjoy leisure time and, even more predominantly, a system of treating arose where men paid women’s way in exchange for sexual favors. This system created a delicate balancing act for women, who had to reciprocate to men without tarnishing their honor.

Patrons pose for a picture at a turn of the century dance hall.

Even as old cultural forms bifurcated into low and high, new cultural forms emerged to fill the vacuum, creating new standards of behavior, freedom of choice, and instances of oppression. Every mechanized reproduction meant that cultural forms lost their aura as cultural products moved further from the original. Like Theodor Adorno, elites tried to preserve the aura of cultural artifacts they deemed genuine and classic by isolating them from the rowdy masses and dictating to those who participated how they should imbibe things like Shakespeare, opera, and art pieces. But as observed by Benjamin, mass culture allowed a new class consciousness to arise. It may not have been revolutionary, but the working class and immigrants, especially young people like young women, emerged as demographic markets to be both catered to and taken advantage of. Culture remained a highly contested place one of newfound choice and carefully calculated limitation.

How are memories formed and how do they shape our understanding of the past, and in this case, history in particular? Maurice Halbwachs believes that memory is a social institution, a set of individual memories constructed out of personal experience but, more importantly, out of information learned from social groups of which people are a part of. Halbwachs raises a crucial debate in the field of memory studies that seeks to delineate and synthesize the relationship between individual and collective memory. Historians seek to examine the relationship between the two, and to explain how memories influence not only the way events are remembered collectively, but the way that histories are written.

David Blight’s Race and Reunion is a model work in this project. In this monograph, Blight traces the ways in which differing narratives about (or collective memories of) the Civil War competed to become the dominant national memory of the war’s events and aftermath, and eventually the dominant historical narrative (until historians in the 1960s began work to uncover forgotten narratives and competing memories). Adroitly, Blight demonstrates how individual memories shaped social memories to write the dominant narrative and then how, interestingly, these dominant narratives created a kind of cultural amnesia surrounding the role of African Americans and slavery in the war. Though reception is a tricky problem, Blight’s wide range of sources demonstrates a breadth of information defining how competing groups in post-Civil War America came together to shape the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War. Blight’s book is an intriguing work of history as well as a thorough investigation into the way collective memories are formed. Though there is evidence of the role of individual memories in the narrative, it is not Blight’s project to demonstrate how collective memory shapes individual memory.

In this way, Blight is attempting to do the opposite of what Alison Landsberg does in her book Prosthetic Memory. Landsberg’s goal is to trace how collective memories can be transferred to individuals through the means of mass media so that their consiousnesses will be altered to create what she dubs “prosthetic memories.” For Landsberg, these memories are meant to inspire empathy in the receiver that will then allow this individual to take empathetic action not possible before the implanting of this memory. Landsberg’s argument is extremely provocative, but it raises many questions. For example, as raised in our discussion, what is the difference between memory and knowledge? Can an experiential museum like the Holocaust Museum really implant memories of the event in a person who has no previous experience of the Holocaust Museum, or is it simply imparting knowledge to the visitor? How can one “have” an experience that they have never actually experienced? And while Landsberg’s book is more a work of presentism, she provides no historical examples of this process being successfully carried out. There are problems of reception – she provides no proof through investigation of these supposed memory receivers that historical actors’ consciousnesses were actually changed. Whereas Blight’s book traces a demonstrable history, Landsberg’s only posits an interesting possibility with no proof of concept. She might argue that Halbwachs social groups have been transformed into mass media culture that helps shape the memories of previously disparate peoples, but even in Halbwachs’ formulation the individual must have individual memories with which to corroborate social memories. For Landsberg this is not so.

For me the most confounding work on collective memory which we read was Lipsitz’s Time Passages. Lipsitz argues that popular culture such as TV and rock and roll keep alive collective memories of groups who are not part of the hegemonic discourse, for example working class immigrants and African Americans. This idea of counter-narratives is provocative because it demonstrates how popular culture can be a dialectic. But it also raises the question: once these forms are synthesized into popular culture, don’t they lose their place as a counter-narrative? There is no work on reception – we hear nothing from cultural receivers about the way they processed the narrative of these cultural forms. And there is no work on cultural amnesia – how there forms may have their counter-narratives erased once they are absorbed into the mainstream. Demonstrating that popular culture can be a repository or reflection of collective memory is a valid project, but often gets lost in Lipsitz’s confusing and incomplete presentation.

This semester I’m taking two independent readings courses to satisfy the requirements of my minor fields. One of the courses, Popular Culture and Collective Memory, requires that I write reaction papers to my weekly readings and discussions. As a thought exercise, I will be posting them here.

When Walter Benjamin writes about the “Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” his argument about the usefulness of mass culture is not always initially clear. As I originally did, some read it as a lament about the loss of the aura of the authentic in regards to traditional cultural forms, i.e. paintings. But what Benjamin is really doing is marginalizing the function of the traditional cultural form in favor of new mass cultural forms. As Benjamin begins his essay, he writes in the Marxist tradition, and believes mass culture is the new vehicle which will help engender mass consciousness within the working class, who will experience class consciousness as a result of experiencing this mass culture.

The question then becomes: why didn’t this happen? It might be argued that mass culture was not prevalent enough in the 1930s at the time of Benjamin’s writing, and only now do we see a wide enough spread of mass cultural forms through processes like cultural globalization that might successfully engender a working class consciousness. But Benjamin does not address the problem of cultural hegemony as raised by Antonio Gramsci. Can class consciousness be raised if the masses are simply buying into the capitalist messages being fed to them by the capitalist cultural producers that they are embedding in their products, i.e. the star system of film, etc.?

Theodor Adorno takes a much more negative view of mass culture than Benjamin, who he is responding to directly. He believes mass culture is an instrument that keeps the masses passive, and that mass culture follows a set formula that is meant to do so. For him, traditional culture like art is an important way to express individualism, to challenge individuals in their thinking and to encourage them to actively engage with a cultural form instead of passively imbibing it (of which Benjamin would say the complete opposite).

How do these views of the advent of mass culture help us understand the study of mass and popular culture? How can we apply them to case studies of mass and popular culture, i.e. film and popular music? And as Gramsci and Lears, and also Levine inquire, how does this help us judge the content of mass and popular culture? Content matters, and though Adorno and Benjamin are fundamental theorists of the field, they do not really examine the content of mass and popular culture. Levine makes an important distinction when he calls for analyzing the content along the folkloric tradition to see how mass culture engenders both individual and collective consciousness. For him mass and popular culture are not supposed to lead to a revolution but instead reflect the way people think about themselves.

It is important for historians of popular culture to remember that popular culture is a dialectical process, not just a hegemony, in which “the masses” and cultural producers speak to one another through the process of consumption to help shape popular culture together. It is correct to say that people buy into dominant culture forms, but they help shape these dominant cultural forms because their consumption dictates the forms that popular culture takes. On the other hand, the range of choice is provided from those selected by cultural producers. In this way popular culture is a joint project.

As to whether or not popular culture is a revolutionary force, arguments can be made for both sides. High culture is important to challenging audiences and promoting individualism, but neither Adorno no Benjamin address the ways in which high culture can become mass or popular culture, i.e. myriad reproductions of the Mona Lisa. This capacity challenges the way we think of aura. Does a piece of artwork retain its aura if it is reproduced in this way? Does it remain both high and popular culture? We can see other mass apparatuses fermenting revolution, such as the internet and social media has during the Arab Spring, but what kind of consciousness are these movements engendering? Perhaps more importantly, are they successful? And are mass cultural forms like film playing a role in these revolutions?

As noted, the most important thing to take away from all of these readings is that mass/popular culture is a process. The masses and cultural producers speak to another other, just as audiences both engage with and receive cultural forms. Mass cultural forms are capable of producing new consciousnesses, but they are not always mass consciousnesses, and the mass consciousnesses can be passive or active. The individual can also take an active role in mass culture. And hegemony is not a static condition, it is also a process in which different groups exert control and individuals and masses find meaning.

In 2002, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt lost the Hugo award to Robert Sawyer’s Hominids, a book I won’t be reading due to its graphic and gratuitous depiction of rape. Instead, I chose to read this alternate history, which details what the world might have looked like if all the Christians/Europeans had died out in the black plague. Geographically the story focuses mostly on the Chinese and India, Muslim Arabia and the Middle East, with some focus also on Native Americans. As a narrative device, the book makes coherent its jumps across time and space by following a group of characters reincarnated through all the chapters and identifiable by the first letter of their first names. The reincarnation serves not only as a plot device but also as an example of the way alternate constructions of history itself might look like.

From the author of Red Mars, it is reasonable to expect an incredibly rich and detailed narrative that focuses both on the characters as well as the world around them. Robinson certainly delivers on this front – his book is richly populated with intriguing characters and somehow the plot device of reincarnation never comes to seem trite. But, as we’ve seen before, one of the most interesting conceits of alternative histories (and there is definitely room to debate whether these are even science fiction at all) is that the author is given carte blanche to create a new world. On this front, Robinson fails.

The Years of Rice and Salt reads as a catalog of human scientific discovery, except with the discovery being done by Muslims and the Chinese, not Europeans. These discoveries, however, often lead to exactly the same ends, such as The Long War, a 67 year war between the Muslims and the Europeans that eerily resembles WWI. Similarly, the Chinese discovery of the Americas leads to a smallpox epidemic that wipes out a large portion of the native population and invasions of South America to overthrow the Incas and take their gold. One notable difference is that somehow the Muslims and the Chinese manage to avoid dropping the atomic bomb, but China still ends up a country revolutionized by a philosophy the sounds exactly like the peasant-centric communism of Mao Zedong.

At one point, Robinson even has one of his characters argue against the kind of counterfactual history he is creating in his own book:

“It’s such a useless exercise…What if this had happened, what if that had happened…The historians who talk about employing counterfactuals to bolster their theories, they’re ridiculous. Because no one ever knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing at all. Because we don’t know if history is sensitive, and for want of a nail civilization was lost, or if our mightiest acts are as petals on a flood, or something in between, or both at once. We just don’t know, and the what-if don’t help us figure it out.”

“Why do people like them so much then?”

“More stories.”

For The Years of Rice and Salt, the alternate history just serves the purpose of more stories, especially since historical events parallel the actual timeline, even with different players. The use of reincarnation as a plot device suggests that all of our lives are endless iterations of more stories, stories that advance the same inevitable history that may come in a foreign garb but when undressed is all the same. Because the alternate history of The Years of Rice and Salt is so close to our own, the book can be difficult to read through, as Robinson becomes lost in his stories and loses sight of the alternate histories he’s creating. The book moves from intriguing to dull and back again, over and over, like the reincarnations of its characters.

Published in 2002, it’s hard to ignore the timeliness of a book about a world where Muslims rule half of it. Robinson’s Muslims are artistic and interested in the hard sciences, they search for the truth about the Koran and believe in equality for women, and let Hindu and Buddhist beliefs about reincarnation color their own religious experiences. With the book’s timely proximity to the events of September 11th, it’s hard to know exactly how much that day affected Robinson’s book. It’s a thick tome, so it’s hard to believe he wasn’t working on it before 9/11. But his mission, regardless of external events in our real history, is to portray Muslims and the Chinese as vibrant, learned civilizations, not backwater barbarians as our history so often paints them. Left unchecked by religious wars and imperialism, The Years of Rice and Salt demonstrates how these societies may well have developed into imperial powers themselves, driven by science, without losing their religious identities.

The Years of Rice and Salt is an interesting read, even if Robinson doesn’t grab the reins allowed him by alternate history and run with them. That’s not his goal here. For those interested in rich character studies and imagined lands populated by familiar cultures, this is the book for you.

Babel-17 is about a new language created to be used interstellar warfare, and as I read the book of the same name, I indeed felt I was reading something written in another language. This terse Nebula winner is more a novella than a novel, and only offers tantalizing glimpses of the world Delany has built and the interesting characters that populate it.

I don’t have much to offer on this book. I found it difficult to get through, even knowing the conceit, having read the Wikipedia article simply to orient myself. Written in 1966. science fiction was opening up to new horizons, even more existential yet hallucinogenic horizons. Rydra Wong is a telepath, much like many of the characters we’ve seen in novels coming from the 1950s and early 60s. But Babel-17 seems to fall more along the lines of the sexual revolution and drug culture that the late 1960s fully embraced, as it is a language that offers wonderful glimpses of a new world, much like a hallucinogen might. The only downside if the drug cum language turns its speakers into saboteurs. Also, the dichotomy between Rydra’s allies and the enemy Invaders mimics the bipolar system of conflict set up by the Cold War during this period.

It’s surprising that the center of Delany’s novel is a young woman who is presented as competent, intelligent, strong, and capable. She’s not asexual but she’s also not oversexualized. This is a triumph for a science fiction novel of any period, not to mention one written in 1966.

I can’t really recommend or not recommend this book, as I found it slipping through my mind like water. I’ve read some of Delany’s short stories and enjoyed them, and he has another Nebula winner from the year immediately proceeding this one, so I’ll get to try again with him at a later date. Until then, I’ll let you all judge Babel-17.

2005 isn’t history, yet, or so chant all the erstwhile history professors in my brain that I’ve encountered over the years. Where to draw the line between history and current events remains hazy. From one professor I heard 20 years was the absolute minimum distance from event zero. Another professor said that if it happened in your lifetime, it isn’t history. I’m not so sure I buy these theories, particularly the last one (humans have a tendency to live through a lot of big events). But Seeker is only 8 years old and so does probably fall under the purview of the ambiguously dubbed category of “current events.” But that doesn’t mean we can’t attempt to understand Seeker within its own particular pocket of time.

Seeker is an incredibly fast-paced and enjoyable read. It’s not just science fiction but a murder mystery within an archaeological mystery about the discovery of a long lost, Atlantis-like space civilization. The world building, set thousands of years in Earth’s future, is exquisite, and the long pages of expository dialogue and description are intriguing and rarely off-putting. You get the sense right away that this is not a story where any of the main characters will meet an untimely end, even if death stares them in the face, but the tone of the novel is too cheerfully appealing and all the hints of unbelievable perfection that surround our main characters is mostly forgiven. The murder mystery sub-plot seems a bit of an unnecessary drag, as the main plot is enough to propel the novel forward to a satisfying conclusion, but it’s quite obvious that McDevitt loves mysteries jut as much as he loves hard sci-fi.

The central mystery of Seeker revolves around the eponymous ship, an interstellar Earth vessel that went out into the stars 9000 years ago to found a utopia and promptly disappeared. It, and the so-named settlers, the Margolians, have become a myth, but when evidence of the Seeker turns up at the door of Alex Benedict, independent archaeologist extraordinaire, the find sparks the imagination of him and Chase Kolpath, Bendict’s assistant and the narrator of the the novel. They are hellbent on finding the Seeker and the Margolians who crewed her, whether they are dead or alive. Margolia and her occupants represent a coup d’etat for Benedict if he can find them.

I don’t want to give away too much about what happens because a lot of the fun of this book is watching the story unfold. I will say that it’s pretty obvious how things are going to end up, but taking each step toward the ending in turn is highly satisfying. I don’t like mysteries, but McDevitt’s deft inclusion of science fiction elements, including the search for a lost world and interactions with an alien race, kept me rapt almost till the end. Usually I do a lot of skimming in these books, but here I didn’t want to miss a detail. The only plot that seemed laborious to me was, as I mentioned the murder plot. There I admit letting my attention wander.

To attempt putting this book in its historical place, we must examine the Margolians themselves. They are a bunch of intellects who leave Earth to start a society based on freedom of thought. My only point of comparison is the anti-intellectualism that emerged under the Bush years, which could make the Margolians and their dream an inspiration for the material, be it conscious or not. The world Chase and Alex live in is devoid of war at a time when the United States was involved in two highly contested wars abroad. In Seeker, every society, be they alien or human, has gone through periods of intraspecies war and then found peace again, which is perhaps McDevitt’s hope for present day mankind.

Whatever the comparison, Seeker is a great read. Historians especially should enjoy this quest for a long lost civilization. McDevitt even manages to write an incredibly smart female protagonist without objectifying her too much. He gets extra points for that as well.