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A review by jasonfurman
The History of Science Fiction: A Graphic Novel Adventure by Xavier Dollo, Djibril Morissette-Phan
4.0
"The History of Science Fiction: A Graphic Novel Adventure" mostly lives up to its title. It begins with a mash-up of science fiction references and tropes as two robots go off to discover the history of science fiction. Then it starts the story going chronologically quickly through the ancient Greeks (The Odyssey as sci-fi?? and Aristophanes), some Renaissance (Thomas More's Utopia and Cyrano de Bergerac), but then the story really gets going with Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. Xavier Dollo and the illustrators tell the story of sci-fi by depicting bits of the major underlying stories, showing the authors conversing with each other and the reader--often across time (e.g., H.G. Wells is around to learn about 1960s British sci-fi), and across space.
After Mary Shelley it goes through Jules Verne (the book is translated from French, I believe some of the more French content was cut out which is a pity), H.G. Wells, the pulps, the Golden Age, and beyond. I particularly liked the treatment of British sci-fi and it's relationship and difference from American sci-fi in the 1950s and 1960s, something I probably should have focused on more before but did not.
For the first two thirds the story is reasonably coherent, there is ample space to explore the context of the stories, how they evolved, as well as the constraints and problems. But then the last third of the book suffers from two diametrically opposite problems. The first problem is way too many name checks as Dollo tries to make sure just about every author one can think of is at least mentioned (every time I was thinking "but he hasn't mentioned someone, e.g., Ian M. Bainks I would turn a few pages and there they would be). He does a decent job of bucketing them in different periods and currents but at times it can feel more like a superficial "to read" list than something that is either insightful or, like the first two thirds of the book, a real "graphic novel adventure."
The second, and diametrically opposed problem, is that it is missing too much. It does a good job of elevating women (and also being frank about their exclusion and depiction and its deleterious consequences for the genre), both through the history of the genre and up through the present, but has almost nothing outside the US or the UK. What about the Soviet Union and the Eastern European contributions (Karel Capek is briefly mentioned but Stanislaw Lem is not)? Going up to the present, Cixin Liu and Chinese science fiction? Afrofuturism? Other traditions?
I am not entirely sure how either of those two problems could have been addressed individually let alone simultaneously. Maybe it was impossible and I'm being unfair. And I don't want the big point to be lost in the criticism: the first two thirds really was a "graphic novel adventure" that was both fun and insightful. And I was glad with all the references and pointers in the last third as well. Now I have a lot more on my TBR.
After Mary Shelley it goes through Jules Verne (the book is translated from French, I believe some of the more French content was cut out which is a pity), H.G. Wells, the pulps, the Golden Age, and beyond. I particularly liked the treatment of British sci-fi and it's relationship and difference from American sci-fi in the 1950s and 1960s, something I probably should have focused on more before but did not.
For the first two thirds the story is reasonably coherent, there is ample space to explore the context of the stories, how they evolved, as well as the constraints and problems. But then the last third of the book suffers from two diametrically opposite problems. The first problem is way too many name checks as Dollo tries to make sure just about every author one can think of is at least mentioned (every time I was thinking "but he hasn't mentioned someone, e.g., Ian M. Bainks I would turn a few pages and there they would be). He does a decent job of bucketing them in different periods and currents but at times it can feel more like a superficial "to read" list than something that is either insightful or, like the first two thirds of the book, a real "graphic novel adventure."
The second, and diametrically opposed problem, is that it is missing too much. It does a good job of elevating women (and also being frank about their exclusion and depiction and its deleterious consequences for the genre), both through the history of the genre and up through the present, but has almost nothing outside the US or the UK. What about the Soviet Union and the Eastern European contributions (Karel Capek is briefly mentioned but Stanislaw Lem is not)? Going up to the present, Cixin Liu and Chinese science fiction? Afrofuturism? Other traditions?
I am not entirely sure how either of those two problems could have been addressed individually let alone simultaneously. Maybe it was impossible and I'm being unfair. And I don't want the big point to be lost in the criticism: the first two thirds really was a "graphic novel adventure" that was both fun and insightful. And I was glad with all the references and pointers in the last third as well. Now I have a lot more on my TBR.