Search Results

In this review of David Brin’s Glory Season, Jones foregrounds the issues that arise when feminism is looked at from a male perspective. She criticises the text for presenting a feminist utopia so clearly designed by a man and analyses the sexual stereotyping that comes out of it.

In this introductory chapter, Kirkham provides a biography of Charles Tomlinson’s early life to present day. It prepares the reader for the contents of the following chapters and foregrounds Tomlinson’s abilities and status as both a poet and a painter.

Building off critical gestures from Eva Hesse and Phillip Furia, we claim throughout this essay that Pound’s Canto 30 privileges ecology, an ecopoetics that situates human persons within their organic, natural connections with the “green world” and its cycles of life. Through inventive “translated” myths of two medieval couples (King Pedro of Portugal and his queen, Inês de Castro; Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, Italy and his queen, Lucrezia Borgia), Pound considers that art is analogous to nature’s cycle of rebirth. He is an aesthetic environmentalist ahead of his time, and Canto 30—rather than being limited by an eros/thanatos conceptualization—is constituted by, and interconnected through, a “green” theme, death begetting life. Always interested in not only the cultural conservation of art, but also the living quality of art, the liveliness—the fecundity, the “ecology,” of art—Ezra Pound is also driven to engender the renaissance of art as central to culture and the future of humanity.

Chapter one provides a close examination and analysis of Tomlinson’s landscape poems, namely those found in The Way of a World, Seeing is Believing, Written on Water, A Peopled Landscape, American Scenes, Relations and Contraries, Collected Poems, The Necklace, and Mauberley. Kirkham focuses on the ways in which physical landscape in the poems is used in comparison to moral and mental landscapes, and foregrounds Tomlinson’s interest in sense experience.

Chapter five begins by providing a brief chronological account of Tomlinson’s poetry published in the 1950s and 1960s, in which Kirkham recalls the literary qualities and aspects discussed earlier in previous chapters. The chapter then goes on to explore the ways of viewing poetry of the 1970s and 1980s as an entity.

Like the chapter before it, chapter four tracks the development of Tomlinson’s poetry over the latter part of the 20^th century. Again, this chapter analyses the human scene and natural landscape in Tomlinson’s ‘human poems’, whilst also adopting a historical approach.

Chapter six discusses new concerns and emphases emerging in the 1980s, whilst looking closely at Tomlinson’s poetic performance during the 80s. The chapter seeks to provide some conclusions about the character of his art and make a note of the building sense of relaxation in Tomlinson’s later poetry.

‘Deconstructing The Starships’ references a speech originally given at the June 1988 presentation of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The speech discusses science fiction’s penetration into popular culture and its inclusion in 20th century mainstream fiction. It also analyses the structure and methodology of a science fiction novel, looking at the characterisation, narrative and literary conventions used in order to develop an understanding of the requirements of a science fiction text. The chapter references Star Wars and Star Trek throughout, and uses the two franchises to associate the Starship Enterprise with US Navy nuclear submarines in the Cold War, thus mirroring science fiction with reality.

In this chapter, Jones reviews various texts by Ursula Le Guin, including Always Coming Home, The Dispossessed, The Word for World is Forest, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Sur. Jones draws attention to the depiction of the ‘South’ in literature as a whole, but more specifically in terms of the feminist utopias that Le Guin creates in her narratives. She also foregrounds the significance of navigating the political, social and gender codes of society and explores the ways in which masculinity and femininity often correspond to an imbalance of power.

Chapter two explores the natural-human world and the sensory and mental experience, aesthetic and moral values in Tomlinson’s poetry and attempts to define the relationship between ‘nature poems’ and ‘human poems’. The chapter looks closely at ‘The Atlantic’ from Seeing is Believing in order to understand the boundaries between the natural world and the human world.

Chapter three traces a historical progression of Tomlinson’s poetry, focusing closely on the distinction between his ‘nature poems’ and ‘human poems’ published during the twenty year period 1958-1966. The chapter discusses the treatment of human experience within natural landscape and describes the ways in which the two genres of human and nature poetry can exist both separately and in unison.

‘My Crazy Uncles’ was originally read at a meeting of the C.S. Lewis Society in June 1994, and later published in the New York Review of Science Fiction in November 1995. It provides a retrospective discussion on the speaker’s first introduction to science fiction through imaginary worlds in children’s literature. The essay analyses the conventions and tropes used in children’s fiction and describes the ways in which they work together to ‘convince’ the reader of alternative realities. Jones also describes her own joy of reading as a child and reflects on the Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings series’ influence on her writing.

‘Sex: The Brains of Female Hyena Twins’ was originally a paper read at the second annual conference of the Academic Fantastic Fiction Network, at Reading University in December 1994, and was also published in Strange Attractors. Throughout the essay, Jones makes comparisons to the sexual habits and composition of other species and wildlife, but pays particularly close attention to the changing attitudes toward gender, human sexual behaviour and social roles in feminist science fiction and other literature.

This chapter contains the first review in the final section of the book, ‘The Reviews’. Within it, Jones critically analyses Sarah Lefanu’s In the Chinks of the World Machine. In her review, Jones addresses the relationship between feminism and science fiction and assesses the relevance of gender roles.

This chapter contains Jones’ review of Carolyn J. Cherryh’s novels, mainly Serpent’s Reach and Cyteen. In her review, Jones foregrounds Cherryh’s use of strong female protagonists, and looks at the methods and techniques used to realistically put forward a futuristic piece of fiction.

In this chapter, Jones reviews Ellen Datlow’s anthology, Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex. Jones unpacks Datlow’s description of sex, gender and abuse and supplements the discussion with her knowledge of other authors, including Pat Cadigan and Ed Bryant, whose literature deals with the treatment of human sexual relations with aliens. In her review, Jones also points out the significance of female writers writing about sex.

In this chapter, Jones reviews science fiction novels by William Gibson, including Necromancer and Virtual Light. She discusses Gibson’s well-established contribution to the cyberpunk genre and outlines his frequent dependence on the heroes/heroines plotline, as well as unsympathetic characterisation. Writing from a feminist perspective, Jones also provides a commentary on the sexual politics present in Virtual Light and debates the titles’ status as radical science fiction.