Classical Traditions in Science Fiction

401 Pages·2015·31.063 MB·English

by  Brett M. Rogers, Benjamin Eldon Stevens

CLASSICAL PRESENCES
General Editors
Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter
CLASSICAL PRESENCES
The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece
and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the
past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the map-
ping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and
identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest schol-
arship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use,
and abuse, of the classical past.
Classical Traditions in
Science Fiction
EDITED BY
BRETT M. ROGERS
AND
BENJAMIN ELDON STEVENS
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Classical traditions in science fiction / Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin
Eldon Stevens [editors].
pages cm. — (Classical presences)
ISBN 978–0–19–998841–9 (hardback); 978–0–19–022833–0 (paperback)
1. Science fiction, American—History and criticism. 2. Science fiction,
English—History and criticism. 3. Science fiction films—History and criticism.
4. Science fiction television programs—History and criticism. 5. Civilization, Ancient,
in literature. 6. Classical literature—Influence. 7. Civilization, Ancient—Influences.
I. Rogers, Brett M., editor of compilation. II. Stevens, Benjamin Eldon,
editor of compilation.
PS374.S35C585 2014
813’.0876209—dc23
2013036304
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
Preface vii
List of Contributors xi
Introduction: The Past Is an Undiscovered Country 1
Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens
Part I: SF’s Rosy-Fingered Dawn
1. The Lunar Setting of Johannes Kepler’s Somnium,
Science Fiction’s Missing Link 27
Dean Swinford
2. Lucretius, Lucan, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 46
Jesse Weiner
3. Virgil in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center
of the Earth 75
Benjamin Eldon Stevens
4. Mr. Lucian in Suburbia: Links Between the True History
and The First Men in the Moon 105
Antony Keen
Part II: SF “Classics”
5. A Complex Oedipus: The Tragedy of Edward Morbius 123
Gregory S. Bucher
6. Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, the Great
Year, and the Ages of Man 145
Erik Grayson
7. Time and Self-Referentiality in the Iliad and
Frank Herbert’s Dune 161
Joel P. Christensen
8. Disability as Rhetorical Trope in Classical Myth and
Blade Runner 176
Rebecca Raphael
vi Contents
Part III: Classics in Space
9. Moral and Mortal in Star Trek: The Original Series 199
George Kovacs
10. Hybrids and Homecomings in the Odyssey and Alien
Resurrection 217
Brett M. Rogers
11. Classical Antiquity and Western Identity in Battlestar
Galactica 243
Vincent Tomasso
Part IV: Ancient Classics for a Future Generation?
12. Revised Iliadic Epiphanies in Dan Simmons’s Ilium 263
Gaël Grobéty
13. Refiguring the Roman Empire in The Hunger
Games Trilogy 280
Marian Makins
14. Jonathan Hickman’s Pax Romana and the End
of Antiquity 307
C. W. Marshall
Suggestions for Further Reading and Viewing 327
Robert W. Cape, Jr.
Works Cited 339
Index 371
Preface
Classical Traditions in Science Fiction was an after-hours topic of con-
versation for us long before it led to conference papers and panels, a
scholarly review essay, invitations to write for more popular forums
and to speak at symposiums, and the present edited volume. The phys-
ical fact of the book seems to offer some confirmation of Douglas
Adams’s idea for an “infinite improbability drive,” in which
faster-than-light travel is made possible by virtue of being not com-
pletely impossible, only very, very unlikely. Truly “unlikely” would this
volume have seemed even a few years ago, much less two decades ago
when we first started to talk about the topic while studying Classics at
Reed College.
Historians of the future may be interested to know that together we
founded and ran that college’s first Classics Dorm in the academic year
1997–1998. As a special event, we screened, via a hard-to-acquire VHS
copy, the 1986 animated science fiction feature film Transformers: The
Movie. Fans will recall that the film pits Latinate “Autobots” (e.g.,
Optimus Prime) against Hellenic “Decepticons” (e.g., Megatron) in a
plot that, to one editor’s mind, seemed faintly to echo stories about the
shifting tectonics of Hellenistic-era political states. To the other editor’s
mind, any such echo was very, very faint indeed . . .
 . . . and so, for us, it began, with questions ramifying like parallel
worlds:
• How might a comparative study of ancient classics and modern sci-
ence fiction proceed?
• Could there be more at the intersection of those two seemingly dispa-
rate fields than a few signal texts? Beyond individual stars, were there
whole galaxies awaiting discovery?
• Above all, could such a comparative study be put on a firm conceptual
or theoretical basis, so that research could move beyond mere “scopo-
philia,” Freud’s term for a love of looking that is pleasing but ulti-
mately pointless ?
viii Preface
It is with a science-fictional “sense of wonder” indeed that we are able to
say that, at this point, an increasing number of scholars has been work-
ing internationally to suggest answers to such questions with energy
and rigor. Classicists have, of course, been writing about science fiction,
or SF, for decades—notably S. C. Fredericks and Nick Lowe—sometimes
bridging the gap between SF and Classics. More recently, theoretical
questions have been raised expressly by authors such as contributor
Tony Keen (especially on his blog, Memorabilia Antoniana), Sarah
Annes Brown (2008, “Plato’s Stepchildren: SF and the Classics”), and
the editors of a volume of essays in French, Mélanie Bost-Fiévet and
Sandra Provini (2014, especially their introductions to the volume and
to each of its four parts). Our own overview of the state of the art, which
forms the basis for the introduction to this volume, was previously pub-
lished in the Classical Receptions Journal (Rogers and Stevens 2012a)
and is indebted to such pioneers.
That same desired level of sophistication and clarity is also reached
for—in our view, it is indeed grasped—by the contributors to this volume.
We are extremely grateful to have been able to consider a wide range of
current research—some for a panel at the 2011 annual meeting of the
American Philological Association (as of 2014, the Society for Classical
Studies) in San Antonio, others via a subsequent call for papers—and we
are pleased and honored to be able to present some of that work for publi-
cation here. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of all of this burgeoning area
of interest is that there is still so much more to be done.
There is ancient history, and then there is the modern world, including
the happy means to achieve even the most unlikely ends. We are grateful
above all to the contributors for sharing their work so generously and for
responding to questions and comments with rigor, energy, and aplomb.
Special thanks are due to the production team at Oxford University
Press, including Classics acquisitions editor Stefan Vranka, assistant edi-
tor Sarah Pirovitz, Classical Presences series editors Lorna Hardwick and
James I. Porter, and the copyeditors, compositors, and others without
whose remarkable work this volume simply would not exist.
Rogers would like to thank his wife, family, and colleagues for their
all-too-patient encouragement, and in particular his brother, Scott
Rogers, for nurturing his kid brother on a steady diet of SF, fantasy, and
comics for over three decades; and would like to thank the students in
his courses on Theories of Myth (Gettysburg College, Spring 2010) and
Preface ix
Classical Traditions (University of Puget Sound, Spring 2013) for their
enthusiasm and insights as various ideas started to come together in his
head.
Stevens would like to thank his parents for telling a school board that
yes, it is okay that their son has asked for a SF novel as his spelling-bee
prize; and would like to thank the students in a tutorial on SF (Bard
College, Spring 2006) and in courses on traditions centering around
Virgil (Bryn Mawr College, Fall 2014), Ovid (Bard College at Eastern
Correctional Facility as well as Annandale, Spring 2013; Hollins
University, Spring 2014), and Milton (Bard College, Fall 2012) for their
inspiring visions of life on other (literary) worlds.
Special thanks go to Christina Salowey and Fred Franko of Hollins
University for setting “Classics and Science Fiction” as the theme of the
2013 Classics Symposium there.