Tom And Jerry Golden Collection Volume 2 Dvd

[Nell Barreto]

James Gunn's 1976 Alternate Worlds was literary history disguised as a coffeetable book (although some uncharitably claimed the reverse was equally true), and much thesame might be said of his new encyclopedia. Like the earlier book, it is the sort ofoversized, attractively designed, generously illustrated volume that people who do notread SF like to buy for their friends who do. Both books are "packaged" for thewidest possible audience and targeted to the trade buyer rather than the library orscholarly audience --although in the current case there is much evidence that the"packager" (something called Promised Land Productions) has exerted considerableinfluence over both major and minor editorial decisions. Both books strongly reflectGunn's more or less official perspective as to what SF is and is not; but in the NewEncyclopedia this perspective is strongly skewed by a heavy emphasis on media, whichone can only assume is the result of the packager's hopes for a wider audience, andperhaps by the exceptional energy of the contributors who worked on the film and TVentries.

Readers will inevitably draw comparisons with Peter Nicholls' excellent The ScienceFiction Encyclopedia (1979) and Gunn's volume is likely to come out the poorer. It isa much shorter book than the Nicholls, with less than a third as many individual entriesand considerably fewer "theme" essays. It contains very spotty coverage ofinternational SF, with only five essays (apart from individual author and film entries) onthe British Commonwealth, Great Britain, Germany, France, and the Soviet Union. Itstreatment of scholarship is lame, with a rather weak essay by Thomas Clareson focussinglargely on conferences, and almost no essays on individual critics or scholars. (SamMoskowitz gets an entry, as does Michel Butor--on the strength of one essay--but there arenone for Suvin, Scholes, Rabkin, Philmus, Ketterer, Clareson, Bailey, Franklin, et al.)Cross-referencing, which would seem to be crucial to a volume lacking an index, ispractically nil (although there is, significantly, a checklist of movie and TV entries,and a table of contents for the theme essays). Even "referral" entries areminimal, so that a user seeking information about Lewis Shiner (who does not merit anentry) has no way of knowing that some of his work is discussed under"Cyberpunk." In the generally thorough film coverage, one has to already knowthat Five Million Years to Earth is one of the Quatermass series in order to findit out, since it is only listed under "Quatermass."

In a sense, though, comparisons to Nicholls may be unfair. A volume which devotes threetimes as much space to Roger Corman as to Doris Lessing cannot be said to have greatpretensions as a literary reference work, and in many ways this book belongs more in thecompany of Brian Ash's The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1977) orRobert Holdstock's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1978). While Gunn's book iscertainly more of an "encyclopedia" than those volumes, it is very much a"product" in the same sense that they are. It has aspirations to being a"browser delight" more than a scholar's tool, and indeed there are manyinsightful essays by Brian Stableford, Maxim Jakubowski, Brian Aldiss, John Kessel, IanWatson, Brooks Landon, Robert Galbreath, Mike Ashley, Russell Letson, and many others. Itwas a rewarding idea to ask a psychologist such as Alan Elms to do entries on psychologyand Cordwainer Smith, and Arthur Clarke's too-brief essay on H.G. Wells is fascinating forwhat it reveals about both authors (although Gunn's avowed early intention to have livingwriters write entries on themselves goes blessedly unrealized). Even when an essay isdisappointing--Susan Shwartz's monumentally titled "Myth in Science Fiction" isonly a half-page long--one often gets the feeling it is less the author's fault than theeditor's. The book, in fact, is not really edited so much as compiled; it's a collectionof hundreds of little essays by more than a hundred contributors, with little apparenteffort to achieve balance, consistency, or a coherent point of view.

Whether a book that calls itself an encyclopedia needs a coherent point ofview is of course subject to debate, but it at least needs a traffic cop. One can acceptGunn's principle of including only those newer writers "who promised, at this earlystage in their careers, to develop a body of work" (p. vi) as an excuse for omittingA.A. Attanasio, but what is the principle that says there should be an entry on B-filmactor Richard Carlson instead? Willis McNelly's essay on Alfred Bester claims him as"one of the giants of the science-fiction field during its GOLDEN AGE [such caps arethe main system of cross-referencing], which his works helped define." Dutifullygoing to Barry Malzberg's entry on GOLDEN AGE, we find it ended seven years beforeBester's first novel was published. Clifford Simak's death predated Robert Heinlein's, butHeinlein's death date is recorded while Simak's isn't, thus raising questions about thevolume's actual cutoff date. I.F. Clarke's intriguing little essay titled"Progress" mentions no SF at all, although one supposes that its purpose wouldhave been to discuss the ideas of progress characteristic of the genre. Someone shouldhave been watching for these things.

In any reference work, one might quibble with the contents of the articles themselves,but for the most part Gunn has found knowledgeable contributors whose judgments aredefensible and sound. Sometimes the value of these essays depends upon knowing where thecontributor is coming from, however. When Poul Anderson claims that the creation of alienworlds "must be consistent with current scientific knowledge" (p. 8), he is notdescribing SF but telling us how to write it. As a writer of hard SF, Anderson is under noobligation whatsoever to be interested in the metaphoric value of such alien worlds; as acritic, he ignores this value and the writers who seek to exploit it at the risk ofdistorting his essay, which clearly implies that alien worlds are the property of himselfand writers like him. When Orson Scott Card discusses the "mainstream"-- animportant essay, since the term is used automatically to describe any non-genre writer whogets an entry--he makes a useful distinction between the commercial and the literary mainstream, but proceeds to rehash the most paranoid arguments about "literary"fiction and the academic establishment (mentioning by name no culprits more recent thanVirginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Henry James). He concludes that SF and mainstreamliterature "are not likely to merge; their communities are clearly separated andunlikely to compromise their identities" (p. 301). Gunn himself, however, in hisessay "The Future of Science Fiction" a few pages earlier, tells us that SF"is likely to become more and more like the mainstream, and part of the mainstream islikely to use the ideas and tropes of SF, until the two genres become almostindistinguishable in the middle" (p. 191). Other essayists, such as David Brin on"The Universe," are simply given topics too big to meaningfully handle.

In general, these theme essays give the volume what overall focus it has, and there aresome continuing themes in them that unmistakably reveal Gunn's editorship--the recurringmention of SF as a "literature of change," the concern with the mainstream, theoptimistic trust in technology and science, the fascination with the mechanics andbusiness of SF (the latter of which gets its own entry). A few essays, such as H. BruceFranklin's on "Nuclear Promise and Threat," seem oddly out of place in thiscontext. Associate Editor Stephen Goldman's many contributions, on the other hand, may bethe most characteristic in the volume. Here, for example, is what he says about"Superpowers":

Authors have considered such questions as What powers would confer true superiority? How would such powers reveal themselves, and what advantages or disadvantages would they involve? How would individuals and society as a whole respond to the possession of such powers? How would others react to those who have such powers? What kind of world would the presence of these extraordinary powers create? (p. 453)

He then goes on to discuss several works that address these questions, but he neverbothers to ask why SF became fascinated with this theme, or what its significanceis to authors and readers, or how the theme might be related to the changing socialhistory of the genre. I am not suggesting that he should have written a different essay;merely that the essay he has written reveals the enthusiasm of an unquestioning reader whosees this highly suggestive theme as merely one of a number of innocent speculativequestions upon which SF has worked endless clever variations. Much the same attitudecharacterizes the entries on religion, alien worlds, scientists, spaceships, and severalother tropes collectively discussed by Gordon R. Dickson in an essay somewhat misleadinglytitled "Literary Conventions." By contrast, Gregory Benford's entry on"Aliens" speculates thoughtfully on how that image has been used and misused as"a template on which we can project our hopes and fears" (p. 11). The usefulnessof a volume such as this must surely depend in part on the questions it asks, andtherefore on the questions it answers. And as Thomas Pynchon reminds us, "If they canget you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers" (Gravity'sRainbow, p. 251).

The kinds of question Gunn's Encyclopedia, or its editors or packagers, seemto want you to ask are fairly simple ones focusing on the most popular aspects of thegenre. For the most part, the entries on historical figures or lesser-known authors seemalmost cursory and obligatory compared to the attention lavished on currently popularauthors and films. Thus Jerry Pournelle gets something like three times the space devotedto Olaf Stapledon, and James Gunn's own entry is larger than Jules Verne's. The entries onwriters such as Miles J. Breurer, Henry Slesar, Raymond Z. Gallun, or FletcherPratt--writers for whom we are likely to need an encyclopedia in order to gain basicinformation--are so short as to be almost useless. (Breurer's entry is even shorter thanthat on actor Leslie Nielsen.) Although coverage of younger writers is generally strong,many contemporary and not-so-contemporary writers are omitted altogether, including notonly the aforementioned Shiner and Attanasio, but William Sloane, Kit Pedler, Gary K. Wolf(not me but him), Ren Barjavel, Brian N. Ball, John Blackburn, Mary Gentle, LisaGoldstein, Rex Gordon, Michael Kube-McDowell, Karen Joy Fowler, John Lymington, MikeResnick, Robert Moore Williams, Rosel George Brown, Pamela Zoline, L.P. Davies, NaomiMitchison, James H. Schmitz, Michel Jeury, and doubtless many others whose names I willremember only when I have reason to try to look them up.

c80f0f1006