The day has finally come. You are about to have your first encounter with a “major orchestra.” The first rehearsal is at ten a.m. You arrive at the hall in good time. The orchestra manager greets you cordially and says he will introduce you to the orchestra. It is 9.59. You stand in the wings. The orchestra is tuning. Now all is quiet. The manager escorts you on to the stage, and gives you a nice introduction. There is a smattering of polite applause. You mount the podium, and say how happy and honored you are to be there. You are ready to begin. The first work to be rehearsed is the Beethoven Consecration of the House Overture, and the players have been apprised of this. (You like those nice big opening chords!) You give a good hefty downbeat and … nothing happens! In a split second, you say to yourself, “What's wrong?!” Then you hear it; the chord is late. But why? You start the next chord and the same thing happens. So it goes, through the next three chords. Almost inadvertently, the orchestra is sending you two messages: (1)We want to be led. (2) Not one of us will play until we are sure that everybody else is playing. An orchestra – especially a major orchestra, with a large budget – develops an instinct as to when to play. They know that their jobs are on the line with every note. It is uncanny, but it works. They all play exactly together. To you, the young conductor, they are late. To them, they are right on time.

With one work, Igor Stravinsky single-handedly transformed the role and function of the conductor. The rhythmic complexities of Le sacre du printemps immediately increased the dexterity and technical skill required from conductors. It is remarkable that today, most self-respecting orchestras will expect a competent conductor to produce an acceptable performance of this towering masterpiece of orchestral invention in a single three-hour rehearsal. With amateur orchestras and even schoolchildren able to play this shattering work, it is little wonder that composers have felt free to demand more and more from performers. Without Le sacre, it is difficult to imagine the complex scores of Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Birtwistle, Carter, Takemitsu, Ferneyhough, or Dillon ever emerging. Without it too, orchestral technique would not have developed at the rate that is has. This technical progress has also meant that first-rate performances of difficult twentieth-century works regularly feature in the programs of all professional orchestras. This is a cause for great rejoicing; Le sacre has raised both the demands on and the abilities of modern conductors. It has thus ensured a rich supply of conductors able and willing to conduct new music, often even more demanding than Stravinsky's masterpiece.

The return of composer-conductors

Until the eighteenth century, composers were usually involved in the performances of their own music. The nineteenth century saw the rise of conductors who specialized in leading the music of others: while some composers were capable conductors, others could now turn their scores over to other musicians for performance. Today,however, it is rare to find composers who have not actually conducted their own music. While conducting requires special skills (especially with complex modern scores) many musicians will attest to the very particular kind of “magic” even the most technically ill-equipped composer can bring to the performance of his or her own music.

When Mary Shelley set out in 1820 to transform Ovid's tale of an overreaching king into “A drama in two acts,” she took liberties with Ovid's narrative, inverting the two main plot lines so that the story of Midas's disastrous wish (in Shelley's version: “Let all I touch be gold, most glorious gold!”) follows the less well-known story of Midas's inopportune intervention in a competition between Apollo and Pan (NSW II 102). In Ovid's tale, Midas gets his wish to be a walking alchemist, learns the sad error of his ways, petitions Bacchus to be freed of his golden touch, and finally, after bungling across the piping competition of Apollo and Pan, acquires donkey ears as punishment for favoring the music of Pan. In Mary Shelley's drama, Midas earns his oversized ears early in Act I, and then makes his fateful wish as the act ends so that its dramatic realization must await Act II's curtain rise.

Mary Shelley meddles with Ovid’s tale to excellent theatrical effect. The interlude between the two acts provides an opportunity for the stage to be transformed, for the quotidian earth tones of Midas’s world to be transformed into a glittering spectacular tableau. When the actor playing Midas enters, a gold rose in his hand, his first soliloquy, with twenty declarations of the word “gold” in forty-four lines, creates a verbal simulacrum of the stage set’s golden excess. Midas invokes, “a golden palace, / Surrounded by a wood of golden trees, / Which will bear golden fruits. – The very ground / My naked foot treads on is yellow gold, / Invaluable gold! my dress is gold! / Now I am great!” (NSW ii 103–04). The reward for Shelley’s manipulation of Ovid’s story line is this transformation scene, a spectacle capable of drawing an audience’s attention back to the stage.

The Creature’s descendants

In an age of reproductive technology, cloning, artificial intelligence, and robotics, has Frankenstein's futurity come to pass? Are we living in the time Mary Shelley foreshadowed? Perhaps so, although the author did not think of her work as prophesying the future. Shelley was much more interested in the science of her own day than in looking ahead. She uses the word “futurity,” an old-fashioned noun meaning a time to come, only once in the novel, and it has nothing to do with fearful prophecies. Rather, it appears in a letter Elizabeth Lavenza writes to reassure Victor that she still wants to marry him; he plays a lead role, she tells him, in all her “airy dreams of futurity” (F 1818, III V 130). Though Mary Shelley, writing in 1816, set her novel in the late eighteenth century, Frankenstein, perhaps more than any other novel, has been interpreted as a warning about impending events. As a cautionary tale, Frankenstein has had an illustrious career; virtually every catastrophe of the last two centuries - revolution, rampant industrialism, epidemics, famines, World War I, Nazism, nuclear holocaust, clones, replicants, and robots - has been symbolized by Shelley's monster. If Shelley's work is the first futuristic novel, as some critics have claimed, then the genre of science fiction was inaugurated as a warning, not a promise, about the world of tomorrow.

Cave ab homine unius libri, as the Latin epigram warns us: “beware the author of one book.” Frankenstein has so overshadowed Mary Shelley's other books in the popular imagination that many readers believe - erroneously - that she is a one-book author. While this is decidedly not the case, Frankenstein has figured more importantly in the development of feminist literary theory than perhaps any other novel, with the possible exception of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. This essay will discuss the major feminist literary interpretations of the novel, beginning with Ellen Moers's landmark reading in Literary Women and then move to the more recent approaches taken by critics engaged in post-colonial theory, cultural studies, queer theory, and disability studies. In the process we will explore the provocative claim made by Fred Botting, who noted, “Frankenstein is a product of criticism, not a work of literature.”

Let us begin by describing briefly the three major strands in feminist literary criticism: American, French, and British. American feminist literary critics (represented best perhaps by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar) understand “women’s experiences” to be the basis of the differences in women’s writings. American feminist critics of the 1970s and 1980s tended to discuss recurring patterns of themes (i.e., the valorization of the quotidian value of domestic life, human community and relationships) or imagery (i.e., houses, claustrophobia, food and eating disorders, insanity, fetishizing of clothing, body image, etc.) in works by women. Led by the pioneering work of Elaine Showalter, such critics also took pains to rediscover “lost” women writers and to demonstrate the continuities of a women’s literary tradition.

Marxism, science fiction and utopia

Marxist theory has played an important role in sf criticism, especially in the last third of the past century. Since the 1960s, many of the most sophisticated studies of sf have been either explicitly Marxist in orientation or influenced by Marxist concepts adopted by feminism, race-criticism, queer theory and cultural studies. Although relatively few critics and writers in the genre have been avowed adherents of Marxism, sf and the closely related genre of utopian fiction have deep affinities with Marxist thought in particular, and socialist thought in general. In its simplest terms, sf and utopian fiction have been concerned with imagining progressive alternatives to the status quo, often implying critiques of contemporary conditions or possible future outcomes of current social trends. Science fiction, in particular, imagines change in terms of the whole human species, and these changes are often the results of scientific discoveries and inventions that are applied by human beings to their own social evolution. These are also the concerns of the Marxist utopian and social imagination.

Readers “divided into two classes”

“I am to justify his ways; I am to make him beloved to all posterity,” pledged Mary Shelley as her late husband's editor, aware that many thought her an unworthy mate. She proved herself with considerable labor: Posthumous Poems in 1824; two editions of Poetical Works in 1839; a volume of essays, letters, translations, and fragments the next year; and across the 1830s, the development of a mainstream audience with the literary remains she placed in the Keepsake, one of the gift-book annuals. The 1839 Works was the canonizing event, the “first stone of a monument due to Shelley's genius, his sufferings, and his virtues”(PW I Preface XVI). This monument was, in no small part, a reconstruction: a plan to rationalize and mediate a poetry of “mystic subtlety” or “huntings after the obscure” (xiii), and a plea of “extenuation” for “whatever faults” the poet had (viii), especially atheism and sedition. In giving “the productions of a sublime genius to the world, with all the correctness possible” (vii), more was involved than redemptive service to the poet: justifying the poet's ways to man, the editor also meant to redeem her worth to him. Across her volumes, she emerges as a uniquely privileged mediator, the intimate who is the poet's ideal, best reader. For this office, she had ready resources: her intimacy with the poet from 1814 on, her literate sympathy for his poetry and, not the least, her possession of much of his unpublished work.

Space opera is the most common, and least respected, form of science fiction. Its popularity in magazines of the 1920s and 1930s helped establish science fiction as a genre, and it continues to find appreciative readers, even while scorned by learned commentators. To many, space opera is synonymous with sf, and to this day, average citizens asked to define sf might respond, 'You know, the Star Trek, Star Wars stuff', which is to say, space opera. Still, although chastised for lacking merit and damaging the reputation of sf, space opera has endured, evolved and grown, so that sophisticated writers and scholars increasingly look to the form with bemused affection, or even genuine admiration.

Despite signs of changing attitudes, space opera has garnered little critical attention; only a few scholars have attempted anything resembling a rigorous definition. Necessarily, anyone discussing the nature, parameters and history of space opera at length breaks new ground.

A good orchestra, fully trained, will be able to play most symphonic works of the classical period without any conductor at all. It might not have the stamp or the personality of an enlightened musician on it, but the performance would not actually come to a halt. However, an opera cannot even begin to be performed without a proper conductor directing the whole proceedings. It has always been a great mystery to me how complicated passages like, say, the second finale of Così fan tutte, or many scenes in Idomeneo, could have been done without a baton-waving conductor. But of course, it may not have been all that well together in those days. As Mozart said himself of the first performance of Don Giovanni, “a lot of notes fell under the desks.”

There is, therefore, a feeling among orchestras that, although they do not really admire symphony conductors so much, they have a grudging respect for opera conductors, because they realize that opera conducting is so much more difficult and complicated. The general suspicion that orchestra players have of conductors is a great deal more prevalent in the concert hall than in the opera house, where the smallest mistake can show up the conductor.

Since humans are innately biological, and since most sf concerns human beings or other biological life forms, sf writers inevitably make biological assumptions - if only the default assumptions that the planets their fictional space travellers visit will have adequate gravity, air and exotic natives with the right number of chromosomes to interbreed. Such crude assumptions are commonly taken for granted in so-called 'hard science' stories that focus on the physics of space travel or interstellar warfare. Over the past decade, however, writers more often have turned to biology as the 'hard science' frontier of the future. The quest for outer space has given way to the quest for the genome. The great adversary is no longer an alien superpower, but the enemies within - cancer, AIDS, and bio-weapons - as well as the accidental results of genetic manipulation, and our own lifestyle destroying our biosphere. The engineering challenge of the future is less a matter of machines replacing living organisms than of machines imitating life's complexity.

The history of conducting in America is at once bound to the profession's European fortunes and characterized by various attempts to break free from those bonds. And if the separation of New World from Old World may never be complete, that is no argument against that struggle's centrality in American musical life. Set against the privileged role of the symphony orchestra in America, the relationship to commercial enterprise, transformations in technology, and the continually growing power of celebrity, is the tale of a young nation both drawn to the artistic traditions of the cultures that spawned it and increasingly determined to forge its own path.

The religious traditions on which American society was largely formed did not encourage the growth of a new musical culture. In addition to the practical problems, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia had religious objections that contributed to the slow start of concert life. But with growing urbanization, a burgeoning sense of nationhood, and the discovery that music could be morally edifying, the seeds of formal concert life took root. Founded in 1815, Boston's Handel and Haydn Society was primarily devoted to the performance of sacred choral works, while a Philharmonic Orchestra founded by Gottlieb Graupner in 1810 lasted for fifteen years, performing the first complete American Messiah in 1818. The multipurpose band, however, remained the most common musical ensemble in nineteenth-century America, and like the rest of American musical concert life at mid-century, variety was its hallmark.

'Alternate history' - or, as grammatical purists call it, 'alternative history' - is an inaccurate but common label for a small but intriguing body of literature. An alternate history is not a history at all, but a work of fiction in which history as we know it is changed for dramatic and often ironic effect. Often an alternate history dramatizes the moment of divergence from the historical record, as well as the consequences of that divergence. Such a story or novel might seem at first to be a work of traditional historical fiction, in which invented characters and events are woven into the known tapestry of history, but the alteration announces itself quickly, usually in the first few pages.

An example is ‘The Lucky Strike’ by Kim Stanley Robinson (1984), which begins:

For several pages, the fictional adventures of Captain January seem to have a nonfictional backdrop, for the setting meshes with the reader’s knowledge, however vague, of the closing months of the Second World War, as US forces in the Pacific ready atom bombs to drop on Japan. Then comes a spectacular moment of divergence, as the horrified January watches a plane in trouble:

As a soloist, conductor, orchestra member, and conductor/soloist, I have had a unique opportunity to examine the relationship between the soloist and the conductor. During a long career, I have experienced collaborations between soloist and conductor that ranged from performances of great ensemble sensitivity and finesse to some that bordered on musical sabotage.

Conducting with a soloist differs in many ways from the norm, the most obvious difference being the expectations of the soloist and the orchestra. The soloist expects the conductor to embrace his or her interpretation without question. Discussions of differences should take place only in the privacy of the pre-rehearsal, as any evidence of disapproval by the conductor is very upsetting to the orchestra. The orchestra expects the conductor to be familiar with the soloist's interpretation and be technically prepared to indicate clearly any tempo changes or dynamic adjustments required. Any suggestions from the soloist should be given to the orchestra by the conductor! On one occasion a soloist chose to communicate directly with a wind player in the Boston Symphony Orchestra and this breach of etiquette caused an angry confrontation that required public apologies before we could resume the rehearsal. Vocal soloists expect the conductor to balance dynamics carefully so that they will not have to strain the voice. Singing full voice on the day of a concert is not to be expected of a vocal soloist.

It is, to begin with, a problem in perception. The nature of sf during the last two decades of the twentieth century can be seen as a classic figure-ground puzzle. One angle of perspective on the era gives us a vision of the triumph of sf as a genre and as a series of outstanding texts which figured to our gaze the significant futures that, during those years, began to come to pass. But under a second angle of perspective, the high profile of sf as a shaping vision becomes indecipherable from the world during these years: in this perspective, sf gradually burned through the categories that gave it the defining potency of genre, and became fatally indistinguishable from the world it attempted to adumbrate, to signify: which is a way of saying, to differ from. Both perspectives, after the nature of figure-ground puzzles, co-exist.

This chapter can be understood to adhere to both perspectives.

Much happened in the two decades between 1980 and 2000. The sf readership broadened and diffused; no longer could it be claimed (a claim only made in any case with any plausibility about some forms of American sf before 1980) that sf was primarily read, or could be profitably written for, adolescent males. Written sf was increasingly presented in the form of books, while magazines declined. Written sf itself lost its unquestioned status as the default form of the genre; indeed, many consumers of sf ideas and iconography now accessed that material solely through film, television and computer gaming, without in fact actually reading sf at all.