Science fiction and the criticism of the genre have so far paid very little attention to the treatment of issues relating to race and ethnicity. The African-Caribbean writer Nalo Hopkinson says about her sf novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), 'I saw it as subverting the genre which speaks so much about the experience of being alienated, but contains so little written by alienated people themselves.' Most English-language sf is written by whites. While some African-American writers produce work that has fantastic or magical elements, this work is not generally grouped with sf or fantasy; it is instead published as and treated by critics as African-American literature. The magical realist elements of Mexican, Native American or Indian subcontinent literatures are also not published or reviewed as speculative literature. Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children (1980), for example, explores Indian independence and the tensions between Moslems and Hindus through the eyes of a boy who is one of a group of children born with powers such as telepathy, but it is not generally considered science fiction. Samuel R. Delany and other black authors, including Charles Saunders and Walter Mosley, have written about the racial issues connected to the field, ranging from the initial cold-shoulder treatment of Delany by racist old-guard white writers to the lack of a substantial black audience for the genre, but neither sf about race nor criticism of it have achieved the same prominence that works about gender issues have.

Shelley and the Scottish magician

Early in 1820 the Shelleys, then living in Italy, received a crate packed with various household articles and a selection of the new novels that had become the talk of the nation. In one, Ivanhoe, the “Dedicatory Epistle”- a letter purportedly sent by one Laurence Templeton to his antiquarian colleague, the Reverend Dr. Dryasdust - mentions a “Scottish magician, [who], you say, was . . . at liberty to walk over the recent field of battle, and to select for the subject of resuscitation by his sorceries a body whose limbs had recently quivered with existence, and whose throat had but just uttered the last note of agony.” Templeton's necromancer, who must have reminded Mary Shelley of the “unhallowed arts” of her own Victor Frankenstein, was none other than Templeton's own creator, Sir Walter Scott. In the opinion of numerous reviewers, such necromancy, resuscitating bygone figures from historical fields as varied as Norman England and eighteenth-century Scotland, had endowed the novel form itself with a new dignity. Typical is one review, which advises that Scott's Waverley should not be “consider[ed] . . . in the light of a common novel, whose fate it is to be devoured with rapidity for the day, and to be afterwards forgotten for ever”; it should rather be, this critic wrote, lauded as a “vehicle of curious accurate information upon a subject which must at all times demand our attention - the history and manners of . . . the inhabitants of these islands.” This claim for historical novels' pedagogic and national significance was to become a refrain over the next decade and a half, repeated on the appearance of each new entry in what Scott was to call the “Waverley Series,”after his immensely popular novel of 1814.

The feature that unites every kind of sf is the construction - in some sense - of a world other than our own. This may be another planet (or even another universe); or it may be a 'future world' in which conditions have changed in some dramatic way. But whatever new conditions or circumstances apply - alien invasion, Martian colonies, a permanent cure for the ageing process - the writer has to signal the changes, and the reader has to be able to understand the significance of these signals. Thus, the reading of an sf story is always an active process of translation. What are we being told about the characters, the politics, the social conditions of the imagined world, through the medium of these bizarre artefacts, landscapes, relationships, industries and customs? The icons of sf are the signs which announce the genre, which warn the reader that this is a different world; and at the same time constitute that difference.

More than in any other fiction, in sf the imaginary setting is a major character in the story – and this fictional surface is held together by the highly foregrounded description of unreal objects, customs, kinships, fashions, that can be identified and decoded by the reader. The word ‘icon’ is derived from the Greek eikon – it means an image, but the term came into English usage via Byzantine art, where an ‘ikon’ is, specifically, a stylized representation of Christ or one of the saints. Similarly, an sf icon will represent something both supernatural (or at least other-worldly), artistically conventional (in that certain features are mandatory) and yet clearly belonging to the public domain. Just as Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein constructed the monster rather than ‘inventing’ him, it is probably fruitless to trace any of the icons of sf back to a single, original author.

Traditionally, sf has been considered a predominantly masculine field which, through its focus on science and technology, 'naturally' excludes women and by implication, considerations of gender. To varying degrees over its history, sf has in fact functioned as an enormously fertile environment for the exploration of sociocultural understandings of gender. My use of the rather slippery term 'gender' here refers to the socially constructed attributes and 'performed' roles that are mapped on to biologically sexed bodies in historically and culturally specific ways. Rather than a comprehensive account of representations of masculinity and femininity, this chapter explores sf's potential to engage with gender issues, highlighting texts that have served to disrupt or challenge normative cultural understandings.

Despite populist notions of the overwhelmingly masculinist nature of sf, the problematic spaces signaled by ‘gender’ are crucial to sf imaginings. The presence of ‘Woman’ – whether actual, threatened or symbolically represented (through the alien, or ‘mother Earth’ for example) – reflects cultural anxieties about a range of ‘Others’ immanent in even the most scientifically pure, technically focused sf. The series of ‘self/other’ dichotomies suggested by ‘gender’, such as human/alien, nature/technology, and organic/inorganic, are also a central (although often unacknowledged) facet of the scientific culture informing much sf.

Mary Shelley well knew that books can make good companions. In the Preface to Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843, she writes: “I have found it a pleasant thing while travelling to have in the carriage the works of those who have passed through the same country . . . If alone, they serve as society; if with others, they suggest matter for conversation”(NSW VIII 65).With this “if,”Shelley gives us two images of her life: first, a lonely, widowed life of reading and writing, isolation and anxiety; and second, a convivial life of adventurous friendship. It was Shelley's way to live both lives at once. In Italy, in the tight embrace of the Shelley circle, she withdrew after losing two children to the vagaries of an itinerant, expatriate life. Soon her dejection was compounded by marital estrangement and by 1822, she was left a widow. After she returned to England in 1823, however, her long widowhood was punctuated by enduring friendships, a proposal of marriage, nights at the theatre and opera, endless correspondence with editors and publishers, and two continental journeys taken with her beloved son and his Cambridge friends. In one of the great ironies of the era, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, two visionaries of social renovation, invented in Frankenstein the loneliest character in the English novel. But this is no more ironic, perhaps, than that Shelley conceived her great novel of loneliness in a writer's game, among the flamboyant companions of her youth.

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.