Scotland as Science Fiction

Caroline McCracken-Flesher is professor of English at the University of Wyoming. Her recent publications include Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (2005), The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders (2011), and the edited Bucknell volume, Culture, Nation, and the New Scottish Parliament (2007).

Scottish writers' concern with fantastic otherworlds goes back to Celtic mythology. The Scottish philosophers of the 18th century and the scientists and inventors of the 19th century were worlds ahead of their time. Today this tiny country survives in the shadow of nuclear subs, Trident missiles, and nuclear reactors, all the stuff of contemporary science fiction. This interesting study, which was born out of an MLA conference, includes work by seven Scotland-based senior scholars and three Americans in addition to McCracken-Flesher (Univ. of Wyoming). Two of the top Scottish sci-fi authors (Iain M. Banks and Matthew Fitt) receive two chapters each; Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, Muriel Spark, Alasdair Gray, Naomi Mitchison, et al. are also treated. Edwin Morgan even managed to write Scottish poetry as sci fi in "A Home in Space." The problem with studying this speculative genre is how to reconcile science fiction with a regional culture and an obsolescent Scots language. This provocative study meets the challenge head-on. With a mixture of science and fantasy, myth and technology, the land of Dolly the cloned sheep has created a "brave new Scotland" in rewriting the genre of science fiction. Good bibliography and notes (devalued by tiny print). Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, researchers.

• Chapter 1 AcknowledgmentsChapter 2 IntroductionChapter 3 Scotland's Fantastic Physics: Energy Transformation in MacDonald, Stevenson, Barrie, and SparkChapter 4 The Other Otherworld: Didactic Fantasy from MacDonald and Lindsay to J. Leslie MitchellChapter 5 Allegory and Cruelty: Gray's Lanark and Lindsay's A Voyage to ArcturusChapter 6 Speculative Nationality: "Stands Scotland Where it Did?" in the Culture of Iain M. BanksChapter 7 Between Enlightenment and the End of History: Ken MacLeod's Engines of LightChapter 8 The Cosmic (Cosmo)Polis in Naomi Mitchison's Science Fiction NovelsChapter 9 Non-Violence, Gender, and Ecology: Margaret Elphinstone's The Incomer and A Sparrow's FlightChapter 10 Past and Future Language: Matthew Fitt and Iain M. BanksChapter 11 Scottish Poetry as Science Fiction: Geddes, MacDiarmid, and Morgan's "A Home in Space"Chapter 12 Brave New Scotland: Science Fiction without Stereotypes in Fitt and CrumeyChapter 13 Alba Newton and Alasdair GrayChapter 14 BibliographyChapter 15 Notes on ContributorsChapter 16 Index