Premonitions of the Future by Bernard Montoneri (review)

Reviewed by: Premonitions of the Futureby Bernard Montoneri James Hamby Premonitions of the Future. Bernard Montoneri. Science Fiction and Anticipation: Utopias, Dystopias and Time Travel. Lexington, 2022. 262 pp. 105 hc. It is commonplace for reviewers of anthologies to conclude that the volume they are writing about is a mixed bag of both good and bad essays. Science Fiction and Anticipation: Utopias, Dystopias and Time Travel, however, contains almost exclusively poor scholarship. The collection is troubled from the start by a loose-knit theme that barely holds the essays together, and then each essay conforms to a strange model, lacking in substance, that must surely be at the direction of the editor. Many of the essays are further plagued by poor editing, dubious research, and obvious mistakes. While some essays do manage to make interesting observations or to shed light on some lesser-known works of sf, the overall impression of this book is that it leaves much to be desired. On the surface, the thematic unity of utopia, dystopia, and time travel makes sense, as sf writers have long found it useful to send their protagonists deep into the past or far into the future to find either a model society to emulate or a nightmarish warning of what may come should society not change its ways. The works analyzed in this volume, however, often have flimsy connections to one another. Time travel is not always present in the works, and even when it is, there is little commentary upon it as a literary trope; it is End Page 117merely treated as a vehicle for the plot. Some stories analyzed, however, do not contain elements of utopia or dystopia, but are merely general sf. The lack of thematic unity leaves the impression that this is a hodgepodge of sf writing with little consideration to time period, place, or genre. Yet even this haphazard assortment would not be so disconcerting if the structure of the essays lent themselves more conveniently to literary criticism. The essays are structured so that it is difficult to discern what argument (if any) the authors are making and one can only assume that this model was followed at the editor's instruction. Nearly every essay begins with a long biographical discourse on the author of the work being analyzed, and the details of these biographies often have no bearing on the interpretation of the texts being discussed. These essays thus read more like encyclopedia entries than literary criticism. The biographies are then typically followed by unnecessarily long plot summaries, often without any sort of critical commentary on the text—the kind of plot summary literature instructors often warn their students against. In fact, some of the chapters are composed nearly entirely of biographies and plot summaries, leaving the reader to wonder what their point is. In addition to the unusual structure of the essays and their lack of analysis, the basic functions of an editor do not seem to have been fulfilled. The text is riddled with various sorts of mechanical errors, small and large. In the preface, Montoneri notes, "the chapters in this book have been peer-reviewed and proofread by contributors of this book and by several professors and researchers" (viii). If true, then several of these peer reviewers and proofreaders failed at their jobs. Glaring errors abound. In the chapter "The Phenomenon of Human-Animal Hybridization in Russian Science Fiction of the 20 thCentury" by Anna Toom, for example, The Island of Dr. Moreauis written incorrectly—twice. On page 96 it is spelled " The Island of Doctor Moro" and on page 113 it is printed as " Moreau's Island. " It is easy enough to understand how an author working with multiple drafts for publication might make a mistake here or there, but surely a peer reviewer should have caught these errors, especially with such a canonical work of sf. In "The 19 thCentury American Socialism: A Vision of a Future Utopia" by Majed S. Al-Lehaibi and Bernard Montoneri, the same paragraph appears twice, once on page 190 and again on page 194. On page 193, the same sentence appears twice within the same paragraph. Similarly, on. . .