Project MUSE - <i>Aliens, Robots & Virtual Reality Idols in the Science Fiction of H.P Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov and William Gibson</i> by <string-name><given-names>John L.</given-names> <surname>Steadman</surname></string-name> (review)

600 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) While Sanders’s discussions of the novels are likely to be of greatest interest to readers, his chapters devoted to short fiction in some ways provide a clearer view of the evolution of Bishop’s craft. At times, though, Sanders’s choice of stories to discuss seems a bit arbitrary. His chapter “Surreal Estates: Short Fiction 1981-1994” covers only a half-dozen stories from this period—sometimes at lengths of three or four pages each—but only one of these was included in Bishop’s own selection of 15 stories from roughly this same period in his 1996 collection At the City Limits of Fate. That collection included some of Bishop’s most mordant and satirical treatments of religious themes, a topic which Sanders touches on, but might have covered in greater depth. Bishop’s work as a poet, essayist, and anthologist are only mentioned in a very brief closing chapter, although one could argue that his huge Light Years and Dark (1984) was one of the defining anthologies of the 1980s and that his nonfiction collection A Reverie for Mister Ray: Reflections on Life, Death, and Speculative Fiction (2005) offers valuable insights as to how Bishop has viewed himself in various literary contexts. An almost equally brief but useful interview with Bishop concludes the volume. Of course, any treatment of an author as varied, eclectic, and restless as Bishop requires making hard choices, and Michael Bishop and the Persistence of Wonder is almost certainly the most informed and enlightening study we are likely to see of an author whose work deserves a good deal more scholarly attention that it has thus far received. Let us hope that this clearly written and deeply thoughtful study can help get that discussion going.—Gary K. Wolfe, Locus Alienation or Alien Love? John L. Steadman. Aliens, Robots & Virtual Reality Idols in the Science Fiction of H.P Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov and William Gibson. Zero Books/John Hunt, 2020. x+256 pp. $25.95 pbk, $20.99 ebk. What is an alien? What does the alien want? These are the key questions asked in John L. Steadman’s masterful account of sf authors H.P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov, and William Gibson. In asking these questions, Steadman attempts to address the even more perplexing problem of what it means to be human. Presenting the human and the alien as a conceptual pair that, according to quantum theory’s idea of complementarity, “cannot be understood at precisely the same time” (2), Aliens, Robots & Virtual Reality Idols offers a lucid survey of how each author juxtaposes the human and non-human. Its impressive range of coverage, detailed knowledge of each writer’s corpus, and development of a shared language to describe the disparate nature of various non-human entities single this book out as a significant contribution to the field of sf studies. Additionally, its confident handling of terrestrial, extraterrestrial, and inter-dimensional aliens; humaniform and humanoid robots; and holographic, biomechanoid, AI, and loa idols as parallel forms of alterity or otherness gestures (a bit hollowly, as will be shown) toward sf’s broader function as cultural or critical commentary. The book itself follows a tripartite structure, beginning with a clear, erudite, and at times poetic introduction to what Steadman terms respectively 601 BOOKS IN REVIEW as Lovecraft, Asimov, and Gibson country. In these descriptions Steadman’s true passion as a Lovecraft scholar reveals itself. For instance, his hypothetical visitor to Lovecraft country “stands alone in a desolate, cathedral-like forest on an autumn day ... as the short day draws to a close and the shadows gather.” Awed by Lovecraft’s cosmic sublime, “she becomes conscious of the great immensities of space and time” (4). Perhaps in stylistic alignment with a shift from horror and fantasy to hard sf and cyberpunk, Steadman’s handling of Asimov and Gibson country is much more practical: “She can marvel at the glittering, immense, underground cities on Earth” (7), while “Gibson’s postmodernistic cities are the same cities that we are all familiar with” (10). After introducing the type of storyworlds each author creates, Steadman allots roughly a third of the remaining book...