Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime

Bolton, Christopher, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi, eds. Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Important work of scholarship and criticism, reviewed insightfully and in some detail by Neil Easterbrook in SFRA Review #287 (Winter 2009): pp. 10-12, who offers passim his own useful observations some of which we quote.[1]

Easterbrook finds this "a terrifically useful collection of new and reprinted essays[...,] a welcome addition to the growing body of work that opens us to the traditions, genres, and nature of SF outside western Europe and North America. It indexes a cluster of concerns interesting to anyone involved with SF: the topoi and tropes are similar — disasters and monsters, lost worlds and robots, cybernetic prosthetics and space operas — as are the thematics—progressive and reactionary responses to" in Roger Luckhurst use, mechanism as a useful 19th term for the advent of "technological machinery transforming human life" (p. 10).

In either the East or the West, SF is best understood as a response to the rise of modernity —initially optimistic, but after Hiroshima increasingly problematic in its accounts of technology. [...] Western “proto-SF” begins with anxieties about technoscience and mechanism (as, for example, in the instance of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus). In Japan, there is a small body of work that corresponds to the “proto-SF” of the West, but the earliest influences came after the mid-nineteenth century, when after 250 years of isolation Japan opened itself to the Western influences that characterized the Meiji period.

RDE, finishing, 19/20Jan21