My Shippey Has Come In

 

Today I got Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction (2016) by Tom Shippey in the mail. When it first appeared on my Wish List it was going for $120; it has since come down to about $50, which allowed me to finally order it. It is a collection of Shippey’s essays on Science Fiction spanning over thirty years on the subject and features his insights on a genre beyond his more well-known subjects of Medieval Literature and the work of J. R. R. Tolkien. As the summation on Amazon has it:

“The fifteen essays collected in Hard Reading argue, first, that science fiction has its own internal rhetoric, relying on devices such as neologism, dialogism, semantic shifts, the use of unreliable narrators. It is a "high-information" genre which does not follow the Flaubertian ideal of le mot juste, "the right word", preferring le mot imprévisible, "the unpredictable word". Both ideals shun the facilior lectio, the "easy reading", but for different reasons and with different effects. The essays argue further that science fiction derives much of its energy from engagement with vital intellectual issues in the "soft sciences", especially history, anthropology, the study of different cultures, with a strong bearing on politics. Both the rhetoric and the issues deserve to be taken much more seriously than they have been in academia, and in the wider world. Each essay is further prefaced by an autobiographical introduction. These explain how the essays came to be written and in what ways they (often) proved controversial. They, and the autobiographical introduction to the whole book, create between them a memoir of what it was like to be a committed fan, from teenage years, and also an academic struggling to find a place, at a time when a declared interest in science fiction and fantasy was the kiss of death for a career in the humanities.” – Amazon.

While I obviously have not had time to read much of it yet, my eye was drawn during a preliminary flip to an essay on Ursula K. Le Guin and the first three books of Earthsea. I felt compelled to read it, and found it to be so insightful and perceptive, clarifying certain inchoate thoughts about the books that had been lurking on the brink of my brain for years, that I cannot help but feel I am in for quite an experience. Both about what I have read and about works that I have not read yet, but which might be pointed out to me here.

The book is beautifully bound, and the pages themselves of a dazzling whiteness that casts a bright shadow down the line of binding between leaves. Why do I mention that? Just because it seems an unusual circumstance to me.