The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction

By Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.

Wesleyan University Press

The title of Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's scholarly text on the genre of science fiction, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, functions as a fine analogy for the matrix of critical discourses that he interweaves and traverses through in his study: the “seven beauties” of the title is an allusion to the medieval Persian poem The Haft Paykar, in which a prince marries seven beautiful princesses for whom he constructs seven domes with seven halls. Csicsery-Ronay explains that his title is “meant to evoke the image of a fantastic edifice with seven halls," and so the structure of the book tackles seven facets—or, as he designates them, “cognitive attractions”—of the genre in seven chapters: "Fictive Neology," "Fictive Novums," "Future History," "Imaginary Science," "The Science-Fictional Sublime," "The Science-Fictional Grotesque," and "The Technologiade."

While the structure of Seven Beauties bespeaks its intellectual rigor, the correlative methodology of engaging with multiple critical discourses at best offers multiple lenses through which to contemplate the defining components of science fiction; at worst, it conveys the sense of superfluousness that pervades a study that attempts to operate within multiple discourses without the consequential conceptual confusion that inheres in such an effort. For instance, the concept of the novum that Csicsery-Ronay attempts to articulate in the second chapter, in which he provides a number of definitions for the concept but never clearly demarcates the parameters of the concept as he plans to use it in his text, could easily be read as a more "science-fictiony" sounding trope for Derridian differánce. 

The study in no way claims to be feminist in scope, but its objective to articulate the conceptual apparatuses of the genre of science fiction could be conceived as feminist, whereby the genre is distinct for its future-oriented narratives and its consideration of alternative ontologies and ethics. The idea that feminism as a philosophy could be understood as a future-oriented discourse—both in regard to ontologies and ethics, or, how we conceptualize our bodies and how we consciously stylize our lives—is how this text could be interpreted as suggesting ideas that feminists can use to think about the still radical nature of feminism. Csicsery-Ronay does not make this connection in his text—indeed, his brief discussion of female bodies is trite and slightly offensive (see the paragraph that references the "juicy changes that occur in the female body" in particular)—but we as readers are able to do so, to that extent that, overall, the text as a “map of suggestions” proves intellectually stimulating and palatable. 

Review by Marcie Bianco