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Crime, Critique, and Utopia ed. by Margaret Malloch and Bill Munro (review)

412 correlates both texts with the phenomenon of interspecies transformation, the former with the film Avatar, where the transformation is from white man to Noble Savage, and the latter with the more mundane but no less terrifying transformation from white man to poor black man. Smith’s final chapter looks at the transplantation of cyberpunk from First World excess into developing world necessity, where, though the archetypes of the genre may remain fairly unmolested, their raison d’être is completely rewritten by the reimagined circumstances of their lives. In the classic style of the marginalized and the alienated, Smith returns to the motif of confrontation and convergence, indicating that, while such a genre might have begun in the postindustrial dystopias of the West, the West can no longer claim such genres as its own. Smith writes an uneasy text that teeters on the brink of hard new thought in some areas yet retreats into the known and the acknowledged in others. To encompass a thorough and vigorous discussion of globalization, utopia, and science fiction in one moderate-sized volume is, perhaps, a sweeping project better suited to a larger work, where the polarized dichotomy between First World and Third World perspectives of emergent postcolonial SF could be discursively unpacked to the very end of the notion. The future has indeed arrived at Kenya and Kolkata, and while it may very well be a different future than that which visits Kansas, it will arrive with the same speed and demands the same respect. In this, Smith will receive no detraction.