After a dozen years of writing book reviews, this is the first one I’ve had published in an academic journal*. Here’s the intro:

It’s long been a truism of science fiction (sf) scholarship that the genre has rarely dealt with the city as anything more than an engineering problem to be solved. I said as much in my Master’s thesis back in 2012, while justifying my own clumsy attempt to reconcile science fiction and psychogeography, but the sentiment was best and most thoroughly expressed by the redoubtable scholar Gary K Wolfe, who has argued that cities and the urban “are basically antithetical to the science fiction imagination” (p5).

Carl Abbott’s Imagining Urban Futures doesn’t exactly gainsay Wolfe’s theory, so much as it seeks to show that the genre’s attitude to the urban has in fact changed with time.

Click through to read in full, if you’ve got institutional access; if you don’t, drop me a line and I’ll hook you up in some completely legitimate and legal not-abusive-of-weird-academic-copyright-protocols type of way.

* Not, however, the first review I’ve written for an academic journal; one of my more lengthy and furious** anti-transhumanist screeds has been languishing for so long in the development hell of what was supposed to be a new journal that I’m pretty much presuming said journal ended up stillborn.

** If you’re wondering “why furious?”, the short answer would be “the book in question is a shameless attempt to rehabilitate eugenics and ‘race science’”; it’d be bad enough if that were all it attempted to do, but it’s not. (And yes, it’s an academic title by a tenured professor with a long reputation of going in to bat for morally repugnant positions.) Once I’ve determined for certain that the aforementioned journal is defunct, I’ll try to find somewhere else to publish it, even if it’s just here.