Shakespeare and Science Fiction by Sarah Annes Brown (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and Science Fictionby Sarah Annes Brown Veronica Hollinger Speculative Bardolatry. Sarah Annes Brown. Shakespeare and Science Fiction. Liverpool UP, L iverpoolS cienceF ictionT exts andS tudies, 2021. vii+ 212 pp. 120 hc, 35. 60 pbk. The speculative imagination loves Shakespeare and, as this well-researched, critically astute, and engaging monograph illustrates, Shakespeare rewards this affection through the richness of his intertextual contributions to sf. Brown makes a strong case for Shakespeare's very real influence on/in the genre, and she suggests several reasons for this. One is to accrue a bit of Shakespeare's canonical cachet, of course, especially in Anglo-American cultural spheres. When you title your Star Trekfilm The Undiscovered Country (1991; cf. Hamlet), the association with Shakespeare immediately implies (misleadingly or not) something about the film's depth and complexity. For Brown, however, this is the least of what is going on "to account for the complexity and inventiveness of science fiction's engagement with Shakespeare's works" (3). Her study is proof of physicist Phillip Schwe's wry observation that "Shakespeare is like an expanding universe. … The more you look, the more meanings you can discover" (qtd. 3). The "real" Shakespeare is notoriously mysterious: his life is largely absent from the historical record and even the authorship of his plays has been open to debate. Shakespeare as blank slate invites fiction to fill in some of the empty spaces in his life, and the protean worlds of his plays invite endless speculation about their often ambiguous "messages. " As a genre itself given to protean world-building, sf is tailor-made to engage with the Bard and his plays. Brown examines Shakespeare's intertextual presence in a wide range of speculative fictions, arguing that "Shakespeare—like science fiction—tests the boundaries of our species" (7). Her readings range from Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826) to recent fiction such as Emily St. John Mandel's critically acclaimed Station Eleven (2014). While her focus is "literary science fiction over the last hundred years" (12), she includes some attention to tv, especially Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) and Dr. Who (countless iterations since 1963), of which she is obviously very fond, as well as the recent reboot of Westworld (2016-2022), and films such as Forbidden Planet (1956) and The Postman (1997). Brown looks at science fictions in which Shakespeare is a character in the storyworld, as well as sf that engages with individual plays, especially Hamletand The Tempest (whose Prospero is often read as an avatar of the playwright), and fictional futures in which "Shakespeare" is the name of a precious cultural resource, "a kind of touchstone for the species, … both transcending and exemplifying what it means to be human" (5). As Brown astutely notes, in some sf stories "there is an interesting interplay between human and Shakespearean exceptionalism" (6), with the latter working to shore up the former (anthropocentric) position. Science fiction has both embraced and resisted the "Benjaminian aura" (22) that surrounds "Shakespeare" (both playwright and plays) as exemplar of human exceptionalism. Brown notes, for instance, that when End Page 312"Shakespeare" and sf aliens encounter each other, "Alien responses to Shakespeare are in a sense the ultimate test of Shakespeare's universalism" (89). One amusing act of "resistance" that Brown introduces is Nick Nicholas and Andrew Strader's Klingon translation of Hamletas The Klingon Hamlet (1996) ; their "scholarly apparatus" argues that Shakespeare was really a Klingon and that the Hamletwe know today is a translation from the original. Brown reproduces the cover illustration of the Klingon Hamlet holding up a skull, in that most iconic of all Shakespearean poses (56). Brown sets the scene in her introduction by recalling the Royal Shakepeare Company's 2008 production of Hamletthat starred David Tennant (the tenth and fourteenth Dr. Who) and Patrick Stewart (ST: The Next Generation'sCaptain Picard). This segues into a consideration of the resonances over time between "Shakespeare" and sf. In her following chapters, Brown organizes an absolute wealth of material into examinations of individual sf tropes: time travel, alternate history, dystopia, new worlds and alien species. . .