rian Stableford is to be found in this book. Flashes of his familiar wit--familiar to readers of dozens of books, fiction and non-fiction--illuminate various surface aspects of The Dictionary of Science Fiction Places; and it is possible to detect, deep within the interstices of this very peculiar volume, in some genuinely playful flows of argument and reference, the true Stableford mind at work.
He can be found; but it is not easy.
In the end, one must say that it's his own fault, because his name is on the title, where the buck stops. The verso of the title page--where packaged books, which this Dictionary resembles (though no packager is listed), can usually be identified as team projects--acknowledges only two colleagues: Galen Smith for design and John Campbell as editor. There are no credits for "project design," or "concept."
Only in the author's Acknowledgments at the rear of the volume do we find any evidence of a controlling hand other than Stableford's. Here the author thanks "the editor who forbade me to call the book Realms of Possibility: A Universal Directory of Imaginary Places for a valuable lesson in marketing strategy, whose merit I might one day learn to see." This seeming courtesy does not fail to bear a Stablefordian sting in its tail, but in fact Stableford should be grateful: The Dictionary of Science Fiction Places contains no sustained discourse on, nor does its entry structure reflect, any informed response to the phrase "realms of possibility"; the book itself is anything but universal in its coverage, if we disregard any casuistry about science fictional places being found all over the universe; and the title of the actual book manages not to evoke comparisons with Alberto Manguel's The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980; rev. 1987), which is highly defective but a lot bigger than the current volume.
Even if one includes the illustrations.
The art of illustration
In fact, however, Stableford's text occupies only about two-thirds of the Dictionary's 384 pages; the rest of the book is given over to a series of pictures, about 150 of them, many of them occupying a full page, by Jeff White. As examples of the art of illustration, most of them are not entirely incompetent, though some of them are; and none of them is really very good. But the main problem with them, over and above the huge amount of space they occupy, is their almost total disengagement from the task of actually illustrating anything Stableford talks about.
It might have been unfair to ask Jeff White to respond accurately to 150 separate SF texts--for the only way he could have done so would have been to become familiar with each of them, whether or not they are set in real places (like Earth), or partly imaginary (like Urth), or totally fabricated (like Pern). These are distinctions Stableford also skates over (see below); but White's recurring failure to particularize his illustrations is a constantly visible failure. His inattention slurries the entire enterprise.
Moreover, many of the illustrations are nothing but stock images of aliens fronting anonymous scapes--but enough of this...
Ontological desuetude
The Dictionary of Science Fiction Places is alphabetical by place, each headword designating a single place. A short history of the location being treated follows, told in a level-playing-field style which does not distinguish between degrees of remoteness of the place being described from the logical "reality default" of Earth at the present time in this (not an alternate) universe. As the text which originally generated the place in question is never mentioned until the end of the entry, this tactic of indistinction generates a quite alarming sense of ontological desuetude: like diving into the mind of a very young fan.
Nor are other ways to sort the material applied: planets (real or fully imagined) consort lubriciously with edifices, cities, artifact arrays in orbit (like the Reefs of Space from the novel with that name by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson) and a wide assortment of generation starships (though oddly Stableford never uses that extremely usual term, preferring instead to say "space Ark," or "microworld," or "far-traveling habitat," or "self-contained biosphere," or "gigantic space habitat," or, in a rare generalizing mood, "locations with Arklike potential").
Another oddity from a man of Stableford's formidable sophistication as a critic: the short histories of each place (each planet, each tower, each generation starship, etc.) are told as they were, indeed, histories. No critical hints as to the plausibility, consistency, complexity of any place are given; no distinction is made between infodumps of backstory that an author may have provided Stableford, as it were, gratis, and Stableford's own admirably concise redactions; no pointers are offered to indicate when backstory feeds into the current action of a novel, which Stableford sometimes enters pretty deeply, but sometimes only hints at.
It is all a bit dizzying.
It might seem odd
There is a slight bias toward British writers in Stableford's highly selective entry list, which American readers might find corrective. It might seem odd (all the same) to give seven entries to Barrington J. Bayley, and three to Gene Wolfe (one of which must suffice for the great place-congested four volumes of The Book of the New Sun).
And so on. But it may not be necessary to take this outing all that seriously. There is a vacation feel to the text, a kind of smiling shrug on the part of the author that seems to say: Chill out. After all, these places are nothing but fiction. And I mean, after all, fiction is lies.
And we begin to relax.
And we can discover, again in medias res, Brian Stableford himself, coming up to breathe. Genius is in the cross-ref. It is in the cross-ref that he flourishes. Each entry closes with a series of three cross-refs to other similar entries; these cross-refs are clever, profound, suggestive, hilarious, sarcastic, critical; and unexpected. They lead us where we did not expect to go. They do not comprise an actual standard cross-reference system--entry y may refer to entries z, t and b; but entries z, t and b generate their own trails, rarely referring back to entry y--and they are clearly not meant to. What they do comprise is a matrix, a shape, a calculus of critical discourse. They are a great lurk.
They turn The Dictionary of Science Fiction Places inside out. It wears much better that way.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. He is also a co-founder of the Hugo-winning British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list.
