A review by bmatzke
Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System by John Rieder

3.0

Rieder makes an argument for the difference between "mass" and "literary" genre, and, following Frederic Jameson, argues for the importance of understanding genres, especially mass cultural genres, in historical rather than formal terms. Science fiction being his main object of study, he contends that the formal features defining science fiction as a genre are a constantly moving target shaped by historical circumstance. Though he goes farther in making this claim than I would, I more or less agree, and he articulates this point very well in the book's first two chapters. The later chapters, in which he provides close readings of some individual works, are less compelling and aren't as rigorously historicist as I would expect them to be given the overall thesis of the book. Still, a very worthwhile piece of science fiction scholarship.