Genres of death and the death of genres: Eschatological critiques of science fiction and fantasy in Michael Swanwick'sA Geography of Unknown Lands

Summary After a preliminary discussion of late‐twentieth‐century parodic science fiction and fantasy, and of this school's uneasy combination of technical imitation of mainstream literary fiction and promotion of popular fiction as a subversive alternative to the mainstream, this article, concentrating on the 1997 short story collection A Geography of Unknown Lands by Michael Swanwick, discusses how this American author exemplifies the strengths and contradictions of this self‐conscious variety of speculative fiction. Swanwick uses his fictions to engage in ironic and revisionist deconstruction and reorientation of previous varieties of science fiction and fantasy. As introduction, Swanwick's novels are cited, indicating how they subvert and reinterpret traditional genre materials by bringing them into conflicting juxtaposition with more contemporary genre forms and trends. This technique is then explored in detail as applied in the six stories in A Geography. Two stories critique science fiction, one by arranging its historical phases as a symbolic architectural “folly”, and the other by locating a folktale of death in the heart of American science fiction's assumptions of manifest destiny. Two further tales assail eschatological fantasy: one introduces contemporary considerations of political liberation into the Christian afterlife, and the other subverts the conventional ghost‐story form by declaring the futility of any posthumous narrative. Finally, two stories deconstruct exotic “high fantasy”, examining whether the works of Lord Dunsany and Tolkien answer to contemporary concerns, and finding in the negative. This article concludes that Swanwick's collection, in the larger context of parodic speculative fiction, is a significant revisionist geography of the unknown lands of fantastic fiction, one which slants them towards the present and the real.