Story Matrices by Gillian Polack

(Luna Press, 2022)

Reviewed by Dan Hartland

In this short book, Gillian Polack seeks to demonstrate how, and to what effects, novels act as transmitters of culture. To do so, she focuses specifically on science fiction and fantasy as instructive generic examples of the processes she identifies.

This is a work of cultural, not literary, criticism: Polack is not interested in what makes a novel ‘good’ from a technical perspective, but rather in ‘novels as artefacts of culture’ (p. 39), by which rubric there is no qualitative difference between one or another example of the form. She ‘does not question their separate literary value’; she simply finds it irrelevant to her purposes (p. 203).

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Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.