Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk

(Soft Skull Press, 2022)

Reviewed by Niall Harrison

In 1998, Jonathan Lethem published an essay, ‘The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction’, which imagined that Gravity’s Rainbow won the 1973 Nebula Award and that subsequently, as a positive consequence, both the term ‘science fiction’ and the separate science fiction community gradually withered away. The essay was knowingly provocative, albeit with a sincere desire behind it for a less territorial literary ecology. It came to mind while reading Elvia Wilk’s essay collection because Lethem has lavishly blurbed it, and because I suspect part of the reason he did is Wilk’s total comfort in segueing from Margaret Atwood to Kathe Koja to Daisy Hildyard to Tricia Sullivan, or between solarpunk and 19th-century poetry and vampire LARPing. Death by Landscape is a lively, wide-ranging demonstration of how far and how fast the borders have fallen: the back cover even describes the contents as ‘fan non-fiction’.

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Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.