The impact of science upon society led to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at one end of the nineteenth century fear of the darkness still lurking in the corners of the bright modern world gave rise to Bram Stoker’s Dracula at the other end. And this corruption is spawning new horrors. Boss Tweed heads the most corrupt city and state government ever known, men who have grown fat and rich and old cheating their government are now the powerful arbiters of social, cultural, political and economic life. But in the approach of this “modern” world, there are new moralities to be forged, moral questions that have never had to be faced before. Throughout the novel, Doctorow describes the city as a vast machine, clanking cogs, belching steam, the thrusting power of the new industry embodied. Now, that prosperity is impelling the city into the future. Its setting is New York in the 1870s, a city grown prosperous on the sale of shoddy goods to the Union Army during the Civil War. It hinges about that eternally spinning moment when the present becomes the future.Īnd if we accept that premise, then there is no doubt at all that The Waterworks is science fiction. SF celebrates, announces, decries, records but can never quite ignore the terrible clash between reality and potential. But if one thing holds true throughout every metamorphosis of the literature, then it is a concern with change. In other words, sf is what we make it to be. By the New Wave it had become a mode of literary experimentation, and now, if anything, it is part of the postmodern feedback loop.

As sf exploded beyond the Gernsbackian continuum, it became a vast, intergalactic, romantic adventure.

What is it we are doing in science fiction? To Gernsback it was didactic, a dramatised lesson in the value of technology. The review first appeared in Vector 180, August/September 1994: Doctorow, whom I talk about here, I thought it appropriate to dig out this review of his excellent novel, The Waterworks. On the day I learned of the death of one of my favourite writers, E.L.

The waterworks by el doctorow