Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System

I found Rieder's work on science fiction a few years back in the article that became chapter two of this book. I found it so, so helpful. When I first read it, I remember thinking, "Wow, this is the best thing I've read on science fiction as a genre." Imagine my excitement when I saw that he had developed his argument into a whole book. I flipped my lid.
The book pays off. It was even more than I had hoped for, actually. I find that it's a deft and searching exploration of genre theory through science fiction, and science fiction through genre theory. Plenty historical and theoretical, but also plenty detailed, with some great case studies. Based on the work that I've read in the past (from Suvin makes a significant contribution to the efforts to grapple with science fiction as a category of analysis and cultural production. For me this is right up there with Seo Young-Chu's _Do Metaphors Dream..._, Camille Bacon-Smith's _Science Fiction Culture_, Samuel Delany's mindblowing essays, the Cambridge Companion edited by Farah Mendlesohn, the encyclopedia from Clute and crew, and Jessica Langer's _Postcolonialism and Science Fiction_. It is just a super helpful tool for positioning and discussing what we're talking about when we're talking about SF.
Building on his previous work in colonialism and science fiction, Rieder’s book begins with an assessment of the scholarship on mass culture and the media flows of the early twenty-first century, when science fiction gained currency as a genre identifier. Drawing together analyses of educational curriculum, technologies of publication, and the social production and distribution of literacy itself, Rieder makes the case for understanding science fiction as a social convention familiar to authors, editors, booksellers, and readers, but often the worse for its encounters with the jagged edges of traditional genre systems that focus more on formalist analysis. Calling on the work of Frederic Jameson, John Frow, Delleuze and Guattari, Bowker and Starr, and Gary Westfahl, among many others, Rieder traces a history of what SF has meant and currently means to people in the world. Rather than viewing the genre as some kind of freestanding thing that is somehow coherent external to human relationships and decisions, Rieder works to reveal that there are always a variety of human investments and human motives at work in defining and employing the idea of science fiction.
Rieder offers an analysis grounded in the social history of texts rather than their formal characteristics. His argument ranges backward in time to the various texts that have become touchpoints in the debates about where science fiction began. He also pushes forward to the present in tracking the roles of science fiction across various forms of media.
Along the way, the book explores and engages the ways that artists and fans have navigated and channeled the shifting ideas about what science fiction is, how we can know it when we see it, and who it belongs to as a literary strategy and a locus for community formation. Ur-texts make frequent appearances in the early going, with a careful reception study of _Frankenstein_ taking pride of place. Further case studies draw insights from the work and experiences of Philip K. Dick, women fans and writers making gains for feminism in the 1970s (this is where he really reminded me of Bacon-Smith), and more recent examples of Afrofuturism and indigenous futurism in North America.
Rieder’s book thus creates a “sketch of the history of SF” that shows the genre to be a “product of multiple communities of practice whose motives and resources may have little resemblance to one another” (11), but whose work we would all identify, somehow, as science fiction. Drawing on his forays in genre theory and the various well-designed case studies, Rieder closes the book by offering a new periodization of science fiction that focuses on the ideological power of the genre.
I think this is going to be a foundational work