Beasts in the Stands

Building on the prior two chapters studying the individual athlete and the institution respectively, this chapter examines the role of the sport spectator. Spectatorship, in this case, includes both the fan, which is the emphasis of the chapter, and the critic who is implicated in making both the athlete and the fan monstrous. That is, the fan is often viewed with the same social suspicion and fear as the athlete. Once again, sf stories and films that engage fandom offer a differing picture of sport fandom and suggest that their monstrosity is the result of the active orchestration of criticism both popular and scholarly. Also as in prior chapters, the dangers of that monstrosity may be equally embodied as examples such as the Hillsborough Disaster demonstrate.

SF Sport and the Individual Talent

While related to the third chapter’s healthy acknowledgement of bodily limitations, this chapter outlines in more detail the predominance of systemic thinking in the context of sport and the allied forgetting of the experience of the individual athlete. Against this trend, the sf stories, films, and even video games in this chapter highlight the experiences of individual athletes, even in team sports, and the positive role that sport may play in their lives. In this way, it highlights the biological humanity of the athlete over and against the abstraction to which much social criticism condemns them. How, it asks, is sport important to the identity of the individuals who engage them?

Baseball, not Biology

This chapter confronts the central claim of many in sport studies that sports may best be characterized by hegemonic masculinity. This school of thought is reflected in the work of such scholars as Nancy Lesko and Varda Burstyn. To challenge this notion, this chapter reads widely from early feminist utopia to contemporary young adult science fiction, exploring the representation of gender as it relates to sport. Science fiction does not limit sport to the realm of the masculine. Athletic bodies, rather, present a distinct limitation to the construction of sport as an inherently violent, destructive (coded masculine) space. In this way, this chapter saves a place for biological embodiment and posits the equation of sport and hegemonic masculinity as an oversimplified essentialism.

Conclusions, or How to Stop Looking for Sinners

The conclusion returns to the central thesis outlined in the introduction. Also, through a reading of one final sf story it attempts to provide an answer to one of the text’s central questions: why has sf studies not engaged sport before? For all the reasons outlined in prior chapters—fear of bodily limitations and death, culturally constructed monstrosity, historical fear and religio-politics—sf has not performed one of its central tasks: to confront Otherness wherever it may be regardless of the embodied form of that Other. Engaging sport sf, therefore, is an endeavour vital to halting the future creation of social and cultural monsters.

Introduction to Part II

Another brief interlude presents a brief description of the second part of the book, the emphasis of which is on the tension between individual athletes and the systems in which they perform. Once again, brief mention is made of the wider implications for this study to science fiction studies more generally. Particular emphasis is on systemic thinking in sf studies.

Broken Teeth

As the prior chapter did with gender, this chapter suggests that science fiction has long served as a site in which to examine the interplay of race and sport. Several texts from early pulp magazines are examined, and an analysis of Steven Barnes’s Aubry Knight series serves as the chapter’s focal point. The chapter reinforces the notion that the social constructivist emphasis on hegemonic masculinity is not reflected universally, even going so far as to posit that this emphasis is a means to dismiss alternative forms of embodied, kinesthetic knowledge. Such a dismissal, it argues, has important implications for the study of race, science fiction, and sport.

Introduction to Part I

This brief essay clarifies the central theses outlined in the introduction and places them in the wider context of science fiction studies. Emphasis here is on the greater critical attention to embodiment in contemporary science fiction studies and the need for an approach that is both intersectional and biopsychosocial. This discussion includes an analysis of the 2017 film Life.

Sport, Institution, and the Devil

This chapter continues the discussion of individuality in sport, but also places the athlete in direct discussion with the institutions that organize and manage sports. Criticism of sport institutions such as the NCAA, NFL, and Olympic Committee are very popular, particularly within sociological constructivism. This chapter places this criticism in a historical context, suggesting it bears a relationship with a longer history of denigrating the athlete as idolatrous. Engaging stories and films that highlight the interaction of athletes with political, religious, and financial institutions the monstrous athlete emerges as a worthy victim caught in a kind of culture war between those who denigrate them and those who exploit them, sometimes one and the same.

Graying the Playing Field

Using both SF literature and film, this chapter indicates age as the clearest challenge to the social construction of the embodied athlete. Within age studies, such constructions often display an escapist quality—the desire to avoid aging and death, to posit aging as a narrative that may be re-written—also sometimes reflected in the fantastic. In much science fiction, however, one also sees a mindful acceptance of the embodied limitations that age places upon us, even in the figures of athletes so often held up as the epitome of youth and health. These limitations are explored in a wide variety of sf literature.

Introduction: Beastmode

The introduction presents the central thesis of the text that there is an important connection between the study of science fiction and that of sport. No unlike the marginalization of science fiction itself, sport and athleticism have historically been viewed with suspicion and derision and the athlete (and their body) afforded a fear akin to that which we reserve for the most frightening monsters. Science fiction is a genre well suited to studying the monster and, while criticism on the topic is lacking, has a long history of highlighting the embodied exclusion of the athlete. These connections are mapped here, a methodology for the book laid out, and chapter synopses provided.