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Just over two hundred years ago on a stormy night, a young woman
conceived of what would become one of the most iconic images of
science gone wrong, the story of Victor Frankenstein and his
Creature. For a long period, Mary Shelley languished in the shadow
of her luminary husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, but was rescued from
obscurity by the feminist scholars of the 1970s and 1980s. This
book offers a new perspective on Shelley and on science fiction,
arguing that Shelley both established a new discursive space for
moral thinking and laid the groundwork for the genre of science
fiction. Adopting a contextual biographical approach to understand
the factors that enabled Shelley to create Frankenstein, and
undertaking a close reading of the 1818 and 1831 editions of the
text, gives readers insight into how this famous story synthesizes
many of the concerns about new science that were prevalent in
Shelley's time. Using Michel Foucault's concept of discourse, this
work argues that Shelley should be credited with not only the
foundation of a genre but recognized as a figure who created a new
cultural space for readers to explore their fears and negotiate the
moral landscape of new science.
Charles Fort was an American researcher from the early twentieth
century who cataloged reports of unexplained phenomena he found in
newspapers and science journals. A minor bestseller with a cult
appeal, Fort's work was posthumously republished in the pulp
science fiction magazine Astounding Stories in 1934. His
idiosyncratic books fascinated, scared, and entertained readers,
many of them authors and editors of science fiction. Fort's work
prophesied the paranormal mainstays of SF literature to come: UFOs,
poltergeists, strange disappearances, cryptids, ancient mysteries,
unexplained natural phenomena, and everything in between. Science
fiction authors latched on to Fort's topics and hypotheses as
perfect fodder for SF stories. Writers like Arthur C. Clarke,
Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, H.P. Lovecraft, and others are
examined in this exploration of Fortean science fiction-a genre
that borrows from the reports and ideas of Fort and others who saw
the possible science-fictional nature of our reality.
Caitlin R. Kiernan is at the forefront of contemporary gothic,
weird and science fiction literature. She has written more than a
dozen novels, over 250 short stories, many chapbooks, along with a
large number of graphic works. For these Kiernan has won numerous
awards. This first full-length look at Kiernan's body of work
explores her fictional universe through critical literary lenses to
show the depth of her contributions to modern genre literature. A
prolific and creative writer, Kiernan's fictions bring to life our
fears about the other, the unknown, and the future through stories
that range widely across time and space. A sense of dark terror
pervades her novels and stories. Yet Kiernan's fictional universe
is not disengaged from reality. That is because she works within
the long tradition of gothic fiction speaking to the gravest
ethical, social and cultural issues. In her dark fiction, Kiernan
illustrates the terror of the tyranny of the normal, the oppression
of marginalized people, and the pervasive violence of our time. Her
dystopian sf propels today's dangerous economic, social, political
and environmental tendencies into the future. Kiernan's fiction
portrays troubling truths about the current human condition.
One of the major figures in science fiction for over sixty years,
James Gunn has been instrumental in the development of science
fiction teaching and in making science fiction one of the most
vibrant and engaging areas of scholarly study. His genre history
Alternate Worlds and his monumental The Road to Science Fiction
anthologies introduced countless readers to the genre. While a
professor of English at the University of Kansas, Gunn founded the
Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction in 1982. But Gunn has
also been one of the genre's leading writers, whose classic novels
Star Bridge (with Jack Williamson), The Joy Makers, The Immortals,
and The Listeners, helped shape the field. Now in his nineties,
Gunn remains a major voice in science fiction. His latest novel,
Transformation (the conclusion of the Transcendental trilogy), will
be published in 2017. Michael Page's study is the first to examine
the life, career, and writing of this science fiction grandmaster.
Drawing on materials from Gunn's archives and from personal
interviews with Gunn and providing detailed analysis and commentary
on Gunn's fiction, in The Science Fiction, Scholarship, and
Teaching of James Gunn Page provides a much-needed exploration of
one of science fiction's important figures.
The purpose of this collection, which was first published in 1996,
is to provide both an overview of the major critical approaches to
the Four Branches of the Mabinogi and a selection of the best
essays dealing with them. The essays examine the origins of the
Mabinogion, comparative analyses, and structural and thematic
interpretations. This book is ideal for students of literature and
Medieval studies.
A prolific author, Isaac Asimov is most admired for his science
fiction, including his collection of short stories I, Robot and his
Robot, Empire and Foundation series novels. While each of these
narratives takes place in a different fictional universe, Asimov
asserted at the end of his career that he had, with his last Robot
and Foundation novels, unified them into one coherent metaseries.
The Encyclopedia Galactica, a compendium of all human knowledge, is
prominent in the Foundation series as a key plot element but is
also widely cited in the text itself. Palumbo and Sullivan's major
new reference work book contains 1,000 selected excerpts from the
Encyclopedia, identifying and describing all of the characters,
locales, artifacts, concepts and institutions in Asimov's
metaseries. The authors argue that Asimov successfully integrates
the three series through the retroactive use of chaos theory, the
underlying principle behind both psychohistory and Three Laws of
Robotics-respectively the crucial concepts in the Foundation and
Robot stories.
Prolific, popular and critically acclaimed, Michael Moorcock is the
most important British fantasy author of his generation. His Elric
of Melnibone is an iconic figure for millions of fans but Moorcock
has also been a pioneer in science fiction and historical fiction.
He was hailed as the central figure of the ""New Wave"" in science
fiction, and has won numerous awards for his fantasy and science
fiction, as well as his ""mainstream"" writing. This first
full-length critical look at Moorcock's career, from the early
1960s to the present, explores the author's fictional multiverse:
his fantasy tales of the ""Eternal Champion""; his experimental
Jerry Cornelius novels; his hilarious science-fiction satire of his
""End of Time"" books; and his complex meditations on 20th-century
history of Mother London and the Colonel Pyat tetralogy.
Speculative science fiction, with its underlying socio-political
dialogue, represents an important intersection of popular culture
and public discourse. As a pop culture text, the animated series
Star Wars: The Clone Wars offers critical commentary on
contemporary issues, marking a moment of interplay whereby author
and audience come together in what Russian philosopher Mikhail
Bakhtin called collaborative meaning making. This book critically
examines the series as a voice in the political dialogs concerning
human cloning, torture, just war theory, peace and drone warfare.
The all-new essays in this book respond to the question, How do
spaces in science fiction, both built and unbuilt, help shape the
relationships among humans, other animals and their shared
environments? Spaces, as well as a sense of place or belonging,
play major roles in many science fiction works. This book focuses
especially on science fiction that includes depictions of the
future that include, but move beyond, dystopias and offer us ways
to imagine reinventing ourselves and our perspectives; especially
our links to and views of new environments. There are ecocritical
texts that deal with space/place and science fiction criticism that
deals with dystopias but there is no other collection that focuses
on the intersection of the two. The essays in this volume treat
Shelley's Frankenstein, Capek's War with the Newts, William
Morris's News from Nowhere, Le Guin's The Word for World Is Forest,
Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Philip K. Dick's
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Marge Piercy's He, She, It,
Neal Stephenson's Anathem, Amitav Ghosh's Calcutta Chromosome and
Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
Many believe that Robert A. Heinlein was the most important
American science fiction writer of the 20th century. This is the
first detailed critical examination of his entire career. It is not
a biography that is being done in a two-volume work by William
Patterson. Instead, this book looks at each piece of fiction (and a
few pieces of sf-related nonfiction) that Heinlein wrote,
chronologically by publication, in order to consider what each
contributes to his overall accomplishment. The aim is to be fair,
to look clearly at the strengths and weaknesses of the writings
that have inspired generations of readers and writers.
Reversing a common science fiction cliche, Farscape follows the
adventures of the human astronaut John Crichton after he is shot
through a wormhole into another part of the universe. Here Crichton
is the only human being, going from being a member of the most
intelligent species on our planet to being frequently considered
mentally deficient by the beings he encounters in his new
environment. Crichton befriends a group of beings from various
species attempting to escape from imprisonment aboard a living
spaceship. The series, which broke many of the so-called ""rules""
of science fiction, follows Crichton's attempts to survive in
worlds that are often hostile to him and his friends. Their
adventures centre on each being's attempt to find a way home. The
essays in this volume explore themes running throughout the series,
such as good and evil, love and sex, and what it means to be a
hero, as well as the various characters populating the series,
including the villains and even the ship itself.
Lois McMaster Bujold has won a shelf full of awards--Hugos,
Nebulas, and others--for both her science fiction and fantasy
writing. She is one of the most respected names in the field,
always delivering polished, thoughtful, and well-crafted writing.
She consistently addresses great issues and problems on a human
level, where they are faced by quirky, prickly, and very real
characters, and her exploration of the theory of reader-response is
an important critical contribution. Yet there has been a surprising
dearth of serious critical writing about her output--in part
because she resists neat and easy classification by genre,
politics, or subject matter. This collection of fresh essays aims
to correct that situation by presenting a variety of critical
perspectives addressing many aspects of her writing. Attention is
given to both her Miles Vorkosigan science fiction series and her
Chalion and Sharing Knife fantasy series, as well as the books that
fall outside these series.
This book is a collection of new essays, with the general objective
of filling a gap in the literature about sex and science fiction.
Although some work has been published, none of it is recent. The
essays herein explore the myriad ways in which authors writing in
the genre, regardless of format (e.g., print, film, television,
etc.), envision very different beings expressing this most
fundamental of human behaviors. ""Science fiction"" can be
translated into ""real unreality."" More than a genre like fantasy,
which creates entirely new realms of possibility, science fiction
constructs its possibilities from what is real, from what is,
indeed, possible, or conceivably so. This collection, then, looks
to understand and explore the ""unreal reality,"" to note ways in
which our culture's continually changing and evolving mores of sex
and sexuality are reflected in, dissected by, and deconstructed
through the genre of science fiction.
From Doctor Who in the 1960s, to the more recent Heroes and Lost a
select group of television series with strong elements of fantasy
has achieved cult status. Focusing on eight such series, this work
analyzes what makes these programs unique, and what they have in
common. Examination of the interaction between the series'
creators, studios and fans provides further insight into the
series' lasting impact. Included are assessments of the strategies
used to promote the series' appeal; an explanation of "transmedia"
storytelling and its influence on the television fantasy genre;
evaluations of how viewers have shaped cult texts and how greater
audience acceptance encouraged creators to develop challengingly
complex long-form dramas; and descriptions of changes within
broadcasting that have enabled "telefantasy" to transcend niche
status and enjoy prominence and popularity.
Science and science fiction have become inseparable-with common
stories, interconnected thought experiments, and shared language.
This reference book lays out that relationship and its
all-but-magical terms and ideas. Those who think seriously about
the future are changing the world, reshaping how we speak and how
we think. This book fully covers the terms that collected,
clarified and crystallized the futurists' ideas, sometimes showing
them off, sometimes slowing them down, and sometimes propelling
them to fame and making them the common currency of our culture.
The many entries in this encyclopedic work offer a guided tour of
the vast territories occupied by science fiction and futurism. In
his Foreword, David Brin says, "Provocative and enticing? Filled
with 'huh!' moments and leads to great stories? That describes this
volume."
This collection of critical essays applies a wide range of critical
frameworks to the analysis of prolific fantasy author Terry
Pratchett's Discworld books. Essays focus on topics such as
Pratchett's treatment of noise and silence and their political
implications, art as an anodyne for racial conflict, humour and
cognitive debugging, visual semiotics and hypotrochoidal texts,
linguistic stylistics and readers' perspectives of word choice, and
Derrida and the "Monstrous Regiment of Women." The volume also
includes an annotated bibliography of critical sources. The essays
provide new critical perspectives on Pratchett's work, which has
stealthily redefined both fantasy and humour for modern audiences.
This book explores how contemporary fantastic fiction by women
writers responds to the past and imagines the future. The first two
chapters look at revisionist rewritings of fairy tales and
historical texts; the third and fourth focus on future-oriented
narratives including dystopias and space fiction. Writers
considered include Margaret Atwood, Octavia E. Butler, Angela
Carter, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, and Jeanette Winterson,
among others. The author argues that an analysis of how past and
future are understood in women's fantastic fictions brings to light
an ""ethics of becoming"" in the texts-a way of interrupting,
revising and remaking problematic power structures that are tied to
identity markers like class, gender and race. The book reveals how
fantastic fiction can be read as narratives of disruption that
enable the creation of an ethics of becoming.
The media vampire has roots throughout the world, far beyond the
shores of the usual Dracula-inspired Anglo-American archetypes.
Depending on text and context, the vampire is a figure of anxiety
and comfort, humor and fear, desire and revulsion. These
dichotomies gesture the enduring prevalence of the vampire in mass
culture; it can no longer articulate a single feeling or response,
bound by time and geography, but is many things to many people.
With a global perspective, this collection of essays offers
something new and different: a much needed counter-narrative of the
vampire's evolution in popular culture. Divided by geography, this
text emphasizes the vampiric as a globetrotting citizen du monde
rather than an isolated monster.
Star Trek: The Next Generation blended speculative science fiction
and space opera in its portrayal of communication. Multiple
different modes of communication used by and between characters are
presented in the show, and the multilevel tapestry of communication
contexts in the series is critical in its appeal to viewers. This
book proposes that these patterns of communication reveal a
foundational philosophy of Star Trek that informs the series as a
whole while also enticing millions of viewers. These patterns serve
as models for the viewer, which both causes stronger empathetic
connections with characters and impels viewers to form parasocial
relationships with the show, explaining their extreme devotion.
Australia has been a frequent choice as the location for narratives
about the end of the world in science fiction and speculative
works, ranging from pre-colonial apocalyptic maps to key literary
works from the last fifty years. This critical volume explores the
role of Australia in both apocalyptic literature and film. Topics
covered include On the Beach and Mad Max, as well as children's
literature, Indigenous writing, and cyberpunk. The text explores
how apocalypse is used to undermine complacency, foretell
environmental disasters, critique colonization, and act as a
protest for minority groups. Australian apocalypse imagines
Australia at the ends of the world, geographically and
psychologically, but also proposes spaces of hope for the future.]
The purpose of this collection, which was first published in 1996,
is to provide both an overview of the major critical approaches to
the Four Branches of the Mabinogi and a selection of the best
essays dealing with them. The essays examine the origins of the
Mabinogion, comparative analyses, and structural and thematic
interpretations. This book is ideal for students of literature and
Medieval studies.
Examining how we interpret Welshness today, this volume brings
together fourteen essays that examine the range of representations
of Welsh mythology, folklore, and ritual in popular culture. Topics
covered include the twentieth-century fantasy fiction of Evangeline
Walton, the Welsh presence in the films of Walt Disney, Welshness
in folk music, non-animated film and postmodern literature.
Together, these interdisciplinary essays explore the ways that
Welsh motifs have proliferated in this age of cultural
cross-pollination, spreading worldwide the myths of one small
British nation.
As Andrzej Sapkowski was fleshing out his character Geralt of Rivia
for a writing contest, he did not set out to write a science
textbook--or even a work of science fiction. However, the world
that Sapkowski created in his series The Witcher resulted in a
valuable reflection of real-world developments in science and
technology. As the Witcher books have been published across
decades, the sorcery in the series acts as an extension of the
modern science it grows alongside. This book explores the
fascinating entanglement of science and magic that lies at the
heart of Sapkowski's novel series and its widely popular video game
and television adaptations. This is the first English-language
book-length treatment of magic and science in the Witcher universe.
These are examined through the lenses of politics, religion,
history and mythology. Sapkowski's richly detailed universe
investigates the sociology of science and ponders some of the most
pressing modern technological issues, such as genetic engineering,
climate change, weapons of mass destruction, sexism, speciesism and
environmentalism. Chapters explore the unsettling realization that
the greatest monsters are frequently human, and their heinous acts
often involve the unwitting hand of science.
This study provides a fascinating look at the various ways in which
20th-century fantasy writers have used Welsh Celtic mythology and
folklore in their work. Following the theories formulated by such
scholars as John Vickery and Joseph Campbell, the use of Celtic
materials by each of the authors is discussed from a
mythology-in-literature perspective. Sullivan presents an extensive
accounting of the Celtic material used and explores the primary
ways in which the authors incorporate it into their fiction, both
structurally and thematically. Sullivan identifies and analyzes the
nature and extent of Welsh Celtic influence on subsequent cultures
and their literatures, and he considers some of the previous
attempts to evaluate this influence. The appendixes provide
valuable background materials, including critical commentary on the
Welsh collection of myths, legends, folktales, and beliefs that are
of major importance in the work of the six authors represented.
Also included are extensive bibliographies of primary and secondary
sources. Illuminating reading for students and scholars of
mythology, modern fantasy, and children's literature, this book
sheds new light on the Welsh influence in literature and opens
paths for further research.
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