Once solely the possession of fans and buffs, the SF author Philip K Dick is now finding a much wider audience, as the success of the films "Blade Runner" and "Minority Report" shows. The kind of world he predicted in his funny and frightening novels and stories is coming closer to most of us: shifting realities, unstable relations, uncertain moralities. "Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern" examines a wide range of Dick's work, including his short stories and posthumously published realist novels. Christopher Palmer analyzes the puzzling and dazzling effects of Dick's fiction, and argues that at its heart is a clash between exhilarating possibilities of transformation, and a frightening lack of ethical certainties. Dick's work is seen as the inscription of his own historical predicament, the clash between humanism and postmodernism being played out in the complex forms of the fiction. The problem is never resolved, but Dick's ways of imagining it become steadily more ingenious and challenging.

Apocalypse is traditional and familiar, and it is an actual threat; it is feared, desired, and banal. Apocalypse in Crisis discusses fictions from the 1940s to the present, examining shifts in the imagination of apocalypse from the postwar British disaster novels, through novels of the countercultural sixties, feminist interventions, and recent revisions and critiques. As empire fades, ideas of sexuality shift, and attitudes to nature and to the city change, so apocalyptic fictions change. The individual subject is asserted, immolated, transcended, abandoned; individual deaths are substituted for mass death; death is faked or erased. The subjects and survivors of catastrophe set about re-establishing civilization, or they abandon it, finding new ways of being and of dying; they respond to it when it comes from outside, as an invasion, or they are immersed in it, as it shifts from being an event to being a condition. They flee the city for the country, or accept that they must draw on the energies of the world city in order to survive. The book includes detailed discussion of novels by H. G. Wells, George M. Stewart, Nevil Shute, John Wyndham, Arthur C. Clarke, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Anna Kavan, Arno Schmidt, Anthony Burgess, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tom Perrotta, Douglas Coupland, Don DeLillo, China Mieville, Jeff VanderMeer, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

for speaker, SATB choir, boys' choir, and orchestra Olivier's Henry V was one of Walton's most celebrated film scores. Christopher Palmer's imaginative reconstruction turned it into a dramatic scenario which has been scrupulously edited, and is presented here with a full set of textual notes, including introduction, synopsis, notes on the sources and text, and facsimiles. Orchestral material is available on hire.

This collection presents the best of Walton's music for voice and piano and provides singers with challenging and rewarding repertoire.