In this comprehensive study of The Stars My Destination, D. Harlan Wilson makes a case for the continued significance of Alfred Bester's SF masterwork, exploring its distinctive style, influences, intertextuality, affect, and innovation as well as its extensive metafictional properties. In Stars, Bester established himself as a son of the pulp-SF and high-modernist writers that preceded him and a forefather to the New Wave and cyberpunk movements that followed his lead. Wilson's study depicts Bester as an SF insider as much as an outlier, writing in the spirit of the genre but breaking with the fixation on hard science in favor of psychological interiority, literary experimentation, and adult themes. The book combines close-readings of the novel with broader concerns about contemporary media, technoculture, and the current state of SF itself. In Wilson's view, SF is a moribund artform, and Stars foresaw the inevitable science fictionalization of our benighted world. With scholarly lucidity and precision, Wilson shows us that Stars pointed the way to what we have (un)become.

In this comprehensive study of The Stars My Destination, D. Harlan Wilson makes a case for the continued significance of Alfred Bester’s SF masterwork, exploring its distinctive style, influences, intertextuality, affect, and innovation as well as its extensive metafictional properties. In Stars, Bester established himself as a son of the pulp-SF and high-modernist writers that preceded him and a forefather to the New Wave and cyberpunk movements that followed his lead. Wilson’s study depicts Bester as an SF insider as much as an outlier, writing in the spirit of the genre but breaking with the fixation on hard science in favor of psychological interiority, literary experimentation, and adult themes. The book combines close-readings of the novel with broader concerns about contemporary media, technoculture, and the current state of SF itself. In Wilson’s view, SF is a moribund artform, and Stars foresaw the inevitable science fictionalization of our benighted world. With scholarly lucidity and precision, Wilson shows us that Stars pointed the way to what we have (un)become. 

Prophetic short stories and apocalyptic novels like The Crystal World made J. G. Ballard a foundational figure in the British New Wave. Rejecting the science fiction of rockets and aliens, he explored an inner space of humanity informed by psychiatry and biology and shaped by surrealism. Later in his career, Ballard's combustible plots and violent imagery spurred controversy--even legal action--while his autobiographical 1984 war novel Empire of the Sun brought him fame. D. Harlan Wilson offers the first career-spanning analysis of an author who helped steer SF in new, if startling, directions. Here was a writer committed to moral ambiguity, one who drowned the world and erected a London high-rise doomed to descend into savagery--and coolly picked apart the characters trapped within each story. Wilson also examines Ballard's methods, his influence on cyberpunk, and the ways his fiction operates within the sphere of our larger culture and within SF itself.

(Publisher's Note: The author failed to fold my laundry in the proper manner, so I am letting the cat out of the bag-these are not actual biographies. They are closer to maps of the author's ego than they are texts about the namesakes adorning their covers. So, if you want to read about Freud or Douglass or Hitler I suggest you do so elsewhere.) Frederick Douglass stands as one of American history's most extraordinary figures, overcoming the evils of slavery and racial construction by force of will and grit. As a fervent abolitionist, gifted orator, and sagacious editor and author, he became one of the most outspoken and influential social reformers of his time. During his life, he published three autobiographies chronicling his struggle from childhood to adulthood, from slave to free man, from ignorance to power-knowledge. And yet the full narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, contrary to popular belief, has been incomplete ... until now. Recently recovered on an archeological dig in Ireland, where Douglass lectured extensively in the 1840s, this heretofore "lost" autobiography marks the fourth and final work in the library of his selfhood. Tying together loose ends in the previous three autobiographies while exposing remarkable, often disturbing secrets about his private life, Douglass portrays himself not only as a man of words and character but as a kind of anachronistic hipster and proto-beatnik. There is a reason this volume never saw publication during his lifetime. A reason-and a method.

(Publisher's Note: The author failed to fold my laundry in the proper manner, so I am letting the cat out of the bag-these are not actual biographies. They are closer to maps of the author's ego than they are texts about the namesakes adorning their covers. So, if you want to read about Freud or Douglass or Hitler I suggest you do so elsewhere.) In this unofficial, unauthorized sequel to Peter Gay's groundbreaking Freud: A Life of Our Time, D. Harlan Wilson reveals a side of the man that has proven too disturbing and risque for past biographers. Based on newly recovered diaries, microfiche, letters, and secret tape recordings, Freud: The Penultimate Biography recounts the daring sexual exploits of the father of psychoanalysis. Once considered to be impotent by the age of forty, if only according to the written testimonies of his wife, Freud is now revealed as an uncompromising flaneur, the figurehead of masculine sexuality and phallic prowess that everybody knew he was. It is a dangerous and at times shocking chronicle that puts the very nature of desire on trial.

Life in Dreamfield, Indiana, is a daily harangue of pigs, cornfields, pigs, fast food joints, pigs, Dollar Stores, motorcycles, pigs, and good old-fashioned Amerikan redneckery. The decidedly estranged yet complacent occupants of this proverbial smalltown go about their business like geriatrics in a casino ... until their business is interrupted by a sinister gang of outsiders. Angry, slick-talking, and ultraviolent to the core, Samson Thataway and the Fuming Garcias commit art-for-art's-sake in the form of hideous, unmotivated serial killings. When an unsuspecting everyman's family is murdered by the throng, it is up to Felix Soandso to avenge their deaths and return Dreamfield to its natural state of absurdity. The second edition of Peckinpah includes and introduction by Ian Cooper, author of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Cultographies).

(Publisher's Note: The author failed to fold my laundry in the proper manner, so I am letting the cat out of the bag-these are not actual biographies. They are closer to maps of the author's ego than they are texts about the namesakes adorning their covers. So, if you want to read about Freud or Douglass or Hitler I suggest you do so elsewhere.) An icon of true evil, Adolf Hitler is arguably the most important figure of the twentieth century. No one has so patently demonstrated the horrific capabilities of mankind. In Hitler: The Terminal Biography, D. Harlan Wilson tracks the life of the infamous monomaniac from struggling artist to mass murderer. Based on more than ten years of archival research and German sociological study, this one-volume account covers ground previously uncharted by other biographers, drawing heavily on newfound diaries, letters, memos, and phonograph recordings of Hitler's closest confidants as well as the Fuhrer himself.

In the wake of the Stick Figure War, civilization lapsed into obscurity. Fallout ravaged the fabric of space and time. History digested reality and reality exhumed the future as survivors tried and failed to create a new beginning ... Amid the chaos, one man experiences a terminal affliction, a revolution of the self: the chronic transformation into the city of Kyoto, Japan. Each transformation further plunges the world into darkness, but he's helpless against the lethal clockwork of his body, his psyche, his mindscreens-and nothing, not even Fate itself, can stop him from becoming God ... In the third and final installment of the Scikungfi trilogy after Dr. Identity and Codename Prague, acclaimed author D. Harlan Wilson composes a narrative grindhouse that combines elements of science fiction and horror with pop culture and literary theory. Erudite, ultraviolent, and riotously satirical, THE KYOTO MAN reminds us how, at every turn, reality is shaped by the forces that destroy it.

Since he assassinated the Nowhere Man, Vincent Prague hasn't been the same, haunted by the ontological impossibility of the kill. His celebrity status has skyrocketed, however, and everybody wants a piece of him. The MAP (Ministry of Applied Pressure) promotes him to Anvil-in-Chief, the catbird's seat of special agents. Under the so-stupid-it's-genius alias of "Vincent 'Codename' Prague," he works a case that leads him to the Former Czech Republik's Prague, a dark cirque du city where androids run wild, femme fatales chronically manhandle him, and a mad chef named Doktor Teufelsdrockh has created a Hitler/Keats/Daikaiju hybrid that would make Frankenstein's monster sing like a Von Trapp ... In an overtechnologized world of constant reckoning, all Vincent has are his wits, his weapons, and a briefcase full of replaceable extremities to crack a mysterious code that, he soon discovers, resides within himself.

D. Harlan Wilson returns with another ferociously mindbending collection of short fiction. Masked in absurdity, these stories reveal the horrifying and hilarious faces of everyday life. Wilson tells of egg raids, hog rippers, monk spitters, fathers who take their children to pet stores to buy them whales, sociopaths who threaten to clothesline eternity, and the simple act of the story itself becoming a means of repetitive, endless torture. Put on your goat head, hop in your hovercraft, and take a ride with a juggernaut of modern imaginative fiction.

For a professor at Corndog University it's quite acceptable to purchase a robotic dopplegnger and have it teach your classes for you. But how does it reflect on your teaching skills when your dopplegnger murders the whole class? Follow the Dystopian Duo (Dr. Blah Blah Blah and his robot Dr. Identity) on a killing spree of epic proportions through the irreal postapocalyptic city of Bliptown where time ticks sideways, artificial Bug-Eyed Monsters punish citizens for consumer-capitalist lethargy, and ultraviolence is as essential as a daily multivitamin.

In Pseudofoliculitis City nothing is as it seems and everything is as it should be. Today's forecast calls for extreme confrontation, with sandwich flurries and the threat of handlebar mustaches to the west. By turns absurd and surreal, dark and challenging, Pseudo-City exposes what waits in the bathroom stall, under the manhole cover and in the corporate boardroom, all in a way that can only be described as mind-bogglingly irreal.

In this collection of stories, D. Harlan Wilson deconditions the boundaries of reality with the same offbeat methodology that energized his first book The Kafka Effekt. Stranger on the Loose is an absurdist account of urban and suburban social dynamics, and of the effects that contemporary image-culture has on the (in)human condition. These stories operate on a plane of existence that resists, and in many cases breaks, the laws of causality. Parrots teach college courses. Fl?neurs impersonate bowling pins. Bodybuilders sneak into people's homes and strike poses at their leisure. Passive-aggressive glaciers and miniature elephant-humans antagonize the seedy streets of Suburbia. Apes disguised as scientists reincarnate Walt Disney, who discovers that he is a Chinese box full of disguised Walt Disneys . . . Wilson's imagination is a rare specimen. The acorns of his fiction are planted in the soil of normalcy, but what grows out of that soil is a dark, witty, otherworldly jungle.

Prophetic short stories and apocalyptic novels like The Crystal World made J. G. Ballard a foundational figure in the British New Wave. Rejecting the science fiction of rockets and aliens, he explored an inner space of humanity informed by psychiatry and biology and shaped by surrealism. Later in his career, Ballard's combustible plots and violent imagery spurred controversy--even legal action--while his autobiographical 1984 war novel Empire of the Sun brought him fame. D. Harlan Wilson offers the first career-spanning analysis of an author who helped steer SF in new, if startling, directions. Here was a writer committed to moral ambiguity, one who drowned the world and erected a London high-rise doomed to descend into savagery--and coolly picked apart the characters trapped within each story. Wilson also examines Ballard's methods, his influence on cyberpunk, and the ways his fiction operates within the sphere of our larger culture and within SF itself.

Charting new territory in filmmaking technologies and Steven Spielberg's oeuvre, Minority Report (2002) portrays a dystopian near-future that comments on our increasingly science-fictional world and pays homage to the history of SF cinema. In this comprehensive monograph, D. Harlan Wilson recounts the film's inception, production, reception, and afterlife since its release in 2002 while depicting it as a symptom of contemporary media pathology, post-9/11 paranoia, consumer-capitalist aggression, religious mania, and above all, the screen culture that has come to define the human condition. At the same time, Wilson explores the many self-reflexive flourishes that render the movie a commentary on Spielberg's style and the precession of the SF genre.