This study confronts current influential theories that science fiction is either an American phenomenon or an international one. The study rejects the idea that British science fiction is distinguishable only by its pessimistic outlook--while also rejecting the idea that other designations, such as "scientific romance" or "speculative fiction," better fit the British product. Instead, the study traces the evolution of British science fiction, showing how H. G. Wells synthesized various strains in English literature, and how later writers, conscious of this Wellsian tradition, built upon Wells's literary achievement. An introduction defines what might reasonably be placed under the heading British science fiction, and why. Chapter 1 examines previous critical ideas about the nature of British science fiction, revealing that most of them are based on untested assumptions. Chapter 2 explores the significance of the dominant motif of the island in British SF --a motif that suggests that British SF and mainstream English literature have been long and fruitfully intertwined. Chapters 3 and 4 deal respectively with British disaster fiction before and after the Second World War. They focus on why British science fiction has so frequently seemed obsessed with catastrophe. Chapter 5, a polemical conclusion, deals with the future of British science fiction based on its current predicament. Ultimate Island forms a theoretical counterpart to the author's recently-published British Science Fiction: A Chronology 1478-1990 (Greenwood 1992), which defines the historical scope of the field.

This collection of twenty essays originally presented at the Eleventh International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts contains five parts: on fantasists and their work, contemporary fantastic theory and practice, studies in the British and European fantastic, studies in American fantasy and science fiction, and sex and techno-horror in fantastic literature and film.

What all the essays here have in common is that their authors are all aware of the tremendous latent power, for good and ill, of the fantastic text. We are given timely reminders of the dangers, as well as the appeal, of elves and how narrators in fantastic fictions take advantage of our desire to be part of a narrative community. We learn how some contemporary fantasists assimilate literary and scientific theory, while others seem in their fiction to require a new sociology to account for it.

This chronology outlines British science fiction from 1479-1990, highlighting the important biographical and publishing events in the field of science fiction literature and fandom, as well as in other media. The chronology includes biographical information on more than 700 authors, listings of more than 2,000 works, including anthologies, criticism and essays, publishing and fandom milestones, first publications, and awards. The works are fully cross-referenced and indexed, with introductory definitions of the field and descriptive headnotes for five periods: The Descent of Scientific Romance, 1478-1894; The Wellsian Synthesis, 1895-1936; British Science Fiction, 1937-1961; New Wave S(peculative) F(iction), 1962-1978; and The British Fantastic, 1979-1990. This book is an outgrowth of and is complementary to Ruddick's critical work, Ultimate Island. Together the two works define the scope and the nature of British science fiction--an enormous field that is not, until recently, examined separately from American science fiction in spite of considerable differences.

The Call of the Wild is a classic of young adult literature, and this edition provides a wealth of information on the work's literary and cultural backgrounds. A best-seller from the moment of its publication, Jack London's ""The Call of the Wild"" (1903) is about Buck, a big mongrel who is shipped from his comfortable life in California to Alaska, where he must adapt to the harsh life of a sled dog during the Klondike Gold Rush. Over the past hundred years London's 'dog story' has proved to have the enduring and universal appeal of the great classic. It has been translated into more than eighty languages and is one of the best-loved works of fiction in all of world literature. This is the only edition with appendices. It includes material on the North, Darwinism, and the history of psychology.

Wells was interested in the implications of evolutionary theory on the future of human beings at the biological, sociological, and cultural levels, and The Time Machine, short and readable, draws on many of the social and scientific debates of the time. The Broadview edition of this science fiction classic includes extensive materials on Wells's scientific and political influences.