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Parabolas of Science Fiction
Essays about the inherently collaborative nature of science fiction As a geometric term, parabola suggests a narrative trajectory or story arc. In science fiction, parabolas take us from the known to the unknown. More concrete than themes, more complex than motifs, parabolas are combinations of meaningful setting, character, and action that lend themselves to endless redefinition and jazzlike improvisation. The fourteen original essays in this collection explore how the field of science fiction has developed as a complex of repetitions, influences, arguments, and broad conversations. This particular feature of the genre has been the source of much critical commentary, most notably through growing interest in the "sf megatext," a continually expanding archive of shared images, situations, plots, characters, settings, and themes found in science fiction across media. Contributors include Jane Donawerth, Terry Dowling, L. Timmel Duchamp, Rachel Haywood Ferreira, Pawel Frelik, David M. Higgins, Amy J. Ransom, John Rieder, Nicholas Ruddick, Graham Sleight, Gary K. Wolfe, and Lisa Yaszek.
Storming the Reality Studio
The term "cyberpunk" entered the literary landscape in 1984 to describe William Gibson's pathbreaking novel Neuromancer. Cyberpunks are now among the shock troops of postmodernism, Larry McCaffery argues in Storming the Reality Studio, marshalling the resources of a fragmentary culture to create a startling new form. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, multinational machinations, frenetic bursts of prose, collisions of style, celebrations of texture: although emerging largely from science fiction, these features of cyberpunk writing are, as this volume makes clear, integrally related to the aims and innovations of the literary avant-garde. By bringing together original fiction by w...
Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed
From its beginnings in the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne to the virtual worlds of William Gibson's Neuromancer and The Matrix, Science Fiction: A Guide to the Perplexed helps students navigate the often perplexing worlds of a perennially popular genre. Drawing on literature as well as example from film and television, the book explores the different answers that criticism has offered to the vexed question, 'what is science fiction?' Each chapter of the book includes case studies of key texts, annotated guides to further reading and suggestions for class discussion to help students master the full range of contemporary critical approaches to the field, including the scientific, technological and political contexts in which the genre has flourished. Ranging from an understanding of the genre through the stereotypes of 1930s pulps through more recent claims that we are living in a science fictional moment, this volume will provide a comprehensive overview of this diverse and fascinating genre.
Edging Into the Future
"The savvy critical essays in this provocative collection investigate the interface between science fiction and postmodern culture. . . . Highly recommended for readers at all levels."—Choice
The Bite, the Breast and the Blood
Central to every vampire story is the undead's need for human blood, but equally compelling is the human ingestion of vampire blood, which often creates a bond. This blood connection suggests two primal, natural desires: breastfeeding and communion with God through a blood covenant. This analysis of vampire stories explores the benefits of the bonding experiences of breastfeeding and Christian and vampire narratives, arguing that modern readers and viewers are drawn to this genre because of our innate fascination with the relationship between human and maker.
Queer Universes
Contestations over the meaning and practice of sexuality have become increasingly central to cultural self-definition and critical debates over issues of identity, citizenship and the definition of humanity itself. In an era when a religious authority can declare lesbians antihuman while some nations legalise same-sex marriage and are becoming increasingly tolerant of a variety of non-normative sexualities, it is hardly surprising that science fiction, in turn, takes up the task of imagining a diverse range of queer and not-so-queer futures. The essays in Queer Universes investigate both contemporary and historical practices of representing sexualities and genders in science fiction literatu...
How We Became Posthuman
In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age. Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological con...
The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children
The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children raises important questions at the heart of society and culture, and through an interdisciplinary, trans-cultural analysis presents important findings on socio-cultural representations and embodiments of the child and childhood. At the start of the 21st, new anxieties constellate around the child and childhood, while older concerns have re-emerged, mutated, and grown stronger. But as historical analysis shows, they have been ever-present concerns. This innovative and interdisciplinary collection of essays considers examples of monstrous children since the 16th century to the present, spanning real-life and popular culture, to exhibit the manifestation of the Western cultural anxiety around the problematic, anomalous child as naughty, dangerous, or just plain evil. The book takes an inter- and multidisciplinary approach, drawing upon fields as diverse as sociology, psychology, film, and literature, to study the role of the child and childhood within contemporary Western culture and to see the historic ways in which each discipline intersects and influences the other.
The World Is Born From Zero
The World is Born From Zero is an investigation into the relationship between video games and science fiction through the philosophy of speculation. Cameron Kunzelman argues that the video game medium is centered on the evaluation and production of possible futures by following video game studies, media philosophy, and science fiction studies to their furthest reaches. Claiming that the best way to understand games is through rigorous formal analysis of their aesthetic strategies and the cultural context those strategies emerge from, Kunzelman investigates a diverse array of games like The Last of Us, VA-11 Hall-A, and Civilization VI in order to explore what science fiction video games can tell us about their genres, their ways of speculating, and how the medium of the video game does (or does not) direct us down experiential pathways that are both oppressive and liberatory. Taking a multidisciplinary look at these games, The World is Born From Zero offers a unique theorization of science fiction games that provides both science fiction studies and video game studies with new tools for thinking how this medium and mode inform each other.
The Global Vampire
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.
