Andrew M. Butler

Revised and Updated (Pocket Essentials)

Philip K. Dick

Pocket Essentials is a dynamic series of books that are concise, lively, and easy to read. Packed with facts as well as expert opinions, each book has all the key information you need to know about such popular topics as film, television, cult fiction, history, and more. Often considered to have been the creation of William Gibson in his seminal novel Neuromancer, the subgenre of cyberpunk can be traced back into the history of science fiction from the 1950s to the late 1970s, and emerged in reaction to the world of the 1980s. Cyberpunk is a mix of hard science fiction, noir plotting, punk attitude, and the cutting edge of culture. This book looks in detail at the movers and shakers in the cyberpunk movement, from the early days of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling through feminist and British versions of cyberpunk to the post-cyberpunk or cyberpunk-flavored fictions of Neal Stephenson, Greg Egan, Jeff Noon, and Jack Womack. It also examines important cyberpunk films including Blade Runner and The Matrix.

Cyberpunk

Paul Kincaid

Essays on winners of the first 18 years of the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

A Critical Anthology

The Arthur C. Clarke Award

Science fiction produced in the 1970s has long been undervalued, dismissed by Bruce Sterling as “confused, self-involved, and stale.” The New Wave was all but over and Cyberpunk had yet to arrive. The decade polarised sf – on the one hand it aspired to be a serious form, addressing issues such as race, Vietnam, feminism, ecology and sexuality, on the other hand it broke box office records with Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien and Superman: The Movie. Across the political spectrum, writers perceived a series of invisible enemies: radicals addressed the ideological structures of racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, pollution and capitalism and the possibility of new social structures, whereas conservatives feared the gains made by the civil rights movement, feminism, gay liberation, independence movements, ecology and Marxism and the perceived threats to the nuclear family. Sf would never be the same again. Beginning with chapters on the First sf and New Wave authors who published during the 1970s, Solar Flares examines the ways in which the genre confronted a new epoch and its own history, including the rise of fantasy, the sf blockbuster, children’s sf, pseudoscience and postmodernism. It explores significant figures such as Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler. From Larry Niven’s Ringworld to Thomas M. Disch’s On Wings of Song, from The Andromeda Strain to Flash Gordon and from Doctor Who to Buck Rogers, this book reclaims seventies sf writing, film and television – alongside music and architecture – as a crucial period in the history of science fiction.

Science Fiction in the 1970s

Solar Flares

A hugely revealing critical encyclopedia of the whole Pratchett oeuvre, including non-Discworld novels, works for children and miscellania.

An Unofficial Companion to the Novels of Terry Pratchett

Science fiction produced in the 1970s has long been undervalued, dismissed by Bruce Sterling as "confused, self-involved, and stale". The New Wave was all but over and Cyberpunk had yet to arrive. The decade polarised sf - on the one hand it aspired to be a serious form, addressing issues such as race, Vietnam, feminism, ecology and sexuality, on the other hand it broke box office records with Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien and Superman: The Movie. Beginning with chapters on the First sf and New Wave authors who published during the 1970s, Solar Flares examines the ways in which the genre confronted a new epoch and its own history, including the rise of fantasy, the sf blockbuster, children's sf, pseudoscience and postmodernism. It explores significant figures such as Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler. From Larry Niven's Ringworld to Thomas M. Disch's On Wings of Song, from The Andromeda Strain to Flash Gordon and from Doctor Who to Buck Rogers, this book reclaims seventies sf writing, film and television - alongside music and architecture - as a crucial period in the history of science fiction.

Farah Mendlesohn

Edward James

Terry Pratchett has long been on Britain's most popular and successful authors, and has already won many fans in North America as well. He is best known for the bestselling Discworld series. This is a new edition of of the first full-length study of Pratchett. The first edition was shortlisted for the Hugo Award in 2001 and the 2001 Locus Award for Non-fiction.

Guilty of Literature

Terry Pratchett

Who was Dick? A freaked-out junkie who took too many drugs? An explorer of madness who go too close to his subject and ended up claiming to have met God? A practical joker? The most consistently brilliant SF writer in the world? At a time when most SF was about cowboys in outer space, Dick explored the landscapes of the mind, conjured fake realities and was able to make you believe six impossible things before breakfast. He embodied the counter-culture a decade before the 1960's. Perhaps best known for Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? - the novel which inspired Blade Runner - Dick's world is one where God speaks through cat food commercials and comes in a handy aerosol can. And where you might be a figment of someone else's imagination... As well as an introductory essay, this pocket sized volume from 2007 reviews and analyses each of Philip K Dick's novels and provides a listing of the many other books and articles which have grappled with this genius.

Andrew M. Butler

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