Gary Westfahl

The leading figure in the development of cyberpunk, William Gibson (born in 1948) crafted works in which isolated humans explored near-future worlds of ubiquitous and intrusive computer technology and cybernetics. This volume is the first comprehensive examination of the award-winning author of the seminal novel Neuromancer (and the other books in the Sprawl trilogy, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive), as well as other acclaimed novels including recent bestsellers Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. Renowned scholar Gary Westfahl draws upon extensive research to provide a compelling account of Gibson's writing career and his lasting influence in the science fiction world. Delving into numerous science fiction fanzines that the young Gibson contributed to and edited, Westfahl delivers new information about his childhood and adolescence. He describes for the first time more than eighty virtually unknown Gibson publications from his early years, including articles, reviews, poems, cartoons, letters, and a collaborative story. The book also documents the poems, articles, and introductions that Gibson has written for various books, and its discussions are enriched by illuminating comments from various print and online interviews. The works that made Gibson famous are also featured, as Westfahl performs extended analyses of Gibson's ten novels and nineteen short stories. Lastly, the book presents a new interview with Gibson in which the author discusses his correspondence with author Fritz Leiber, his relationship with the late scholar Susan Wood, his attitudes toward critics, his overall impact on the field of science fiction, and his recently completed screenplay and forthcoming novel.

William Gibson

Wolfgang Neuhaus

Dominik Irtenkauf

Erik Simon

Judith C. Vogt

Florian Rinke

Simon Spiegel

Karlheinz Steinmüller

Markus Tillmann

Matthias Hofmann

Hans Frey

Udo Klotz

Guido Sprenger

Johannes Hahn

Kai U. Jürgens

Uwe Neuhold

Maurice Schuhmann

Yvonne Tunnat

Thorsten Hanisch

Lutz Göllner

Science Fiction und wie sie die Welten verändert Welches literarische Genre lädt Schreibende wie die Science Fiction dazu ein, sich eine andere als unsere Realität auszumalen, Was-wäre-wenn-Fragen zu stellen, neue Gesellschaftsformen zu denken und Konflikte ohne Gewalt zu lösen? Diverse aktuelle gesellschaftliche und politische Anlässe haben dazu geführt, dass wir genau diesen Themen unsere diesjährigen Schwerpunkte widmen: Alternate History und Pazifismus in der SF, die von Autor*innen wie Judith Vogt, Guido Sprenger oder Maurice Schuhmann beleuchtet werden. Zudem finden Gedanken und Erinnerungen an den wohl prägendsten deutschsprachigen SF-Autor, Herbert W. Franke, der im Juni 2022 verstarb, Platz. Zudem wartet die 38. Ausgabe des von Wolfgang Jeschke ins Leben gerufenen Almanachs mit einem umfangreichen Überblick über die Entwicklungen des Genres in Rezensionen und Beiträgen zu Buch, Film, Game, Serie und Hörspiel auf. Abgerundet wird der Jahresrückblick mit einer Liste der Genre-Preise, einem Nekrolog sowie einer Bibliografie der Bücher, die 2022 erstmals auf Deutsch erschienen sind. Das SCIENCE FICTION JAHR erscheint seit 2019 im Hirnkost Verlag und wird von Melanie Wylutzki und Hardy Kettlitz herausgegeben und wurde mehrfach mit dem Kurd Laßwitz Preis ausgezeichnet, zuletzt 2023 in der Kategorie "Bester deutschsprachiger Sachtext zur SF mit Erstausgabe 2022".

Das Science Fiction Jahr 2023

This book provides students and other interested readers with a comprehensive survey of science fiction history and numerous essays addressing major science fiction topics, authors, works, and subgenres written by a distinguished scholar. This encyclopedia deals with written science fiction in all of its forms, not only novels and short stories but also mediums often ignored in other reference books, such as plays, poems, comic books, and graphic novels. Some science fiction films, television programs, and video games are also mentioned, particularly when they are relevant to written texts. Its focus is on science fiction in the English language, though due attention is given to international authors whose works have been frequently translated into English. Since science fiction became a recognized genre and greatly expanded in the 20th century, works published in the 20th and 21st centuries are most frequently discussed, though important earlier works are not neglected. The texts are designed to be helpful to numerous readers, ranging from students first encountering science fiction to experienced scholars in the field.

An Encyclopedia [2 volumes]

Science Fiction Literature through History [2 volumes]

While students and general readers typically cannot relate to esoteric definitions of science fiction, they readily understand the genre as a literature that characteristically deals with subjects such as new inventions, space, robot and aliens. This book looks at science fiction in precisely this manner, with twenty-one chapters that each deal with a subject that is repeatedly addressed in science fiction of recent centuries. Based on a packet of original essays that the author assembled for his classes, the book could serve as a supplemental textbook in science fiction classes, but also contains material of interest to science fiction scholars and others devoted to the genre. In some cases, chapters offer thorough surveys of numerous works involving certain subjects, such as imagined vehicles, journeys beneath the Earth and undersea adventures, discovering intriguing patterns in the ways that various writers developed their ideas. When comprehensive coverage of ubiquitous topics such as robots, aliens and the planet Mars is impossible, chapters focus on major themes referencing selected texts. A conclusion discusses other science fiction subjects that were omitted for various reasons, and a bibliography lists additional resources for the study of science fiction in general and the topics of each chapter.

Hardware, Settings, Characters

The Stuff of Science Fiction

This book gathers together many of the illuminating essays on science fiction and fantasy film penned by a major critic in the SF field. The pieces are roughly organized in the chronological order of when the movies and television programs being discussed first appeared, with essays providing more general overviews clustered near the beginning and end of the volume, to provide the overall aura of a historical survey. Although this book does not pretend to provide a comprehensive history of science fiction and fantasy films, it does intermingle analyses of films and TV programs with some discussions of related plays, novels, stories, and comic books, particularly in the essays on This Island Earth and 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequels. Inciteful, entertaining, and full of intelligent and witty observations about science fiction and its sometimes curious relationship with the visual media, these essays will both delight and entertain critics, fans, and viewers alike.

Explorations of Science Fiction and Fantasy Films

A Sense-of-Wonderful Century

George Edgar Slusser

David Leiby

With our lives firmly controlled by the steady pace of time, humans have yearned for ways to escape its constraints, and authors have responded with narratives about traveling far into the past or future, reversing the flow of time, or creating alternate universes. This book considers how imaginative works involving time travel reflect ongoing scientific concerns and examine the human condition. The scope of the volume is unusually wide, covering such topics as Dante, the major novels of the 19th century, and stories and films of the 1990s. The book concludes with a lengthy bibliography of short stories and novels, films and television programs, and nonfiction works that feature time travel or speculations about time.

Explorations of Time in Science Fiction and Fantasy

Worlds Enough and Time

Eric S. Rabkin

These nineteen original essays seek to recontextualize the subject of immortality, examining its influence as an ancient human aspiration while at the same time considering new scientific advances and their impact on life and literature. Grouped in three broad categories, the essays provide key information about and concepts of immortality, examine science fiction stories and scientific research to consider the prospects and possible effects of achieving immortality, and discuss immortality and life extension as literary themes. The topics the essays focus on, as well as the perspectives of the contributors, range widely: genetics, cryonics, Marxism, Darwinism, cyberspace, feminist writing, religion, Italian science fiction, film, children's literature, video games, and comic books.

Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy

Immortal Engines

George Slusser

Essays in this volume demonstrate how science fiction can serve as a bridge between the sciences and the humanities. The essays show how early writers like Dante and Mary Shelley revealed a gradual shift toward a genuine understanding of science; how H.G. Wells first showed the possibilities of combining scientific and humanistic perspectives; how writers influenced by Gernsback's ideas, like Isaac Asimov, illustrated the ways that literature could interact with science and assist in its progress; and how more recent writers offer critiques of science and its practitioners.

Essays on Bridging the Gap Between the Sciences and the Humanities

Science Fiction and the Two Cultures

The first comprehensive critical study of hard science fiction, this book reveals how the term "hard science fiction" originated, and closely examines three representative works.

A Study of Hard Science Fiction

Cosmic Engineers

Howard V. Hendrix

Joseph D. Miller

Gregory Benford,

﻿ The J. Lloyd Eaton Conferences on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature—long held at the University of California, Riverside—have been a major influence in the study of science fiction and fantasy for thirty years. The conferences have attracted leading scholars whose papers are published in Eaton volumes found in university libraries throughout the world. This collection brings together 22 of the best papers—most with new afterwords by the authors—presented in chronological order to show how science fiction and fantasy criticism has evolved since 1979.

Outstanding Essays from the J. Lloyd Eaton Conferences

Bridges to Science Fiction and Fantasy

Science fiction occupies a peculiar place in the academic study of literature. For decades, scholars have looked at science fiction with disdain and have criticized it for being inferior to other types of literature. But despite the sentiments of these traditionalists, many works of science fiction engage recognized canonical texts, such as the Odyssey, and many traditionally canonical works contain elements of science fiction. More recently, the canon has been subject to revision, as scholars have deliberately sought to include works that reflect diversity and have participated in the serious study of popular culture. But these attempts to create a more inclusive canon have nonetheless continued to marginalize science fiction. This book examines the treatment of science fiction within the academy. The expert contributors to this volume explore a wide range of topics related to the place of science fiction in literary studies. These include academic attitudes toward science fiction, the role of journals and cultural gatekeepers in canon formation, and the marginalization of specific works and authors by literary critics. In addition, the volume gives special attention to multicultural and feminist concerns. In discussing these topics, the book sheds considerable light on much broader issues related to the politics of literary studies and academic inquiry.

Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy

﻿ By examining important aspects of science fiction in the twentieth century, this book explains how the genre evolved to its current state. Close critical attention is given to topics including the art that has accompanied science fiction, the subgenres of space opera and hard science fiction, the rise of SF anthologies, and the burgeoning impact of the marketplace on authors. Included are in-depth studies of key texts that contributed to science fiction's growth, including Philip Francis Nowlan's first Buck Rogers story, the first published stories of A. E. van Vogt, and the early juveniles of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein.

The Rise and Fall of American Science Fiction, from the 1920s to the 1960s

Gluttony and starvation, pleasure and pain, growth and decay. These and other extremes of our condition related to food, though all but banned from the "civilized" tables of mainstream fiction, are ideal topics for the "undomesticated," free-roaming modes of fantasy. As acts and ideas, food and eating are fundamental to all that makes us human and dominate our symbolic realms of art, literature, and cuisine. These essays show us the power of speculative modes of fiction to help us look anew at prehistorical and psychomythical attitudes toward food and eating; historical Western-cultural attitudes toward the material fact of food and the necessity of eating; and the relationship between attitudes toward food and how, how much, when, and where we eat. The contributors come from a variety of backgrounds, including anthropology, film, and French, Russian, English, and medieval literature. Ranging in their focus from shamans to cannibals, utopias to social Darwinism, muscle magazines to supermarket tabloids, the contributors discuss the theory and practice of science fictional eating; the dialectic, at the level of eating, between individual needs and collective norms; and the ways that eating habits and the availability and choice of food serve to contextualize and demarcate modern fictional genres. In addition to discussing such writers as C. S. Lewis, Stephen King, Octavia Butler, Jonathan Swift, and Anne Rice, the contributors also consider such films as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast.

Eating and the Eaten in Fantasy and Science Fiction

Foods of the Gods

Child characters are surprisingly common in horror, fantasy, and science fiction literature and films. Children represent innocence and virtue and symbolize the classic question of fantastic literature: What is the future of the human race, and how will science and society improve or impair that future? This collection of essays explores the roles of children in the literature and film of the fantastic. The works vary in critical approach from textual analyses to psychological, historical, and gender- and ethnicity-based interpretations and draw their subject matter from contemporary and classic literary and film pieces. "The Triumph of Teen Prop: Terminator II and the End of History" is a playful discussion of teen propaganda movies and social issues. "E.T. as Fairy Tale" examines how Stephen Spielberg's combination of science fiction, fantasy, and fairy tale elements blends logic and childhood magic. Howard M. Lenhoff connects mythical creatures with biology in "A Real-World Source for the 'Little People': A Comparison of Fairies to Individuals with Williams Syndrome." The literary selection ranges from Alida Allison's study of childhood in Isaac Bashevis Singer's writings to Bud Foote's interpretation of childhood roles in the characters of selected Stephen King works. Other essays consider Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, Anne Rice's The Witching Hour, and the childhood classic Peter Pan.

Children in the Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror

Nursery Realms

In his "true history of science fiction," Westfahl (U. of California- Riverside), columnist for Interzone magazine and author of several books on this genre, makes a case for Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 (1925) as being the science fiction novel that launched the genre. The author also evaluates the importance of John W. Campbell's theories, and critiques Heinlein's Beyond the Horizon. Name index only. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction

The Mechanics of Wonder

Literature often is central to individual maturation. It typically reflects, in one way or another, the experiences of the reader and the larger strains of society. This book examines representative works of science fiction, children's literature, and popular culture as mirrors of what it means to grow up in the contemporary world. That world is permeated by technology, and technology thus figures prominently in the process of growing up and in these literary works. Included are chapters on Superman, the Hardy Boys, Star Trek, music videos, and other topics.

Coming of Age in Fantasyland

Science Fiction, Children's Literature, and Popular Culture

Ideal for high school and college students studying history through the everyday lives of men and women, this book offers intriguing information about the jobs that people have held, from ancient times to the 21st century. • Provides detailed, interesting essays describing more than 300 professions and occupations across a broad range of eras, including the 21st century, and from around the world, which will give readers a wider understanding of how people have supported themselves throughout time • Supplies historical primary documents that provide personal perspectives on past occupations • Offers fascinating information on how professions began, who did them, and continuity in occupations across time, such as that 18th-century journalists were often imprisoned for displeasing those in authority, and yet 21st-century U.S. journalists may still spend time in jail for refusing to reveal their sources

300 Trades and Professions through History

A Day in a Working Life: 300 Trades and Professions through History [3 volumes]

Kathleen Church Plummer

The fields of science fiction and fantasy art need to be examined thoroughly and systematically. This book provides such an examination. The volume offers both surveys of the entire history of these traditions and focused examinations of particular genres and artists. In contrast to existing studies of science fiction and fantasy art, this book argues that science fiction and fantasy art needs to be explored within different contexts, such as literary history, art history, and cultural history, and by following different vectors, such as art displaying recurring iconic images and art related to particular subgenres. The volume's contributors include several internationally recognized and award-winning science fiction writers and scholars.

Gary Westfahl

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