Time travel and brothels; unusual visitors from different eras, dimensions, and realities; human zoos maintained by curious aliens who like to watch; private eyes who are zombies; leafy-green literary collaborators; moral steampunk issues; a dreamer at the edge of the solar system; an astronaut who's gone insane; and the conspiracies of chrono-assassins--just a few of the fantastic themes in these 16 stories from Michael Hemmingson's first collection of speculative fiction: page-turners, every one of them!
This study considers the recent surge of science fiction narratives from the postcolonial Third World as a utopian response to the spatial, political, and representational dilemmas that attend globalization.
This book looks at Margaret Atwood’s use of food motifs in speculative fiction. Focusing on six novels – The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, the Maddaddam trilogy, and The Heart Goes Last – Katarina Labudova explores the environmental, ecological, and cultural questions at play and the possible future scenarios which emerge for humanity’s survival in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic conditions. Labudova argues that food has special relevance in these novels and that characters’ hunger, limited food choices, culinary creativity and eating rituals are central to Atwood’s depictions of hostile environments. She also links food to hierarchy, dominance and oppression in Atwood’s novels, and foregrounds the problem of hunger, both psychological or physical, caused by pollution and loss of contact with the natural and authentic. The book shows how Atwood’s writing draws from a range of genres, including apocalyptic fiction, science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopia, utopia, fairy tale, myth, and thriller – and how food is an important, highly versatile motif linking these intertextual threads.
Drawing on a variety of theoretical approaches including trauma theory, psychoanalysis, genre theory, narrative theory, theories of temporality, cultural theory, and ethics, this book breaks new ground in bringing together trauma and romance, two categories whose collaboration has never been addressed in such a systematic and in-depth way. The volume shows how romance strategies have become an essential component of trauma fiction in general and traumatic realism in particular. It brings to the fore the deconstructive powers of the darker type of romance and its adequacy to perform traumatic acting out and fragmentation. It also zooms in on the variations on the ghost story as medium for the evocation of trans-generational trauma, as well as on the therapeutic drive of romance that favors a narrative presentation of the working-through phase of trauma. Chapters explore various acceptations and extensions of psychic trauma, from the individual to the cultural, analyzing narrative texts that belong in various genres from the ghost story to the misery memoir to the graphic novel. The selection of primary sources allows for a review of leading contemporary British authors such as Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson, and of those less canonical such as Jackie Kay, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Justine Picardie, Peter Roche and Adam Thorpe.
"The Eighth Science Fiction Megapack" presents another stellar lineup of classic science fiction, new and old. Here are 25 stories (plus a bonus interview with best-selling author George R.R. Martin) by some of the field's greatest authors. Included are: THE TRUE DARKNESS, by Pamela Sargent PERMANENT FATAL ERRORS, by Jay Lake ADJUSTMENT TEAM, by Philip K. Dick ROBOTS DON’T CRY, by Mike Resnick NO GREAT MAGIC, by Fritz Leiber ESCAPE HATCH, by Brenda W. Clough BACKLASH, by Winston K. Marks THE PICK-UP, by Lawrence Watt-Evans POPULATION IMPLOSION, by Andrew J. Offutt WAY DOWN EAST, by Tim Sullivan THROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT: 28, by Grendel Briarton TO INVADE NEW YORK, by Irwin Lewis THEY WERE THE WIND, by C.J. Henderson STOPOVER, by William Gerken CONSEQUENCES OF STEAM, by Michael Hemmingson OUTSIDE LOOKING IN, by Mark E. Burgess DEAD WORLD, by Jack Douglas NEFERTITI'S TENTH LIFE, by Mary A. Turzillo QUICKSILVER, by Lonni Lees AFTER ALL, by Robert Reginald THE BARBARIANS, by Algis Budrys EX MACHINA, by Cynthia Ward MONKEY ON HIS BACK, by Charles V. De Vet THE SURVIVORS, by Tom Godwin THROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT: 99, by Grendel Briarton SPEAKING WITH GEORGE R.R. MARTIN: Interview conducted by Darrell Schweitzer And don't forget to search this ebook store for "Wildside Megapack" to see more entries in this series, covering classic authors and subjects like mysteries, science fiction, westerns, ghost stories -- and much, much more!
This book considers the key critical interventions on short story writing in South Africa written in English since the year 2000. The short story genre, whilst often marginalised in national literary canons, has been central to the trajectory of literary history in South Africa. In recent years, the short story has undergone a significant renaissance, with new collections and young writers making a significant impact on the contemporary literary scene, and subgenres such as speculative fiction, erotic fiction, flash fiction and queer fiction expanding rapidly in popularity. This book examines the role of the short story genre in reflecting or championing new developments in South African writing and the ways in which traditional boundaries and definitions of the short story in South Africa have been reimagined in the present. Drawing together a range of critical interventions, including scholarly articles, interviews and personal reflective pieces, the volume traces some of the aesthetic and thematic continuities and discontinuities in the genre and sheds new light on questions of literary form. Finally, the book considers the place of the short story in twenty-first century writing and interrogates the ways in which the short story form may contribute to, or recast ideas of, the post-apartheid or post-transitional. The perfect guide to contemporary short story writing in South Africa, this book will be essential reading for researchers of African literature.
The end of the twentieth century and the turn of the new millennium witnessed an unprecedented flood of traumatic narratives and testimonies of suffering in literature and the arts. Graphic novels, free at last from long decades of stern censorship, helped explore these topics by developing a new subgenre: the trauma graphic novel. This book seeks to analyze this trend through the consideration of five influential graphic novels in English. Works by Paul Hornschemeier, Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons will be considered as illustrative examples of the representation of individual, collective, and political traumas. This book provides a link between the contemporary criticism of Trauma Studies and the increasingly important world of comic books and graphic novels.
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.
This volume examines a wide variety of the ways in which the fantastic has impacted upon contemporary women's fiction. Some of the issues addressed include: the importance of the cyborg and the spectre to critical and fictional discourses of gender; the interface between the grotesque and contemporary readings of feminist utopianism; the growing similarity between late twentieth-century gothicism and the magical real. The study is based upon the work of fifteen writers and includes novels by Allende, Atwood, Carter, Head, Morrison, Weldon, Winterson and Wittig.
The trope of humans being ‘replaced’ by ‘AI’ is one of the most familiar examples of the rhetoric of replaceability. Not only have questions about what is unique and what is replaceable gained momentum in digital culture, but notions of ‘fungibility’ have emerged in many other contexts as well such as ecology, management theory, and, more sinisterly, in racist and conspiracist thinking. This volume argues that there is a ‘replaceability paradigm’ at work throughout the culture of modernity, from the European Renaissance, through Freudian psychoanalysis, Chinese science fiction and postcolonial theory, all the way to neural network programs such as Google’s DeepDream. This collection will be of interest to anybody engaged with the conceptual architecture of contemporary culture, whether through film, literature, or new digital media.
