Nordic Speculative Fiction

Nordic Speculative Fiction

Author: Jyrki Korpua

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-12-20

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1040255469

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This volume brings together scholarly theories and practices on speculative fiction from the Nordic countries, including Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, that are all rooted in similar values, culture, and history yet are independent and unique societies. The book exhibits both the convergences and the diversity of the Nordics in fiction and fandom as well as in research. It traces the roots of Nordic speculative fiction, how it has developed over time, and how the changes in Nordic environments and societies caused by overhanging shared global issues – such as climate change, mass migration, and technological acceleration – find space in speculative practices. The first of its kind, this book allows for deeper insights into the unique characteristics that make Nordic literature and art recognisable and allows for a better understanding of the place of the Nordics within wider global culture systems. The chapters range from literary critiques, film and television studies, creative works by three Nordic creative writers, transcultural text comparisons, and contributions on speculative art to theoretical and methodological discussions on fandom, worldbuilding, and semantics. Part of the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series, this book contributes to connecting Nordic speculative fiction scholarship to the wider global community within the field. It will be of interest to scholars and general enthusiasts of speculative fiction and those with interest in Nordic fiction; film and television studies; literary, culture, or media studies; comparative literature; and cultural history or art-based research.


Nordic Visions: The Best of Nordic Speculative Fiction

Nordic Visions: The Best of Nordic Speculative Fiction

Author: John Ajvide Lindqvist

Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

Published: 2023-10-10

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1837860289

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A Unique Speculative Fiction Collection From The Nordic Countries Storytelling has been a major force in the Nordic countries for thousands of years, renowned for its particular sense of dark humour, featuring pacts with nature and a view of the world you seldom find in other places. Perhaps it is the freezing cold winter? The closeness to the Atlantic Ocean and the Arctic? Maybe it’s the huge ancient forests... Most have heard about Nordic crime fiction with its dark noir flare or the Icelandic Sagas. This anthology combines all that is unique about Nordic speculative fiction, from the darkest dystopian science fiction to terrifying horror. From the rational to the eccentric, these stories combine a deep sense of place with social criticism, themes of loneliness and the concern for humanity's impact on the wilderness. Featuring 16 stories from the best contemporary speculative authors from Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and The Faroe Islands, including John Ajvide Lindqvist, Hannu Rajaniemi, Tor Åge Bringsværd and more, many of which are appearing in English for the very first time.


History and Speculative Fiction

History and Speculative Fiction

Author: John L. Hennessey

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-12-14

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 303142235X

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This open access book demonstrates that despite different epistemological starting points, history and speculative fiction perform similar work in “making the strange familiar” and “making the familiar strange” by taking their readers on journeys through space and time. Excellent history, like excellent speculative fiction, should cause readers to reconsider crucial aspects of their society that they normally overlook or lead them to reflect on radically different forms of social organization. Drawing on Gunlög Fur’s postcolonial concept of concurrences, and with contributions that explore diverse examples of speculative fiction and historical encounters using a variety of disciplinary approaches, this volume provides new perspectives on colonialism, ecological destruction, the nature of humanity, and how to envision a better future.


The Imagined Arctic in Speculative Fiction

The Imagined Arctic in Speculative Fiction

Author: Maria Lindgren Leavenworth

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-31

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1000915395

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The Imagined Arctic in Speculative Fiction explores the ways in which the Arctic is imagined and what function it is made to serve in a selection of speculative fictions: non-mimetic works that start from the implied question "What if?" Spanning slightly more than two centuries of speculative fiction, from the starting point in Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein to contemporary works that engage with the vast ramifications of anthropogenic climate change, analyses demonstrate how Arctic discourses are supported or subverted and how new Arctics are added to the textual tradition. To illuminate wider lines of inquiry informing the way the world is envisioned, humanity’s place and function in it, and more-than-human entanglements, analyses focus on the function of the actual Arctic and how this function impacts and is impacted by speculative elements. With effects of climate change training the global eye on the Arctic, and as debates around future northern cultural, economic and environmental sustainability intensify, there is a need for a deepened understanding of the discourses that have constructed and are constructing the Arctic. A careful mapping and serious consideration of both past and contemporary speculative visions thus illuminate the role the Arctic has played and may come to play in a diverse set of practices and fields.


Nordic Speculative Fiction

Nordic Speculative Fiction

Author: Aino-Kaisa Koistinen

Publisher: Routledge Chapman & Hall

Published: 2024-12-20

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781032602363

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This volume brings together scholarly theories and practices on speculative fiction from the Nordic countries, including Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, that are all rooted in similar values, culture, and history, yet are independent and unique societies. The book exhibits both the convergences and the diversity of the Nordics in fiction and fandom, as well as in research. It traces the roots of Nordic speculative fiction, how it has developed over time and how the changes in Nordic environments and societies caused by overhanging shared global issues - such as climate change, mass migration, and technological acceleration - find space in speculative practices. The first of its kind, this book allows for deeper insight into the unique characteristics that make Nordic literature and art recognisable and allows for a better understanding of the place of the Nordics within wider global culture systems. The chapters range from literary critiques, film and television studies, creative works by three Nordic poets, transcultural text comparisons and contributions on speculative art, to theoretical and methodological discussions on fandom, worldbuilding and semantics. Part of the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series, this anthology contributes to connecting Nordic speculative fiction scholarship to the wider global community within the field. It will be of interest to scholars and general enthusiasts of speculative fiction and those with interest in Nordic fiction; film and television studies; literary, culture or media studies; comparative literature; and cultural history or art-based research.


Transnational Crime Fiction

Transnational Crime Fiction

Author: Maarit Piipponen

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-27

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 3030534138

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Focusing on contemporary crime narratives from different parts of the world, this collection of essays explores the mobility of crimes, criminals and investigators across social, cultural and national borders. The essays argue that such border crossings reflect on recent sociocultural transformations and geopolitical anxieties to create an image of networked and interconnected societies where crime is not easily contained. The book further analyses crime texts’ wider sociocultural and affective significance by examining the global mobility of the genre itself across cultures, languages and media. Underlining the global reach and mobility of the crime genre, the collection analyses types and representations of mobility in literary and visual crime narratives, inviting comparisons between texts, crimes and mobilities in a geographically diverse context. The collection ultimately understands mobility as an object of study and a critical lens through which transformations in our globalised world can be examined.


Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction

Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction

Author: Eugen Bacon

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024-11-14

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13:

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In this vibrant and approachable book, award-winning writers of black speculative fiction bring together excerpts from their work and creative reflections on futurisms with original essays. Features an introduction by Suyi Okungbowa. Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction showcases creative-critical essays that negotiate genre bending and black speculative fiction with writerly practice. As Afrodecendant peoples with lived experience from the continent, award-winning authors use their intrinsic voices in critical conversations on Afrofuturism and Afro-centered futurisms. By engaging with difference, they present a new kind of African study that is an evaluative gaze at African history, African spirituality, Afrosurrealism, "becoming," black radical imagination, cultural identity, decolonizing queerness, myths, linguistic cosmologies, and more. Contributing authors – Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga, Cheryl S. Ntumy, Dilman Dila, Eugen Bacon, Nerine Dorman, Nuzo Onoh, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Stephen Embleton, Suyi Okungbowa, Tobi Ogundiran and Xan van Rooyen – offer boldly hybrid chapters (both creative and scholarly) that interface Afrocentric artefacts and exegesis. Through ethnographic reflections and intense scrutinies of African fiction, these writers contribute open and diverse reflections of Afro-centered futurisms. The authors in Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction feature in major genre and literary awards, including the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Locus, Ignyte, Nommo, Philip K. Dick, Shirley Jackson and Otherwise Awards, among others. They are also intrinsic partners in a vital conversation on the rise of black speculative fiction that explores diversity and social (in)justice, charting poignant stories with black hero/ines who remake their worlds in color zones of their own image.


Nordic Exposures

Nordic Exposures

Author: Arne Lunde

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2011-07-01

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0295800844

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Nordic Exposures explores how Scandinavian whiteness and ethnicity functioned in classical Hollywood cinema between and during the two world wars. Scandinavian identities could seem mutable and constructed at moments, while at other times they were deployed as representatives of an essential, biological, and natural category. As Northern European Protestants, Scandinavian immigrants and emigres assimilated into the mainstream rights and benefits of white American identity with comparatively few barriers or obstacles. Yet Arne Lunde demonstrates that far from simply manifesting a normative unmarked whiteness, Scandinavianness in mass-immigration America and in Hollywood cinema of the twentieth century could be hyperwhite, provisionally off-white, or not even white at all. Lunde investigates key silent films, such as Technicolor's The Viking (1928), Victor Sjostrom's He Who Gets Slapped (1924), and Mauritz Stiller's Hotel Imperial (1927). The crises of Scandinavian foreign voice and the talkie revolution are explored in Greta Garbo's first sound film, Anna Christie (1930). The author also examines Warner Oland's long career of Asian racial masquerade (most famously as Chinese detective Charlie Chan), as well as Hollywood's and Third Reich Cinema's war over assimilating the Nordic female star in the personae of Garbo, Sonja Henie, Ingrid Bergman, Kristina Soderbaum, and Zarah Leander.


Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction

Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction

Author: Meghan Gilbert-Hickey

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2021-04-22

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 149683383X

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Winner of the Children’s Literature Association’s 2023 Edited Book Award Contributions by Malin Alkestrand, Joshua Yu Burnett, Sean P. Connors, Jill Coste, Meghan Gilbert-Hickey, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Sierra Hale, Kathryn Strong Hansen, Elizabeth Ho, Esther L. Jones, Sarah Olutola, Alex Polish, Zara Rix, Susan Tan, and Roberta Seelinger Trites Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction offers a sustained analysis of race and representation in young adult speculative fiction (YASF). The collection considers how characters of color are represented in YASF, how they contribute to and participate in speculative worlds, how race affects or influences the structures of speculative worlds, and how race and racial ideologies are implicated in YASF. This collection also examines how race and racism are discussed in YASF or if, indeed, race and racism are discussed at all. Essays explore such notable and popular works as the Divergent series, The Red Queen, The Lunar Chronicles, and the Infernal Devices trilogy. They consider the effects of colorblind ideology and postracialism on YASF, a genre that is often seen as progressive in its representation of adolescent protagonists. Simply put, colorblindness silences those who believe—and whose experiences demonstrate—that race and racism do continue to matter. In examining how some YASF texts normalize many of our social structures and hierarchies, this collection examines how race and racism are represented in the genre and considers how hierarchies of race are reinscribed in some texts and transgressed in others. Contributors point toward the potential of YASF to address and interrogate racial inequities in the contemporary West and beyond. They critique texts that fall short of this possibility, and they articulate ways in which readers and critics alike might nonetheless locate diversity within narratives. This is a collection troubled by the lingering emphasis on colorblindness in YASF, but it is also the work of scholars who love the genre and celebrate its progress toward inclusivity, and who further see in it an enduring future for intersectional identity.


Sinophagia: A Celebration of Chinese Horror

Sinophagia: A Celebration of Chinese Horror

Author: Xueting Christine Ni

Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

Published: 2024-09-24

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 1837861188

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An anthology of unsettling tales from contemporary China, translated into English for the very first time. Fourteen dazzling horror stories delve deep into the psyche of modern China in this new anthology curated by acclaimed writer and essayist Xueting C. Ni, editor and translator of the British Fantasy Award-winning Sinopticon. From the menacing vision of a red umbrella, to the ominous atmosphere of the Laughing Mountain; from the waking dream of virtual working to the sinister games of the locked room… this is a fascinating insight into the spine-chilling voices working within China today – a long way from the traditional expectations of hopping vampires and hanging ghosts. This ground-breaking collection features both well-known names and bold upcoming writers, including: Hong Niangzi, Fan Zhou, Chu Xidao, She Cong Ge, Chuan Ge, Goodnight, Xiaoqing, Zhou Dedong, Nanpai Sanshu, Yimei Tangguo, Chi Hui, Zhou Haohui, Su Min, Cai Jun, and Gu Shi.