Today, concerns over homeland security have led thousands of Americans to volunteer for various citizen emergency response groups, such as the Civil Air Patrol, U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary, Community Emergency Response Teams, fire units, etc. In Citizens Defending America, Martin Greenberg focuses new attention on the subject of citizen volunteerism by chronicling the nature and purpose of volunteer police units—authorized organizations of a public or private nature that work at deterring crime and/or preventing terrorism for little or no monetary compensation—in America since 1620. A number of these historical groups responsible for maintaining the civil order of the day—slave patrols, frontier posses, vice suppression societies, the American Protective League, for example—now seem controversial when viewed through a contemporary lens. Greenberg uses the history of such groups to reflect upon the nation’s past and to consider the possibilities for a safe and secure future. He also emphasizes the role of young people in the fields of security and safety, and stresses the need for more qualified, trained volunteers to help cope with man-made and natural disasters.
The essays selected by the editors to explore these apocalyptic visions are: “The Remaking of Zero: Beginning at the End,” by Gary K. Wolfe; “The Lone Survivor,” by Robert Plank; “Ambiguous Apocalypse: Transcendental Versions of the End,” by Robert Galbreath; “World’s End: The Imagination of Catastrophe,” by W. Warren Wagar; “Man-Made Catastrophes,” by Brian Stableford; and “The Rebellion of Nature,” by W. Warren Wagar.
Wolfe sees in these postholocaust narratives a central attraction—“the mythic power inherent in the very conception of a remade world.” This power derives from three sources: the emergence of a new order from the ashes of the old system, and thus a kind of denial of death; the reinforcement of one set of values as opposed to another; and as something always replaces whatever was destroyed, a promise that nothing can annihilate humanity.
Writers have created fictions of social perfection at least since Plato’s Republic. Sir Thomas More gave this thread of intellectual history a name when he called his contribution to it Utopia, Greek for noplace.
With each subsequent author cognizant of his predecessors and subject to altered real-world conditions which suggest ever-new causes for hope and alarm, “no place” changed. The fourteen essays presented in this book critically assess man’s fascination with and seeking for “no place.”
“In discussing these central fictions, the contributors see ‘no place’ from diverse perspectives: the sociological, the psychological, the political, the aesthetic. In revealing the roots of these works, the contributors cast back along the whole length of utopian thought. Each essay stands alone; together, the essays make clear what ‘no place’ means today. While it may be true that ‘no place’ has always seemed elsewhere or elsewhen, in fact all utopian fiction whirls contemporary actors through a costume dance no place else but here.”—from the Preface
The contributors are Eric S. Rabkin, B. G. Knepper, Thomas J.Remington, Gorman Beauchamp, William Matter, Ken Davis, Kenneth M. Roemer, William Steinhoff, Howard Segal, Jack Zipes, Kathleen Woodward, Merritt Abrash, and James W. Bittner.
Other stories in this anthology are “Old Man Henderson,” “The Hunter,” “Underground Movement,” “The Forest of Zil,” and “From the Government Printing Office.”
In most of the stories Neville writes of loneliness, isolation, alienation, intolerance of anything or anyone different, and of insanity created by the pressures of living. Along with madness of various kinds, his stories explore the essence of human nature and individuals interacting with one another as well as with society. As Malzberg notes, Neville, unlike many science fiction writers, was a serious author interested in “Big ideas.”
This collection of the best short stories of Mark Clifton makes these fine tales readily available for the first time in two decades.
Winner with Frank Riley of the 1955 Hugo Award for They’d Rather Be Right,Clifton has for a variety of reasons unrelated to the quality of his writing all but disappeared from the awareness of today’s science fiction audience. Never a prolific writer he had published only about twenty-five short stories before his death in 1963.But with those stories and his three novels he irrevocably altered the course of contemporary science fiction.
Almost single-handedly he introduced the full range of psychological insights to the commonly occurring themes of the genre—alien invasion, expanding technology, revolution against political theocracy, and space exploration and colonization—to ever more truthfully portray how humanity would react to a future that could be either mindless or intellectually stunning.
With his first published story, “What Have I Done?” Clifton initiated the theme of a starkly realistic world in which, at its best, humanity is inalterably vile—a theme that became an inextricable part of all his subsequent works. In his later works Clifton occasionally clothed his bitter indictment in the garb of comedy.
The stories collected here include “What Have I Done?” “Star, Bright,” “Crazy Joey,” “What Thin Partitions,” “Sense from Thought Divide,” “How Allied,” “Remembrance and Reflection,” “Hide! Hide! Witch!” “Clerical Error,” “What Now, Little Man?” and “Hang Head, Vandal!”
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