Results by title
111 books match the query 'Science Fiction' and 4 start with f
Fantastic Stories
Abram Tertz
Northwestern University Press, 1986
Abram Tertz is the pseudonym of Andrei Sinyavsky, the exile Soviet dissident writer whose works have been compared to fabulists like Kafka and Borges. Tertz's settings are exotic but familiar and as compelling as those of lunatics and mystics. This edition contains the nightmarish "Pkhentz," a story missing from the first English edition.
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Feminist Fabulation
Space/Postmodern FictionMarleen S. Barr
University of Iowa Press, 1992
The surprising and controversial thesis of Feminist Fabulation is unflinching: the postmodern canon has systematically excluded a wide range of important women's writing by dismissing it as genre fiction. Marleen Barr issues an urgent call for a corrective, for the recognition of a new meta- or supergenre of contemporary writing--feminist fabulation--which includes both acclaimed mainstream works and works which today's critics consistently ignore.
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Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
The 1818 TextMary Wollstonecraft Shelley
University of Chicago Press, 1982
The definitive edition of the original version of Mary Shelley's enduring classic
When Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, she created a legend that, like the monster of her story, grew far beyond anything she could ever have dreamed of, or that anyone could ever control. With one book, she founded the field of science fiction, pushed the gothic into new territory, and gave us an unforgettable character capable of being monster, man, and metaphor, a symbol simultaneously of the potential and perils of science--even of humanity itself.
The novel was originally published in three volumes in March 1818. In 1831, a different publisher issued a single-volume edition that had been heavily rewritten by an older Mary Shelley. That edition served as the standard Frankenstein for well over a century. In recent decades, however, growing awareness of the role of Shelley's husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in the revision process, and corresponding interest in giving readers access to the original text from Mary Shelley's hand, has led to increasing attention to the original 1818 edition.
This edition reproduces the text of the 1818 edition with the addition, clearly indicated within the book, of minor changes that Mary Shelley made by hand in 1823. It also preserves the original three-volume structure within this single book, helping readers better understand the symmetries within the story as Shelley constructed it. Explanatory notes, meanwhile, explain references and provide historical and cultural context.
The result is a new look at a lasting classic, one that has as much to say to readers today as it did when first published more than two centuries ago.
When Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, she created a legend that, like the monster of her story, grew far beyond anything she could ever have dreamed of, or that anyone could ever control. With one book, she founded the field of science fiction, pushed the gothic into new territory, and gave us an unforgettable character capable of being monster, man, and metaphor, a symbol simultaneously of the potential and perils of science--even of humanity itself.
The novel was originally published in three volumes in March 1818. In 1831, a different publisher issued a single-volume edition that had been heavily rewritten by an older Mary Shelley. That edition served as the standard Frankenstein for well over a century. In recent decades, however, growing awareness of the role of Shelley's husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in the revision process, and corresponding interest in giving readers access to the original text from Mary Shelley's hand, has led to increasing attention to the original 1818 edition.
This edition reproduces the text of the 1818 edition with the addition, clearly indicated within the book, of minor changes that Mary Shelley made by hand in 1823. It also preserves the original three-volume structure within this single book, helping readers better understand the symmetries within the story as Shelley constructed it. Explanatory notes, meanwhile, explain references and provide historical and cultural context.
The result is a new look at a lasting classic, one that has as much to say to readers today as it did when first published more than two centuries ago.
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From Utopia to Apocalypse
Science Fiction and the Politics of CatastrophePeter Y. Paik
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
"I read Peter Y. Paik’s lucid, graceful, ruthless book in one single astonished sitting. I scarred it all over with arrows and exclamation points, so I can read it again as soon as possible." —Bruce Sterling
Revolutionary narratives in recent science fiction graphic novels and films compel audiences to reflect on the politics and societal ills of the day. Through character and story, science fiction brings theory to life, giving shape to the motivations behind the action as well as to the consequences they produce.
In From Utopia to Apocalypse, Peter Y. Paik shows how science fiction generates intriguing and profound insights into politics. He reveals that the fantasy of putting annihilating omnipotence to beneficial effect underlies the revolutionary projects that have defined the collective upheavals of the modern age. Paik traces how this political theology is expressed, and indeed literalized, in popular superhero fiction, examining works including Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel Watchmen, the science fiction cinema of Jang Joon-Hwan, the manga of Hayao Miyazaki, Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, and the Matrix trilogy. Superhero fantasies are usually seen as compensations for individual feelings of weakness, victimization, and vulnerability. But Paik presents these fantasies as social constructions concerned with questions of political will and the disintegration of democracy rather than with the psychology of the personal.
What is urgently at stake, Paik argues, is a critique of the limitations and deadlocks of the political imagination. The utopias dreamed of by totalitarianism, which must be imposed through torture, oppression, and mass imprisonment, nevertheless persist in liberal political systems. With this reality looming throughout, Paik demonstrates the uneasy juxtaposition of saintliness and cynically manipulative realpolitik, of torture and the assertion of human dignity, of cruelty and benevolence.
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