Download or read book Future Perfect written by Howard Bruce Franklin and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critics, science fiction writers, scientists, and scholars throughout the world hailed the original publication of Future Perfect in 1966 as a book that would transform our evaluation of science fiction and our understanding of American culture. The praise has proved well founded, for Future Perfect has been more responsible than any other single work for the recognition of the value and significance of science fiction.
Download or read book Novel Science written by Adelene Buckland and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Novel Science is the first in-depth study of the shocking, groundbreaking, and sometimes beautiful writings of the gentlemen of the “heroic age” of geology and of the contribution these men made to the literary culture of their day. For these men, literature was an essential part of the practice of science itself, as important to their efforts as mapmaking, fieldwork, and observation. The reading and writing of imaginative literatures helped them to discover, imagine, debate, and give shape and meaning to millions of years of previously undiscovered earth history. Borrowing from the historical fictions of Walter Scott and the poetry of Lord Byron, they invented geology as a science, discovered many of the creatures we now call the dinosaurs, and were the first to unravel and map the sequence and structure of stratified rock. As Adelene Buckland shows, they did this by rejecting the grand narratives of older theories of the earth or of biblical cosmogony: theirs would be a humble science, faithfully recording minute details and leaving the big picture for future generations to paint. Buckland also reveals how these scientists—just as they had drawn inspiration from their literary predecessors—gave Victorian realist novelists such as George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, and Charles Dickens a powerful language with which to create dark and disturbing ruptures in the too-seductive sweep of story.
Download or read book Mesmerists Monsters and Machines written by Martin Willis and published by Kent State University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using key canonical science fiction narratives, 'Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines' examines the intersection of the literary and scientific cultures of the 19th century.
Download or read book Nineteenth Century Science Fiction written by David Seed and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a selection from the American and British fiction of the nineteenth century which was evolving into what we now know as science fiction. Taking Frankenstein as its formative work, it assembles stories and excerpts from narratives exploring the complex impact of new technologies like the telegraph and later the cinema, or new scientific practices like mesmerism (hypnotism) and microscopy. The selected authors range from those famous within the realist tradition like George Eliot and Mark Twain to scientists like the physician Silas Weir Mitchell and the inventor Thomas Edison. They repeatedly destabilize their narratives so that some come to resemble scientific records and frequently leave their endings unresolved, encouraging the reader to speculate about their subjects, which include extensions to the senses, new inventions, and challenges to individual autonomy. Many focus on experiments but might combine scientific enquiry with the supernatural, producing hybrid narratives as a result which are difficult to classify.
Download or read book Nineteenth Century Science written by A.S. Weber and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2000-03-10 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-Century Science is a science anthology which provides over 30 selections from original 19th-century scientific monographs, textbooks and articles written by such authors as Charles Darwin, Mary Somerville, J.W. Goethe, John Dalton, Charles Lyell and Hermann von Helmholtz. The volume surveys scientific discovery and thought from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of evolution of 1809 to the isolation of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898. Each selection opens with a biographical introduction, situating each scientist and discovery within the context of history and culture of the period. Each entry is also followed by a list of further suggested reading on the topic. A broad range of technical and popular material has been included, from Mendeleev’s detailed description of the periodic table to Faraday’s highly accessible lecture for young people on the chemistry of a burning candle. The anthology will be of interest to the general reader who would like to explore in detail the scientific, cultural, and intellectual development of the nineteenth-century, as well as to students and teachers who specialize in the science, literature, history, or sociology of the period. The book provides examples from all the disciplines of western science-chemistry, physics, medicine, astronomy, biology, evolutionary theory, etc. The majority of the entries consist of complete, unabridged journal articles or book chapters from original 19th-century scientific texts.
Download or read book Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century written by Anne Stiles and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1860s and 1870s, leading neurologists used animal experimentation to establish that discrete sections of the brain regulate specific mental and physical functions. These discoveries had immediate medical benefits: David Ferrier's detailed cortical maps, for example, saved lives by helping surgeons locate brain tumors and haemorrhages without first opening up the skull. These experiments both incited controversy and stimulated creative thought, because they challenged the possibility of an extra-corporeal soul. This book examines the cultural impact of neurological experiments on late-Victorian Gothic romances by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, H. G. Wells and others. Novels like Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde expressed the deep-seated fears and visionary possibilities suggested by cerebral localization research, and offered a corrective to the linearity and objectivity of late Victorian neurology.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Science Fiction written by Gerry Canavan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first science fiction course in the American academy was held in the early 1950s. In the sixty years since, science fiction has become a recognized and established literary genre with a significant and growing body of scholarship. The Cambridge History of Science Fiction is a landmark volume as the first authoritative history of the genre. Over forty contributors with diverse and complementary specialties present a history of science fiction across national and genre boundaries, and trace its intellectual and creative roots in the philosophical and fantastic narratives of the ancient past. Science fiction as a literary genre is the central focus of the volume, but fundamental to its story is its non-literary cultural manifestations and influence. Coverage thus includes transmedia manifestations as an integral part of the genre's history, including not only short stories and novels, but also film, art, architecture, music, comics, and interactive media.
Download or read book Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Science Fiction of the 19th Century written by Isaac Asimov and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains 15 science fiction stories from the 19th century.
Download or read book Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth Century Literature and Science written by Stella Pratt-Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the nineteenth century, practitioners of science, writers of fiction and journalists wrote about electricity in ways that defied epistemological and disciplinary boundaries. Revealing electricity as a site for intense and imaginative Victorian speculation, Stella Pratt-Smith traces the synthesis of nineteenth-century electricity made possible by the powerful combination of science, literature and the popular imagination. With electricity resisting clear description, even by those such as Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell who knew it best, Pratt-Smith argues that electricity was both metaphorically suggestive and open to imaginative speculation. Her book engages with Victorian scientific texts, popular and specialist periodicals and the work of leading midcentury novelists, including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray and Wilkie Collins. Examining the work of William Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Pratt-Smith explores how Victorian novelists attributed magical qualities to electricity, imbuing it with both the romance of the past and the thrill of the future. She concludes with a case study of Benjamin Lumley’s Another World, which presents an enticing fantasy of electricity’s potential based on contemporary developments. Ultimately, her book contends that writing and reading about electricity appropriated and expanded its imaginative scope, transformed its factual origins and applications and contravened the bounds of literary genres and disciplinary constraints.
Download or read book The History of Science Fiction written by A. Roberts and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-11-28 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The History of Science Fiction traces the origin and development of science fiction from Ancient Greece up to the present day. The author is both an academic literary critic and acclaimed creative writer of the genre. Written in lively, accessible prose it is specifically designed to bridge the worlds of academic criticism and SF fandom.
Download or read book The Land of the Changing Sun written by Will N. Harben and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2022-12-08 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original.
Download or read book Science Fiction written by Roger Luckhurst and published by Polity. This book was released on 2005-05-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new and timely cultural history of science fiction, Roger Luckhurst examines the genre from its origins in the late nineteenth century to its latest manifestations. The book introduces and explicates major works of science fiction literature by placing them in a series of contexts, using the history of science and technology, political and economic history, and cultural theory to develop the means for understanding the unique qualities of the genre. Luckhurst reads science fiction as a literature of modernity. His astute analysis examines how the genre provides a constantly modulating record of how human embodiment is transformed by scientific and technological change and how the very sense of self is imaginatively recomposed in popular fictions that range from utopian possibility to Gothic terror. This highly readable study charts the overlapping yet distinct histories of British and American science fiction, with commentary on the central authors, magazines, movements and texts from 1880 to the present day. It will be an invaluable guide and resource for all students taking courses on science fiction, technoculture and popular literature, but will equally be fascinating for anyone who has ever enjoyed a science fiction book.
Download or read book The Brick Moon and Other Stories written by Edward Everett Hale and published by . This book was released on 1899 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Frankenstein Dreams written by Michael Sims and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Mary Shelley to H.G. Wells, a collection of the best Victorian science fiction from Michael Sims, the editor of Dracula's Guest. Long before 1984, Star Wars, or The Hunger Games, Victorian authors imagined a future where new science and technologies reshaped the world and universe they knew. The great themes of modern science fiction showed up surprisingly early: space and time travel, dystopian societies, even dangerously independent machines, all inspiring the speculative fiction of the Victorian era. In Frankenstein Dreams, Michael Sims has gathered many of the very finest stories, some by classic writers such as Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, and H.G. Wells, but many that will surprise general readers. Dark visions of the human psyche emerge in Thomas Wentworth Higginson's "The Monarch of Dreams," while Mary E. Wilkins Freeman provides a glimpse of “the fifth dimension” in her provocative tale "The Hall Bedroom.' With contributions by Edgar Allan Poe, Alice Fuller, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle, and many others, each introduced by Michael Sims, whose elegant introduction provides valuable literary and historical context, Frankenstein Dreams is a treasure trove of stories known and rediscovered.
Download or read book Science Fact and Science Fiction written by Brian M. Stableford and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2006 with total page 758 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book Perseverance Island Or The Robinson Crusoe of the Nineteenth Century written by Douglas Frazar and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perseverance Island; Or, The Robinson Crusoe of the Nineteenth Century by Douglas Frazar is a captivating novel that follows the story of a man stranded on a deserted island and his struggle for survival. The book is written in a descriptive and engaging literary style, drawing parallels to the classic novel Robinson Crusoe while adding a unique twist to the narrative. Frazar skillfully weaves themes of resilience, isolation, and human resourcefulness into the story, making it a thought-provoking read for those interested in adventure and survival literature of the 19th century. Douglas Frazar, the author of Perseverance Island, was known for his fascination with tales of survival and exploration. His personal experiences and travels likely inspired him to write a novel that delves into the psychological and physical challenges faced by individuals in extreme circumstances. Frazar's attention to detail and his ability to create vivid imagery contribute to the richness of the storytelling in Perseverance Island. I highly recommend Perseverance Island; Or, The Robinson Crusoe of the Nineteenth Century to readers who enjoy immersive and well-crafted tales of survival and adventure. Frazar's novel offers a compelling narrative that will keep you engaged from start to finish, making it a worthwhile addition to any literary collection.
Download or read book Young Adult Science Fiction written by Charles William Sullivan and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1999-03-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the close of the nineteenth century, American youths developed a growing interest in electricity and its applications, machines, and gadgetry. When authors and publishers recognized the extent of this interest in technology, they sought to create reading materials that would meet this market need. The result was science fiction written especially for young adults. While critics tended to neglect young adult science fiction for decades, they gradually came to recognize its practical and cultural value. Science fiction inspired many young adults to study science and engineering and helped foster technological innovation. At the same time, these works also explored cultural and social concerns more commonly associated with serious literature. Nor was young adult science fiction a peculiarly American phenomenon: authors in other countries likewise wrote science fiction for young adult readers. This book examines young adult science fiction in the U.S. and several other countries and explores issues central to the genre. The first part of the book treats the larger contexts of young adult science fiction and includes chapters on its history and development. Included are discussions of science fiction for young adults in the U.S. and in Canada, Great Britain, Germany, and Australia. These chapters are written by expert contributors and chart the history of young adult science fiction from the nineteenth century to the present. The second section of the book considers topics of special interest to young adult science fiction. Some of the chapters look at particular forms and expressions of science fiction, such as films and comic books. Others treat particular topics, such as the portrayal of women in Robert Heinlein's works and representations of war in young adult science fiction. Yet another chapter studies the young adult science fiction novel as a coming-of-age story and thus helps distinguish the genre from science fiction written for adult readers. All chapters reflect current research, and the volume concludes with extensive bibliographies.
