Download or read book Science Fiction as Genre of Possibilities Social Criticism in a Limitless Range of Opportunities written by Philipp Freund and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2018-07-04 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Würzburg (Neuphilologisches Institut), course: Science Fiction and Social Activism, language: English, abstract: This paper investigates if Octavia Butler’s Kindred is fitting into the overall definition of science fiction and, if not, why and how she is exaggerating the genre and its limits. There are different approaches available to analyze this content. For example, one could work with a historical analysis of a genre, presented in Cuddon/ Preston. On the other hand, no investigation on history could prevent the paper from losing itself in trivialities of change. For this reason, I will choose a mixed approach, analyzing standard works, dictionaries, companions, and specialist books on different branches of the genre, to be able to summarize all parameters needed to form a profound definition. On the one hand, the paper will therefore work quantitatively in sense of finding as much evidence as possible for each and every parameter. On the other hand, I am going to work qualitatively in sense of investigating one special example (Kindred) regarding the overall contemplation. Although the paper could never reach representativeness, the selection of possible classifications and definitions is highly important, as they shape the paper’s outcome and final conclusion. For this reason, writers from both sides of the ocean shall be taken into consideration, as they influenced the genre in a wide extent, for example in creating the progression of the »New Wave« and, therefore, might be important for the paper, too. Assuming that, the paper is going to deal with the genre itself, not authors in particular. A distinct theory is not needed, as the structure is set up to be a theoretical one, analyzing the content of a genre and hence works on theoretical constructs itself. Nevertheless, postmodernism will be of a great importance, which will be both introduced and explained in the following chapters. The paper will be organized in an introduction, presenting the topic, research question, and thesis. Next to that is chapter two, containing definitions, in which parameters from research are being listed to be able to set a definition. Chapter three changes to social criticism in SF and explores, why Kindred is social criticism in the first place, and investigates, if it fits into the definition found in chapter two. Part four will merge the two lines of action and set a new and overall definition. It will answer the research question, if and how Octavia Butler’s Kindred is exaggerating the definition and verifies or falsifies the thesis.
Download or read book The Science Fiction Novel written by Basil Davenport and published by Chicago : Advent. This book was released on 1969 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays presented in a University of Chicago lecture series in 1957.
Download or read book Science Fiction written by Patrick Parrinder and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-19 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 1980, analyses science fiction as a mode of literature, examines the definition of the genre, its function as social criticism and as an embodiment and critique of the scientific outlook.
Download or read book The Science Fiction Novel written by C. M. Kornbluth and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagination and Social Criticism3rd EditionA spectacular analysis of science fiction by the masters of the genre!Based on a 1957 lecture series at the University of Chicago.Does science fiction have any real effect as a force of social criticism? This question has been given much thought and discussion, but until the publication of this volume there was no definitive inquiry available in book form. Here are four sharply different analyses of the question: a positive "yes," a positive "no," a literate "maybe," and perhaps most surprising, a revealing look at the inner workings of an author.These four broadly ranging essays by Robert A. Heinlein, C. M. Kornbluth, Alfred Bester, and Robert Bloch illuminate the successes and failures of science fiction considered as social criticism and as education for social change. Kornbluth's essay includes his famous explication of Orwell's 1984.Above all, The Science Fiction Novel is entertaining as well as informative and useful. As Basil Davenport says in his introduction, "This book has given me the pleasure, all too rare since my college days, of being a book that I could argue with. No one can agree with all these papers, since they do not agree with each other; but where you disagree you will find yourself wanting to say exactly how far and why. That is my idea of a really stimulating and enjoyable book."Please note that because of inventory issues, the 1974 printings of the paperback and hardback editions are only available directly via the Advent:Publishers' web site. (Same edition and contents.)TABLE OF CONTENTS- Introduction by Basil Davenport- "Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults and Virtues" by Robert A. Heinlein- "The Failure of the Science Fiction Novel as Social Criticism" by C. M. Kornbluth- "Science Fiction and the Renaissance Man" by Alfred Bester- "Imagination and Social Criticism" by Robert Bloch
Download or read book The Science Fiction Novel Imagination and Social Criticism By Basil Davenport and Others Etc written by Basil DAVENPORT and published by . This book was released on 1959 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Science Fiction and Empire written by Patricia Kerslake and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its beginnings, science fiction has experimented with imperialistic scenarios of alien invasion, extraterrestrial exploitation, xenophobia, and colonial conquest. In Science Fiction and Empire, Patricia Kerslake brings contemporary thinking about postcolonialism and imperialism to bear on a variety of classic sci-fi novels and films, including The War of the Worlds, Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, and Star Wars. The first book to identify the consequences of empire in science fiction, Kerslake’s study is a compelling investigation of the political ramifications of how we imagine our future. “Science Fiction and Empire is thought-provoking and insightful, . . . the kind of large-scale postcolonial work that science fiction has needed for quite some time.”—Science Fiction Studies
Download or read book The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year written by Jonathan Strahan and published by Start Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2013-04-18 with total page 949 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In print and on-line, science fiction and fantasy is thriving as never before. A multitude of astonishingly creative and gifted writers are boldly exploring the mythic past, the paranormal present, and the promises and perils of myriad alternate worlds and futures. There are almost too many new and intriguing stories published every year for any reader to be able to experience them all. So how to make sure you haven’t missed any future classics? Award-winning editor and anthologist Jonathan Strahan has surveyed the expanding universes of modern sf and fantasy to find the brightest stars in today’s dazzling literary firmament. From the latest masterworks by the acknowledged titans of the field to fresh visions from exciting new talents, this outstanding collection is a comprehensive showcase for the current state of the art in both science fiction and fantasy. Anyone who wants to know where the future of imaginative short fiction is going, and treat themselves to dozens of unforgettable stories, will find this year’s edition of Best Science Fiction and Fantasy to be just what they’re looking for!
Download or read book In Other Worlds written by Margaret Atwood and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale At a time when speculative fiction seems less and less far-fetched, Margaret Atwood lends her distinctive voice and singular point of view to the genre in a series of essays that brilliantly illuminates the essential truths about the modern world. This is an exploration of her relationship with the literary form we have come to know as "science fiction,” a relationship that has been lifelong, stretching from her days as a child reader in the 1940s, through her time as a graduate student at Harvard, where she worked on the Victorian ancestor of the form, and continuing as a writer and reviewer. This book brings together her three heretofore unpublished Ellmann Lectures from 2010: "Flying Rabbits," which begins with Atwood's early rabbit superhero creations, and goes on to speculate about masks, capes, weakling alter egos, and Things with Wings; "Burning Bushes," which follows her into Victorian otherlands and beyond; and "Dire Cartographies," which investigates Utopias and Dystopias. In Other Worlds also includes some of Atwood's key reviews and thoughts about the form. Among those writers discussed are Marge Piercy, Rider Haggard, Ursula Le Guin, Ishiguro, Bryher, Huxley, and Jonathan Swift. She elucidates the differences (as she sees them) between "science fiction" proper, and "speculative fiction," as well as between "sword and sorcery/fantasy" and "slipstream fiction." For all readers who have loved The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood, In Other Worlds is a must. Note: The electronic version of this title contains over thirty additional, illuminating eBook-exclusive illustrations by the author.
Download or read book The Time Machine illustrated written by H. G. Wells and published by BoD - Books on Demand. This book was released on 2022-06-22 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Time Machine by H. G. Wells is a science fiction classic, which lends itself well to visualization. This version, illustrated by Yoann Laurent-Rouault, an illustrator master who graduated from the Beaux-Arts, and published in the international literary collection Memoria Books, is a reference on the time travel theme. Wells transports us in the year 802 701, in a society made up of the “Elois”, who live peacefully in a kind of big Garden of Eden, eating fruits and sleeping high up, while underground lives another species, also descending from men, the “Morlocks”, who do not stand the light anymore, living in the dark for too long now. At night, they return to the surface, going back up by the wells, in order to kidnap some Elois that they eat ; these last became livestock unknowingly. In The Time Machine, made into a movie several times, the last of them in 2002 by Simon Wells, the great-grandson of H. G. Wells, time is both a pretext to move the class struggle and warn... and also, in a way, a full character, who fascinates, arbitrates, transcends... The illustrations come to reinforce the time travel and provide a new experience to the reader.
Download or read book Science Fiction and Psychology written by Gavin Miller and published by Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies. This book was released on 2020-01-31 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The psychologist may appear in science fiction as the herald of utopia or dystopia; literary studies have used psychoanalytic theories to interpret science fiction; and psychology has employed science fiction as an educational medium. Science Fiction and Psychology goes beyond such incidental observations and engagements to offer an in-depth exploration of science fiction literature's varied use of psychological discourses, beginning at the birth of modern psychology in the late nineteenth century and concluding with the ascendance of neuroscience in the late twentieth century. Rather than dwelling on psychoanalytic readings, this literary investigation combines with history of psychology to offer attentive textual readings that explore five key psychological schools: evolutionary psychology, psychoanalysis, behaviourism, existential-humanism, and cognitivism. The varied functions of psychological discourses in science fiction are explored, whether to popularise and prophesy, to imagine utopia or dystopia, to estrange our everyday reality, to comment on science fiction itself, or to abet (or resist) the spread of psychological wisdom. Science Fiction and Psychology also considers how psychology itself has made use of science fiction in order to teach, to secure legitimacy as a discipline, and to comment on the present.
Download or read book Films from the Future written by Andrew Maynard and published by Mango Media Inc.. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Deftly shows how a seemingly frivolous film genre can guide us in shaping tomorrow’s world.” —Seth Shostak, senior astronomer, SETI Institute Artificial intelligence, gene manipulation, cloning, and interplanetary travel are all ideas that seemed like fairy tales but a few years ago. And now their possibilities are very much here. But are we ready to handle these advances? This book, by a physicist and expert on responsible technology development, reveals how science fiction movies can help us think about and prepare for the social consequences of technologies we don’t yet have, but that are coming faster than we imagine. Films from the Future looks at twelve movies that take us on a journey through the worlds of biological and genetic manipulation, human enhancement, cyber technologies, and nanotechnology. Readers will gain a broader understanding of the complex relationship between science and society. The movies mix old and new, and the familiar and unfamiliar, to provide a unique, entertaining, and ultimately transformative take on the power of emerging technologies, and the responsibilities they come with.
Download or read book The Andromeda Strain written by Michael Crichton and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-05-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Jurassic Park, Timeline, and Sphere comes a captivating thriller about a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism, which threatens to annihilate human life. Five prominent biophysicists have warned the United States government that sterilization procedures for returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere. Two years later, a probe satellite falls to the earth and lands in a desolate region of northeastern Arizona. Nearby, in the town of Piedmont, bodies lie heaped and flung across the ground, faces locked in frozen surprise. What could cause such shock and fear? The terror has begun, and there is no telling where it will end.
Download or read book Lucian s True History written by Lucian (of Samosata.) and published by . This book was released on 1902 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Too Like the Lightning written by Ada Palmer and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the winner of the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Ada Palmer's 2017 Compton Crook Award-winning political science fiction, Too Like the Lightning, ventures into a human future of extraordinary originality Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer--a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away. The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labelling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations. And most of the world's population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competition is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life. And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destablize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life... Terra Ignota 1. Too Like the Lightning 2. Seven Surrenders 3. The Will to Battle At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Cloud Atlas written by David Mitchell and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-07-16 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A timeless, structure-bending classic that explores how actions of individual lives impact the past, present and future—from a postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in fiction One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, to the West Coast in the 1970s, to an inglorious present-day England, to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok, and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn’t end even there. The novel boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, David Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. As wild as a video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.
Download or read book Child in the Valley written by Gordy Sauer and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For fans of Ian McGuire's The North Water and Michael Punke's The Revenant, Child in the Valley by Gordy Sauer is a coming-of-age story set in the harsh landscape of Gold Rush America, centering on a orphan's journey to California in a wagon train of ruthless 49ers. Seventeen-year-old Joshua Gaines is suddenly orphaned in 1849, and after discovering that his foster father has left him deeply in debt, he flees his St. Louis home for Independence, Missouri. There, he plans to offer his medical expertise in exchange for passage to California in a Gold Rush party. Joshua is initially rebuffed given his youth and inexperience, but as his resentment and greed grow, a chance encounter with a ruthless adventurer and an ex-slave enlists him in a party comprised of provincial identical twins and a wealthy Englishman. The party departs overland along a 1,500-mile trail carved out by hardship, disease, violence, and death. When finally they arrive starving and exhausted in California's Sacramento Valley, Joshua discovers that attaining those riches is not as simple as pulling them from the riverbed, forcing him to redefine his sense of morality within the context of his greed; his complex sexuality; and the growing, though still-fledgling, American government. This novel is part of the Cold Mountain Fund Series, in partnership with Charles Frazier"--
Download or read book Selected Stories of H G Wells written by H. G. Wells and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ursula K. Le Guin’s selection of twenty-six stories showcases H. G. Wells’s genius and reintroduces readers to his singular talent for making the unbelievable seem utterly plausible. He envisioned a sky filled with airplanes before Orville Wright ever left the ground. He described the spectacle of space travel decades before men set foot on the moon. H. G. Wells was a visionary, a man of science with an enduring literary touch, and his originality and inventiveness are fully on display in this essential collection. “Wells imagined both dark and bright futures because his creed allowed both while promising neither, and because the eighty years of his life were years of immense intellectual and technological accomplishment and appalling violence and destruction.”—Ursula K. Le Guin, from the introduction “Everything one imagines in the way of genius and fun.”—Rebecca West Including these stories: “A Slip Under the Microscope” “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes” “The Plattner Story” “Under the Knife” “The Crystal Egg” “The New Accelerator” “The Stolen Body” “The Argonauts of the Air” “In the Abyss” “The Star” “The Land Ironclads” “A Dream of Armageddon” “The Lord of the Dynamos” “The Valley of Spiders” “The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham” “The Man Who Could Work Miracles” “The Magic Shop” “Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland” “The Door in the Wall” “The Presence by the Fire” “A Vision of Judgment” “The Story of the Last Trump” “The Wild Asses of the Devil” “Answer to Prayer” “The Queer Story of Brownlow’s Newspaper” “The Country of the Blind”
