Environments in Science Fiction: Essays on Alternative Spaces

Description

The all-new essays in this book respond to the question, How do spaces in science fiction, both built and unbuilt, help shape the relationships among humans, other animals and their shared environments? Spaces, as well as a sense of place or belonging, play major roles in many science fiction works. This book focuses especially on depictions of the future that include, but move beyond, dystopias and offer us ways to imagine reinventing ourselves and our perspectives; especially our links to and views of new environments. There are ecocritical texts that deal with space/place and science fiction criticism that deals with dystopias but there is no other collection that focuses on the intersection of the two. Acknowledgments Table of Contents Introduction PART ONE: IN THE MARGINS: RECENTERING INDIVIDUALS, SOCIETIES AND ENVIRONMENTS Heterotopian Possibilities in Science Fictions by Stephen Baxter, Terry Pratchett, Samuel Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin • Lauren J. Lacey Acceptance of the Marginalized in Marge Piercy’s He, She, It and Melissa Scott’s Trouble and Her Friends • Melanie A. Marotta Anathem’s Flows of Power: State Space and Nomadology on a Cloistered Planet • Jonathan P. Lewis PART TWO: SHIFTING WORLDS THROUGH RE-CREATION Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts: Deterritorializing Land and Language • Adam Lawrence Mary Shelley’s Literary Laboratory: Frankenstein and the Emergence of the Modern Laboratory in Nineteenth-Century Europe • Matthew Hadley Ecotopian London: Morris’s Geography of Conservation • Margaret S. Kennedy PART THREE: RE-VIEWING DAMAGED WORLDS THROUGH QUESTS Underworlds of Despair and Hope in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road • Justin T. Noetzel The Silence of the Subaltern: The Rejection of History and Language in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome • Shayani Bhattacharya A Case of Terraphilia: Longing for Place and Community in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? • Susan M. Bernardo Discursive Transgressions and Ideological Negotiations: From Orwell’s 1984 to Butler’s Parable of the Sower • Keith Elphick About the Contributors Index