Science Fiction, Critical Frontiers

Description

Science fiction has recently been identified as providing the narrative paradigm for postmodernity. This volume of essays combines theoretical discussions of the nature of science fiction, with specific studies of utopian and dystopian narratives. Alongside of this, the essays here address feminist and African American issues, the envisioning of radical alternative realities and futures, cyborgs, cyberpunk and cyber-space, age and aging, hybridity and monstrosity, and contemporary society and the postmodern condition. Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Front Matter....Pages 1-1 Novum Is as Novum Does....Pages 3-22 Science Fiction: Metaphor, Myth or Prophecy?....Pages 23-34 Modernity as a Project and as Self-Criticism: The Historical Dialogue between Science Fiction and Utopia....Pages 35-47 ‘Dare to struggle, dare to win’: On Science Fiction, Totality and Agency in the 1990s....Pages 48-65 Front Matter....Pages 67-67 The Monsters of Botany and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein....Pages 69-84 Contending Forces: Racial and Sexual Narratives in Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren....Pages 85-99 The Death of the Author and the Power of Addiction in Naked Lunch and Blade Runner....Pages 100-115 The Informatic Jeremiad: The Virtual Frontier and US Cyberculture....Pages 116-126 Doomsday Looms: Gudrun Pausewang’s Anti-Nuclear Novels....Pages 127-139 In-Between Subjects: C. L. Moore’s ‘No Woman Born’....Pages 140-153 (Re)Productive Fictions; Reproduction, Embodiment and Feminist Science in Marge Piercy’s Science Fiction....Pages 154-168 The Female State: Science Fiction Alternatives to the Patriarchy — Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country and Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming Series....Pages 169-192 Back Matter....Pages 193-219