Science Fiction Collection

In this hip, accessible primer to the music, literature, and art of Afrofuturism, author Ytasha Womack introduces readers to the burgeoning community of artists creating Afrofuturist works, the innovators from the past, and the wide range of subjects they explore. From the sci-fi literature of Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and N. K. Jemisin to the musical cosmos of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and the Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am, to the visual and multimedia artists inspired by African Dogon myths and Egyptian deities, the book's topics range from the "alien" experience of blacks in America to the "wake up" cry that peppers sci-fi literature, sermons, and activism. With a twofold aim to entertain and enlighten, Afrofuturists strive to break down racial, ethnic, and social limitations to empower and free individuals to be themselves.

Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space is the first full-scale analysis of an aesthetic, scientific, and political movement that sought the amelioration of racial difference and social antagonisms through the conquest of space. Drawing on the popular science writing and science fiction of an eclectic group of scientists, engineers, and popular writers, De Witt Douglas Kilgore investigates how the American tradition of technological utopianism responded to the political upheavals of the twentieth century. Kilgore argues that in the decades following the Second World War the subject of race became the most potent signifier of political crisis for the predominantly white and male ranks of astrofuturism.

Essays that explore the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture. Through essays by some of hip-hop's most interesting thinkers, theorists, journalists, writers, emcees, and DJs, Boogie Down Predictions embarks on a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture and what that means for the culture at large.

The first combined science fiction critical anthology and short story collection to focus upon black women via written and visual texts. The volume creates a dialogue with existing theories of Afro-Futurism in order to generate fresh ideas about how to apply race to science fiction studies in terms of gender. The contributors, including Hortense Spillers, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, and Steven Barnes, formulate a woman-centered Afro-Futurism by repositioning previously excluded fiction to redefine science fiction as a broader fantastic endeavor.

This critical collection covers a broad spectrum of works, both literary and cinematic, and issues from writers, directors, and artists who claim the science fiction, speculative fiction, and Afro-futurist genres. The anthology extends the discursive boundaries of science fiction by examining iconic writers like Octavia Butler, Walter Mosley, and Nalo Hopkinson through the lens of ecofeminist veganism, post-9/11 racial geopolitics, and the effect of the computer database on human voice and agency. Contributors expand what the field characterizes as speculative fiction by examining for the first time the vampire tropes present in Audre Lorde's poetry, and by tracing her influence on the horror fiction of Jewelle Gomez.

In Speculative Blackness, André M. Carrington analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction--including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan cultures--to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination. Carrington's argument about authorship, fandom, and race in a genre that has been both marginalized and celebrated offers a black perspective on iconic works of science fiction. Throughout this nuanced analysis, Carrington theorizes the relationship between race and genre in cultural production, revealing new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture.

Black and Brown Planets embarks on a timely exploration of the American obsession with color in its look at the sometimes contrary intersections of politics and race in science fiction. The contributors, including De Witt D. Kilgore, Edward James, Lisa Yaszek, and Marleen S. Barr, among others, explore science fiction worlds of possibility (literature, television, and film) and consider the role of race and ethnicity in our visions of the future. By infusing more color in this otherwise monochrome genre, Black and Brown Planets imagines alternate racial galaxies with viable political futures in which people of color determine human destiny.

This book explores the emergence and development of terraforming in science fiction from H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898) to James Cameron's blockbuster Avatar (2009). Terraforming is the process of making other worlds habitable for human life. Its counterpart on Earth - geoengineering - has begun to receive serious consideration as a way to address the effects of climate change. This book asks how science fiction has imagined the ways we shape both our world and other planets and how stories of terraforming reflect on science, society and environmentalism. It explores terraforming as a nexus for environmental philosophy, the pastoral, ecology, the Gaia hypothesis, the politics of colonisation and habitation, tradition and memory.

Animals and Science Fiction is the first edited collection to be published focusing on the intersection of animal studies and science fiction studies. It offers a broad range of theoretical approaches and primary source texts--including novels, short stories, poetry, film and TV, photography, erotica, video games, and urban planning documents--that explore the ways works of science fiction can transform how we see and interact with nonhuman others. With an eye toward more just multispecies futures, it argues that speculative imaginaries can be pivotal in changing attitudes toward and understandings of nonhuman animals in our world today.

Science fiction goes green? Eric C. Otto explores literary science fiction's engagement with a central concern of our times: ecological degradation. Situated at the intersection of science fiction studies and environmental philosophy, Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism highlights key works of environmental science fiction that critique various human values for their roles in instigating such degradation. Green Speculations demonstrates how environmental science fiction can be read not only as reflecting the ideas of environmental philosophies such as deep ecology, ecofeminism, and ecosocialism, but also as instrumental in thinking through the tenets of these philosophies.

Despite the occasional upsurge of climate change scepticism amongst Anglophone conservative politicians and journalists, there is still a near-consensus amongst climate scientists that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to disastrous effect. The resultant climate crisis is simultaneously both a natural and a socio-cultural phenomenon and in this book Milner and Burgmann argue that science fiction occupies a critical location within this nature/culture nexus. Science Fiction and Climate Change takes as its subject matter what Daniel Bloom famously dubbed 'cli-fi'. It does not, however, attempt to impose a prescriptively environmentalist aesthetic on this sub-genre. Rather, it seeks to explain how a genre defined in relation to science finds itself obliged to produce fictional responses to the problems actually thrown up by contemporary scientific research.

Plants have played key roles in science fiction novels, graphic novels, and film. John Wyndham's triffids, Algernon Blackwood's willows, and Han Kang's sprouting woman are just a few examples. Plants surround us, sustain us, pique our imaginations, and inhabit our metaphors - but in many ways they remain opaque. The scope of their alienation is as broad as their biodiversity. And yet, literary reflections of plant-life are driven, as are many threads of science fictional inquiry, by the concerns of today. This book's original essays argue that plant-life in SF is transforming our attitudes toward morality, politics, economics, and cultural life at large; questioning and shifting our understandings of institutions, nations, borders, and boundaries; erecting - and dismantling - new visions of utopian and dystopian futures.

From the 1960s to the present, activists, artists, and science fiction writers have imagined the consequences of climate change and its impacts on our future. As public awareness of climate change has grown, so has the popularity of works of climate fiction that connect science with activism. Today, real-world social movements helmed by Indigenous people and people of color are leading the way against the greatest threat to our environment: the fossil fuel industry. Their stories and movements--in the real world and through science fiction--help us all better understand the relationship between activism and culture, and how both can be valuable tools in creating our future. This book introduces readers to the history and most significant flashpoints in climate justice through speculative fictions and social movements, exploring post-disaster possibilities and the art of world-making.

This study has coined the term TechnoFeminist Science Fiction by grounding it on the insights of Judy Wajcman’s TechnoFeminist approach that combines cyberfeminism and cyborg feminism following the philosophies of Sadie Plant and Donna Haraway. The core study of TechnoFeminism gives voice to the mutual relationship between women and technology that is a constructivist and a sociotechnical network by rejecting technological determinism. Likewise, TechnoFeminist Science Fiction, a new trend in women or feminist science fiction, provides both technoscientific politics and TechnoFeminist politics in desire for women or feminist science fiction writers to be more active in creating female cyber and cyborg images in their technoscience fictions.

In this groundbreaking cultural history, Lisa Yaszek recovers a lost tradition of women's science fiction that flourished after 1945. This new kind of science fiction was set in a place called galactic suburbia, a literary frontier that was home to nearly 300 women writers. These authors explored how women's lives, loves, and work were being transformed by new sciences and technologies, thus establishing women's place in the American future imaginary. Yaszek shows how the authors of galactic suburbia rewrote midcentury culture's assumptions about women's domestic, political, and scientific lives. As Yaszek demonstrates, stories written by women about women in galactic suburbia anticipated the development of both feminist science fiction and domestic science fiction written by men.

In the 1950s, science fiction invasion films played a complicated part in supporting and criticizing Cold War ideologies. By reading these invasion narratives as performances of middle-class, white Americans' excitement and anxiety about social and political issues, George shows how they often played out as another round in the battle of the sexes.

From Frankenstein to futuristic feminist utopias, Decoding Gender in Science Fiction examines the ways science fiction writers have incorporated, explored, and revised conventional notions of sexual difference. Attebery traces a fascinating history of men's and women's writing that covertly or overtly investigates conceptions of gender, suggesting new perspectives on the genre.

In an era when a religious authority can declare lesbians antihuman while some nations legalise same-sex marriage and are becoming increasingly tolerant of a variety of non-normative sexualities, it is hardly surprising that science fiction, in turn, takes up the task of imagining a diverse range of queer and not-so-queer futures. The essays in Queer Universes investigate both contemporary and historical practices of representing sexualities and genders in science fiction literature. Queer Universes opens with Wendy Gay Pearson's award-winning essay on reading sf queerly and goes on to include discussions about cyberpunk fiction, the queering of nature in ecofeminist science fiction, and the radical challenges posed to conventional science fiction in the work of writers such as Samuel R. Delany and Joanna Russ.

Alien worlds, alter-egos, and Pleasure Domes-Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation explores the overlooked importance of science fiction fandom and the occult to US queer history. Science fiction and occult communities helped pave the way for the LGBTQ+ movement by providing a place for individuals to meet, imagine, and create a life less restricted by societal norms. Focusing on Los Angeles from the late 1930s through the 1950s, this book follows the lives of artists, writers, publishers, early sci-fi enthusiasts, and progressive communities, from Kenneth Anger, Lisa Ben, and Jack Parsons to the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS), and Ordo Templi Orientis at the Agape Lodge (O.T.O.).

The Planetary Humanism of European Women's Science Fiction argues that utopian science fiction written by European women has, since the seventeenth century, played an important role in exploring the racial and gender possibilities of the outer limits of the humanist imagination. This book focuses on six works of science fiction from the UK, France, Spain, and Italy: Jennifer Marie Brissett's Elysium; Nicoletta Vallorani's Sulla Sabbia di Sur and Il Cuore Finto di DR; Aliette de Bodard's Xuya Universe series; Elia Barcelo's Consecuencias Naturales; and Historias del Crazy Bar, a collection of stories by Lola Robles and Maria Concepcion Regueiro. It asserts that a key concern for feminism, anti- racism, and science fiction now is to seek inventive ways of returning to the question of the human in the context of increasing racial and gender divisions.

Women's contributions to science fiction over the past century have been lasting and important, but critical work in the field has only just begun to explore its full range. Justine Larbalestier has collected 11 key stories--many of them not easily found, and all of them powerful and provocative--and sets them alongside 11 new essays, written by top scholars and critics, that explore the stories' contexts, meanings, and theoretical implications. The resulting dialogue is one of enormous significance to critical scholarship in science fiction, and to understanding the role of feminism in its development.

How do women writers use science fiction to challenge assumptions about the genre and its representations of women? To what extent is the increasing number of women writing science fiction reformulating the expectations of readers and critics? What has been the effect of this phenomenon upon the academic establishment and the publishing industry? These are just some of the questions addressed by this collection of original essays by women writers, readers and critics of the genre.

This book examines science fiction's relationship to religion and the sacred through the lens of significant books, films and television shows. It provides a clear account of the larger cultural and philosophical significance of science fiction, and explores its potential sacrality in today's secular world by analyzing material such as Ray Bradbury's classic novel The Martian Chronicles, films The Abyss and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and also the Star Trek universe. Richard Grigg argues that science fiction is born of nostalgia for a truly 'Other' reality that is no longer available to us, and that the most accurate way to see the relationship between science fiction and traditional approaches to the sacred is as an imitation of true sacrality; this, he suggests, is the best option in a secular age.

Hyper-real religions are innovative religions and spirituality that mix elements of religious tradition with popular culture. Through various case studies, this book studies the on and off-line religious/spiritual consumption of these narratives through a social scientific approach."

Science fiction imagines a universe teeming with life and thrilling possibility, but also hidden and hideous dangers. Christian theology, often a polemical target for science fiction, reflects on the plenitude out of which and for which the universe exists. In Science Fiction Theology, Alan Gregory investigates the troubled relationship between science fiction and Christianity and, in particular, how both have laid claim to the modern idea of sublimity. To the extent that science fiction has appropriated--and reveled--in the sublime, it has persisted in a sometimes explicit, sometimes subterranean, relationship with Christian theology.

Science Fiction Film examines one of the most enduring and popular genres of Hollywood cinema, suggesting how the science fiction film reflects attitudes toward science, technology, and reason as they have evolved in American culture over the course of the twentieth century. J. P. Telotte provides a survey of science fiction film criticism, emphasizing humanist, psychological, ideological, feminist, and postmodern critiques. He also sketches a history of the genre, from its earliest literary manifestations to the present, while touching on and comparing it to pulp fiction, early television science fiction, and Japanese animé. Telotte offers in-depth readings of three key films: Robocop, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and THX 1138, each of which typifies a particular form of science fiction fantasy.

Designer Dave Addey invites sci-fi movie fans on a journey through seven genre-defining classics, discovering how they create compelling visions of the future through typography and design. The book delves deep into 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Alien, Blade Runner, Total Recall, WALL·E, and Moon, studying the design tricks and inspirations that make each film transcend mere celluloid and become a believable reality. These studies are illustrated by film stills, concept art, type specimens, and ephemera.

Science fiction film offers its viewers many pleasures, not least of which is the possibility of imagining other worlds in which very different forms of society exist. Not surprisingly, however, these alternative worlds often become spaces in which filmmakers and film audiences can explore issues of concern in our own society. Through an analysis of over thirty canonic science fiction (SF) films, including Logan's Run, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Back to the Future, Gattaca, and Minority Report, Black Space offers a thorough-going investigation of how SF film since the 1950s has dealt with the issue of race and specifically with the representation of blackness.

Space Oddities examines the representation of women in outer space films from 1960 to 2000, with an emphasis on films in which women are either denied or given the role of astronaut. Marie Lathers traces an evolution in this representation from women as aliens and/or "assistant" astronauts, to women as astronaut wives, to women as astronauts themselves. Many popular films are considered, as are earlier films (from Aelita Queen of Mars to Devil Girl From Mars) and television shows (especially I Dream of Jeannie).

Since the 1927 release of Fritz Lang's pioneer film, Metropolis, science fiction cinema has largely been regarded a Western genre. In Simultaneous Worlds, Jennifer L. Feeley and Sarah Ann Wells showcase authors who challenge this notion by focusing on cinemas and cultures, from Cuba to North Korea, not traditionally associated with science fiction. Simultaneous Worlds is the first volume to bring a transnational, interdisciplinary lens to science fiction cinema.

1950s Cold War-era monsters meet 21st-century terrorists: Matthews provides a thoughtful interpretation of sci-fi movies that examines the similarities and differences between the political environment and popular culture of two eras. This well-researched examination and appreciation of science fiction films includes behind-the-scenes tales about their production and many quotes from those who produced and starred in the films.

Covering titles ranging from Rocketship X-M (1950) to Wall-E (2008), these insightful essays measure the relationship between music and science fiction film from a variety of academic perspectives. Thematic sections survey specific compositions utilized in science fiction movies; Broadway's relationship with the genre; science fiction elements in popular songs; the conveyance of subjectivity and identity through music; and such individual composers as Richard Strauss (2001: A Space Odyssey) and Bernard Herrmann (The Day the Earth Stood Still).

The music for science fiction television programs, like music for science fiction films, is often highly distinctive, introducing cutting-edge electronic music and soundscapes. There is a highly particular role for sound and music in science fiction, because it regularly has to expand the vistas and imagination of the shows and plays a crucial role in setting up the time and place. Notable for its adoption of electronic instruments and integration of music and effects, science fiction programs explore sonic capabilities offered through the evolution of sound technology and design, which has allowed for the precise control and creation of unique and otherworldly sounds.

A groundbreaking approach to sound in sci-fi films offers new ways of construing both sonic innovation and science fiction cinema. Including original readings of classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, and Blade Runner, The Sound of Things to Come delivers a comprehensive history of sound in science fiction cinema. Approaching movies as sound objects that combine cinematic apparatus and consciousness, Trace Reddell presents a new theory of sonic innovation in the science fiction film. Reddell assembles a staggering array of movies from sixty years of film history--including classics, blockbusters, B-movies, and documentaries from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union--all in service to his powerful conception of sound making as a speculative activity in its own right.

This in-depth study by William Whittington considers the evolution of sound design not only through cultural and technological developments during the last four decades, but also through the attitudes and expectations of filmgoers. Fans of recent blockbuster films, in particular science fiction films, have come to expect a more advanced and refined degree of film sound use, which has changed the way they experience and understand spectacle and storytelling in contemporary cinema. Whittington focuses on seminal science fiction films that have made specific advances in film sound, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, THX 1138, Star Wars, Alien, Blade Runner (original version and director's cut), Terminator 2: Judgment Day and The Matrix trilogy and games--milestones of the entertainment industry's technological and aesthetic advancements with sound.

A critical examination of Blackness and race in the predominantly White genre. Noting that science fiction is characterized by an investment in the proliferation of racial difference, Isiah Lavender III argues that racial alterity is fundamental to the genre's narrative strategy. Race in American Science Fiction offers a systematic classification of ways that race appears and how it is silenced in science fiction, while developing a critical vocabulary designed to focus attention on often-overlooked racial implications.

What will the future look like? To judge from many speculative fiction films and books, from Blade Runner to Cloud Atlas, the future will be full of cities that resemble Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, and it will be populated mainly by cold, unfeeling citizens who act like robots. Techno-Orientalism investigates the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hyper-technological terms in literary, cinematic, and new media representations, while critically examining the stereotype of Asians as both technologically advanced and intellectually primitive, in dire need of Western consciousness-raising. The collection's fourteen original essays trace the discourse of techno-orientalism across a wide array of media, from radio serials to cyberpunk novels, from Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu to Firefly.

Combining work by critics from Latin America, the USA, and Europe, this is the first anthology of articles in English to examine science fiction in all of Latin America, from Mexico and the Caribbean to Brazil and the Southern Cone. Using a variety of sophisticated theoretical approaches, the book explores not merely the development of a science fiction tradition in the region, but more importantly, the intricate ways in which this tradition has engaged with the most important cultural and literary debates of recent year.

In this book, the authors examine manifestations of transmedia storytelling in different historical periods and countries, spanning the UK, the US and Argentina. It takes us into the worlds of Conan the Barbarian, Superman and El Eternauta, introduces us to the archaeology of transmedia, and reinstates the fact that it's not a new phenomenon.

An illustrated exploration of themes from science fiction and space travel, as imagined by artists across the Americas from the 1940s to the 1970s. From the 1940s to the 1970s, visionary artists from across the Americas reimagined themes from science fiction and space travel. They mapped extraterrestrial terrain, created dystopian scenarios amid fears of nuclear annihilation, and ingeniously deployed scientific and technological subjects and motifs. This book offers a sumptuously illustrated exploration of how artists from the United States and Latin America visualized the future.

Caroline Alphin presents an original exploration of biopolitics by examining it through the lens of cyberpunk science fiction. Comprised of five chapters, Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is guided by four central themes: biopolitics, intensification, resilience, and accelerationism.

This lively collection looks at science as filtered through literature, film, and television. It discusses classic works in science fiction and provides an in-depth look at the chemistry depicted in popular culture, particularly in Star Trek, Star Wars, and Doctor Who.

This timely book explores what might be termed 'Gothic science fiction' from 1980 to 2010. This designation may at first appear contradictory, as the Gothic's connotations of the irrational and supernatural seem to conflict with the rational foundations of science fiction. However, this collection demonstrates that the two categories in fact overlap and intersect in creatively and critically fruitful ways.

American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction explores the post-apocalyptic American city in literary and popular fiction, across print, visual, audio and digital media.

Carl Abbott, who has taught urban studies and urban planning in five decades, brings together urban studies and literary studies to examine how fictional cities in work by authors as different as E. M. Forster, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, and China Miéville might help us to envision an urban future that is viable and resilient. Abbott delivers a compelling critical discussion of science fiction cities found in literary works, television programs, and films of many eras from Metropolis to Blade Runner and Soylent Green to The Hunger Games, among many others.

Offers an examination of the central role played by urban spaces in science fictional narratives in various media forms from the literary to the ludic to the cinematic. Our contributors reflect on the ways diverse urban scenarios are central to the narratives' science fictional imaginary and consider the pivotal roles cityscapes play in underscoring major thematic concerns, such as political struggles, social inequality and other cultural epistemologies. The chapters are divided into three sections examining the city and the body, cities of estrangement, and cities of the imagination.

Frankenstein and Its Classics is the first collection of scholarship dedicated to how Frankenstein and works inspired by it draw on ancient Greek and Roman literature, history, philosophy, and myth. Presenting twelve new essays, the volume explores classical receptions in some of Frankenstein's most important scenes, sources, and adaptations. Not limited to literature, the chapters discuss a wide range of modern materials-including recent films like Alex Garland's Ex Machina and comics like Matt Fraction's and Christian Ward's Ody-C-in relation to ancient works including Hesiod's Theogony, Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Apuleius's The Golden Ass.

This book is a survey of typical Science Fiction elements in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Erkenbrecher first goes through a short history of Science Fiction and identifies certain motifs of the genre in order to correctly place the novel within a useful context. Classical elements of the Science Fiction canon are identified in the novel and scrutinized. It becomes clear that Douglas Adams was fully aware of the SF ""burden"" and we can see how its elements are used in order to create both humour and criticism.

A prolific author, Isaac Asimov is most admired for his science fiction, including his collection of short stories I, Robot and his Robot, Empire and Foundation series novels. This reference work identifies and describes all of the characters, locales, artifacts, concepts and institutions in Asimov's metaseries. Mimicking the style of The Encyclopedia Galactica, the fictional compendium of all human knowledge that features prominently in the Foundation series, this encyclopedia is an invaluable companion to Asimov's science fiction oeuvre.

This companion to Frank Herbert's six original Dune novels--Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune--provides an encyclopedia of characters, locations, terms and other elements, and highlights the series' underrated aesthetic integrity. An extensive introduction discusses the theme of ecology, chaos theory concepts and structures, and Joseph Campbell's monomyth in Herbert's narratives.

For fifty years Samuel Delany has cultivated a special relationship with language in works of fiction, criticism, and memoir that have garnered critical praise and legions of fans. In Search of Silence presents over a decade's worth of Delany's private journals, commencing in 1957 when he was still a student at the Bronx High School of Science, and ending in 1969 when he was living in San Francisco and on the verge of reconceiving the novel that would become Dhalgren. Delany scholar Kenneth R. James presents the journal entries alongside generous samplings of story outlines, poetry, fragments of novels and essays that have never seen publication, and more.

Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw appeared originally in 1977, and is now long out of print and hard to find. The impact of its demonstration that science fiction was a special language, rather than just gadgets and green-skinned aliens, began reverberations still felt in science fiction criticism. This edition includes two new essays, one written at the time and one written about those times, as well as an introduction by writer and teacher Matthew Cheney, placing Delany's work in historical context. Close textual analyses of Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Joanna Russ read as brilliantly today as when they first appeared. Essays such as "About 5,750 Words" and "To Read The Dispossessed" first made the book a classic; they assure it will remain one.

Samuel R. Delany moved to the Lower East Side, in summer 1961. Through the decade's opening years, new art, new sexual practices, new music, and new political awareness burgeoned among the crowded streets and cheap railroad apartments. Beautifully, vividly, insightfully, Delany calls up this era of exploration and adventure as he details his development as a black gay writer in an open marriage, with tertiary walk-ons by Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin, and a panoply of brilliantly drawn secondary characters.

Fox offers a clear and important, if brief, consideration of the fiction of Baraka, Reed, and Delany. He renders an especially important service by establishing the relationship among three fictionists whose work has been substantially neglected. Readers will find this volume useful as a starting point for the investigation of recent Afro-American fiction and as an example of the application of poststructuralist criticism to Afro-American fiction.

Le Guin’s sharp and witty voice is on full display in this collection of twenty-four essays, revised by the author a decade after its initial publication in 1979. The collection covers a wide range of topics and Le Guin’s origins as a writer, her advocacy for science fiction and fantasy as mediums for true literary exploration, the writing of her own major works such as A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness, and her role as a public intellectual and educator. The book and each thematic section are brilliantly introduced and contextualized by Susan Wood, a professor at the University of British Columbia and a literary editor and feminist activist during the 1960s and ’70s.

The Dispossessed has been described by political thinker Andre Gorz as 'The most striking description I know of the seductions--and snares--of self-managed communist or, in other words, anarchist society.' To date, however, the radical social, cultural, and political ramifications of Le Guin's multiple award-winning novel remain woefully under explored. Editors Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman right this state of affairs in the first ever collection of original essays devoted to Le Guin's novel. Among the topics covered in this wide-ranging, international and interdisciplinary collection are the anarchist, ecological, post-consumerist, temporal, revolutionary, and open-ended utopian politics of The Dispossessed.

Join Ursula K. Le Guin as she explores a broad array of subjects, ranging from Tolstoy, Twain, and Tolkien to women's shoes, beauty, and family life. With her customary wit, intelligence, and literary craftsmanship, she offers a diverse and highly engaging set of readings. The Wave in the Mind includes some of Le Guin's finest literary criticism, rare autobiographical writings, performance art pieces, and, most centrally, her reflections on the arts of writing and reading.