Search Worlds Without End

Contemporary visions of the future have been shaped by hopes and fears about the effects of human technology and global capitalism on the natural world. In an era of climate change, mass extinction, and oil shortage, such visions have become increasingly catastrophic, even apocalyptic. Exploring the close relationship between science fiction, ecology, and environmentalism, the essays in Green Planets consider how science fiction writers have been working through this crisis. Beginning with H. G. Wells and passing through major twentieth-century writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Stanislaw Lem, and Thomas Disch to contemporary authors like Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, and Paolo Bacigalupi--as well as recent blockbuster films like Avatar and District 9--the essays in Green Planets consider the important place for science fiction in a culture that now seems to have a very uncertain future. The book includes an extended interview with Kim Stanley Robinson and an annotated list for further exploration of "ecological SF" and related works of fiction, nonfiction, films, television, comics, children's cartoons, anime, video games, music, and more.

Table of Contents:

• Preface - essay by Gerry Canavan
• Introduction: If This Goes On (Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction) - essay by Gerry Canavan
• Extinction, Extermination, and the Ecological Optimism of H.G. Wells - essay by Christina Alt
• Evolution and Apocalypse in the Golden Age - essay by Michael Page
• Daoism, Ecology, and World Reduction in Le Guin's Utopian Fictions - essay by Gib Prettyman
• Biotic Invasions: Ecological Imperialism in New Wave Science Fiction - essay by Rob Latham
• "The Real Problem of a Spaceship Is Its People": Spaceship Earth as Ecological Science Fiction - essay by Sabine Höhler
• The Sea and Eternal Summer: An Australian Apocalypse - essay by Andrew Milner
• Care, Gender, and the Climate-Changed Future: Maggie Gee's The Ice People - essay by Adeline Johns-Putra
• Future Ecologies, Current Crisis: Ecological Concern in South African Speculative Fiction - essay by Elzette Steenkamp
• Ordinary Catastrophes: Paradoxes and Problems in Some Recent Post-Apocalypse Fictions - essay by Christopher Palmer
• "The Rain Feels New": Ecotopian Strategies in the Short Fiction of Paolo Bacigalupi - essay by Eric C. Otto
• Life after People: Science Faction and Ecological Futures - essay by Brent Bellamy and Imre Szeman
• Pandora's Box: Avatar, Ecology, Thought - essay by Timothy Morton
• Churning Up the Depths: Nonhuman Ecologies of Metaphor in Solaris and "Oceanic" - essay by Melody Jue
• Afterword: Still, I'm Reluctant to Call This Pessimism (Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction) - interview of Kim Stanley Robinson - interview by Gerry Canavan
• Of Further Interest - essay by Gerry Canavan

Returning to print for the first time since the 1980s, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction is the origin point for decades of literary and theoretical criticism of science fiction and related genres.

Darko Suvin's paradigm-setting definition of SF as "the literature of cognitive estrangement" established a robust theory of the genre that continues to spark fierce debate, as well as inspiring myriad intellectual descendants and disciples. Suvin's centuries-spanning history of the genre links SF to a long tradition of utopian and satirical literatures crying out for a better world than this one, showing how SF and the imagination of utopia are now forever intertwined.

In addition to the 1979 text of the book, this edition contains three additional essays from Suvin that update, expand and reconsider the terms of his original intervention, as well as a new introduction and preface that situate the book in the context of the decades of SF studies that have followed in its wake.

The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction explores the relationship between the ideas and themes of American science fiction and their roots in the American cultural experience. Science fiction in America has long served to reflect the country's hopes, desires, ambitions, and fears. The ideas and conventions associated with science fiction are pervasive throughout American film and television, comics and visual arts, games and gaming, and fandom, as well as across the culture writ large.

Through essays that address not only the history of science fiction in America but also the influence and significance of American science fiction throughout media and fan culture, this companion serves as a key resource for scholars, teachers, students, and fans of science fiction.

Contents:

• 1 - Introduction (The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction) - essay by Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan
• 17 - The Mightiest Machine: The Development of American Science Fiction from the 1920s to the 1960s - essay by Gary Westfahl
• 31 - Dangerous Visions: New Wave and Post-New Wave Science Fiction - essay by Darren Harris-Fain
• 44 - American Science Fiction after 9/11 - essay by David M. Higgins
• 58 - Afrofuturism in American Science Fiction - essay by Lisa Yaszek
• 70 - Feminist and Queer Science Fiction in America - essay by Alexis Lothian
• 83 - The Futures Market: American Utopias - essay by Mark Bould
• 99 - American Slipstream: Science Fiction and Literary Respectability - essay by Rob Latham
• 111 - Hollywood Science Fiction - essay by Sherryl Vint
• 125 - U.S. Superpower and Superpowered Americans in Science Fiction and Comic Books - essay by Matthew J. Costello
• 139 - Digital Games and Science Fiction - essay by Patrick Jagoda
• 153 - Fandom and Fan Culture - essay by Karen Hellekson
• 167 - American Frontiers - essay by John Rieder
• 179 - Science, Technology, and the Environment - essay by Priscilla Wald
• 194 - American Weird - essay by Roger Luckhurst
• 206 - After America - essay by Rebekah C. Sheldon

"I began writing about power because I had so little," Octavia E. Butler once said. Butler's life as an African American woman--an alien in American society and among science fiction writers -- informed the powerful works that earned her an ardent readership and acclaim both inside and outside science fiction.

Gerry Canavan offers a critical and holistic consideration of Butler's career. Drawing on Butler's personal papers, Canavan tracks the false starts, abandoned drafts, tireless rewrites, and real-life obstacles that fed Butler's frustrations and launched her triumphs. Canavan departs from other studies to approach Butler first and foremost as a science fiction writer working within, responding to, and reacting against the genre's particular canon.

The result is an illuminating study of how an essential SF figure shaped themes, unconventional ideas, and an unflagging creative urge into brilliant works of fiction.