Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase

``With an introduction and twenty-five separate essays, Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase covers impressive ground.... The rewards of engaging the text as a whole are great.... The effect produced is one of cycling defamiliarization, a shuffling of imagined destinies and short-circuited hopes that comprise a dauntingly heterogeneous futurity.... Whether for teaching or research, I anticipate this collection will prove an invaluable reference, opening up new pathways and connections for those well versed in science fiction's dystopian variants as well as for those newly embarking down the pathways of the future.'' -- Brent Bellamy -- English Studies in Canada, 40.2-3, January 2015, 201503 Not only does it have the coolest title, but Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase is also among the best-edited volumes on SF published last year ... As a study of North American texts, it addresses the continent's tri-lingual colonial heritage, including five essays on Spanish-language and two on French-language texts. Reasonably priced for its heft, rigorous in its approach, this volume offers an extended interrogation of how contemporary writers extrapolate the detrimental effects of neoliberalism, the ongoing vicissitudes of European colonization of the Americas, and the dehumanizing aspects of global capitalism. At the same time, it covers a staggering array of texts and writers; above all, like NAFTA itself, it seeks to erase the national borders that all too often artificially compartmentalize literary studies, ultimately decentring the US by forcing readers to rethink the equation US = America. -- Amy J. Ransom -- SFRA Review, 20150601

Brett Josef Grubisic is a lecturer at the University of British Columbia and specializes in contemporary Canadian and UK fiction. His publications include Contra/diction (ed.), Carnal Nation (co-edited with Carellin Brooks), the City of Vancouver Book Award finalist The Age of Cities , and Understanding Beryl Bainbridge . Gisle M. Baxter has taught in the English Department at the University of British Columbia since 1997. Her research interests include near-future dystopias, the Gothic inheritance, childrens/YA literature, and British modernism. Her publications, talks, and media work address topics such as Spanish Civil War narratives, vampires, zombies, Internet culture, women in music, and Peter Pan. She is writing a novel. Tara Lee teaches in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. Her teaching and research interests include media and technology, science fiction, critical race theory, and contemporary minority Canadian literature. She also works as a freelance writer and broadcaster for a variety of local and national publications.

Table of Contents Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature , edited by Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisle M. Baxter, and Tara Lee Introduction | Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisle M. Baxter, and Tara Lee PART I Altered States The Man in the Klein Blue Suit: Searching for Agency in William Gibson's Bigend Trilogy | Janine Tobeck The Cultural Logic of Post-Capitalism: Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Popular Dystopia | Carl F. l. Miller Logical Gaps and Capitalism's Seduction in Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl | Sharlee Reimer The Dystopia of the Obsolete: Lisa Robertson's Vancouver and the Poetics of Nostalgia | Paul Stephens Post-Frontier and Re-Definition of Space in Tropic of Orange | Hande Tekdemir Our Posthuman Adolescence: Dystopia, Information Technologies, and the Construction of Subjectivity in M.T. Anderson's Feed | Richard Gooding PART II Plastic Subjectivities Woman Gave Names to All the Animals: Food, Fauna, and Anorexia in Margaret Atwood's Dystopian Fiction | Annette Lapointe The End of Life as We Knew It: Material Nature and the American Family in Susan Beth Pfeffer's Last Survivors Series | Alexa Weik von Mossner The Treatment for Stirrings: Dystopian Literature for Adolescents | Joseph Campbell Imagining Black Bodies in the Future | Gregory Hampton Brown Girl in the Ring as Urban Policy | Sharon DeGraw PART III Spectral Histories Archive Failure? Cielos de la Tierra's Historical Dystopia | Zac Zimmer Love, War, and Mal de Amores : Utopia and Dystopia in the Mexican Revolution | Mar-a Odette Canivell Culture of Control/Control of Culture: Anne Legault's Rcits de Mdilhault | Lee Skallerup Bessette The Sublime Simulacrum: Vancouver in Douglas Coupland's Geography of Apocalypse | Robert McGill Neoliberalism and Dystopia in U.S.Mexico Borderlands Fiction | Lysa Rivera America and Books are Never Going to Die: Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story as a New York Jewish Ustopia | Marleen S. Barr In Pursuit of an Outside: Art Spiegelman's In The Shadow of No Towers and the Crisis of the Unrepresentable | Thomas Stubblefield Homero Aridjis and Mexico's Eco-Critical Dystopia | Adam Spires PART IV Emancipating Genres Lost in Grand Central: Dystopia and Transgression in Neil Gaiman's American Gods | Robert Tally Which Way is Hope? Dystopia into the (Mexican) Borgian Labyrinth | Luis Gmez Romero Dystopia Now: Examining the Rach(a)els in Automaton Biographies and Player One | Kit Dobson The Romance of the Blazing World: Looking back from CanLit to SF | Owen Percy It's not power, it's sex: Jeanette Winterson's The PowerBook and Nicole Brossard's Baroque at Dawn | Helene Staveley Another Novel is Possible: Muckraking in Chris Bachelder's U.S.! and Robert Newman's The Fountain at the Center of the World | Lee Konstantinou About the Contributors