Christopher Palmer – författare

Once the sole possession of fans and buffs, the SF author Philip K Dick is now finding a much wider audience, as the success of the films Blade Runner and Minority Report shows. The kind of world he predicted in his funny and frightening novels and stories is coming closer to most of us: shifting realities, unstable relations, uncertain moralities. Philip K Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern examines a wide range of Dick’s work, including his short stories and posthumously published realist novels. Christopher Palmer analyses the puzzling and dazzling effects of Dick’s fiction, and argues that at its heart is a clash between exhilarating possibilities of transformation, and a frightening lack of ethical certainties. Dick’s work is seen as the inscription of his own historical predicament, the clash between humanism and postmodernism being played out in the complex forms of the fiction. The problem is never resolved, but Dick’s ways of imagining it become steadily more ingenious and challenging.

Apocalypse is traditional and familiar, and it is an actualthreat; it is feared, desired, and banal. Apocalypse in Crisis discussesfictions from the 1940s to the present, examining shifts in the imagination ofapocalypse from the postwar British disaster novels, through novels of thecountercultural sixties, feminist interventions, and recent revisions andcritiques. As empire fades, ideas of sexualityshift, and attitudes to nature and to the city change, so apocalyptic fictionschange. The individual subject isasserted, immolated, transcended, abandoned; individual deaths are substitutedfor mass death; death is faked or erased. The subjects and survivors of catastrophe set about re-establishingcivilization, or they abandon it, finding new ways of being and of dying; theyrespond to it when it comes from outside, as an invasion, or they are immersedin it, as it shifts from being an event to being a condition. They flee the city for the country, or acceptthat they must draw on the energies of the world city in order to survive. The book includes detailed discussion of novels by H. G. Wells, George M. Stewart, Nevil Shute, JohnWyndham, Arthur C. Clarke, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Doris Lessing, AngelaCarter, Anna Kavan, Arno Schmidt, Anthony Burgess, Ursula K. Le Guin, TomPerrotta, Douglas Coupland, Don DeLillo, China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, andKim Stanley Robinson.

Apocalypse is traditional and familiar, and it is an actualthreat; it is feared, desired, and banal. Apocalypse in Crisis discussesfictions from the 1940s to the present, examining shifts in the imagination ofapocalypse from the postwar British disaster novels, through novels of thecountercultural sixties, feminist interventions, and recent revisions andcritiques. As empire fades, ideas of sexualityshift, and attitudes to nature and to the city change, so apocalyptic fictionschange. The individual subject isasserted, immolated, transcended, abandoned; individual deaths are substitutedfor mass death; death is faked or erased. The subjects and survivors of catastrophe set about re-establishingcivilization, or they abandon it, finding new ways of being and of dying; theyrespond to it when it comes from outside, as an invasion, or they are immersedin it, as it shifts from being an event to being a condition. They flee the city for the country, or acceptthat they must draw on the energies of the world city in order to survive. The book includes detailed discussion of novels by H. G. Wells, George M. Stewart, Nevil Shute, JohnWyndham, Arthur C. Clarke, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Doris Lessing, AngelaCarter, Anna Kavan, Arno Schmidt, Anthony Burgess, Ursula K. Le Guin, TomPerrotta, Douglas Coupland, Don DeLillo, China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, andKim Stanley Robinson.