D. Harlan Wilson - Böcker

Prophetic short stories and apocalyptic novels like The Crystal World made J. G. Ballard a foundational figure in the British New Wave. Rejecting the science fiction of rockets and aliens, he explored an inner space of humanity informed by psychiatry and biology and shaped by surrealism. Later in his career, Ballard's combustible plots and violent imagery spurred controversy--even legal action--while his autobiographical 1984 war novel Empire of the Sun brought him fame. D. Harlan Wilson offers the first career-spanning analysis of an author who helped steer SF in new, if startling, directions. Here was a writer committed to moral ambiguity, one who drowned the world and erected a London high-rise doomed to descend into savagery--and coolly picked apart the characters trapped within each story. Wilson also examines Ballard's methods, his influence on cyberpunk, and the ways his fiction operates within the sphere of our larger culture and within SF itself.

Prophetic short stories and apocalyptic novels like The Crystal World made J. G. Ballard a foundational figure in the British New Wave. Rejecting the science fiction of rockets and aliens, he explored an inner space of humanity informed by psychiatry and biology and shaped by surrealism. Later in his career, Ballard's combustible plots and violent imagery spurred controversy--even legal action--while his autobiographical 1984 war novel Empire of the Sun brought him fame. D. Harlan Wilson offers the first career-spanning analysis of an author who helped steer SF in new, if startling, directions. Here was a writer committed to moral ambiguity, one who drowned the world and erected a London high-rise doomed to descend into savagery--and coolly picked apart the characters trapped within each story. Wilson also examines Ballard's methods, his influence on cyberpunk, and the ways his fiction operates within the sphere of our larger culture and within SF itself.

Auto/biographical literature has been theorized with metaphors that reflect its inherent instability as a form of truth-telling. The best auto/biographies exhibit a metanarrational awareness of this instability and favor the art of writing over the alleged “truth” of a life. The autobiographical nature of Philip K. Dick's novels and stories has spawned a sizable body of biographical texts, many of which are creative performances that give primacy to the artistic impulse. Most critical biographies about Dick, on the other hand, do not account for this dynamic; instead, they read the fiction as a symptom of the author’s notorious drug use and schizoid tendencies. Bolstered by scholarship on Auto/Biography and Science Fiction Studies as well as psychoanalytic theory, The Auto/Biographies of Philip K. Dick: Infinite Regressions surveys and analyzes the proliferation of "biotexts" written about the science-fiction icon, who consistently eroded the boundary between lived and imagined experience, turning his own precarious sense of reality into the generative engine for his fiction and the biographical mythology that continues to orbit his work.

Charting new territory in filmmaking technologies and Steven Spielberg’s oeuvre, MinorityReport (2002) portrays a dystopian near-future that comments on our increasingly science-fictional world and pays homage to the history of SF cinema. In this comprehensive monograph, D. Harlan Wilson recounts the film's inception, production, reception, and afterlife since its release in 2002 while depicting it as a symptom of contemporary media pathology, post-9/11 paranoia, consumer-capitalist aggression, religious mania, and above all, the screen culture that has come to define the human condition. At the same time, Wilson explores the many self-reflexive flourishes that render the movie a commentary on Spielberg’s style and the precession of the SF genre.

Charting new territory in filmmaking technologies and Steven Spielberg’s oeuvre, MinorityReport (2002) portrays a dystopian near-future that comments on our increasingly science-fictional world and pays homage to the history of SF cinema. In this comprehensive monograph, D. Harlan Wilson recounts the film's inception, production, reception, and afterlife since its release in 2002 while depicting it as a symptom of contemporary media pathology, post-9/11 paranoia, consumer-capitalist aggression, religious mania, and above all, the screen culture that has come to define the human condition. At the same time, Wilson explores the many self-reflexive flourishes that render the movie a commentary on Spielberg’s style and the precession of the SF genre.

Wilson’s study depicts Bester as an SF insider as much as an outlier, writing in the spirit of the genre but breaking with the fixation on hard science in favor of psychological interiority, literary experimentation, and adult themes.

Wilson’s study depicts Bester as an SF insider as much as an outlier, writing in the spirit of the genre but breaking with the fixation on hard science in favor of psychological interiority, literary experimentation, and adult themes.