George Slusser – författare

Gregory Benford is perhaps best known as the author of Benford''s law of controversy: "Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available." That maxim is a quotation from Timescape, Benford''s Nebula and Campbell Award-winning 1980 novel, which established his work as an exemplar of "hard science fiction," dedicated to working out the consequences of modern science rather than substituting pseudoscience for fantasy.

Like many other current science fiction writers, Benford has tackled the major genres: space travel, time travel, technology running amok, prolonged longevity, searing apocalyptic cosmic events, and alien life, which he theorizes to be more likely viral than intelligent. An astrophysicist by training and profession, Benford has published more than twenty novels, over one hundred short stories, some fifty essays, and myriad articles that display both his scientific rigor as well as a recognition of literary traditions.

In this study, George Slusser explores the extraordinary, seemingly inexhaustible display of creative energy in Gregory Benford''s life and work. Presenting Benford''s ideas on science and the writing of science fiction, the volume addresses the writer''s literary production and his place in contemporary science fiction. By identifying direct sources and making parallels with other works and writers, Slusser reveals the vast scope of Benford''s knowledge, both of literature and of the major scientific and philosophical issues of our time. Slusser also discusses Benford''s numerous scientific articles and nonfiction books and includes a new interview with Benford.

Science fiction occupies a peculiar place in the academic study of literature. For decades, scholars have looked at science fiction with disdain and have criticized it for being inferior to other types of literature. But despite the sentiments of these traditionalists, many works of science fiction engage recognized canonical texts, such as the Odyssey, and many traditionally canonical works contain elements of science fiction. More recently, the canon has been subject to revision, as scholars have deliberately sought to include works that reflect diversity and have participated in the serious study of popular culture. But these attempts to create a more inclusive canon have nonetheless continued to marginalize science fiction. This book examines the treatment of science fiction within the academy.The expert contributors to this volume explore a wide range of topics related to the place of science fiction in literary studies. These include academic attitudes toward science fiction, the role of journals and cultural gatekeepers in canon formation, and the marginalization of specific works and authors by literary critics. In addition, the volume gives special attention to multicultural and feminist concerns. In discussing these topics, the book sheds considerable light on much broader issues related to the politics of literary studies and academic inquiry.

With our lives firmly controlled by the steady pace of time, humans have yearned for ways to escape its constraints, and authors have responded with narratives about traveling far into the past or future, reversing the flow of time, or creating alternate universes where Napoleon was triumphant at Waterloo or the South won the Civil War. Writers ranging from Dante and Lewis Carroll to Philip K. Dick and Martin Amis have probed into the workings of time, and an overwhelming desire to master time reverberates throughout popular culture. This book considers how imaginative works involving time and time travel reflect ongoing scientific concerns and examine the human condition.The scope of the volume is unusually wide, covering such topics as Dante, the major novels of the 19th century, and stories and films of the 1990s. The book concludes with a lengthy bibliography of short stories and novels, films and television programs, and nonfiction works that feature time travel or speculations about time. With a roster of contributors that includes several of the field's major scholars, this book offers many new insights into this fascinating subject.

A pioneering scholarly examination of the rich and fascinating fields of science fiction and fantasy art, this book stimulates scholarly interest in these areas by offering both surveys of the entire history of these traditions and focused examinations of particular genres and artists. In contrast to existing studies of science fiction and fantasy art, this volume argues that the subject needs to be explored within different contexts, such as literary history, art history, and cultural history. In addition, it maintains that certain trends should be followed across the field, such as art displaying recurring iconic images and art related to particular subgenres.The volume places special emphasis on studies that connect science fiction and fantasy artists to the authors and works they have illustrated. The contributors include several internationally recognized and award-winning science fiction writers and scholars. In addition to its historical surveys, the book provides detailed examinations of space art, representative artists Richard M. Powers and Frank Frazetta, and the major illustrators of noted children's author Margaret Wise Brown and famed fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien.

With our lives firmly controlled by the steady pace of time, humans have yearned for ways to escape its constraints, and authors have responded with narratives about traveling far into the past or future, reversing the flow of time, or creating alternate universes where Napoleon was triumphant at Waterloo or the South won the Civil War. Writers ranging from Dante and Lewis Carroll to Philip K. Dick and Martin Amis have probed into the workings of time, and an overwhelming desire to master time reverberates throughout popular culture. This book considers how imaginative works involving time and time travel reflect ongoing scientific concerns and examine the human condition.The scope of the volume is unusually wide, covering such topics as Dante, the major novels of the 19th century, and stories and films of the 1990s. The book concludes with a lengthy bibliography of short stories and novels, films and television programs, and nonfiction works that feature time travel or speculations about time. With a roster of contributors that includes several of the field's major scholars, this book offers many new insights into this fascinating subject.

Speculations about new medical advances have been a crucial aspect of science fiction since its origins in the 19th century, when such novels as Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau provided powerful mythic images of doctors with godlike abilities to create and transform human life. This book is the first full-length study of the speculative literature of medicine, with contributions by two science fiction novelists and several noted scholars. Chapters examine how science fiction stories have commented on and influenced the medical establishments of the past and present. But the volume also considers the strangely marginalized status of medical science fiction, concluding that the doctor's traditional focus on maintaining the health of the human body conflicts at a fundamental level with the genre's desire to transcend the human body.The first section provides broad surveys of the history of medical science fiction, ranging from 19th-century classics to major films of the 1990s. The second offers detailed examinations of important texts and series, including Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, James White's Sector General stories, the Alien films, and the Terminator films. A concluding bibliography lists more than 500 science fiction and fantasy novels, stories, films, and television programs involving disease and medicine as well as relevant nonfiction works and critical studies.

Science fiction occupies a peculiar place in the academic study of literature. For decades, scholars have looked at science fiction with disdain and have criticized it for being inferior to other types of literature. But despite the sentiments of these traditionalists, many works of science fiction engage recognized canonical texts, such as the Odyssey, and many traditionally canonical works contain elements of science fiction. More recently, the canon has been subject to revision, as scholars have deliberately sought to include works that reflect diversity and have participated in the serious study of popular culture. But these attempts to create a more inclusive canon have nonetheless continued to marginalize science fiction. This book examines the treatment of science fiction within the academy.The expert contributors to this volume explore a wide range of topics related to the place of science fiction in literary studies. These include academic attitudes toward science fiction, the role of journals and cultural gatekeepers in canon formation, and the marginalization of specific works and authors by literary critics. In addition, the volume gives special attention to multicultural and feminist concerns. In discussing these topics, the book sheds considerable light on much broader issues related to the politics of literary studies and academic inquiry.

Essays in this volume demonstrate how science fiction can serve as a bridge between the sciences and the humanities. The essays show how early writers like Dante and Mary Shelley revealed a gradual shift toward a genuine understanding of science; how H.G. Wells first showed the possibilities of combining scientific and humanistic perspectives; how writers influenced by Gernsback's ideas, like Isaac Asimov, illustrated the ways that literature could interact with science and assist in its progress; and how more recent writers offer critiques of science and its practitioners.

The planet Mars has always maintained a strong grip on the human imagination. These 17 wide-ranging essays explore the study of Mars through history and the ways in which Mars has figured in literature, the arts and popular culture. Topics covered include the role of scientific discovery in the development of science fiction as a genre and the ways in which science fiction and popular discourse have, in turn, influenced science; the extent of life in the solar system; and the presence of Mars in the work of popular writers such as Philip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury.

Will novels and stories be relevant in the next millennium, when the boundaries between illusion and reality, and observer and observed, may dissipate in a whirl of images, signals and data? This essay collection divines the prospects of fiction in the information age by examining cyberpunk literature. A movement less than a decade old, cyberpunk is driven by deep concerns about society, ethics, and new technology and has been defined as the literature of the first generation of science-fiction writers actually to live in a science-fiction world.These essays were first presented at the 1989 annual J. Lloyd Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, the field's most prestigious international gathering. They address concerns common not only to cyberpunk and traditional science-fiction scholars, critics, and writers but to their counterparts outside the genre as well. Interdisciplinary in perspective, the essays consider the origins of cyberpunk, the appropriation of its conventions by the mass media, the literature's paradoxical retrogressive/iconoclastic nature, cyberpunk's affinities to and deviations from both traditional science fiction and postmodernist literature, the parameters and components of the cyberpunk canon, and the movement's future course.Some essays are theoretical, but all are grounded in works familiar to serious science-fiction readers: Neuromancer, Frontera, Deserted Cities of the Heart, Islands in the Net, Great Sky River, the Mirrorshades anthology, and others; cyberpunk TV and cinema like the Max Headroom programs, Blade Runner, and Tron; and precursory literature, including Frankenstein, Le Roman de l'avenir, Ralph I24C 41 +, and A Clockwork Orange. Useful for its views on a volatile science-fiction subgenre, Fiction 2000 is also valuable for what it tells us about the fate of mainstream literature.

This collection of fifteen original essays offers new perspectives on armed conflict as a central aspect of science fiction and fantasy writing. Looking past the superficial conventions associated with ray guns and aliens, swords and sorcerers, the contributors show how writers in the genre today are not so much imagining war more fully as they are completely re-imagining it. Science fiction and fantasy writing is no longer mired in epic or chivalric models but is responding to new and more complex "real-world" motivations for armed aggression: advances in weaponry, shifts in the theaters of war, and changes in battlefield conditions.Most of the papers were presented at the annual J. Lloyd Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, the field's most prestigious international gathering. The trend throughout the book is away from critical interest in stories of spatial or territorial conquest and toward works that deal with topics related to wars of temporal logistics and the internationalization of the combat zone, including urban street violence, gender conflicts, and resistance to runaway technology. The essays range from studies of the semantics and linguistics of warfare in science fiction to a critique of Osip Senkovsky's Fantastic Journeys of Baron Brambeus; from writer Joe Haldeman's assessment of the impact of his Vietnam experiences on his fiction to inquiries into a shared author/reader agenda in novels concerning potential mass destruction, including Stephen King's Dead Zone and M. J. Engh's Arslan. The collection also charts new directions in writing, such as the anti-apocalyptic science fiction of Samuel R. Delany, and embraces new modes of presentation, particularly computer animation and the bande dessinee, or illustrated narrative, as exemplified by French novelist Phillippe Druillet's La Nuit. Musician Bob Marley, film actor/directors Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Lee, and the cyberpunk film classics Terminator and the Road Warrior series are among other topics discussed.Together, the essays reinforce the editors' contention that the true function of these fantasies and science fictions is neither nostalgia nor fancy, but analysis. The contributors treat the texts they examine as a means not of playing war games but of understanding the role of war in the present and the future.

These nineteen original essays seek to recontextualize the subject of immortality, examining its influence as an ancient human aspiration while at the same time considering new scientific advances and their impact on life and literature. Grouped in three broad categories, the essays provide key information about and concepts of immortality, examine science fiction stories and scientific research to consider the prospects and possible effects of achieving immortality, and discuss immortality and life extension as literary themes. The topics the essays focus on, as well as the perspectives of the contributors, range widely: genetics, cryonics, Marxism, Darwinism, cyberspace, feminist writing, religion, Italian science fiction, film, children's literature, video games, and comic books.

Child characters are surprisingly common in horror, fantasy, and science fiction literature and films. Children represent innocence and virtue and symbolize the classic question of fantastic literature: What is the future of the human race, and how will science and society improve or impair that future? This collection of essays explores the roles of children in the literature and film of the fantastic. The works vary in critical approach from textual analyses to psychological, historical, and gender- and ethnicity-based interpretations and draw their subject matter from contemporary and classic literary and film pieces."The Triumph of Teen Prop: Terminator II and the End of History" is a playful discussion of teen propaganda movies and social issues. "E.T. as Fairy Tale" examines how Stephen Spielberg's combination of science fiction, fantasy, and fairy tale elements blends logic and childhood magic. Howard M. Lenhoff connects mythical creatures with biology in "A Real-World Source for the 'Little People': A Comparison of Fairies to Individuals with Williams Syndrome." The literary selection ranges from Alida Allison's study of childhood in Isaac Bashevis Singer's writings to Bud Foote's interpretation of childhood roles in the characters of selected Stephen King works. Other essays consider Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, Anne Rice's The Witching Hour, and the childhood classic Peter Pan.

Acclaimed as a work of genius when first published in 1895, The Time Machine represents a revolution in storytelling. H. G. Wells's first--and greatest--novel has been recognized worldwide as a founding text of the science fiction genre and one of the most seminal narratives of the last hundred years.This collection of essays offers a series of original, penetrating, and wide-ranging perspectives on Wells's masterpiece by an international group of major Wells and science fiction scholars. The authors explore such textual topics as the narrative techniques and mythological undertones of the novel as well as its contribution to modern ideas of time and evolution and its focusing of the intellectual cross-currents of the late nineteenth century. This insightful volume captures the innovative imagination, richness, and fascinating ambiguity that resulted in a classic literary work and demonstrates that Wells's novel is both a visionary story and an unstoppable idea.

This collection of fifteen original essays offers new perspectives on armed conflict as a central aspect of science fiction and fantasy writing. Looking past the superficial conventions associated with ray guns and aliens, swords and sorcerers, the contributors show how writers in the genre today are not so much imagining war more fully as they are completely re-imagining it. Science fiction and fantasy writing is no longer mired in epic or chivalric models but is responding to new and more complex "real-world" motivations for armed aggression: advances in weaponry, shifts in the theaters of war, and changes in battlefield conditions.Most of the papers were presented at the annual J. Lloyd Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, the field's most prestigious international gathering. The trend throughout the book is away from critical interest in stories of spatial or territorial conquest and toward works that deal with topics related to wars of temporal logistics and the internationalization of the combat zone, including urban street violence, gender conflicts, and resistance to runaway technology. The essays range from studies of the semantics and linguistics of warfare in science fiction to a critique of Osip Senkovsky's Fantastic Journeys of Baron Brambeus; from writer Joe Haldeman's assessment of the impact of his Vietnam experiences on his fiction to inquiries into a shared author/reader agenda in novels concerning potential mass destruction, including Stephen King's Dead Zone and M. J. Engh's Arslan. The collection also charts new directions in writing, such as the anti-apocalyptic science fiction of Samuel R. Delany, and embraces new modes of presentation, particularly computer animation and the bande dessinee, or illustrated narrative, as exemplified by French novelist Phillippe Druillet's La Nuit. Musician Bob Marley, film actor/directors Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Lee, and the cyberpunk film classics Terminator and the Road Warrior series are among other topics discussed.Together, the essays reinforce the editors' contention that the true function of these fantasies and science fictions is neither nostalgia nor fancy, but analysis. The contributors treat the texts they examine as a means not of playing war games but of understanding the role of war in the present and the future.

These nineteen original essays seek to recontextualize the subject of immortality, examining its influence as an ancient human aspiration while at the same time considering new scientific advances and their impact on life and literature. Grouped in three broad categories, the essays provide key information about and concepts of immortality, examine science fiction stories and scientific research to consider the prospects and possible effects of achieving immortality, and discuss immortality and life extension as literary themes. The topics the essays focus on, as well as the perspectives of the contributors, range widely: genetics, cryonics, Marxism, Darwinism, cyberspace, feminist writing, religion, Italian science fiction, film, children's literature, video games, and comic books.

In what N. Katherine Hayles describes as "this enormously ambitious posthumous volume," renowned scholar George Slusser offers a definitive version of the argument about the history of science fiction that he developed throughout his career: that several important ideas and texts, routinely overlooked in other critical studies, made significant contributions to the creation of modern science fiction as it developed into a truly global literature. He explores how key thinkers like René Descartes, Benjamin Constant, Thomas DeQuincey, Guy du Maupassant, J.D. Bernal, and Ralph Waldo Emerson influenced and are reflected in twentieth-century science fiction stories from the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Poland, and Russia. The conclusion begins with Slusser’s overview of global science fiction in the twenty-first century and discusses recent developments in countries like China, Romania, and Israel. Hayles’s foreword provides a useful summation of the book’s contents, while science fiction writer Gregory Benford contributes an afterword providing a personal perspective on the life and thoughts of his longtime friend. The book was edited by Slusser’s former colleague Gary Westfahl, a distinguished scholar in his own right.

In what N. Katherine Hayles describes as "this enormously ambitious posthumous volume," renowned scholar George Slusser offers a definitive version of the argument about the history of science fiction that he developed throughout his career: that several important ideas and texts, routinely overlooked in other critical studies, made significant contributions to the creation of modern science fiction as it developed into a truly global literature. He explores how key thinkers like René Descartes, Benjamin Constant, Thomas DeQuincey, Guy du Maupassant, J.D. Bernal, and Ralph Waldo Emerson influenced and are reflected in twentieth-century science fiction stories from the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Poland, and Russia. The conclusion begins with Slusser’s overview of global science fiction in the twenty-first century and discusses recent developments in countries like China, Romania, and Israel. Hayles’s foreword provides a useful summation of the book’s contents, while science fiction writer Gregory Benford contributes an afterword providing a personal perspective on the life and thoughts of his longtime friend. The book was edited by Slusser’s former colleague Gary Westfahl, a distinguished scholar in his own right.

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