Van Ikin – författare

Australia has long been thought of by Europeans as an exotic and mysterious land. During the nineteenth century, it was envisioned much as the moon and Mars are today: a distant and uncharted place with hidden possibilities for explorations and adventures. The continent captured the imagination of European writers in the 1800s, and with its settlement, Australia became the setting for tales of lost worlds and ancient civilizations. Australia has since developed a rich national literature, and perhaps because of its novelty and wilderness, it has inspired numerous science fiction writers. This book provides a critical survey of the history of Australian science fiction from its nineteenth century origins to the present.The volume proceeds chronologically, with an introductory section on the origins of Australian science fiction before 1925. It then turns to the rise of traditional science fiction in Australia from 1926 to 1959, with discussions of such writers as James Morgan Walsh, Norma Hemming, and Wynne Whiteford. A section on the period from 1960 to 1974 examines the growing national recognition given to such Australian science fiction writers as David Rome and Jack Wodhams, while a section on science fiction between 1975 and 1984 reviews the rise of small presses and the growth of literary criticism of the genre in Australia. A final section addresses the maturation of Australian science fiction from 1985 to 1998 with attention to Aussiecon Two. Extensive bibliographic information concludes the volume.

Science fiction loves strangeness. It relishes oddities, even when it piles on fear and dystopian loathing. The technical term for a fascination with the strange and alien is xenophilia, just as the term for a terror of the strange is xenophobia. At its core, then, science fiction is...Xeno Fiction. So science fiction seeks out the strange, roams far from home in space and time, looks with avid eagerness upon the ways of the Others, human or alien. It participates, in brilliantly lighted imagination, in their strange lives. In this second gathering from Van Ikin''s critical journal, Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature, writers of the alien are investigated with wit and insight. G. Travis Regier follows the Other into its own home, accompanying those experts in the alien, C. J. Cherry and Samuel R. Delany. In the book''s long key essay, Terry Dowling pursues the Art of Xenography as exemplified by Jack Vance''s "General Culture" novels. Three expert commentators look into Booker Prize-winner Peter Carey''s postcolonial and postmodern frolics into alternative realities. And the Xeno fictions of Isaac Asimov, Greg Egan, Mary Gentle, Ursula K. Le Guin, Naomi Mitchison, Neal Stephenson, and Stanley Weinbaum are read as their road maps into the strange. Eleven revealing essays on speculative fiction by some of the best critics in the field.