Genre Fiction and Film Companions – serie

What is Cli-Fi?Climate change fiction is a new literary phenomenon that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century in response to what may be society’s greatest challenge. Climate change is already part responsible for extreme weather events, flooding, desertification and sea level rise, leading to famine, the spread of disease, and population displacement. Cli-fi novels and films are typically set in the future, telling of disaster and its effect on humans, or they depict the present, beset by dilemmas, conflicts or conspiracies, and pointing to grave consequences. At their heart are ethical and political questions: will humankind rise to the challenge of acting collectively, in the interest of the future? What sacrifices will be necessary, and is a green dictatorship our only hope for survival as a species? Each chapter in this volume offers a way of reading a particular literary text or film, drawing attention to themes, formal features, reception, contribution to public debate, and issues for class discussion. Popular novels and films (Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capitol trilogy, Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, Ian McEwan’s Solar, and The Day after Tomorrow) are examined alongside lesser known writing (for instance J. G. Ballard’s «proto-climate change» novel The Drowned World and Antti Tuomainen’s Finnish thriller, The Healer), and films not generally thought of as being about climate change (Frozen and Take Shelter). The book, which includes an introduction tracing the emergence and influence of cli-fi, is directed towards general readers and film enthusiasts as well as teachers and students. Written in an accessible style, it fills the gap between academic studies and online blogs, offering a comprehensive look at this timely new genre.

What is Sci-Fi?Science fiction is a non-realist genre that foregrounds a sense of material plausibility, insisting that despite seeming outlandish, it is consonant with history and the laws of nature. By turns subtle and bombastic, sci-fi revels in discovery and revelation, whether through human ingenuity or world-altering paradigm shifts. The same impulse informs both the idealism of Star Trek and the existential terror of Frankenstein.Each chapter of this book examines a specific trope or theme through a different critical lens – including eco-criticism, feminism and historicism – while also providing a historical overview of the genre, from its disputed origins to the pulp era, the New Wave, and the exponential growth of Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurisms. Revered masters such as Isaac Asimov, Octavia Butler and Iain M. Banks are considered alongside newer talents, including Rebecca Roanhorse and N. K. Jemisin. Other chapters provide overviews of different media, from television (Doctor Who, Westworld) to comics/manga (2000AD, Métal Hurlant), video games (Deus Ex: Human Revolution) and theatre (Alistair McDowall’s X).Sci-Fi: A Companion not only provides an accessible introduction to sci-fi for general readers and researchers alike, but also illuminates new approaches to a familiar genre.

What are Monsters?Monsters are everywhere, from cyberbullies online to vampires onscreen: the twenty-first century is a monstrous age. The root of the word «monster» means «omen» or «warning», and if monsters frighten us, it’s because they are here to warn us about something amiss in ourselves and in our society. Humanity has given birth to these monsters, and they grow and change with us, carrying the scars of their birth with them.This collection of original and accessible essays looks at a variety of contemporary monsters from literature, film, television, music and the internet within their respective historical and cultural contexts. Beginning with a critical introduction that explores the concept of the monster in the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Jack Halberstam, Elaine Showalter and more, the book takes a broad approach to the monster, including not only classic slasher films, serial killers (Bates Motel), the living dead (Game of Thrones) and aliens (District 9), but also hyper-contemporary examples like clones (Orphan Black), cyberbullies (Cyberbully), viral outbreaks (The Strain) and celebrities (Lady Gaga). Gender and culture are especially emphasized in the volume, with essays on the role of gender and sexuality in defining the monster (AHS Apocalypse) and global monsters (Cleverman, La Llorona).This compact guide to the monster in contemporary culture will be useful to teachers, students and fans looking to expand their understanding of this important cultural figure.

What is Transmedia?The Transmedia Cultures companion demonstrates that transmedia, and indeed transmedia storytelling, are fundamental to the human experience of being in the world and creating the stories of who we are, both as individuals and communities. Transmedia is not just limited to the Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises nor narratives exclusive to new media platforms and devices, though both these areas will necessarily be discussed. Indeed, transmedia embraces a multiplicity of media platforms (old and new, online and offline), content expansion, and evolving forms of audience engagement.This collection of concise, readable essays takes a holistic approach, expanding the areas of everyday life implicated in transmedia worldbuilding and the levels of immersion that they, purposely or otherwise, create. Beginning with a comprehensive introduction and historical overview, the volume explores contemporary transmedia worlds like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Walking Dead, Life is Strange and BTS Universe as well as urgent topics such as COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and human rights on the internet. User-created worlds (Magic: A Gathering) and ones that express individual identities (Queerskins) are also of particular interest.This volume offers a fresh approach to transmedia cultures, revealing the ever-increasing levels of entanglement they have within our real lives and with those we experience in other more imaginative or creative ones, bringing into focus exactly what is at stake in the «worlds» we choose to call our own.

«Beyond the narrow application to the pop-cultural zombie, Simon Bacon’s editorial definition of the concept of being «undead» generates discussions in each chapter that creatively engage with the full agenda of critical debates in studies of horror and the gothic. With each chapter, the book unpacks the dense implications of its key concept, as it explores what it means to be undead, to determine who is and who isn’t, and how this matters. The book earns its rewards as a «Companion» in the true sense of the term since it is sure to accompany many curious and critical journeys through undead twenty-first-century culture.»(Professor Steffen Hantke, Sogang University, Seoul, author of Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America after World War II)Who are the Undead?The twenty-first century is truly the age of the undead. They are no longer just vampires or zombies, but every kind of monster that can be imagined. More so, they not only live in the alien terrain of our imaginations or nightmares but are embedded into the very nature of our existence in the neverending catastrophe of the 2000s. Featuring leading scholars such as David Punter, Roger Luckhurst, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Lorna Piatti-Farnell amongst many others, the 30 original essays in The Undead in the 21st Century: A Companion describe and explain how the various fears and anxieties we have around such things as contagion, the environment, geopolitics and even ageing give form to the multifarious undead that plague our existence and seem bent on our destruction. However, as shall be argued here, if we can recognise and understand the undead they might not be the end of humanity as we know it, but possibly a way to exist beyond it.

«We live in an age defined by toxicity. Bacon and the contributors have produced a timely, astute collection that intelligently and creatively engages and analyzes the wide panoply of trauma and poisoned discourse. Entertaining, fascinating and, honestly, terrifying, this book is paradoxically a delight and purgative to read! An antidote to the very thing it explores.» (Professor Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., author of Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema)What is Toxic?This volume provides a timely and original examination of the concept of «toxic» that today seems to inform all areas of popular culture and society. Connoting many forms of negativity, denial or disillusion, «toxic» has become central to the experience of living in the twenty-first century.Comprising twenty-nine original essays by experts in their fields, this collection offers something of a guide to how areas of toxicity often overlap and/or inform other ones. Topics as diverse as «fake news», environmental denialism, toxic nostalgia, deep fakes, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and cancel culture are covered. Studied texts include popular culture from the film Get Out (2018) to the Pussy Hat Movement, from social media «sadfishing» to governmental responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.This companion unravels the often purposely entangled narratives that are used to fuel much cultural and political populism. It serves as an important intervention into the conversations occurring around extreme partisanship and divisive views on where we might be heading and how dystopian the future will really be.

2021 Bram Stoker Awards(R) Nominee for Superior Achievement in Non-FictionFrom the short story «The Lottery» to the masterworks The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson’s popular, often bestselling works experimented with popular generic forms (melodrama, folktale, horror, the Gothic, and the Weird) to create a uniquely apocalyptic vision of America and its contradictions.With a Foreword by award-winning Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin, this collection features comprehensive critical engagement with Jackson’s works, including those that have received less scholarly attention. Among these are the novels The Road Through the Wall, The Bird’s Nest, and Hangsaman, as well as Jackson’s historical study, The Witchcraft of Salem Village. Also included are essays on Jackson’s darkly humorous collections Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, on Stephen King’s «literary friendship» with Jackson, on the little-known film adaptations Lizzie (1957) and Hosszú Alkony (Long Twilight) (1997), and the first-ever extended analysis devoted to Jackson’s unpublished satirical cartoon sketches.The collection’s five sections focus on Jackson’s style, key themes, and influence; her politics and poetics of space; her treatment of the «monstrous» mother and monstrousness of motherhood; her representations of outsiders and minorities; and moving-image adaptations of her work.

What’s in the Deep? This companion explores the myths and legends of merfolk and sea monsters to navigate our transcultural pasts and environmental presents and explain our endless fascination with the sea. More than any other time in human history, our relationship to the oceans and the creatures of the Deep has come into focus, not just as an environment to be explored, exploited and, more recently, poisoned, but as source of both our deepest anxieties and possible futures. In 31 original essays by experts in their respective fields, the Deep is brought to life, from representations of mythological sea creatures to present-day visions of the blue environment. As our place in the world and our effects upon it become increasingly contentious, The Deep offers ways in which we might re-experience and realign ourselves to the watery world that covers the majority of the earth’s surface and become part of a shared, more ecological, future.

In the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic, death has become an all too familiar feature of the early 2020s.The 21st century has in fact produced a singular historical moment with its unique intersection of popular politics, environmental extremes, globalisation and technological innovation, which has correspondingly created distinctive expressions of death, as well.This companion reveals our visions of death in the 21st century and what they say about us and the times we live in. Organised into sections on the war on terror, technology, climate change, extremism and global pandemics, the short, reader-friendly essays in this volume highlight crucial encounters with death in the contemporary period.

‘This diverse collection, edited by Gina Wisker, offers a range of fresh perspectives on Margaret Atwood, one of today’s most important authors. Spanning feminism, ecology, posthumanism, storytelling and more, it provides new analysis into her work from her early novels to recent poetry, revealing Atwood’s enduring power to challenge, inspire, and reimagine identity and survival. It is essential reading for Atwood scholars and students alike.’ – Dr Claire O’Callaghan, Loughborough University‘This companion to Atwood’s writing is an impressively wide-ranging and theoretically ambitious addition to Atwood scholarship. It engages with key texts in her oeuvre while also discussing her libretti, poetry, short stories and children’s books from a variety of critical perspectives: including biotechnologies, eco-cultural, dystopian and post-humanist approaches. In attending so fully to the ethical imperatives animating Atwood’s work, the collection also provides a fascinating genealogy of feminist engagements over the past several decades.’ – Dr Denise deCaires Narain, Emeritus Reader, University of Sussex‘A comprehensive, intellectually provocative and accessible collection. Wisker’s helpful introduction thoughtfully addresses the evolution of Atwood’s work as both literature and social commentary. The essays cover everything from music, fairy tales and feminism in Atwood’s work and reveal her as a groundbreaking writer across genres and modes. Thorough and engaging scholarship.’ – Dr Regina Hansen, Boston University For several decades Margaret Atwood has been a consistent, insightful, wry, concerned and utterly engaged voice for our varying times. Margaret Atwood: A New Companion offers new interpretations of a wide range of Atwood’s writing, including lesser discussed works like her children’s books, poetry and music. The book addresses crucial contemporary political and cultural issues, including climate change, sustainability, eco-diversity, Covid-19, Trump’s policies, surveillance, identity, gender and power. The collection shares new insights into the ever topical Alias Grace, The Handmaid’s Tale and the legacies in The Testaments. It explores and enacts themes of mourning and loss and an exuberant engagement with life in her poetry as well as her activist writing on eco-diversity and survival. The book affirms Margaret Atwood as a fount of powerful, insightful and practical knowledge about the importance of language and story in action and of carefully and deliberately choosing, speaking and sharing insights, arguments and alternative ways of imagining. A skilled weaver of words, Atwood enacts the magic of writing, speaking truth to power.

This book is the first of its kind to explore the role of aliens in popular culture from a global and multidisciplinary perspective. Space aliens are everywhere: from cinematic franchises, such as Star Wars, to bestselling novels; from religious cults to conspiracy theories; from UFO subcultures to SETI deep-space explorations. But until now, there has never been a comprehensive analysis of the role and significance of alien representations in popular culture across the globe. This book fills this gap. It discusses images of extraterrestrial intelligence in science fiction literature, cinema and video games. It addresses issues such aliens and media, the relationship between aliens and posthumanity, aliens and gender, and aliens in/as religion. Ranging from The War of the Worlds to Star Trek, and from India to Latin America, Africa to China, this collection offers a fresh look at the intriguing cultural phenomenon of our growing fascination with extraterrestrial life.

Fairies: A Companion provides a unique and unparalleled view of the ubiquity of fairies and fairy culture across the world, in its many expressions and manifestations. As well as providing historical perspectives on our belief in the fae, the companion also uniquely traces their ongoing evolution and their importance to culture in the 21st century and beyond. Including original artworks, poems and flash fiction, this collection provides an invaluable resource for scholars and non-academics alike who want to understand the richness of our connection to fairies and what they say about our past, our present and even our tomorrows.

«This volume is colossal in all senses: most obviously – at over 500 pages – in its sheer physical heft, but most importantly in its ambition, scope and achievement. It brings an unparalleled range of approaches to bear on Carroll’s neglected sequel and in doing so marks the arrival of an exciting new wave of Carrollian scholarship and enquiry. A comprehensive and illuminating companion to Looking-Glass and its author, it is also an exemplar of everything that collaborative, transdisciplinary scholarship can offer.»(Kiera Vaclavik, Professor of Children’s Literature and Childhood Culture, Queen Mary University of London)«This impeccably edited volume with its impressive assemblage of contributors addresses a diverse array of topics: the creation, illustration, translation and commercialization of the world beyond the mirror; discussions philosophical, psychological and theological; studies on logic and linguistics; and, fittingly for a nonsense classic, speculative examinations of the flora and fauna of the Looking-Glass World. This stimulating collection of essays is a timely appreciation of a literary masterwork too long overshadowed by its elder Wonderland sibling.»(Brian Sibley, Chair of The Lewis Carroll Society)«It is spring-loaded with surprises and fun, excellent writing, and engaging new ideas on a topic that has been waiting for exactly this. If we are to have the obligatory mirror imagery for talking about Looking-Glss, consider this Companion to be a disco ball, flashing with numerous facets and inviting us to get up and join the dance.»(Stephanie Lovett, Knight Letter, Vol. III/13, No. 113, Fall 2024)This book offers a truly interdisciplinary exploration of the polymathic influences that shaped Through the Looking-Glass, the lesser explored sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It explores the work’s diverse historical intellectual influences as well as its kaleidoscopic afterlives, including scholars from the history of science, logic, philosophy, theology, literature, popular and visual culture, and translation studies as well as practitioners in business, data science, writing, and visual arts. The collection also offers insights into the minds of those who adapt, pastiche, or translate the Looking-Glass with an original poem, four new Jabberwockies, and an Italian translation of Looking-Glass’s iconic poem. This collection thus encourages us to re-evaluate the intellectual scope and place in society of this work.

Weird works unsettle, decentering humanity on a cosmic scale and, at other times, breaking down the human barriers erected around race, class, gender, and sexuality. Featuring a comprehensive editors’ introduction to the Weird as a mode engaging with forms of knowledge, transcendence, and resistance, this collection offers a broad-reaching discussion of Weird fiction, film, art, and thought. Its 31 essays explore theoretical and philosophical applications of the Weird, such as Black Metal Theory, and key Weird themes and tropes such as cosmic horror, radical embodiment and sensation, dark ecological speculation, and forms of alterity. Essays are highly varied in period focus and subject matter, ranging from early Weird works by William Hope Hodgson and Conan creator Robert E. Howard, to the surrealist paintings of Leonora Carrington, to more recent works by David Lynch, Octavia Butler, and Yorgos Lanthimos.