Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies - Böcker

In 1959, at the age of 22, Joanna Russ published her first science fiction story, “Nor Custom Stale,” in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. In the forty-five years since, Russ has continued to write some of the most popular, creative, and important novels and stories in science fiction. She was a central figure, along with contemporaries Ursula K. Le Guin and James Tiptree, in revolutionizing science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, and her 1970 novel The Female Man is widely regarded as one of the most successful and influential depictions of a feminist utopia in the entire genre. The Country You Have Never Seen gathers Joanna Russ’s most important essays and reviews, revealing the vital part she played over the years in the never-ending conversation among writers and fans about the roles, boundaries, and potential of science fiction. Spanning her entire career, the collection shines a light on Russ’s role in the development of new wave science fiction and feminist science fiction, while at the same time providing fascinating insight into her own development as a writer.

H. G. Wells, the inventor of the concept of the time machine and the phrase ‘the Shape of Things to Come’ described his life’s work as one of ‘critical anticipation’. Shadows of the Future identifies this attempt to imagine possible futures as the unifying principle behind Wells’s diverse and sometimes wayward literary career. Described by John Middleton Murry as ‘the last prophet of bourgeois Europe’, he was also its first futurologist.

The Mechanics of Wonder will arouse debate and force the questioning of presuppositions. No other book so closely examines the origins and development of the idea of science fiction, and it will stand among a small number of crucial texts with which every science fiction scholar or prospective science fiction scholar will have to read.

In this major study of the work of Joanna Russ, Jeanne Cortiel gives a clear introduction to the major feminist issues relevant to Russ’s work and assesses its development. The book will be especially valuable for students of SF and feminist SF, especially in its concern with the function of woman-based intertextuality. Although Cortiel deals principally with Russ’s novels, she also examines her short stories, and the focus on critically neglected texts is a particularly valuable feature of the study.

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.

In the second of a series of anthologies on future war stories, the leading specialist in the field presents a selection of prophetic tales about the conflict-to-come between the British and the Germans, tales which had immense influence in the quarter-century before the First World War. An extensive range of contemporary illustrations is included.

This is the second of three volumes which chart the history of the science fiction magazine from the earliest days to the present. The first volume Time Machines traced the development of the sf magazine from its earliest days and the creation of the first specialist magazine, Amazing Stories. Transformations takes up the story to reveal a turbulent period that was to witness the extraordinary rise and fall and rise again of science. Britain’s foremost sf historian, Mike Ashley charts the sf boom years in the wake of the nuclear age that was to see the ‘The Golden Age’ of Science Fiction with the emergence of magazines such as Galaxy, Startling Stories and Fantastic, as well as authors like Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick and Frank Herbert . He then goes on to explore the bust years of 1954-1960 followed by the renaissance in the 1960s led by the new wave of British authors like Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard and the rise in interest of fantasy fiction, encouraged by Lord of the Rings and the Conan books of Robert E. Howard. Transformations concludes with an examination of the new found interest in sf magazines during the late 1960s and the incredibly influential roles Star Treck , the film 2001: A Space Odyssey and, above all, the first manned Moon landing played in transforming the sf magazine.

This new study of the fiction of Gene Wolfe, one of the most influential contemporary American science fiction writers, offers a major reinterpretation of Gene Wolfe’s four-volume The Book of the New Sun and its sequel The Urth of the New Sun. After exposing the concealed story at the heart of Wolfe’s magnum opus, Wright adopts a variety of approaches to establish that Wolfe is the designer of an intricate textual labyrinth intended to extend his thematic preoccupations with subjectivity, the unreliability of memory, the manipulation of individuals by social and political systems, and the psychological potency of myth, faith and symbolism into the reading experience.

This is the first theoretically informed book on Ballard, reading his work not only within the science fiction genre, but also connecting it to issues of popular culture and legitimisation, postmodernism and the legacy of the avant-garde. Aiming where necessary to contextualise Ballard’s fiction within the science fiction genre, Luckhurst’s study also travels over many terrains more or less foreign to SF: existentialism, Surrealism, Pop Art, psychoanalysis, ethnologies of contemporary modernity, and the theory of autobiography.

Originally conceived as atrilogy, this is the first of five volumes that chart the history of thescience fiction magazine from the earliest days to the present. This firstvolume looks at the exuberant years of the pulp magazines. It traces the growth and development of the science fiction magazines from when Hugo Gernsback launched the very first, Amazing Stories, in 1926 through to the birth of the atomic age and the death of the pulps in the early 1950s. These were the days of the youth of science fiction, when it was brash, raw and exciting: the days of the first great space operas by Edward Elmer Smith and Edmond Hamilton, through the cosmic thought variants by Murray Leinster, Jack Williamson and others to the early 1940s when John W. Campbell at Astounding did his best to nurture the infant genre into adulthood. Under him such major names as Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A. E. van Vogt and Theodore Sturgeon emerged who, along with other such new talents as Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, helped create modern science fiction. For over forty years magazines were at the heart of science fiction and this book considers how the magazines, and their publishers, editors and authors influenced the growth and perception of this fascinating genre.

Originally conceived as atrilogy, this is the first of five volumes that chart the history of thescience fiction magazine from the earliest days to the present. This firstvolume looks at the exuberant years of the pulp magazines. It traces the growth and development of the science fiction magazines from when Hugo Gernsback launched the very first, Amazing Stories, in 1926 through to the birth of the atomic age and the death of the pulps in the early 1950s. These were the days of the youth of science fiction, when it was brash, raw and exciting: the days of the first great space operas by Edward Elmer Smith and Edmond Hamilton, through the cosmic thought variants by Murray Leinster, Jack Williamson and others to the early 1940s when John W. Campbell at Astounding did his best to nurture the infant genre into adulthood. Under him such major names as Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A. E. van Vogt and Theodore Sturgeon emerged who, along with other such new talents as Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, helped create modern science fiction. For over forty years magazines were at the heart of science fiction and this book considers how the magazines, and their publishers, editors and authors influenced the growth and perception of this fascinating genre.

This timely book explores what might be termed ‘Gothic science fiction’ from 1980 to 2010. This designation may at first appear contradictory, as the Gothic’s connotations of the irrational and supernatural seem to conflict with the rational foundations of science fiction. However, this collection demonstrates that the two categories in fact overlap and intersect in creatively and critically fruitful ways. Understanding texts of this period by means of this hybrid category allows a fresh examination of their engagement with the dramatic socio-economic changes – in communication technology, medical science, globalization, and global politics – that have transformed the way we live, and for which Gothic science fiction texts provide compelling narrative modes.The essays in this collection reflect the current willingness among researchers to explore interpretations across genre, form, and discipline, as well as revealing a buoyant field of research in contemporary Gothic and science fiction studies. The collection ranges across narrative media (including literature, film, graphic novels and trading card games) and across genres, taking in horror, science fiction, the Gothic, the New Weird and more. The essays explore questions of genre, medical science, gender, biopower and capitalism, demonstrating the ways in which Gothic science fiction texts stage contemporary concerns around power, anxiety, resistance and capital.

Stanislaw Lem died on 26 March, 2006 but in this book his voice can be heard afresh for the benefit of all those who believe that, with his passing, a quintessential element of twentieth-century artistic and intellectual heritage has come to an end.Peter Swirski’s edited and annotated translation of Lem’s fifteen-year correspondence with his principal American translator offers an unparalleled testimony to the raw intellectual powers, smouldering literary passions, and abiding personal concerns from the central period of the writer’s life and career. Even as they reposition Lem as a consummate litterateur and an intellectual oracle, the letters reveal tantalizing glimpses of the man behind the giant. Fighting depression, at times hitting the bottle, plagued by ill health, obsessed by his legacy, driven to distraction by lack of appreciation in the United States, Lem the arch-rationalist emerges here at his most human, vulnerable, and... likeable.

The Liverpool Companion to World Science Fiction Film offers critical insights into SF far beyond the more common Anglo-American narratives. Contributors take either a national or transnational approach, and stretch the geographic and conceptual boundaries of science fiction cinema. Recurrent themes include genre discussions, engagement with Hollywood, and the international subgenre of science fiction parody. Chapters contain a variety of perspectives and styles: from gender and race studies, to the eco-critical, and the post-colonial; from the avant-garde, to socialist realism, and the Hammer film.Edited by Sonja Fritzsche, the collection contains fourteen chapters written by specialists from around the world. Film traditions represented include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Cameroon, China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. There is also a chapter on digital shorts.From the dinosaur myth that became Godzilla to Brazilian science fiction comedy, from China’s Death Ray to Kenya’s Pumzi, this book will broaden the horizons of scholars and students of science fiction.

Locating Science Fiction is a ground breaking and potentially paradigm-shifting book, a major intervention into contemporary theoretical debates about SF.Academic literary criticism has tended to locate SF primarily in relation to the older genre of utopia; fan criticism primarily in relation to fantasy and SF in other media, especially film and television; popular fiction studies primarily in relation to other contemporary genres such as the romance and the thriller. This bold new synthesis relocates SF in relation to each of these other genres and media and also to the historical and geographic contexts of its emergence and development.Locating Science Fiction effects a series of vital shifts in the way SF theory and criticism has conceptualised its subject, away from prescriptively abstract dialectics of cognition and estrangement and towards the empirically grounded understanding of what is actually a messy amalgam of texts, practices and artefacts. Inspired by Raymond Williams's cultural materialism, Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of culture and Franco Moretti's application of world systems theory to literary studies, Locating Science Fiction draws on the disciplinary competences of Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Critical Theory and Sociology to produce a powerfully persuasive mode of analysis, engagement and argument.

Science fiction produced in the 1970s has long been undervalued, dismissed by Bruce Sterling as “confused, self-involved, and stale.” The New Wave was all but over and Cyberpunk had yet to arrive. The decade polarised sf – on the one hand it aspired to be a serious form, addressing issues such as race, Vietnam, feminism, ecology and sexuality, on the other hand it broke box office records with Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien and Superman: The Movie. Across the political spectrum, writers perceived a series of invisible enemies: radicals addressed the ideological structures of racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, pollution and capitalism and the possibility of new social structures, whereas conservatives feared the gains made by the civil rights movement, feminism, gay liberation, independence movements, ecology and Marxism and the perceived threats to the nuclear family. Sf would never be the same again. Beginning with chapters on the First sf and New Wave authors who published during the 1970s, Solar Flares examines the ways in which the genre confronted a new epoch and its own history, including the rise of fantasy, the sf blockbuster, children’s sf, pseudoscience and postmodernism. It explores significant figures such as Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler. From Larry Niven’s Ringworld to Thomas M. Disch’s On Wings of Song, from The Andromeda Strain to Flash Gordon and from Doctor Who to Buck Rogers, this book reclaims seventies sf writing, film and television – alongside music and architecture – as a crucial period in the history of science fiction.

Irish Science Fiction revisits a critical paradigm that has often been overlooked or dismissed by science fiction scholars – namely, that science fiction can be understood in terms of myth. Science fiction springs from pseudo-science rather than ‘proper’ science, because pseudo-science is more easily converted into narrative; in this book it is argued that different cultures produce distinct pseudo-sciences, and thus, unique science fiction traditions. Fennell's innovative framework is used to examine Irish science fiction from the 1850s to the present day, covering material written both in Irish and in English. Considering science fiction novels and short stories in their historical context, Irish Science Fiction analyses a body of literature that has largely been ignored by Irish literature researchers. This is the first book to focus exclusively on Irish science fiction, and the first to consider Irish-language stories and novels alongside works published in English.

Lemography is a unique collection of critical essays on Stanislaw Lem, writer and philosopher. Its aim is to introduce aspects of his work hitherto unknown or neglected by scholarship and evaluate his influence on twentieth-century literature and culture—and beyond. The book’s uniqueness is enhanced by the global makeup of the contributors who hail from Canada, United States, Great Britain, Germany, Croatia, Poland, Sweden and Finland. In all cases, these are scholars and translators who for many years have pursued, and in some cases defined, Lem scholarship. Rather than study Lem as a science fiction writer, each essay commands a wider sphere of reference in order to appraise Lem’s literary and philosophical contributions. Each focuses on a different novel (or set of novels) from the writer’s opus, examining them critically. Between them, the essays cover virtually all phases of Lem’s multidimensional career, ensuring comprehensive coverage.

Although the self-definition of Surrealism and the initial defining of science fiction as a genre both took place in the 1920s and the links between the two are manifest, no full study has appeared till now on Surrealism and SF. Across ten original essays, Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics looks at how the Surrealist movement in France and the USA used, informed, contributed to, and criticised SF from that moment, whilst including discussion of the related genre of comics. Among its aims are a reassessment of Jules Verne in the light of Surrealism and an analysis of the debate in the 1950s on the ‘new’ Anglo-American literature arriving in France. This received, in fact, a mixed reception from the Surrealists of that decade even though writers and intellectuals close to the movement in the 1920s were directly responsible for its success. The book includes further essays on the subsequent impact of Surrealism on SF novelists J.G. Ballard and Alan Burns, and features essays that argue for Salvador Dalí’s closeness to SF in the 1960s and his disagreement with the earlier scientific romance defined by Verne. The chapters that bring in comics range from theoretical discussions of the relation between the original comic strips of Rodolphe Töpffer and the key Surrealist technique of automatism, used in art and writing, through the cybernetic implications of the proto-SF Surrealist ciné-roman ‘M. Wzz…’ of 1929, which has never discussed in any detail before, to the 1948 Vache paintings by René Magritte, inspired by Louis Forton’s strip Les Pieds nickelés. This pioneering set of essays shows how Surrealism from the 1920s to the 1970s did not just receive and adapt SF but impacted the genre in its later manifestations.

Critical discussion of cult cinema has often noted its tendency to straddle or ignore boundaries, to pull together different sets of conventions, narrative formulas, or character types for the almost surreal pleasure to be found in their sudden juxtapositions or narrative combination. With its own boundary-blurring nature—as both science and fiction, reality and fantasy—science fiction has played a key role in such cinematic cult formation. This volume examines that largely unexplored relationship, looking at how the sf film’s own double nature neatly matches up with a persistent double vision common to the cult film. It does so by bringing together an international array of scholars to address key questions about the intersections of sf and cult cinema: how different genre elements, directors, and stars contribute to cult formation; what role fan activities, including “con” participation, play in cult development; and how the occulted or “bad” sf cult film works. The volume pursues these questions by addressing a variety of such sf cult works, including Robot Monster (1953), Zardoz (1974), A Boy and His Dog (1975), Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), Space Truckers (1996), Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004), and Iron Sky (2012). What these essays afford is a revealing vision of both the sf aspects of much cult film activity and the cultish aspects of the whole sf genre.

Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future brings a welter of unknown elements of Lem’s life, career, and literary legacy to light. Part One traces the context of his cultural influence, telling the story of one of the greatest writers and thinkers of the century. It includes a comprehensive critical overview of Lem’s literary and philosophical oeuvre which comprises not only the classics like Solaris, but his untranslated first novels, realistic prose, experimental works, volumes of nonfiction, latter-day metafiction, as well as the final twenty years of polemics and essays.The critical and interpretive Part Two examines a range of Lem’s novels with a view to examining the intellectual vistas they open up before us. It focuses on several of Lem’s major but less studied books. “Game, Set, Lem” uses game theory to shed light on his arguably most surreal novel, the Kafkaesque and claustrophobic Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961). “Betrization Is the Worst Solution… Except for All Others” takes a close look at the quasi-utopia of Return From the Stars (1961) and at the concept of ethical cleansing and mandatory de-aggression. “Errare Humanum Est” focuses on the popular science thriller The Invincible (1964) in the context of evolution. “A Beachbook for Intellectuals” is a critical fugue on Lem’s medical thriller cum crime mystery, The Chain of Chance (1976).Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future closes with a two-part coda. “Fiasco” recapitulates and reflects on the literary and cognitive themes of Lem’s farewell novel, and “Happy End of the World!” reviews The Blink of an Eye, Lem’s farewell book of analyses and prognoses from the cusp of our millennium.

Mike Ashley's acclaimed history of science-fiction magazines comes to the 1980s with Science Fiction Rebels: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1981 to 1990. This volume charts a significant revolution throughout science fiction, much of which was driven by the alternative press, and by new editors at the leading magazines. The period saw the emergence of the cyberpunk movement, and the drive for what David Hartwell called 'The Hard SF Renaissance', which was driven from within Britain. Ashley plots the rise of many new authors in both strands: William Gibson, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, John Kessel, Pat Cadigan and Rudy Rucker in cyberpunk, and Stephen Baxter, Alistair Reynolds, Peter Hamilton, Neal Asher and Robert Reed in hard sf. He also shows how the alternative magazines looked to support each other through alliances, which allowed them to share and develop ideas as science fiction evolved.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.The fifteen essays collected in Hard Reading argue, first, that science fiction has its own internal rhetoric, relying on devices such as neologism, dialogism, semantic shifts, the use of unreliable narrators. It is a “high-information” genre which does not follow the Flaubertian ideal of le mot juste, “the right word”, preferring le mot imprévisible, “the unpredictable word”. Both ideals shun the facilior lectio, the “easy reading”, but for different reasons and with different effects.The essays argue further that science fiction derives much of its energy from engagement with vital intellectual issues in the “soft sciences”, especially history, anthropology, the study of different cultures, with a strong bearing on politics. Both the rhetoric and the issues deserve to be taken much more seriously than they have been in academia, and in the wider world.Each essay is further prefaced by an autobiographical introduction. These explain how the essays came to be written and in what ways they (often) proved controversial. They, and the autobiographical introduction to the whole book, create between them a memoir of what it was like to be a committed fan, from teenage years, and also an academic struggling to find a place, at a time when a declared interest in science fiction and fantasy was the kiss of death for a career in the humanities.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.This book explores the emergence and development of terraforming in science fiction from H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) to James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar (2009). Terraforming is the process of making other worlds habitable for human life. Its counterpart on Earth – geoengineering – has begun to receive serious consideration as a way to address the effects of climate change. This book asks how science fiction has imagined the ways we shape both our world and other planets and how stories of terraforming reflect on science, society and environmentalism. It traces the growth of the motif of terraforming in stories by such writers as H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon in the UK, American pulp science fiction by Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, the counter cultural novels of Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin and Ernest Callenbach, and Pamela Sargent’s Venus trilogy, Frederick Turner’s epic poem of terraforming, Genesis, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s acclaimed Mars trilogy. It explores terraforming as a nexus for environmental philosophy, the pastoral, ecology, the Gaia hypothesis, the politics of colonisation and habitation, tradition and memory. This book shows how contemporary environmental awareness and our understanding of climate change is influenced by science fiction, and how terraforming in particular has offered scientists, philosophers, and many other readers a motif to aid in thinking in complex ways about the human impact on planetary environments. Amidst contemporary anxieties about climate change, terraforming offers an important vantage from which to consider the ways humankind shapes and is shaped by their world.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.Biopunk Dystopias contends that we find ourselves at a historical nexus, defined by the rise of biology as the driving force of scientific progress, a strongly grown mainstream attention given to genetic engineering in the wake of the Human Genome Project (1990-2003), the changing sociological view of a liquid modern society, and shifting discourses on the posthuman, including a critical posthumanism that decenters the privileged subject of humanism. The book argues that this historical nexus produces a specific cultural formation in the form of "biopunk", a subgenre evolved from the cyberpunk of the 1980s. The analysis deals with dystopian science fiction artifacts of different media from the year 2000 onwards that project a posthuman intervention into contemporary socio-political discourse based in liquid modernity in the cultural formation of biopunk. Biopunk makes use of current posthumanist conceptions in order to criticize contemporary reality as already dystopian, warning that a future will only get worse, and that society needs to reverse its path, or else destroy all life on this planet. As Rosi Braidotti argues, "there is a posthuman agreement that contemporary science and biotechnologies affect the very fibre and structure of the living and have altered dramatically our understanding of what counts as the basic frame of reference for the human today". The proposed book analyzes this alteration as directors, creators, authors, and artists from the field of science fiction extrapolate it from current trends.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Well-known in science fiction for tomb-raiding and mummy-wrangling, the archaeologist has been a rich source for imagining ‘strange new worlds’ from ‘strange old worlds.’ But more than a well-spring for SF scenarios, the genre’s archaeological imaginary invites us to consider the ideological implications of digging up the past buried in the future. A cultural study of an array of very popular, though often critically-neglected, North American SF film and television texts–running the gamut of telefilms, pseudo-documentaries, teen serial drama and Hollywood blockbusters–Excavating the Future explores the popular archaeological imagination and the political uses to which it is being employed by the U.S. state and its adversaries. By treating SF texts as documents of archaeological experience circulating within and between scientific and popular culture communities and media, Excavating the Future develops critical strategies for analyzing SF film and television’s critical and adaptive responses to post 9/11 geopolitical concerns about the war on terror, homeland security, the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq, and the ongoing fight against ISIS.

Sport and Monstrosity in Science Fiction examines fantastic representations of sport in science fiction, both cataloguing this almost entirely unexamined literary tradition and arguing that the reason for its neglect reflects a more widespread social suspicion of the athletic body as monstrous. Combining scholarship of monstrosity with a biopolitically focused philosophy of embodiment, this work plumbs the depths of our abjection of the athletic body and challenges us to reconsider sport as an intersectional space. In this latter endeavour it contradicts the image presented by both the most dystopian films such as Deathrace and Rollerball as well as social criticism of sport that limits its focus to an essentially violent masculinity. The book traces an alternative tradition of sport sf through authors as diverse as Arthur C. Clarke, Steven Barnes, and Joan Slonczewski, exploring the way the intersectional categories of gender, race, and age in these works are negotiated in, for example, a solar wind sailing race or futuristic anti-gravity boxing. These complex athletic bodies display the social mobility that sport allows and challenge us to acknowledge our own monstrously animal bodies and our place in a “cycle of living and dying.”

Winner of the Science Fiction Research Association Book Award 2021.This is the first book-length study of the relationship between science fiction, the techno-scientific policies of independent India, and the global non-aligned movement that emerged as a response to the Cold War and decolonization. Today, we see the trend of science fiction writers being used by governments as advisors on techno-scientific policies and defence industries. But such relationships between literature, policy and geo-politics have a long and complex history. Glimpses of this history can be seen in the case of the first generation of post-colonial Indian science fiction writers, the policies of scientific and technological development in independent India, and the political strategy of non-alignment advocated by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who proposed that Third World nations should maintain an equal distance between Washington and Moscow. Such a perspective reveals the surprisingly long and relatively unknown life of Indian science fiction, as well as the critical role played by the genre in imagining alternative pathways for scientific and geo-political developments to those that dominate our lives now.

Lemography is a unique collection of critical essays on Stanislaw Lem, writer and philosopher. Its aim is to introduce aspects of his work hitherto unknown or neglected by scholarship and evaluate his influence on twentieth-century literature and culture—and beyond. The book’s uniqueness is enhanced by the global makeup of the contributors who hail from Canada, United States, Great Britain, Germany, Croatia, Poland, Sweden and Finland. In all cases, these are scholars and translators who for many years have pursued, and in some cases defined, Lem scholarship. Rather than study Lem as a science fiction writer, each essay commands a wider sphere of reference in order to appraise Lem’s literary and philosophical contributions. Each focuses on a different novel (or set of novels) from the writer’s opus, examining them critically. Between them, the essays cover virtually all phases of Lem’s multidimensional career, ensuring comprehensive coverage.