New Dimensions in Science Fiction – serie

One of the few points critics and readers can agree upon when discussing the fiction popularly known as New Space Opera – a recent subgenre movement of science fiction – is its canny engagement with contemporary cultural politics in the age of globalisation. This book avers that the complex political allegories of New Space Opera respond to the recent cultural phenomenon known as neoliberalism, which entails the championing of the deregulation and privatisation of social services and programmes in the service of global free-market expansion. Providing close readings of the evolving New Space Opera canon and cultural histories and theoretical contexts of neoliberalism as a regnant ideology of our times, this book conceptualises a means to appreciate this thriving movement of popular literature.

One of the few points critics and readers can agree upon when discussing the fiction popularly known as New Space Opera – a recent subgenre movement of science fiction – is its canny engagement with contemporary cultural politics in the age of globalisation. This book avers that the complex political allegories of New Space Opera respond to the recent cultural phenomenon known as neoliberalism, which entails the championing of the deregulation and privatisation of social services and programmes in the service of global free-market expansion. Providing close readings of the evolving New Space Opera canon and cultural histories and theoretical contexts of neoliberalism as a regnant ideology of our times, this book conceptualises a means to appreciate this thriving movement of popular literature.

Darwinian Feminism in Early Science Fiction provides the first detailed scholarly examination of women’s SF in the early magazine period before the Second World War. Tracing the tradition of women’s SF back to the 1600s, the author demonstrates how women such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Shelley drew critical attention to the colonial mindset of scientific masculinity, which was attached to scientific institutions that excluded women. In the late nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection provided an impetus for a number of first-wave feminists to imagine Amazonian worlds where women control their own bodies, relationships and destinies. Patrick B. Sharp traces how these feminist visions of scientific femininity, Amazonian power and evolutionary progress proved influential on many women publishing in the SF magazines of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and presents a compelling picture of the emergence to prominence of feminist SF in the early twentieth century before vanishing until the 1960s.

Darwinian Feminism in Early Science Fiction provides the first detailed scholarly examination of women’s SF in the early magazine period before the Second World War. Tracing the tradition of women’s SF back to the 1600s, the author demonstrates how women such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Shelley drew critical attention to the colonial mindset of scientific masculinity, which was attached to scientific institutions that excluded women. In the late nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection provided an impetus for a number of first-wave feminists to imagine Amazonian worlds where women control their own bodies, relationships and destinies. Patrick B. Sharp traces how these feminist visions of scientific femininity, Amazonian power and evolutionary progress proved influential on many women publishing in the SF magazines of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and presents a compelling picture of the emergence to prominence of feminist SF in the early twentieth century before vanishing until the 1960s.

Since publication of Thomas More‘s Utopia more than five hundred years ago, there has been a steady stream of literary works that depict a better world; positive utopias in film, however, have been scarce. There is a consensus that utopias in the Morean tradition are not suited to fiction film, and research has accordingly focused on dystopias. Starting from the insight that utopias are always a critical reaction to the deficits of the present, Utopia and Reality takes a different approach by looking into the under-researched area of propaganda and documentary films for depictions of better worlds. This volume brings together researchers from two fields that have so far seen little exchange – documentary studies and utopian scholarship – and covers a wide range of films from Soviet avant-garde to propaganda videos for the terror organisation ISIS, from political-activist to ecofeminist and interactive documentaries.

Since publication of Thomas More‘s Utopia more than five hundred years ago, there has been a steady stream of literary works that depict a better world; positive utopias in film, however, have been scarce. There is a consensus that utopias in the Morean tradition are not suited to fiction film, and research has accordingly focused on dystopias. Starting from the insight that utopias are always a critical reaction to the deficits of the present, Utopia and Reality takes a different approach by looking into the under-researched area of propaganda and documentary films for depictions of better worlds. This volume brings together researchers from two fields that have so far seen little exchange – documentary studies and utopian scholarship – and covers a wide range of films from Soviet avant-garde to propaganda videos for the terror organisation ISIS, from political-activist to ecofeminist and interactive documentaries.

Since publication of Thomas More‘s Utopia more than five hundred years ago, there has been a steady stream of literary works that depict a better world; positive utopias in film, however, have been scarce. There is a consensus that utopias in the Morean tradition are not suited to fiction film, and research has accordingly focused on dystopias. Starting from the insight that utopias are always a critical reaction to the deficits of the present, Utopia and Reality takes a different approach by looking into the under-researched area of propaganda and documentary films for depictions of better worlds. This volume brings together researchers from two fields that have so far seen little exchange – documentary studies and utopian scholarship – and covers a wide range of films from Soviet avant-garde to propaganda videos for the terror organisation ISIS, from political-activist to ecofeminist and interactive documentaries.

This study draws on postcolonial theory, science fiction criticism, utopian studies, genre theory, Western and Indian philosophy and history to propose that Indian science fiction functions at the intersection of Indian and Western cultures. Banerjee deploys a diachronic and comparative approach in examining the multilingual science fiction traditions of India, to trace the overarching generic evolutions, which he complements with an analysis of specific patterns of hybridity in the genre's formal and thematic elements. The book analyses Indian science fiction's use of alterity in its use of time, space and characters, and the epistemologies that ground its world building, to contend that in all of these intrinsic elements Indian science fiction shows an inherent cultural intersectionality - mostly between India and the West, but also among the diverse cultures of the nation. The work demonstrates that, despite the linguistic and cultural diversity of the Indian science fiction traditions, larger patterns and connections are visible.

India is mutating - and its Science Fiction (SF) with it. Star Warriors of the Modern Raj is a critical catalogue of contemporary India's anglophone SF, a path-breaking work that flits between texts, vantage points and frameworks. An alternative to a male Eurocentric perspective of SF, this study avoids essentialising definitions and delves into how the world of SF (text) intersects with that of the writer/reader. Fusing paradigms of Science Fiction Studies, South Asian Studies and Postcolonial Studies, among others, the book explicates how India and its SF negotiate one another. It evolves a 'transMIT thesis' to analyse how mythology (M), ideology (I) and technology (T) contour Indian SF and its fictional reimaginings. This study identifies the manifestations of divine beings within SF (as differing epistemological categories), locates the modes of marginalisation within Indian popular imagination (as altars of alterity), and then proceeds to analyse how newer technologies engage with socio-political anxieties in (and through) SF.

Speculative Fiction in Translation from Around the World gives readers a comprehensive look at the speculative fiction that has been translated into English from over forty languages over the past half century. Each chapter offers an analysis of SFT from the eight major regions of the world in order to explore why certain subgenres (e.g., science fiction or horror) predominate, and how this knowledge can help us cultivate a better understanding of what is chosen for translation and how it impacts a domestic market. This is the only study to capture the global diversity of the genre, offering readers an accessible entry into the world of SFT and inspiring scholars to further research in the field.

This study introduces the original rubric of ‘speculative flesh ecologies’ by bringing together the concept of ‘flesh’, the ethical approach of ‘indistinction’, and a strand of twenty-first-century speculative fiction interested in human and nonhuman ontologies and ethical relationships. It challenges human/nonhuman distinctions, and explores the wide range of multi-species possibilities imagined by the ‘speculative flesh ecologies’ of contemporary speculative fiction. Through five kinds of flesh in speculative fiction – human, animal, plant, thing and cultured – this book demonstrates the value of ‘speculative flesh ecologies’ as an approach for understanding and embracing the seemingly disparate ontologies of humans and nonhumans, making present new forms of ethical thinking that explore what it means to live as, with and through other fleshy beings.

Istvan Csicsery Ronay defines the science fictional (SF) megatext as a ‘shared subcultural thesaurus of the genre’ (plot devices, tropes, character types, etc.) drawn upon and contributed to by each new work. Voices and trends from SF and global futurisms beyond the dominant anglophone market have attracted wider attention only in recent decades, and this study’s eleven essays map parts of the megatext by acquainting English-speaking readers, students and scholars of SF with works from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Indigenous Australia, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and Wales. Each essay contextualises one author within national and international SF traditions, with in-depth analysis of a chosen work. Who are these writers and why are they important? What innovative thematic material or formal elements do they offer? What unique cultural characteristics do they bring to the genre, and how do they dialogue with both the history of the genre and the contemporary SF scene?