Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon – serie
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24 produkter
24 produkter
Inbunden, Engelska, 2022
677 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
This book offers an in-depth analysis of Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer, an Afrofuturist project that appeared simultaneously as a concept album and a visual album or “emotion picture” in spring 2018. In the previous decade, Janelle Monáe has developed into a global media personality who effortlessly unites speculative world-building with social and political activism. Across the intersecting album and film that together make up Dirty Computer, Monáe brings together the science-fictional themes that informed her previous work, resulting in a powerfully focused artistic and political statement. While the music on the album can be enjoyed as an accessible collection of pop tracks, the accompanying film, music videos, and media paratexts add layers of meaning that combine speculative world-building with anti-racist activism. This unique convergence of energies, ideas, and media platforms has made Dirty Computer a new classic of Afrofuturist science fiction.
Häftad, Engelska, 2023
677 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
This book offers an in-depth analysis of Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer, an Afrofuturist project that appeared simultaneously as a concept album and a visual album or “emotion picture” in spring 2018. In the previous decade, Janelle Monáe has developed into a global media personality who effortlessly unites speculative world-building with social and political activism. Across the intersecting album and film that together make up Dirty Computer, Monáe brings together the science-fictional themes that informed her previous work, resulting in a powerfully focused artistic and political statement. While the music on the album can be enjoyed as an accessible collection of pop tracks, the accompanying film, music videos, and media paratexts add layers of meaning that combine speculative world-building with anti-racist activism. This unique convergence of energies, ideas, and media platforms has made Dirty Computer a new classic of Afrofuturist science fiction.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2022
542 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Fantasy author Neil Gaiman’s 1996 novel Neverwhere is not just a marvelous self-contained novel, but a terrifically useful text for introducing students to fantasy as a genre and issues of adaptation. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s briskly written A Critical Companion to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere offers an introduction to the work; situates it in relation to the fantasy genre, with attention in particular to the Hero’s Journey, urban fantasy, word play, social critique, and contemporary fantasy trends; and explores it as a case study in transmedial adaptation. The study ends with an interview with Neil Gaiman that addresses the novel and a bibliography of scholarly works on Gaiman.
Häftad, Engelska, 2023
542 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Fantasy author Neil Gaiman’s 1996 novel Neverwhere is not just a marvelous self-contained novel, but a terrifically useful text for introducing students to fantasy as a genre and issues of adaptation. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s briskly written A Critical Companion to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere offers an introduction to the work; situates it in relation to the fantasy genre, with attention in particular to the Hero’s Journey, urban fantasy, word play, social critique, and contemporary fantasy trends; and explores it as a case study in transmedial adaptation. The study ends with an interview with Neil Gaiman that addresses the novel and a bibliography of scholarly works on Gaiman.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2022
601 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
In this comprehensive study of The Stars My Destination, D. Harlan Wilson makes a case for the continued significance of Alfred Bester’s SF masterwork, exploring its distinctive style, influences, intertextuality, affect, and innovation as well as its extensive metafictional properties. In Stars, Bester established himself as a son of the pulp-SF and high-modernist writers that preceded him and a forefather to the New Wave and cyberpunk movements that followed his lead. Wilson’s study depicts Bester as an SF insider as much as an outlier, writing in the spirit of the genre but breaking with the fixation on hard science in favor of psychological interiority, literary experimentation, and adult themes. The book combines close-readings of the novel with broader concerns about contemporary media, technoculture, and the current state of SF itself. In Wilson’s view, SF is a moribund artform, and Stars foresaw the inevitable science fictionalization of our benighted world. With scholarly lucidity and precision, Wilson shows us that Stars pointed the way to what we have (un)become.
Häftad, Engelska, 2023
601 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
In this comprehensive study of The Stars My Destination, D. Harlan Wilson makes a case for the continued significance of Alfred Bester’s SF masterwork, exploring its distinctive style, influences, intertextuality, affect, and innovation as well as its extensive metafictional properties. In Stars, Bester established himself as a son of the pulp-SF and high-modernist writers that preceded him and a forefather to the New Wave and cyberpunk movements that followed his lead. Wilson’s study depicts Bester as an SF insider as much as an outlier, writing in the spirit of the genre but breaking with the fixation on hard science in favor of psychological interiority, literary experimentation, and adult themes. The book combines close-readings of the novel with broader concerns about contemporary media, technoculture, and the current state of SF itself. In Wilson’s view, SF is a moribund artform, and Stars foresaw the inevitable science fictionalization of our benighted world. With scholarly lucidity and precision, Wilson shows us that Stars pointed the way to what we have (un)become.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2022
350 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
This book offers an examination of Jeff Noon’s iconoclastic debut novel, Vurt (1993). In this first book-length study of the novel, which includes an extended interview with Noon, Wenaus considers how Vurt complicates the process of literary canonization, its constructivist relationship to genre, its violent and oneiric setting of Manchester, its use of the Orphic myth as an archetype for the practice of literary collage and musical remix, and how the structural paradoxes of chaos and fractal geometry inform the novel’s content, form, and theme. Finally, Wenaus makes the case for Vurt’s ongoing relevance in the 21st century, an era increasingly characterized by neuro-totalitarianism, psychopolitics, and digital surveillance. With Vurt, Noon begins his project of rupturing feedback loops of control by breaking narrative habits and embracing the contingent and unpredictable. An inventive, energetic, and heartbreaking novel, Vurt is also anoptimistic and heartfelt call for artists to actively create open futures.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2022
601 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
This book is a detailed examination of one of the most important works of fantasy literature from the twentieth century. It goes through Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock considering how it engages with war on a personal and family level, how it plays with ideas of time as something fluid and disturbing, and how it presents mythology as something crude and dangerous. The book places Mythago Wood in the context of Holdstock’s other works, noting in part how complex ideas of time have been a consistent element in his fiction. The book also briefly examines how the themes laid out in Mythago Wood are carried through into later books in the sequence as well as the Merlin Codex
Häftad, Engelska, 2022
231 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
This book is a critical introduction to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, but it also advances an argument about the novel in the context of Tolkien’s larger literary and philosophical project. Notwithstanding its canonical place in the fantasy genre, The Hobbit is ultimately a historical novel. It does not refer directly to any “real” historical events, but it both enacts and conceptualizes history in a way that makes it real. Drawing on Marxist literary criticism and narrative theory, this book examines the form and content of Tolkien’s work, demonstrating how the heroic romance is simultaneously employed and subverted by Tolkien in his tale of an unlikely hero, “quite a little fellow in a wide world,” who nonetheless makes history. First-time readers of Tolkien, as well as established scholars and fans, will enjoy this engaging and accessible study of The Hobbit.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2022
328 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
This book offers a critical study of Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), the world’s bestselling science fiction novel. Kara Kennedy discusses the novel’s exploration of politics and religion, its influential ecological messages, the focus on the human mind and consciousness, the complex nature of the archetypal hero, and the depiction of women’s influence and control. In Dune, Herbert demonstrated that sophistication, complexity, and a multi-layered world with three-dimensional characters could sit comfortably within the science fiction genre. Underneath its deceptively simple storyline sits a wealth of historical and philosophical contexts and influences that make it a rich masterpiece open to multiple interpretations. Kennedy’s study shows the continuing relevance of the novel in the 21st century due to its classic themes and its concerns about the future of humanity, as well as the ongoing nature of issues such as ecological disruption and conflicts over resources and religion.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2022
601 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
This book argues that Ann Leckie’s novel Ancillary Justice offers a devastating rebuke to the political, social, cultural, and economic injustices of American imperialism in the post 9/11 era. Following an introductory overview, the study offers four chapters that examine key themes central to the novel: gender, imperial economics, race, and revolutionary agency. Ancillary Justice’s exploration of these four themes, and the way it reveals how these issues are all fundamentally entangled with the problem of contemporary imperial power, warrants its status as a canonical work of science fiction for the twenty-first century. The book concludes with a brief interview with Leckie herself touching on each of the topics examined during the preceding chapters.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2022
440 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
The videogame series Mass Effect is a remarkable rarity not only for being an original science-fictional franchise of recent vintage that has risen to such prominent commercial and critical success in popular culture but also for pushing the canonical boundaries of how science fiction as a genre will be experienced and understood in the future. This book analyzes the significance of the game for an understanding of the evolving SF genre and articulates an explanatory framework to limn its landmark reception in videogame history. This book both synthesizes the burgeoning body of scholarship on Mass Effect for a readership unfamiliar with either the game or the critical conversation on its salient importance, while simultaneously, for readers already invested in the science-fiction and videogame scholarship, mounting an extended inquiry as to why Mass Effect has served as such a representative milestone in videogame and genre history. The book should appeal to veteran science-fiction and videogame scholars and students as well as a wide variety of fans, consumers, gamers, and general readers.
Häftad, Engelska, 2023
440 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
The videogame series Mass Effect is a remarkable rarity not only for being an original science-fictional franchise of recent vintage that has risen to such prominent commercial and critical success in popular culture but also for pushing the canonical boundaries of how science fiction as a genre will be experienced and understood in the future. This book analyzes the significance of the game for an understanding of the evolving SF genre and articulates an explanatory framework to limn its landmark reception in videogame history. This book both synthesizes the burgeoning body of scholarship on Mass Effect for a readership unfamiliar with either the game or the critical conversation on its salient importance, while simultaneously, for readers already invested in the science-fiction and videogame scholarship, mounting an extended inquiry as to why Mass Effect has served as such a representative milestone in videogame and genre history. The book should appeal to veteran science-fiction and videogame scholars and students as well as a wide variety of fans, consumers, gamers, and general readers.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2023
601 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Written not so long after "Tolkien mania" first gripped the United States in the 1960s, Ursula K. Le Guin's novel A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) has long been recognized as a classic of the fantasy genre, and the series of Earthsea books that followed on it over the next several decades earned its author both considerable sales and critical accolades. This new introduction to the text will closely contextualize the original novel in relation to its heady decade of composition and publication — a momentous time for genre publishing — and also survey the half century and more of scholarship on Earthsea, which has shifted in direction and emphasis many times over the decades, just as surely as Le Guin frequently adjusted her own sails when composing later works set in the fantasy world. Above all, this book positions A Wizard of Earthsea as perhaps an "old text" that nevertheless belongs in a "new canon," a key novel in the author's career and the genre in which it participates, and one that at once looks back to Tolkien and his own antecedents in masculinist early fantasy; looks forward to Le Guin's own continuing feminist and progressive education; and anticipates and indeed helped to shape young adult literature in its contemporary form.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2024
598 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
This book assesses the work of one of the foundational figures of American fantasy, Peter S. Beagle. Through its focused analysis of The Last Unicorn, this study contextualises Beagle’s work in relation to the popularity of the fantasy genre, following its growing success in the aftermath of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. In addition, through reference to the film adaptation of The Last Unicorn and also Beagle’s other works, this study highlights the author’s longevity and the influence that his metafictional and comedic work has had on contemporary fantasy.
Häftad, Engelska, 2025
601 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
This book assesses the work of one of the foundational figures of American fantasy, Peter S. Beagle. Through its focused analysis of The Last Unicorn, this study contextualises Beagle’s work in relation to the popularity of the fantasy genre, following its growing success in the aftermath of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. In addition, through reference to the film adaptation of The Last Unicorn and also Beagle’s other works, this study highlights the author’s longevity and the influence that his metafictional and comedic work has had on contemporary fantasy.
Häftad, Engelska, 2024
720 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
William Gibson’s Neuromancer: A Critical Companion presents Gibson’s rise as an influential figure within and beyond the science fiction field. Gibson’s success with Neuromancer, the first novel to win the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and Philip K. Dick Award, is in part a direct result of the rising popularity of cyberpunk in the early- to mid-1980s, although it could just as easily be said cyberpunk’s success was in no small part a direct result of Neuromancer’s explosion onto the science fiction scene.Neuromancer’s ongoing relevance remains undiminished because we are effectively living in a technocultural age that is increasingly difficult to distinguish from Gibson’s novel. As Graham J. Murphy demonstrates in this companion, the novel remains instrumental in thinking through the ongoing explorations of the posthuman:transhumanism, the Utopia/Anti-Utopia dynamic, and capitalist realism, to name a few of themore significant critical vehicles with which to better understand and contextualize our technocultural age and Neuromancer’s role in both shaping it and responding to it. This book provides a critical introduction to Neuromancer and cyberpunk culture.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2024
459 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
This book offers an in-depth analysis of Keith Roberts's Pavane and explores why this work was instrumental to the evolution of the Science Fiction genre in British Literature. In addition to a focused exploration of the individual stories and themes that make up Pavane, this study also presents a commentary on the mosaic structure of this work, and the impact this has on the book as a whole. Through its discussion of themes such as religion, technology and morality, this text explores how alternate history plots can be used as a commentary or criticism of the current state of society.
Häftad, Engelska, 2025
459 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
This book offers an in-depth analysis of Keith Roberts's Pavane and explores why this work was instrumental to the evolution of the Science Fiction genre in British Literature. In addition to a focused exploration of the individual stories and themes that make up Pavane, this study also presents a commentary on the mosaic structure of this work, and the impact this has on the book as a whole. Through its discussion of themes such as religion, technology and morality, this text explores how alternate history plots can be used as a commentary or criticism of the current state of society.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2024
542 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
J.G. Ballard's Crash (1973) remains a byword for transgression in literature: declared 'too disgusting for words' upon publication. The basis for David Cronenberg's equally provocative film, Crash has been regarded variously as the apotheosis of New Wave science fiction, the ur-source for postmodernism, a transhumanist manifesto, and a pornographic masterpiece in the tradition of Sade and Bataille. This revisionist account, based on previously unexplored archive material, shatters the myths that have accrued around this tantalising work whilst also revealing why it continues to inspire writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers in the 21st century. The book vividly reconstructs how Ballard came to write Crash, the cultural landscape in which it was written, the effect of its reception, and the toll it took on its author. New perspectives reveal how Crash reworks surrealist anthropology, evolutionary theory, and pornographic imagery in order to expose a society addicted to the abuse of power, the silencing of others, and its own environmental destruction. As Ballard later admitted, he 'must have been mad' to write Crash.
Häftad, Engelska, 2025
542 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
J.G. Ballard's Crash (1973) remains a byword for transgression in literature: declared 'too disgusting for words' upon publication. The basis for David Cronenberg's equally provocative film, Crash has been regarded variously as the apotheosis of New Wave science fiction, the ur-source for postmodernism, a transhumanist manifesto, and a pornographic masterpiece in the tradition of Sade and Bataille. This revisionist account, based on previously unexplored archive material, shatters the myths that have accrued around this tantalising work whilst also revealing why it continues to inspire writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers in the 21st century. The book vividly reconstructs how Ballard came to write Crash, the cultural landscape in which it was written, the effect of its reception, and the toll it took on its author. New perspectives reveal how Crash reworks surrealist anthropology, evolutionary theory, and pornographic imagery in order to expose a society addicted to the abuse of power, the silencing of others, and its own environmental destruction. As Ballard later admitted, he 'must have been mad' to write Crash.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2026
482 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
This book provides a brief scholarly introduction to A Game of Thrones, the first volume of George R. R. Martin's ongoing series A Song of Ice and Fire. The book examines Martin's novel as a shrewd, genre-literate utilization of commonplaces and imperatives of its genre. Young focuses on various aspects of Martin's worldbuilding, as well as his use of fantasy to manage and utilize narrative tension. The overall polemic thrust of the book will be that Martin's novel displays his ability to manage the inherent tension between literary convention and innovation, producing something that is both an admirable essay in genre and a strong platform for distinctive author.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2026
482 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
This book closely reads Mark Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme for its complex, contradictory, yet ultimately productive engagement with the social dreaming of utopianism. Specifically, Squadron Supreme provides critical traction for readers to engage with the social dreaming of utopianism by asking how it depicts the pursuit of a radically alternative society, at what cost, and whether that cost is worth paying. These questions fuel the utopia problematic, which, in turn, points to the productive tension in Squadron Supreme. By extension, Squadron Supreme's commitment to the utopia problematic also provides opportunities to think through utopia and the state of exception, labor in the condition of epivitality, the tension with ends justifying the means, and the persistent resilience of an anti-utopianism that increasingly defines the United States' contemporary socio-political landscape. While this book focuses on the social dreaming of utopianism as the core thread uniting the chapters of Mark Gruenwald’s groundbreaking series, it also provides access points to several theoretical and critical topics to further unpack the series.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2026
516 kr
Kommande
This book offers a critical overview focused on the Bas-Lag trilogy of novels by British speculative fiction writer, China Miéville. The Bas-Lag trilogy is a significant re-evaluation of the fantasy fiction genre, infused with contemporary political commentary presented through recognisable, albeit subverted, conventions associated with the canon. Filled with monstrous creations, the world of the Bas-Lag books utilises the effectiveness of teratology to critically explore ideas around capitalism, imperialism, urban space, concepts of the body and utopian and revolutionary ideals. The Bas-Lag books are a product of the time within which they were written, beautifully evoking the late-capitalist society from which Miéville writes. As a writer, Miéville extrapolates concepts and perceptions of genre, urban landscapes and socio-political concerns through the lenses of fantastika and teratology. This critical companion will explore this approach by focusing on his celebrated Bas-Lag trilogy, comprising the novels Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002) and Iron Council (2004).Miéville's fantasy world building is exemplary and Bas-Lag as a creation is a fine example of creativity and vivid imagination tinged with real-world political structures and ideas. The creation and application of monsters within the Bas-Lag novels acts as a conduit for this socio-political commentary. This critical companion will demonstrate that by analysing monsters as manifestations of political concerns. Miéville successfully utilises the hybridity and liminality of both monsters and fantastic fiction as a methodology to critique such subjects as law, justice, utopian ideals and our interpretations of urban space. Embracing genre conventions make these tough subjects easier for the reader to process.