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Recommended further reading
Canavan, Gerry, and Kim Stanley Robinson, eds. Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2014.
A pathbreaking collection of essays that explores how SF deploys ecological theory and engages with environmental issues, including chapters on eco-catastrophes, green futures, and extraterrestrial ecologies.
Chude-Sokei, Louis. The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2016.
Examines the links among race, technology, and colonialism in popular literary and sonic cultures, especially figurations of Afro-Diasporic subjects and their relationship with machines.
Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet, 1999.
A pioneering and creatively structured study of Afrofuturist theory and culture that probes the “possibility space” offered by SF and other popular forms for critiquing racialized histories and imagining alternative futures.
Foster, Thomas. The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005.
Places race and ethnicity at the center of debates about posthumanism, in and outside the genre, showing how these debates have been unconsciously structured by racialized histories.
Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2003.
Examines how race functions in the prognostication and promotion of space flight in both SF and popular science discourses; includes as a chapter a Pioneer Award–winning essay on the fiction of Vonda N. McIntyre.
Langer, Jessica. Postcolonialism and Science Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Explores the dialectic linking postcolonial theory and SF, exposing the imperialist fantasies that undergird much popular work while also showing how the genre enables articulations of decolonized futures.
Leonard, Elizabeth Anne, ed. Into Darkness Peering: Race and Color in the Fantastic. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997.
One of the earliest studies of race in fantastic literature
and film, including SF; offers insightful chapters on the erasure of race in cyberpunk writing and on the “Africanist presence” in Ray Bradbury’s and Philip K. Dick’s fiction.
Otto, Eric C. Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2012.
A study of “environmental SF” that shows how the genre has both powerfully warned against imminent ecological catastrophe while also offering transformative visions of sustainable futures.
Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2008.
Argues that the history of colonialism conditioned the emergence and consolidation of SF, including a number of the genre’s classic themes, such as the imaginary voyage and encounters with “aliens,” while at the same time making possible a critical popular discourse interrogating the myths of imperialism.
Roh, David S., Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu, eds. Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History and Media. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2015.
A collection of essays (expanded from a 2008 special issue of the journal MELUS) that explores the ways in which Asians and Asian Americans have been depicted in SF and other popular technological discourses as, variously, mysterious, dangerous, robotic, and empowered.
List of contributors
Marc Angenot was senior editor of Science Fiction Studies from 1979–81. He has taught French literature and literary theory for many years at McGill University in Montreal, where he holds the James McGill Chair of Social Discourse. He is author of numerous books on philosophy, social theory, and utopian literature.
J. G. Ballard was one of the most important British authors of science fiction of the postwar period. His early work was associated with the New Wave movement, which sought to bring the genre into conversation with cutting-edge trends in contemporary art and modern literature. His major novels include The Crystal World (1966), The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Crash (1973), and Empire of the Sun (1984). His nonfiction was gathered in A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (1996).
Damien Broderick is a major Australian science fiction author, literary critic, and popular science writer. His SF novels include The Dreaming Dragons (1980) and The Judas Mandala (1982), and his fiction has won numerous major Australian Awards, including the Aurealis and the Ditmar. His critical study Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (1995) examines the relationship between the genre and contemporary experimental literature.
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., a professor of English at DePauw University, has been a senior editor of Science Fiction Studies since 1992. He has written important essays on the work of Stanislaw Lem, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and the cyberpunk writers. His 2008 critical study The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction offers an important literary anatomy of the genre in terms of major aesthetic categories and modes.
Allison de Fren teaches in the Department of Art, History, and Visual Arts at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She has made numerous short films exploring links between contemporary technoculture and gender norms and values. Her 2009 essay on Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Tomorrow’s Eve won the Pioneer Award from the Science Fiction Research Association for best critical article of the year.
Samuel R. Delany is a celebrated American author of science fiction and fantasy literature, as well as an important literary theorist and cultural historian. Over the course of a five-decade career, he has won four Nebula and two Hugo Awards for such novels and stories as The Einstein Intersection (1967) and “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” (1969). His collections of essays include The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977) and Starboard Wine (1988). In 1985, he received the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Award for lifetime contributions to SF scholarship.
Philip K. Dick was a major American science fiction writer whose most notable work chronicled the relationship between humans and artificial beings. His 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was memorably filmed as Blade Runner (1982) by director Ridley Scott. Dick’s essays and other nonfiction have been gathered in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (1996), edited by Lawrence Sutin.
Grace Dillon is a Professor of Indigenous Native Studies at Portland State University. She is the editor of Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012), the first collection of speculative writing by Native Americans. She has published widely in such journals as Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, The Journal of Science Fiction Film and Television, and The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.
Kodwo Eshun teaches in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is a theorist of the cultures of the African Diaspora, including popular forms such as music and science fiction. His 1998 book More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction offers a penetrating historical and aesthetic exploration of Afrofuturist art and culture.
Carl Freedman is the Russell B. Long Professor of English at Louisiana State University. His books on science fiction include Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000) and Art and Idea in the Novels of China Miéville (2015), and he has edited collections of interviews with SF authors Isaac Asimov, Samuel R. Delany, and Ursula K. Le Guin. His essay on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey won the 1999 Pioneer Award from the Science Fiction Research Association for best critical article of the year.
Hugo Gernsback was a major editor of science fiction pulp magazines, beginning with Amazing Stories, the first SF pulp, in 1926. He went on to edit Wonder Stories in the 1930s and Science Fiction Plus in the 1950s. He also wrote the SF novel Ralph 124C 41+ (1911), which predicted a high-tech future dominated by transcontinental travel, television, video phones, and solar energy.
Donna Haraway is professor emerita in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a theorist of feminist science studies and science fiction whose books include Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), and The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003). In 2011, she received the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Award for lifetime contributions to SF scholarship.
N. Katherine Hayles is a professor of literature at Duke University who writes on theories of science, electronic literacy, and science fiction. She is the author of Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (1990), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999), and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012). She received the Pilgrim Award for lifetime contributions to SF scholarship from the Science Fiction Research Association in 2013.
Robert A. Heinlein was one of the most celebrated science fiction authors of the twentieth century. He received the Hugo Award for best novel five times for works such as Starship Troopers (1959), Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966). He was selected as an SF “Grand Master” by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1974, and was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1998.
Veronica Hollinger is professor emerita in the Cultural Studies Program at Trent University in Ontario. Her critical work focuses on science fiction in relation to feminist and postmodernist cultural theory. Since 1992, she has been a senior editor of Science Fiction Studies and has also coedited a series of anthologies, including Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation (2002), Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (2008), and Parabolas of Science Fiction (2013).
Nalo Hopkinson is a major Afro-Caribbean SF and fantasy author whose works include the novels Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Midnight Robber (2000), and Sister Mine (2013), as well as the story collections Skin Folk (2001) and Falling in Love with Hominids (2015). She has edited several anthologies, including Whispers fr
om the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (2000). She teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
Fredric Jameson is Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies and the director of the Center for Critical Theory at Duke University. His many critical works include studies of science fiction and utopian literature such as The Seeds of Time (1994) and Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005). He has received lifetime achievement awards for scholarship from the Science Fiction Research Association and the Modern Language Association.
Gwyneth Jones is a British author of feminist science fiction whose celebrated novels include White Queen (1991), Bold as Love (2001), and Life (2004). She has won numerous awards for her fiction, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. Her critical writings on the genre have been gathered into the collections Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction, and Reality (1999) and Imagination/Space (2009).
Rob Latham’s critical work focuses on the intersections between science fiction and popular technoculture. For many years a senior editor of Science Fiction Studies, he is the author of Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption (2002) and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (2014). In 2013, he received the Thomas. D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service to the field from the Science Fiction Research Association.
Roger Luckhurst is professor of modern and contemporary literature in the English and Humanities Department of Birkbeck College, University of London. He is author of numerous books on science fiction, including a cultural history of the genre, Science Fiction (2005), as well as critical studies of zombies and mummies as cultural icons. His essay included in this volume won the Pioneer Award from the Science Fiction Research Association for best critical article of the year in 1995.
Judith Merril was a major science fiction author and editor. During the 1950s and 1960s, she edited the anthology The Year’s Best SF, which included important annual summations of trends in the field. During the 1960s, she emerged as a significant proponent of the genre’s “New Wave.” Her scattered criticism of SF was gathered into The Merril Theory of Lit’ry Criticism, a 2016 volume edited by Ritch Calvin.
