Every age has characteristic inventions that change the world. In the 19th century it was the steam engine and the train. For the 20th, electric and gasoline power, aircraft, nuclear weapons, even ventures into space. Today, the planet is awash with electronic business, chatter and virtual-reality entertainment so brilliant that the division between real and simulated is hard to discern. But one new idea from the 19th century has failed, so fa...
Science fiction explores the wonderful, baffling and wildly entertaining aspects of a universe unimaginably old and vast, and with a future even more immense. It reaches into that endless cosmos with the tools of rational investigation and storytelling. At the core of both science and science fiction is the engaged human mind--a consciousness that sees and feels and thinks and loves. But what is this mind, this aware and self-aware consciousne...
Until now, no scholarly study has dealt specifically with the abrupt shift of emphasis away from space travel, atomic weapons, robots, and other once-imaginary technologies, and into the realm of the paranormal treated as science. Damien Broderick surveys this long-ignored terrain, reading a series of influential or characteristic psience fiction novels and short stories, from the 1930s to now.
Science fiction loves strangeness. It relishes oddities, even when it piles on fear and dystopian loathing. The technical term for a fascination with the strange and alien is xenophilia, just as the term for a terror of the strange is xenophobia. At its core, then, science fiction is...Xeno Fiction. So science fiction seeks out the strange, roams far from home in space and time, looks with avid eagerness upon the ways of the Others, human or a...
In his Foreword, Rich Horton says: "First rate stories..."
"Time Considered as a Series of Thermite Burns in No Particular Order" is a clever and very funny time travel romp, "The Beancounter's Cat" is set in a far future with Clarkean science sufficiently advanced to appear magical, "Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone" (with Barbara Lamar) is another look at the mystery of human destiny, "Under the Moons of Venus" is a remarkable, evocative hom...
Two centuries ago, the first Enlightenment failed when its dream of reason smashed into the passions and fury of stubborn humans. Without a deep, broad understanding of the world, the emerging Enlightenment was left floundering, its best impulses perverted into the bloody excess of the French Revolution. Arguably, its idealism and noble goals led directly, and shockingly, to the 20th century's totalitarian nightmares.
Now the 21st century i...
Presents the best English-language science fiction novels from 1985-2010. Employing a critical slant, this book provides a discussion of the novels and the writers in the context of popular literature. Moreover, each entry features a cover image of the novel, a plot synopsis, and a mini review.
Theodore Sturgeon Award finalist, 2010 A. Bertram Chandler Award for Outstanding Achievement in SF, 2010 *** "The Qualia Engine" is a worthy addition to the long line of superman-in-hiding stories that stretches all the way back to Olaf Stapledon, with notable stops along the way... A dense story with a rich nougat vein of well-observed human emotion. —Gardner Dozois, Locus *** Sharply told, very funny at times, and ultimately very powerful. —...
Attorney Jill Shannon's clients include Blick Pharmaceuticals, which is pursuing research into life-extending drugs. Blick has reawakened the homicidal maniac Payback, whom they created twenty years earlier, to literally kill off the competition by targeting research scientists. Jill's boyfriend, Paul Gibson, one of the scientists, is forced to inject them with an intelligence booster. Suddenly they find themselves in the middle of a war--a wa...
Award-winning writer Dr. Damien Broderick gathers his most forthright articles from the 1960s and '70s, on topics ranging from sex, politics, and religion to drugs and the way things were before the Internet, and caps them with sharp insights from today, looking back in amazement--and often with dismay or laughter. Great reading!
This second anthology of the best of Australian SF Review includes pieces by Gregory Benford, Janeen Webb, Lucius Shepard, Jenny Blackford, George Turner, Yvonne Rousseau, Douglas Barbour, and others--writing about Watchmen, cyberpunk, steampunk, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Lucius Shepard. Complete with introduction, bibliography, and index.
In the year 4004 AD, the entire universe of habitable worlds has been filled with human beings, thanks to an ancient teleport network and unlimited growth. Humans live on more than a hundred quadrillion terraformed planets, all woven into a bureaucratic and restrictive Empire. VALENCIES tracks a frustrated group of libertarian anarchists on the marginal planet Victoria. Kael, son of three gay doctors, and Theri, daughter of a man and woman bou...
Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature is one of the world's leading journals of science fiction. Warriors of the Tao includes 16 essays from this landmark (but little-known) review, distilling its witty and sometimes controversial dialogue about fantastic writing during the last third of a century, including such topics as: the NON-sf writing of Philip K. Dick, sex with an intelligent ape, Cordwainer Smith's astonishing instrumen...
Transrealist writing treats immediate perceptions in a fantastic way, according to science fiction writer and mathematician Rudy Rucker, who originated the term. In the expanded sense argued in this book, it also intensifies imaginative fiction by writing the fantastic from the standpoint of richly personalized experience. Transrealism is also related to slipstream writing, another category introduced into studies of speculative fiction to acc...
Reading by Starlight explores the characteristics in the writing, marketing and reception of science fiction which distinguish it as a genre.Damien Broderick explores the postmodern self-referentiality of the sci-fi narrative, its intricate coded language and discursive encyclopaedia'. He shows how, for perfect understanding, sci-fi readers must learn the codes of these imaginary worlds and vocabularies, all the time picking up references to t...
