Oil and Energy Infrastructures in Science Fiction Short Stories

2020 ◽  
pp. 469-482
Author(s):  
Chris Pak
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Energy Infrastructures

Octavia Butler

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca J. Holden
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
African American ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Women ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
American Women ◽  
Her Family ◽  
City College

Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947–d. 2006), one of the first African American science fiction (sf) authors, remains the most prominent African American women science fiction author. She was born to Laurice and Octavia M. Butler in Pasadena, CA. Her father died when she was a toddler and she was raised an only child by her mother and grandmother. Her family called her “Junie” but most of her friends called her Estelle. An avid reader her entire life, Butler wrote her first sf story when she was about twelve years old after she watched sci-fi B-movie “The Devil Girl from Mars” and realized she could write a better story. She earned an associate’s degree from Pasadena City College and took classes at both Cal State and UCLA. At the behest of Harlan Ellison, whom she met at the “Open Door” Workshop, she attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in 1971, after which she sold her first two stories, one of which, “Crossover,” was published in 1971. She published her first novel, Patternmaster, in 1976, and went on to publish a total of twelve novels, seven short stories, and ten Essays. Two additional short stories, both written early in her career, were published posthumously in 2014. Butler also gave numerous Interviews and presentations at sf conventions and conferences. Her writings transformed the science fiction field by showing us futures—usually difficult futures—in which African American women play primary roles and futures in which being black was not exceptional. She brought together multiple genres—slave narrative, fantasy, science fiction, dystopia, historical narrative, and vampire literature—and transformed sf tropes—including alien invasion, first contact, post-apocalypse, cyborgs, genetic manipulations, and others—in her boundary-breaking sf. Butler often commented that her fiction addressed three sometimes overlapping audiences: those interested in feminism, African American literature, and science fiction. Her fiction was nominated for and won the top science fiction awards, including two Hugos, two Nebulas, two Science Fiction Chronicle awards, and a Locus award. Butler was the first sf author to receive a MacArthur “genius” grant (1995) and also won a Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the PEN American Center (2000). Butler’s fiction and life has had a significant influence on the sf genre and field. Teaching at Clarion West, participating in panel discussions, and offering advice and mentorship, Butler inspired many from the recent generation of sf writers of color and has been claimed by the Afrofuturism movement. Her untimely death rocked the sf world, depriving society of a necessary critical and intuitive voice.

Díaz, Junot

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yomaira C. Figueroa
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Short Story ◽  
English Language ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Massachusetts Institute Of Technology ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Institute Of Technology

Junot Díaz is a Dominican American award-winning fiction writer and essayist. For over twenty years his work has helped to map and remap Latinx, Caribbean, and American literary and cultural studies. Since his collection of short stories, Drown, debuted in 1996, Díaz has become a leading literary figure in Latinx, Afro-Latinx, and diaspora studies. His voice is critically linked to the legacy of Latinx Caribbean literary poetics reaching back to the 1960s (including Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, 1967). Díaz’s work is likewise transnational and diasporic, often reflecting the lived experiences of working-class immigrant populations of color in northeastern urban centers. Within a broader scope, Díaz’s writing is tied to feminist African American and Chicana literary traditions, with Díaz citing the influence of writers such as Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros in his writing practice. His 2007 award-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, earned him a Pulitzer Prize in fiction and catapulted him into literary superstardom. Díaz followed that success with his 2012 collection of short stories, This Is How You Lose Her, which was a finalist for both the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. In 2012, Díaz was conferred the MacArthur Fellows Program Award, commonly known as the MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and in 2017, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2019, he was the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the fiction editor at the renowned literary magazine the Boston Review. Over the course of his professional writing career, Díaz has published numerous nonfiction essays and political commentaries, and coauthored opinion editorials on immigration and reflections on Caribbean and US politics. His short story “Monstro,” published in 2012, further rooted Díaz in the genres of science fiction and Afrofuturism. “Monstro” was understood to be a teaser for a now discarded novel of the same name. The simultaneous publication of the English-language Islandborn and Spanish-language Lola in 2018 represented the author’s first foray into the genre of children’s literature. Like much of Díaz’s literary oeuvre, the children’s books chronicle the experiences and memories of Afro-Dominicans in the diaspora through the perspective of a child narrator. Díaz is one of the founders of Voices of Our Nation (VONA), a summer creative writing workshop for writers of color where he helps aspiring writers to workshop their fiction. Díaz’s fiction and nonfiction writings have catalyzed work in literary, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx studies, prompting renewed discourses on literary representations of masculinity, gender, sexuality, intimacy, sexual violence, dictatorship, immigration, disability, Dominican history, race and anti-blackness, anti-Haitianism, decolonization and radical politics, and diaspora and belonging.

The Anthology Game

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Eller
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Ray Bradbury ◽  
Failed Attempt ◽  
The Impact ◽  
American Short Stories

This chapter examines Ray Bradbury's failed attempt to publish a mainstream literary anthology of science fiction stories centered on Mars. The development of the Illinois novel was slowed by Bradbury's increased focus on the science fiction stories he was writing and revising with more and more frequency. Despite Don Congdon's influence with a wide range of editors, these stories were still not selling to the major magazines at all. What sustained both his spirit and his reputation during this period was his almost phenomenal success with the premier award anthologies of the day such as the Best American Short Stories annual and the O. Henry Prize Stories. This chapter considers the impact of Bradbury's anthology awards on his writing life by focusing on his membership in the leftist poetry magazine California Quarterly, founded by Dolph Sharp and others. It also discusses Bradbury's idea for an anthology that would consist of twenty-five science fiction stories, a project that he called “The Martian Chronicles. Edited by Ray Bradbury” and never came to fruition.

Modernist Alternatives

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Eller
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the dark themes and moods that characterize some of Ray Bradbury's short stories, a reflection of his deep ambivalence toward an increasingly destabilized world. Bradbury never developed a postmodernist dislike of where technology and science had brought the world, but he always remained wary of where science may lead mankind in the future. This predictive urge led him to use his science fiction stories to work through some of the issues left unresolved in his failed novels. This chapter discusses “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright” and several of Bradbury's tales, written in the 1946–1948 period, which are distinguished from other Bradbury stories of the period by their science fiction trappings, their unrelieved darkness, the lack of any familiar points of reference, and their relative obscurity within the Bradbury canon. It also considers the relationship stories that eased Bradbury through his impasse with Modernist themes.

Life Is a Biological Risk: Contagion, Contamination, and Utopia in African Science Fiction

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nedine Moonsamy
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Biological Risk ◽  
Sustainable Future ◽  
African Context ◽  
African Writers

Given the centrality of utopia to the African literary and postcolonial imaginary, science fiction by African writers offers a unique opportunity to explore and critique the sociopolitical salience of imagined African futures. Through a close reading of three short stories in theAfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers Vol I(2012) anthology, I illustrate how generic science fiction utopias prove to be much too sterile when applied to an African context and thus do not amount to a viable and sustainable future. Making use of tropes of contagion, there is a clear desire to demonstrate that the human impulse is, in many ways, contrary to the objectives of neat utopias and these stories subsequently seek to “contaminate” the notion of utopia itself. Overall, I suggest that this is indicative of a shifting postcolonial landscape that needs to more carefully weigh the price of its utopias.

I'm here, I'm listening : short stories

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jennifer Julian
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Political ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Creative Writers ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Creative Dissertation ◽  
The University

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] I'm Here, I'm Listening is a creative dissertation that makes the case for non-realist speculation as a fundamental tool for creative writers. The collection's twelve short stories push against the boundaries of realism, borrowing from genre conventions found in historic fiction, fabulism, and sci-fi to investigate the uncanny intersection of ecology, technology, and the human experience. The critical introduction, "New Worlds, Green Futures," argues for the political potential in science fiction and speculative writing. It close reads two novels -- Margaret Atwood's Surfacing (1972) and Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013) -- and argues that the cathartic instances of time travel in these novels serve to break down the societal limitations of gender, time, environment, and species. The creative component of the dissertation depicts variations on womanhood and loss. The stories' many female protagonists contend with missing parents, siblings, and partners, absences both physical and emotional. Non-realist and speculative genres highlight the estranging experience of mourning. Characters must navigate strange and perilous dystopias, and many face external conflicts typical of a Cold War era sci-fi film--mutant spiders, doorways to other dimensions, sentient plant people, and cyber-ghosts. At the same time, the collection hones in on these women's interior lives, exploring, not only what makes their world strange and surreal, but what sense of beauty can be found and what connections can be forged in the wake of their own personal apocalypses.

Frederik Pohl

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R. Page
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Public Library ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Agent ◽  
Fiction Writers

One of science fiction's undisputed grandmasters, Frederik Pohl built an astonishing career that spanned more than seven decades. In publishing novels, short stories, and essays, Pohl won millions of readers and seemingly as many awards while leaving a lasting mark on the genre. This book traces Pohl's extraordinary journey from discovering books as a boy at the Brooklyn Public Library to publishing the novel All the Lives He Led at age 91. A first-of-its-kind study, the book delves into the iconic works of fiction like The Space Merchants, Jem, and the tales of the Gateway universe, as well as Pohl's creative alliances with the likes of C. M. Kornbluth, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov. But the book also examines Pohl's as-essential contributions in other areas. He represented many of the major science fiction writers as a literary agent in the 1940s and 1950s. He helped professionalize the field by midwifing science fiction publishing at Ballantine and Ace Books. Finally, while working at Galaxy and If, he aided countless careers as, in Gardner Dozois' words, “quite probably the best SF magazine editor who ever lived.”

scholarly journals SANTIAGO RAMÓN Y CAJAL Y LA LITERATURA DE FICCIÓN Los cuentos de vacaciones y su valor pedagógico

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susana Collado-Vázquez ◽  
Jesús María Carrillo
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Scientific Concepts ◽  
Educational Purpose ◽  
Scientific Education ◽  
Ramón Y Cajal

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, father of neuroscience, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1906 for his neural theory. Besides being a great histologist, researcher, and teacher, he showed interest in photography, philosophy, astronomy, chess, and hypnosis. He wrote very relevant scientific and biographical works as well as his Vacation stories. Five science fiction tales, five short stories with an educational purpose that mix scientific concepts, fiction, and some irony, and where microscopy and microbiology are always present. These stories raise difficult social or moral dilemmas that are often motivated by advances in science or an incorrect scientific education of the population. Cajal sought to improve that education and banish false beliefs and superstitions.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document