Paul A. Carter, The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1977, $12.95). Pp. x, 318. - Harold L. Berger, Science Fiction and the New Dark Age (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Univ. Popular Press, 1976, $11.95). Pp. xi, 231. - Thomas D. Clareson (ed.), Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Univ. Popular Press, 1976, $12.50). Pp. 283.

1978 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 428-429
Author(s):  
Patrick Parrinder
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
The Creation

Deleuze and Guattari and the Future of Politics: Science Fiction, Protocols and the People to Come

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (supplement) ◽  
pp. 77-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Bogue
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Group Relations ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The People ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Creation ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Relationship

When is the future? Is it to come or is it already here? This question serves as the frame for three further questions: why is utopia a bad concept and in what way is fabulation its superior counterpart? If the object of fabulation is the creation of a people to come, how do we get from the present to the future? And what is a people to come? The answers are (1) that the future is both now and to come, now as the becoming-revolutionary of our present and to come as the goal of our becoming; (2) utopia is a bad concept because it posits a pre-formed blueprint of the future, whereas a genuinely creative future has no predetermined shape and fabulation is the means whereby a creative future may be generated; (3) the movement from the revolutionary present toward a people to come proceeds via the protocol, which provides reference points for an experiment which exceeds our capacities to foresee; (4) a people to come is a collectivity that reconfigures group relations in a polity superior to the present, but it is not a utopian collectivity without differences, conflicts and political issues. Science fiction formulates protocols of the politics of a people to come, and Octavia Butler's science fiction is especially valuable in disclosing the relationship between fabulation and the invention of a people to come.

Kim Stanley Robinson

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Markley
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Economics And Politics ◽  
Time Culture ◽  
Selection Of

Kim Stanley Robinson is the first full-length study of one of the most widely read and influential science-fiction writers of our era. In dicussing eighteen of his novels published since 1984 and a selection of his short fiction, this study explores the significance of his work in reshaping contemporary literature. Three of the chapters are devoted to Robinson’s major trilogies: the Orange County trilogy (1984-90), the Mars trilogy (1992-96), and the Science in the Capital trilogy (2004-07). Two other chapters consider his groundbreaking alternative histories, including “The Lucky Strike” (1984), The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), and Shaman (2014), and his future histories set among colonies in the solar system, notably Galileo’s Dream (2009) and 2312 (2012). The concluding chapter examines Robinson’s most recent novels Aurora (2015) and New York 2140 (2017). In interviews, Robinson describes his fiction as weaving together, in various combinations, Marxism, ecology, and Buddhist thought, and all of his novels explore how we might imagine forms of utopian political action. His novels—from the Mars trilogy to New York 2140—offer a range of possible futures that chart humankind’s uneven progress, often over centuries, toward the greening of science, technology, economics, and politics. Robinson filters our knowledge of the past and our imagination of possible futures through two superimposed lenses: the ecological fate of the Earth (or other planets) and the far-reaching consequences of moral, political, and socioeconomic decisions of individuals, often scientists and artists, caught up in world or solar-systemic events. In this respect, his fiction charts a collective struggle to think beyond the contradictions of historical existence, and beyond our locations in time, culture, and geography.

Arthur C. Clarke

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Westfahl
Keyword(s):  
Solar System ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
First Century ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Distance Communication ◽  
First Time

Despite extensive critical attention, Arthur C. Clarke’s distinctive science fiction has never been fully or properly understood. This study examines some of his lighthearted shorter works for the first time and explores how Clarke’s views regularly diverge from those of other science fiction writers. Clarke thought new inventions would likely bring more problems than benefits and suspected that human space travel would never extend beyond the solar system. He accepted that humanity would probably become extinct in the future or be transformed by evolution into unimaginable new forms. He anticipated that aliens would be genuinely alien in both their physiology and psychology. He perceived a deep bond between humanity and the oceans, perhaps stronger than any developing bond between humanity and space. Despite his lifelong atheism, he frequently pondered why humans developed religions, how they might abandon them, and why religions might endure in defiance of expectations. Finally, Clarke’s characters, often criticized as bland, actually are merely reticent, and the isolated lifestyles they adopt--remaining distant or alienated from their families and relying upon connections to broader communities and long-distance communication to ameliorate their solitude--not only reflect Clarke’s own personality, as a closeted homosexual and victim of a disability, but they also constitute his most important prediction, since increasing numbers of twenty-first-century citizens are now living in this manner.

scholarly journals Powrót do (już) nie swojego domu. Analiza porównawcza „Powrotu z gwiazd” Stanisława Lema i „Cylindra Van Troffa” Janusza A. Zajdla

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 107-124
Author(s):  
Andrzej Jamiołkowski
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Culture Shock ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Wrong Direction ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Creation ◽  
New Vision ◽  
Stanislaw Lem

The article is an attempt at a comparative analysis of the novels: Return from the Stars by Stanisław Lem and Van Troff’s Cylinder by Janusz A. Zajdel. Both works belonging to Polish science fiction present visions of humanity in the future. Despite obvious differences (both novels were written in different circumstances, one novel is a dystopia, the other an anti-utopia) it is possible to find areas common to both works representing the Polish science fiction genre. The novels present a pessimistic vision of humanity in the future. The greatest similarity, however, can be observed in the creation of the main characters, who experience culture shock when faced with a new vision of human society. The protagonists find themselves confused, discordant and despairing. They see that the changes have gone in the wrong direction. But it is too late for them to do anything about it, except for accepting this reality or trying to escape from it back into the stars. 

Samuel R. Delany

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Matharoo
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Temple University ◽  
City College ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Aids Crisis ◽  
Open Relationship ◽  
University Of Massachusetts

Samuel R. Delany is a profoundly influential and award-winning African-American gay author, critic, and teacher, whose many novels, short stories, memoirs, and essays are among the most important of the 20th and 21st centuries. His works have fundamentally altered the terrain of science fiction (SF) due in part to their formally consummate, theoretically sophisticated, materially grounded, and politically radical explorations of difference. These explorations reach an apogee in Dhalgren (1975), a bestselling countercultural classic. Delany is a Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) Grand Master. He is also one of SF’s best critics. The courageous humility and pragmatism with which he treats his subjects, when considered alongside the virtuosity with which he writes, gesture at a cosmologically scaled multiplicity, the understanding of which is dependent on biography, a point rendered clear in his exquisite autobiography The Motion of Light in Water (1988). Delany was born in Harlem, New York, on 1 April 1942. He was educated at the prestigious Dalton School and Bronx High School of Science. He spent summers at progressive youth camps. He also briefly attended the City College of New York. Delany has held professorships at University of Massachusetts Amherst, SUNY Buffalo, and Temple University. From 1961 to 1980, he and poet Marilyn Hacker had an open marriage; they have one child. He has been in an open relationship with Dennis Rickett since 1991. He was astoundingly prolific at a prodigal age. He translated Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre (1871) when he was eighteen. For a time, he lived in a commune in New York, writing songs for the folk-rock band Heavenly Breakfast. He has worked on shrimp boats in Texas. He has written graphic novels and a couple of stories for the Wonder Woman comics. He has written an opera, and he has written and directed a film. He has published pornographic novels that engage thoughtfully with the HIV/AIDS crisis. In short, to borrow a concept he develops in Empire Star (1966), Delany might be described as “multiplex”: even an ephemeral biography such as this one casts light on his singular ability to sustain and synthesize presumably opposed differences into a greater unity.

The Miracle Year: Winter and Spring

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Eller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Keynote Address ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Major Market ◽  
The Future ◽  
To Receive

This chapter focuses on Ray Bradbury's auspicious year as a writer during the winter and spring of 1950. Between the fall of 1949 and the fall of 1950, Bradbury submitted major works such as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man to various publications. His readers were beginning to make little distinction between his science fiction, his fantasy, and his semiautobiographical Green Town stories. Finally, Don Congdon was overcoming major market editorial resistance to Bradbury's stylistic originality and his specialized subjects. This chapter examines Bradbury's remarkable successes during the first weeks of 1950, which saw his science fiction tales “There Will Come Soft Rains” and “To the Future” being bought by Collier's, and “The Illustrated Man” by Esquire. It also discusses other significant developments in Bradbury's career, including a productive publishing visit to New York, his return to California to receive his “Invisible Little Man” award, and make his keynote address at the Bay Area society's annual banquet.

scholarly journals COUNTERACTION TO THE SYSTEM AND ANTI-SYSTEM IN THE STRUGATSKY BROTHERS'STORY "SNAIL ON THE SLOPE"

2021 ◽  
pp. 5-9
Author(s):  
I. V. Bratus
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
The Future ◽  
Literary Heritage ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Underlying Causes ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Future Work

Aspects of countering the system and anti-system are considered in the Strugatsky brothers ' novel "Snail on the slope". It is proved that science fiction writers managed to recreate quite complex aspects of the interaction of various systems within the framework of literary heritage. The broad palette of writers has absorbed an understanding of contradictions with underlying causes. In this article, some aspects of the interaction of the individual and the system, systems and anti-systems are demonstrated. Special attention is paid to the Soviet realities, which became the basis for the artistic picture of the fantastic world. This indicates the uniqueness of "Snail on the slope". One of the unique qualities is the influence on the story "Snail on the slope" by Franz Kafka (novels "The Process", "The Castle"). When analyzing the story, the focus of countering the system and the anti- system is transferred to the idea of the future. It is proved that the writers abandoned the continuous optimistic model of the future inherent in their earlier works. Strugatsky brothers have worked out in detail the mechanism of the inability to evolve into the future without radical changes in the essence of man. The literature of the second half of the twentieth century contains an extraordinary potential for understanding our current realities. Somewhere we are even in a more "winning" position – the authors and readers of that time had a more narrowed range of analysis, which was naturally inherent in "their time". At the same time, we are also partially vulnerable, especially in the historical and cultural context. Because the time of writing a work leaves an imprint on its content, the keys to its understanding are often in the social parallels of everyday life, which is fully understood by contemporaries, and "descendants" need to explain certain specific aspects of everyday life, psychological model or banal meaning of a particular word (they become anachronisms or acquire a different meaning). At the same time, it is worth paying attention to those questions that are transcendental in nature. Strugatsky brothers in "Snail on the Slope" experienced a corresponding experience – they tried to create a multi-faceted picture of the world with "their own" laws. At the same time, the task they set was not only to come up with, but also to "guess" the true concept, to bring the artistic fabric of the work closer to the "truth of life". Therefore, this work is fundamentally different from a significant part of their literary heritage, it is a kind of "experimental platform". They did not try to repeat this experience in their future work.

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