Out of The Science Fiction Ghetto

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Seed
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Adult Writing ◽  
Childhood Reading

This chapter examines Ray Bradbury's creation of a kind of science fiction (SF) beyond the genre ghetto of the 1940s. The discussions cover his fascination with film; his early; his mentors; his attempts to write detective fiction and horror; his attitude toward technology; his exploration of time travel through dinosaur stories; his commentary on SF through a series of essays and interviews; and his repeated claim of a continuity between his childhood reading and adult writing. The chapter argues that Bradbury's surge of creativity in the late 1940s and 1950s coincided with the last years of the Golden Age of SF. In tandem with the publication of the fiction itself, more and more writers examined the nature of the genre. Broadly speaking, these writers all agreed that SF had emerged from its ghetto and taken up a socially central role as the literature of speculation.

The Many Pasts of Detective Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
Thomas Leitch
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Public History ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
The Many

Building on Tzvetan Todorov's observation that the detective novel ‘contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’, this essay argues that detective novels display a remarkably wide range of attitudes toward the several pasts they represent: the pasts of the crime, the community, the criminal, the detective, and public history. It traces a series of defining shifts in these attitudes through the evolution of five distinct subgenres of detective fiction: exploits of a Great Detective like Sherlock Holmes, Golden Age whodunits that pose as intellectual puzzles to be solved, hardboiled stories that invoke a distant past that the present both breaks with and echoes, police procedurals that unfold in an indefinitely extended present, and historical mysteries that nostalgically fetishize the past. It concludes with a brief consideration of genre readers’ own ambivalent phenomenological investment in the past, present, and future each detective story projects.

Playing at Murder: The Collaborative Works of the Detection Club

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-78
Author(s):  
Andrew Green ◽  
Roger Dalrymple
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age

This paper explores the inter-war collaborative works of the Detection Club as a source of commentary and insight on the ludic and dialogic nature of Golden Age detective fiction. Less well known than the single-authored works of Detection Club members, the multi-authored Behind the Screen, The Scoop, The Floating Admiral, Ask a Policeman and Six Against the Yard capitalise upon the genre's capacity for intertextual play and self-conscious engagements with literary formula and convention. By adopting a range of collaborative approaches and working in different combinations, the joint authors (including Berkeley, Christie, Crofts, and Sayers) construct playful textual ‘spaces’ that foreground gameplay and dialogism as key dynamics in the writing and reception of detection fiction. The discussion deals with the texts and their games in two groupings, showing the appositeness of Barthes' notion of the ‘writerly text’ and Bruner's concept of subjunctivity to the first grouping, and of Bakhtinian dialogism and ‘carnival’ to the second. Attention is thus drawn to the richness of these texts as a source of commentary and illustration of the signature playful dynamic of Golden Age detective fiction.

scholarly journals Towards a Poetics of Strangeness: Experiments in Classifying Language of Technological Novelty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Simeone ◽  
Advaith Gundavajhala Venkata Koundinya ◽  
Anandh Ravi Kumar ◽  
Ed Finn
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Special Relationship ◽  
William Gibson ◽  
World War ◽  
The Future ◽  
Bruce Sterling

The trajectory of science fiction since World War II has been defined by its relationship with technoscientific imaginaries. In the Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s, writers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein dreamed of the robots and rocket ships that would preoccupy thousands of engineers a few decades later. In 1980s cyberpunk, Vernor Vinge, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling imagined virtual worlds that informed generations of technology entrepreneurs. When Margaret Atwood was asked what draws her to dystopian visions of the future, she responded, "I read the newspaper." This is not just a reiteration of the truism that science fiction is always about the present as well as the future. In fact, we will argue, science fiction is a genre defined by its special relationship with what we might term "scientific reality," or the set of paradigms, aspirations, and discourses associated with technoscientific research.

Astounding Transhumanism!

Transhumanism ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pilsch
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Utopian Communities

Chapter 2 discusses the "Superman Boom," a science fiction publishing phenomenon in the 1930s that coincided with the dawn of the Golden Age of SF. In addition to the fiction, this chapter documents the fan response that positioned SF readers as genetic supermen and inspired plans for fan utopian communities.

scholarly journals ‘Tale Engineering’: Agatha Christie and the Aftermath of the Second World War

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-199
Author(s):  
Gill Plain
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
World War ◽  
Atomic Age ◽  
Genre Fiction ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Agatha Christie ◽  
Second World

The ‘golden age’ of clue-puzzle detective fiction is usually considered to end in 1939 with the outbreak of the Second World War. Yet Agatha Christie, the most high-profile and successful exponent of the form, continued to produce bestselling novels until her death in 1976. This essay examines three novels from the immediate postwar period to consider how she adapted her writing to negotiate a changing world and evolving fashions in genre fiction. Engaging with grief, demobilisation, gender, citizenship and the new fears of the atomic age, Christie proves unexpectedly attentive to the anxieties of a new modernity.

Detective Fiction, Nostalgia and Rian Johnson's Knives Out: Making the Golden Age Great Again

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-253
Author(s):  
Eric Sandberg
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Centre Of Gravity ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Agatha Christie

The Golden Age is back with a vengeance: reprints, re-boots, and adaptations of interwar detective fiction and its off-shoots have proliferated in the twenty-first century, as have works more loosely, but nonetheless substantially, inspired by the clue-puzzle format developed and perfected by authors like Agatha Christie. This resurgence of the ‘whodunnit’ mystery is something of mystery itself, as the centre of gravity of crime writing has long shifted away from this ostensibly dated and aesthetically limited form. This paper explores this unexpected development, looking in particular at the role of nostalgia in relation to new Golden Age mysteries. While nostalgia is frequently, and quite justly, viewed in negative terms as a personally and politically regressive phenomenon, in some cases, as in Rian Johnson’s murder mystery Knives Out (2019), examined here, it can be used not simply as a dubious marketing or aesthetic strategy, but as part of a broader social critique in which one form of nostalgia is used to critique another.

Alfred Bester

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jad Smith
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Entire Career ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Alfred Bester

Like Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, science fiction author Alfred Bester started his career as a pulp writer and finished it as a Grand Master, but he followed a far more curious path to the field’s highest honor than either of his big-name contemporaries. He focused on SF only intermittently yet, as a result, developed a distinctive, outsider approach that opened up avenues for cutting-edge vanguards such as New Wave and cyberpunk. Making extensive use of Bester’s unpublished correspondence, this book carefully examines Bester’s entire career, giving particular attention to how his work across mediums, combined with his love of modernist and decadent authors, shaped his groundbreaking approach to science fiction. During the 1950s, Bester crossbred pulp aesthetics and high style to explosive effect, producing landmark novels and stories that crackled with excess and challenged the assumptions of Golden Age science fiction. His focus on language as a plot device and a tool for world-building, and his use of modernist style in the service of science-fictional extrapolation left the field changed forever. The book argues that what Bester brought to SF was not a radically new template but an idiosyncratic self-reflexivity about the writing and reading protocols of the genre that put the field into a highly productive and transformative dialogue with itself.

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