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 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.

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 Making extensive use of Bester’s unpublished correspondence, this book carefully examines Bester’s entire career, giving particular attention to how his work across mediums, combined with his love of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.

The Reception of American Science Fiction in Japan

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tadashi Nagasawa
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
American Science ◽  
Japanese Science ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

American science fiction has been a significant source of ideas and imagination for Japanese creators: they have been producing extensive works of not only written texts but also numerous films, television shows, Japanese comics and cartoons (Manga and Animé), music, and other forms of art and entertainment under its influence. Tracing the history of the import of American science fiction works shows how Japan accepted, consumed, and altered them to create their own mode of science fiction, which now constitutes the core of so-called “Cool-Japan” content. Popular American science fiction emerged from pulp magazines and paperbacks in the early 20th century. In the 1940s, John W. Campbell Jr. and his magazine Astounding Science Fiction had great impact on the genre, propelling its “Golden Age.” In the 1960s, however, American science fiction seemed dated, but the “New Wave” arose in the United Kingdom, which soon affected American writers. With the cyberpunk movement in the 1980s, science fiction became part of postmodernist culture. Japanese science fiction has developed under the influence of American science fiction, especially after WWII. Paperbacks and magazines discarded by American soldiers were handed down to Japanese readers. Many would later become science fiction writers, translators, or editors. Japanese science fiction has mainly followed the line of Golden Age science fiction, which speculates on how science and technology affect the social and human conditions, whereas the New Wave and cyberpunk movements contributed to Japanese postmodernism. Japanese Manga, Animé, and special effects (SFX) television shows and films (Tokusatsu) are also closely related to science fiction and have developed under its influence. Even as works of the Japanese popular culture owe much to American science fiction, they have become popular worldwide.

Who Really Shaped American Science Fiction?

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 45-72
Author(s):  
Eric S. Rabkin ◽  
James B. Mitchell ◽  
Carl P. Simon
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Peer Review ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Science ◽  
History Of

Treating science fiction, critics have taught us to understand that the field shrugged itself out of the swamp of its pulp origins in two great evolutionary metamorphoses, each associated with a uniquely visionary magazine editor: Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell Jr. Paul Carter, to cite one critic among many, makes a case that Hugo Gernsback's magazines were the first to suggest thatscience fiction was not only legitimate extrapolation… [but] might even become a positive incentive to discovery, inspiring some engineer or inventor to develop in the laboratory an idea he had first read about in one of the stories. (5)Another, critic and author Isaac Asimov, argues that science fiction's fabledGolden Age began in 1938, when John Campbell became editor of Astounding Stories and remolded it, and the whole field, into something closer to his heart's desire. During the Golden Age, he and the magazine he edited so dominated science fiction that to read Astounding was to know the field entire. (Before the Golden Age, xii)Critics arrive at such understandings not only by surveying the field but also — perhaps more importantly — by studying, accepting, modifying, or even occasionally rejecting the work of other critics. This indirect and many-voiced conversation is usually seen as a self-correcting process, an informal yet public peer review. Such interested scrutiny has driven science fiction (SF) criticism to evolve from the letters to the editor and editorials and mimeographed essays of the past to the nuanced literary history of today, just as, this literary history states, those firm-minded editors helped SF literature evolve from the primordial fictions of Edgar Rice Burroughs into the sophisticated constructs of William S. Burroughs.

Screening the Golden Ages of the Classical Tradition

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Historical Societies ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Religious Piety ◽  
Building Activities

Screening the Golden Ages of the Classical Tradition explores how films and television programs have engaged with one of the most powerful myths in the Western classical tradition: that humans once lived under ideal conditions, as defined by proximity to the divine. We feel nostalgia for this imagined origin, regret at being born too late to enjoy it, and worry over why we lost it. We seek to recover that “golden age” by religious piety—or, by technological innovation, try to create our own utopia. The breach between this imagined world and lived reality renders these mythical constructs as powerful political tools. For the “golden age” concept influences how participants in the Western classical tradition view our own times by comparison, as an “iron age” whose degradation we lament and wish to escape. This “golden age” complex has manifested in the world-building activities of ancient Greek and Roman texts, from Hesiod to Suetonius, and in modernity’s hagiographic memory of certain historical societies: Periclean Athens, Thermopylae-era Sparta, and Augustan Rome. These fourteen collected essays discuss how golden age themes animate screen texts ranging from prestige projects like Gladiator and HBO’s Rome, to cult classics like Xanadu and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, to films made by auteurs including Jules Dassin’s Phaedra and the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? Essays also examine the classical “golden age” tradition in fantasy (Game of Thrones), science fiction (Serenity), horror (The Walking Dead), war/combat (the 300 franchise, Centurion, The Eagle), and the American Western.

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.

Alfred Bester

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jad Smith
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Ample Opportunity ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
Alfred Bester

The introduction examines how Bester’s unique approach challenged the paradigm of Golden Age science fiction. After a stint scripting comics and radio, Bester returned to the SF field in search of creative freedom; however, a conflict with legendary editor John W. Campbell over the story “Oddy and Id,” among other circumstances, prompted Bester to assume the stance of an outsider and write against the grain of the Astounding ethos, which he came to regard as escapist and scientistic. Bester wanted to write “arrest” fiction “full of romantic curiosity” that left ample opportunity for the reader to cogenerate meaning and experience the euphoria of raw imagination. Bester’s approach is discussed in terms of Roland Barthes’s distinction between “readable” and “writable” fiction.

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