Mike Ashley's acclaimed history of science-fiction magazines comes to the 1980s with Science-Fiction Rebels: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1981 to 1990. This volume charts a significant revolution throughout science fiction, much of which was driven by the alternative press, and by new editors at the leading magazines. The period saw the emergence of the cyberpunk movement, and the drive for, what David Hartwell called, 'The Hard SF Renaissance', which was driven from within Britain. Ashley plots the rise of many new authors in both strands: William Gibson, John Shirley,...

This book explores the emergence and development of terraforming in science fiction from H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898) to James Cameron's blockbuster Avatar (2009). Terraforming is the process of making other worlds habitable for human life. Its counterpart on Earth - geoengineering - has begun to receive serious consideration as a way to address the effects of climate change. This book asks how science fiction has imagined the ways we shape both our world and other planets and how stories of terraforming reflect on science, society and environmentalism. It traces the growth of...

This book pits the imaginative sports of science fiction against our widespread suspicion of the monstrous athletic body. The biopolitical nature of sport demands we see these bodies as our bodies, capable of the greatest physical feats science fiction can imagine, but also our worst fears of injury and death.

A unique collection of critical essays on writer and philosopher Stanislaw Lem, evaluating his influence on twentieth-century literature and culture.

Dread Trident focuses on tabletop role-playing games as vital mechanisms in the increasing creation of 'realized worlds' in modern culture. We often think of these as emerging from novel reading, film viewing, or video game playing; rarely do we consider the worlds of analog games, such as Dungeons and Dragons.

Offering a survey of Hollywood science fiction cinema from 1979 to 2017 (from Ridley Scott’s Alien to Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049), Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science Fiction Film argues that the trajectory of Hollywood’s dystopianism in that period is inextricable from the phenomenon of the ‘new enclosures’, the new dispossessions and privatisations sweeping across the United States since the 1970s. More precisely, it contends that the critiques of such dispossessions elaborated before the turn of the century – consider the satire of private policing in...

Speculative Epistemologies is about truth effects in sf, which stands for both science fiction and speculative fiction. It examines six narratives, one from each decade from the 1960s to the 2010s, that challenge dominant assumptions about the normal, the possible, and the real. It asks what the patterns of overlap and interference generated by texts located in border territories that make their identification as sf problematic, and sometimes controversial, can reveal about the dynamics of sf’s multiple subcultures (e.g. professionals, academics, and fans); the complexity of the genre’s...

The first two seasons of Star Trek: Discovery, the newest instalment in the long-running and influential Star Trek franchise, received media and academic attention from the moment they arrived on screen. Discovery makes several key changes to Star Trek’s well-known narrative formulae, particularly the use of more serialized storytelling, appealing to audiences’ changed viewing habits in the streaming age – and yet the storylines, in their topical nature and the broad range of socio-political issues they engage with, continue in the political vein of the series’ megatext. This...