Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Science Fiction & Fantasy

This collection of fifteen original essays offers new perspectives on armed conflict as a central aspect of science fiction and fantasy writing. Looking past the superficial conventions associated with ray guns and aliens, swords and sorcerers, the contributors show how writers in the genre today are not so much imagining war more fully as they are completely re-imagining it. Science fiction and fantasy writing is no longer mired in epic or chivalric models but is responding to new and more complex "real-world" motivations for armed aggression: advances in weaponry, shifts in the theaters...

The modern marketplace of science fiction, and the relationship between art, culture, and commerce as reflected in works of science fiction, are the concerns of these original essays. The contributors, all of whom are science fiction writers, editors, or critics, offer a wealth of new perspectives and insights on the forces that both drive and hinder creativity and its commodification.

Many of the essays look at how the market constrains a writer's aesthetic and financial development, how changing perceptions of the science fiction audience are "distorting the product," how writers can...

The Dark Tower series is the backbone of Stephen King's legendary career. Eight books and more than three thousand pages make up this bestselling fantasy epic.

The Complete Concordance is an entertaining and incredibly useful guide to Stephen King's epic Dark Tower series, covering books I-VII and The Wind Through the Keyhole, and is the definitive encyclopedic reference book that provides readers with everything they need to navigate their way through the series. With...

Literature is often regarded as a window on the human soul. However, in an era of turbulent planetary change, perhaps this inward focus will give way to a preoccupation with the relations between humans and their nonhuman environments, thus decentering humanity. Such a perspective may be called environmental posthumanism, a term that foregrounds ecological relations and critically reassesses the dominant role of technology in debates around the posthuman condition. This book develops the concept of environmental posthumanism through analyses of acclaimed science fiction...

Are we living in a post-temporal age? Has history come to an end? This book argues against the widespread perception of postmodern narrativity as atemporal and ahistorical, claiming that postmodernity is characterized by an explosion of heterogeneous narrative "timeshapes" or chronotopes.

Chronological linearity is being challenged by quantum physics that implies temporal simultaneity; by evolutionary theory that charts multiple time-lines; and by religious and political millenarianism that espouses an apocalyptic finitude of both time and space. While science, religion, and...

In "The Wisdom of the Shire," Noble Smith sheds a light on the life-changing ideas tucked away inside the classic works of J.R.R. Tolkien and his most beloved creation the stouthearted Hobbits.

"The Wisdom of the Shire "draws important lessons from "The Lord of the Rings," "The Hobbit," "The Silmarillion," and other tales of the adventures of Bilbo Baggins, the wizard Gandalf, and the many residents of Middle-earth. Author Noble Smith shows how a snug Hobbit-hole is actually just a state of mind and how even the smallest person can have the valor of a Rider of Rohan. He explores...