Recently added articles from Extrapolation:
Rachel writes back: racialised androids and replicant texts.
Dec 22, 2008; ... Larissa Lai uses fantasy, myth, realism, and speculation to highlight the generational divides between first-generation immigrants and their children, and to explore the alienation of living in a society which questions your authenticity and your claim to a cultural heritage. She draws on ...
Humanity's scarred children: the Cylons' oedipal dilemma in Battlestar Galactica.
Dec 22, 2008; ... The new Battlestar Galactica series is constantly being praised for what Mary McDonnell likes to call "stones that contain relevance to our own world" (Bassom, Companion Season Two 6). Unlike the political, social, and military allusions, however, the psychological themes in the show have ...
The violence of the name: patronymy in Earthsea.
Dec 22, 2008; ... The Earthsea novels of Ursula K. Le Guin pit two visions of language and subjectivity against one another. On the one hand, the fantasy cycle is based upon the myth of a magical language, and the texts imitate this myth in the very rhetoric of the novels by way of carefully constructed ...
Just like so but isn't: musical consciousness in Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2.
Dec 22, 2008; ... <Pre> The if-feeling would have to be compared with the special 'feeling' which a musical phrase gives us ... But can this feeling be separated from the phrase? And yet it is not the phrase itself, for that can be heard without the feeling. --Wittgenstein, Philosophical ...
Asimov's Foundation trilogy: from the fall of Rome to the rise of cowboy heroes.
Dec 22, 2008; ... Writing the Foundation trilogy, Asimov based the idea of a declining empire on Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789). Because of this the trilogy is often read as re-enacting the fall of the Roman Empire on a galactic scale. In this paper I ...
Shadow of a dark muse: reprint history of original fiction from Weird Tales 1928-1939.
Dec 22, 2008; ... Between the World Wars, newsstands were rife with lurid fiction marketed in the form of cheaply produced pulp magazines. These publications, inheriting the mantle of public popularity and critical opprobrium from the fiction papers and dime novels of the previous century, were largely seen ...
Cain-Leviathan typology in Gollum and Grendel.
Dec 22, 2008; ... J. R. R. Tolkien was fascinated with monsters. His most enduring influence as a critic is his defense of the monster's central place in Beowulf, and he expressed similar enthusiasm for his own famous monster, Gollum, who owes much to the monsters of this Anglo-Saxon poem, particularly ...
19th-Century Sf and the Discourses of Science.
Dec 22, 2008; ... 19th-century Sf and the Discourses of Science. Martin Willis. Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century. Kent: The Kent State UP, 2006. 272 pp. $29 pbk I hate to sound like Robin Williams in Dead Poet's Society, ...
Unread TV.
Dec 22, 2008; ... Unread TV. Elana Levine and Lisa Parks, eds. Undead TV; Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. 210 pp. $74.95 hdbk/$21.95 pbk. Students of the work of Buffy creator Joss Whedon and his associates have long been awaiting Undead TV. Its earlier title of Red ...
Wells: The Scientific Romances and Beyond.
Dec 22, 2008; ... Wells: The Scientific Romances and Beyond. John S. Partington, ed. H. G. Wells s [sic] Fin-de-Siecle: Twenty-first Century Reflections on the Early H. G. Wells. Selections from The Wellsian. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007. 150 pp. $46.95 pbk. This little anthology consists ...
Battlestar Galactica and the Quest for Understanding.
Dec 22, 2008; ... Battlestar Galactica and the Quest for Understanding. Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall, eds. Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica. New York: Continuum Press International, 2008. 278 pp. $24.95 pbk. In casual conversation with two academic colleagues, we ...
Star Trek Nation: Fan Letters as Social Practice.
Dec 22, 2008; ... Star Trek Nation: Fan Letters as Social Practice. Lincoln Geraghty. Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe. London: LB. Tauris, 2007. 232 pp. $19.95 pbk. A principal lecturer in the School of Creative Arts, Film and Media at the University of ...
Faulty Cartography.
Dec 22, 2008; ... Faulty Cartography. Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2008. 336 pp. $27.95 pbk. Rhetorics of Fantasy is a structuralist account of generic Fantasy that works hard not to be doctrinaire or procrustean. Mendlesohn's project, which is to say disposing ...
Introduction: mundane science fiction, harm and healing the world.(Geoff Ryman )(Critical essay)
Jun 22, 2008; ... This collection of articles on sf writer Geoff Ryman's fiction initially took shape not unlike a Micky Rooncy-Judy Garland musical. A mutual discovery of common interest (in this case Ryman's work) led to a conversation which went something like this: "Gee, my dad has a barn--or in this ...
An email conversation with Geoff Ryman.
Jun 22, 2008; ... On February 15, 2008 at 2:52 AM, Hiromi Goto wrote: Hello, Geoff. Happy Year of the Rat. I would like to begin our email conversation. I'm hoping that it can be a generative discourse and less a Q & A model of interaction. What I mean by this is that I'm ...
Is air Mundane?(Critical essay)
Jun 22, 2008; ... In 2004, Geoff Ryman proposed the idea of Mundane sf, science fiction with "no FTL, no FTL Communications, no time travel, no aliens in the flesh, no immortality, no telepathy, no parallel universes, no magic wands" ("Take the Third Star"); such science fiction, he suggested, "could be the ...
History and AIDS in Was and Angels in America.
Jun 22, 2008; ... <Pre> It is necessary to distinguish between history and fantasy wherever possible. And then use them against each other.Geoff Ryman, Was: A Novel I usually say, "Fuck the truth," but mostly, the truth fucks you. Prior Walter, Angels in America </Pre> Early in part one ...
"Giving an account of oneself": ethics, alterity, air.(Air by Geoff Ryman)(Critical essay)
Jun 22, 2008; ... <Pre> "Of Ground, or Air, or Ought" --Emily Dickinson ("After Great Pain") </Pre> * Despite its own format--the mundane credo and uncluttered, accessible prose--Geoff Ryman's Air (Or, Have Not Have) rides waves of central metaphors, images or motifs of change and transformation ...
Antelopes of desire: knowledge, documentation, and love in the novels of Geoff Ryman.(Critical essay)
Jun 22, 2008; ... An information society is defined as one where commerce in information is a characteristic activity. Yet, because this commerce has historically been coupled to advances in information communication technologies, the question of what constitutes an artifact of information--a ...
The Pervert's guide to Geoff Ryman: desire, subjectivity and identity in Lust and Was.
Jun 22, 2008; ... Lust (n): I. Pleasure, delight .... Liking, friendly inclination to a person. Obs. 2. Desire, appetite, relish or inclination for something .... Obs .... 3. spec, in Biblical and Theological use: Sensuous appetite or desire, considered as sinful or leading to sin. ... 4. Sexual appetite or ...