Recently added articles from Yearbook of English Studies:

Some things we know about aliens.(Critical essay)

Jul 01, 2007; Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. ... ABSTRACTS The alien is one of SF's core motifs, often discussed as the Other of the Human. One might think, then, that the very idea would allow SF artists limitless creativity, with an opportunity to imagine anything at all that is 'not human'. However, at least since the ...

Paranormality: science fiction's holy grail.(Critical essay)

Jul 01, 2007; Slusser, George ... ABSTRACTS At the time of the rise of the physical sciences and their cold equations, the paranormal emerged in France as a Cartesian reaction to this invasion of res extensa, which threatened to sweep away the privileged role of mind as opposed to matter. From Mesmer's famous ...

Courtship with a Club: wife-capture in prehistoric fiction, 1865-1914.(Essay)

Jul 01, 2007; Ruddick, Nicholas ... ABSTRACTS Supposedly, when a Stone Age man was ready to mate, he would ambush a woman from another tribe, beat her senseless with his club, and drag her back to his cave by the hair. This scenario, which might be referred to as the motif of 'wife-capture', is one that ...

Constructing America's enemies: the invasions of the USA.(Essay)

Jul 01, 2007; Seed, David ... ABSTRACTS As soon as the USA began to emerge as an imperial power in the late nineteenth century, writers began to publish narratives describing how the country was being attacked by different hostile forces. The identity of these forces was sometimes clear (as in Yellow Peril ...

Animals and animality from the Island of Moreau to the Uplift universe.(Critical essay)

Jul 01, 2007; Vint, Sherryl ... ABSTRACTS This essay argues that H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau is best understood in the context of feminist critiques of science, animal studies, and antivivisectionism. This context allows us to see that the novel's themes are concerned with the very foundational ...

Biotic invasions: ecological imperialism in new wave science fiction.(Critical essay)

Jul 01, 2007; Latham, Rob ... ABSTRACTS This essay examines a spate of SF novels and stories by Thomas M. Disch, J. G. Ballard, and others published during the 1960s and 70s that address imminent threats to human survival. Replacing 1950s-era tales of nuclear annihilation, these texts envisioned less ...

A relation of story to idea: the Vines of Nancy Kress and other SF women.(Critical essay)

Jul 01, 2007; Hassler, Donald M. ... ABSTRACTS This essay is concerned with some of the responses to the 'toughness' of golden-age SF and to the lack of confidence in that literature in any compromise positions in the harsh realities of species competition and other elements of nature. In addition to the work of ...

(En)gendering artificial intelligence in cyberspace.(Critical essay)

Jul 01, 2007; Heuser, Sabine ... ABSTRACTS Artificial intelligences are an interesting test case for how readers construct fictional characters in SF in general. William Gibson's and Pat Cadigan's post-cyberpunk novels offer a different emphasis with regard to the attribution of gender characteristics because ...

Post media human modern: how nature was finished when it invented the human brain.(Critical essay)

Jul 01, 2007; Porush, David ... ABSTRACTS Media are the means to the evolution of posthumanity through their ever-intensifying feedback loop with our cognitive apparatus. They are also the expression of the universal human urge to exchange subjectivities, to achieve a form of telepathy. This article explores ...

'The human contradiction': identity and/as essence in Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy.(Critical essay)

Jul 01, 2007; Tucker, Jeffrey A. ... ABSTRACTS In Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-89) aliens seek to interbreed with the survivors of a nuclear war to remove a conflict between humanity's genetic traits: intelligence and hierarchical thinking. Extant criticism shows Xenogenesis contributing to ...

Postcolonialism/s, gender/s, sexuality/ies and the legacy of The Left Hand of Darkness: Gwyneth Jones's Aleutians talk back.(Critical essay)

Jul 01, 2007; Pearson, Wendy Gay ... ABSTRACTS This article attempts to bring together postcolonial theory, contemporary theories of sexuality, predominantly queer theory, and SF in an examination of two works that speak with great force to the colonial/postcolonial condition: Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of ...

C. J. Cherryh: the ties that bind.(Critical essay)

Jul 01, 2007; Clark, Stephen R.L. ... ABSTRACTS In Destroyer (2005) and Pretender (2006) C. J. Cherryh continues her exploration of loyalty, family ties, feudal devotion, and personal friendship. Further recurrent themes include the community cut off from broader human culture, and the solitary human who takes on ...

Catastrophism, American style: the fiction of Greg Bear.

Jul 01, 2007; Luckhurst, Roger ... ABSTRACTS Greg Bear's fictions insistently stage moments of catastrophic species change, from the early novella Blood Music to the recent sequence of novels about posthuman species emergence, Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children. This essay will examine the array of models for ...

On the boundary between oneself and the other: aliens and language in the films AVP, Dark City, The Brother from Another Planet, and Possible Worlds.(Critical essay)

Jul 01, 2007; Bould, Mark ... ABSTRACTS This essay explores a key SF scenario--the encounter with the alien--in four 'postfuturist' SF films, AVP: Alien vs. Predator, Dark City, The Brother from Another Planet, and Possible Worlds, through a perspective informed by the materialist critique of idealist ...

Guest editor's preface.

Jul 01, 2007; Seed, David ... The days are happily long gone when science fiction (SF) novels had to be published with an apologetic reference on their covers to 'what is unhappily known as "science fiction"', as was the case with the 1950s Penguin editions of John Wyndham's works. (1) Now no justification is needed; ...