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This book surveys the life and career of Roger Zelazny (1937-1995), an American science fiction writer who quickly rose to prominence in the 1960s with works that offered new perspectives on traditional science fiction scenarios such as planetary exploration, alien encounter, and immortality as they audaciously remixed Western mythology and Eastern religion within a brilliant, allusive prose style. Although he continued to produce innovative and often formally experimental fiction, after 1970 Zelazny increasingly focused on more commercial work, in particular the extraordinarily popular fantasy novels in the Amber series. At the time of his death, Zelazny remained a beloved figure within the field, but the critical consensus was that he had chosen commercial success over literary ambition and that his later work did not rise to the level of the breakthrough stories of the 1960s. This book argues that such a reading is an oversimplification. Whereas Zelazny’s use of mythic structures and sophisticated prose is important, so is his strikingly consistent preoccupation with questions of autonomy that evolves from early stories of the noble resistance of often violent individuals to later stories of such individuals’ existing within a larger community--all produced, from the beginning to the end of his career, within the ongoing tensions between the ambitions of the literary artist and the requirements of the commercial writer.

Edgar Lee Masters’s best-selling Spoon River Anthology (1915) captured a regional conception of Midwestern rural life, packaged it in verse by fictional dead people, and disseminated it so widely that the book helped shift the popular conception of the representative American municipality from the New England village to the Midwestern small town. Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town explores the atmosphere into which Masters’s book was born and the environments in which it thrived, even beyond the life and legacy of its author. Masters’s book aroused interest among modernists like Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Carl Van Doren and popular writers like William Allen White. Its legacy resonated in popular culture through films like It’s a Wonderful Life and Rebel without a Cause, amusement parks like Disneyland, and The Rolling Stones’ album Exile on Main Street. One hundred years after its publication, signs of Spoon River could still be found in films like Fargo; Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri; television series like Twin Peaks, Stranger Things, and Ozark; and the radio program A Prairie Home Companion. While this book uncovers the milieu in which Spoon River Anthology was created, it also traces the ways in which Americans embraced, debated, and transformed Masters’s portrayal of Spoon River and made it part of the mythology of small-town life in the United States.

This book completes the biography trilogy begun in Becoming Ray Bradbury and continued in Ray Bradbury Unbound. Bradbury Beyond Apollo begins in the early 1970s, as Bradbury found himself fully established as a witness and celebrant of the Space Age. His storytelling powers were turning to stage, screen, and television adaptations of his classic midcentury titles, including The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Although he was no longer producing a high volume of masterful tales, Bradbury Beyond Apollo chronicles how the last four decades of his life produced the playful fantasies of The Halloween Tree, his award-winning television series The Ray Bradbury Theater, a collaboration with Disney Imagineers on EPCOT’s Spaceship Earth, and significant essays on the common ground between science and religion represented by humanity’s Space Age achievements. The book also documents how Bradbury’s influential lectures, interviews, and essays explored the history of ideas, the nature of creativity, and his own evolving work ethic of optimal behaviorism. Mid-book chapters analyze Bradbury’s significant late-life achievements in fictionalized autobiography and his completion of books that originated decades earlier, including Somewhere a Band Is Playing, perhaps his most significant late-life reflection on time and memory. The book’s overarching contention is that Bradbury’s wide range of ventures were largely sustained by his ever-increasing prominence as a Space Age visionary.

Kim Stanley Robinson is the first full-length study of one of the most widely read and influential science-fiction writers of our era. In dicussing eighteen of his novels published since 1984 and a selection of his short fiction, this study explores the significance of his work in reshaping contemporary literature. Three of the chapters are devoted to Robinson’s major trilogies: the Orange County trilogy (1984-90), the Mars trilogy (1992-96), and the Science in the Capital trilogy (2004-07). Two other chapters consider his groundbreaking alternative histories, including “The Lucky Strike” (1984), The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), and Shaman (2014), and his future histories set among colonies in the solar system, notably Galileo’s Dream (2009) and 2312 (2012). The concluding chapter examines Robinson’s most recent novels Aurora (2015) and New York 2140 (2017). In interviews, Robinson describes his fiction as weaving together, in various combinations, Marxism, ecology, and Buddhist thought, and all of his novels explore how we might imagine forms of utopian political action. His novels—from the Mars trilogy to New York 2140—offer a range of possible futures that chart humankind’s uneven progress, often over centuries, toward the greening of science, technology, economics, and politics. Robinson filters our knowledge of the past and our imagination of possible futures through two superimposed lenses: the ecological fate of the Earth (or other planets) and the far-reaching consequences of moral, political, and socioeconomic decisions of individuals, often scientists and artists, caught up in world or solar-systemic events. In this respect, his fiction charts a collective struggle to think beyond the contradictions of historical existence, and beyond our locations in time, culture, and geography.

Joanna Russ (1937-2011) was an outstanding writer, critic, and theorist of science fiction at a time when female writers were marginal to the genre, and very few women, perhaps only Judith Merril and Joanna herself, had significant influence on the field. In her university teaching and in her writing she championed the integration of new social models and higher literary standards into genre works. In her review columns for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction she dissected the masters of the New Wave with appreciation, wit, and incisive intelligence. Her experimental novel The Female Man (1975) is an essential seventies Feminist text, still relevant today; her groundbreaking academic articles are recognized as foundation studies in feminist and science fiction literary scholarship. Drawing on Jeanne Cortiel’s lesbian feminist appraisal of Russ, Demand My Writing (1999), Farah Mendelsohn’s essay collection On Joanna Russ (2009), and a wide range of contemporary sources, this book aims to give context to her career in the America of her times, from the Cold War domestic revival through the 1960s decade of protest and the Second Wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s, into the twenty-first century, examining her novels, her remarkable short fiction, her critical and autobiographical works, her role in the science fiction community, and her contributions to feminist debate.

This book seeks to develop an answer to the major question arising from the adoption of sophisticated data-science approaches within humanities research: are existing humanities methods compatible with computational thinking? Data-based and algorithmically powered methods present both new opportunities and new complications for humanists. This book takes as its founding assumption that the exploration and investigation of texts and data with sophisticated computational tools can serve the interpretative goals of humanists. At the same time, it assumes that these approaches cannot and will not obsolete other existing interpretive frameworks. Research involving computational methods, the book argues, should be subject to humanistic modes that deal with questions of power and infrastructure directed toward the field’s assumptions and practices. Arguing for a methodologically and ideologically self-aware critical digital humanities, the author contextualizes the digital humanities within the larger neo-liberalizing shifts of the contemporary university in order to resituate the field within a theoretically informed tradition of humanistic inquiry. Bringing the resources of critical theory to bear on computational methods enables humanists to construct an array of compelling and possible humanistic interpretations from multiple dimensions—from the ideological biases informing many commonly used algorithms to the complications of a historicist text mining, from examining the range of feature selection for sentiment analysis to the fantasies of human subjectless analysis activated by machine learning and artificial intelligence.

This book offers theoretical perspectives and case studies for teaching American literature of the long nineteenth century using the tools and methods of the digital humanities (DH). The essays highlight best methods for integrating the building of digital tools and projects in the nineteenth-century American literature classroom and strategies for incorporating into the curriculum already established digital materials. By emphasizing a discipline-specific approach, the collection invites conversations among scholars of other disciplines about how digital pedagogies can deepen their objectives for student learning. The collection is organized into five keywords, or tags: Make, Read, Recover, Archive, and Act. The essays in Make illustrate the pedagogical value of project-based, collaborative learning. The essays in Read describe assignments in which students engage in multiple reading practices, from close to collaborative and computational. In Recover, contributors show how DH approaches aid in the scholarly consideration of marginalized texts. The essays in Archive encourage students to select and organize artifacts with an ethics of care, often in communities beyond the classroom. The final section, Act, advocates for an activist approach, demonstrating how DH can bring new insights to debates central to the study of the long nineteenth century, particularly concerning difference. As they engage digital humanities practices and pedagogies, the essays in the collection model inventive strategies and rethink what is possible in the American literature classroom.

Despite extensive critical attention, Arthur C. Clarke’s distinctive science fiction has never been fully or properly understood. This study examines some of his lighthearted shorter works for the first time and explores how Clarke’s views regularly diverge from those of other science fiction writers. Clarke thought new inventions would likely bring more problems than benefits and suspected that human space travel would never extend beyond the solar system. He accepted that humanity would probably become extinct in the future or be transformed by evolution into unimaginable new forms. He anticipated that aliens would be genuinely alien in both their physiology and psychology. He perceived a deep bond between humanity and the oceans, perhaps stronger than any developing bond between humanity and space. Despite his lifelong atheism, he frequently pondered why humans developed religions, how they might abandon them, and why religions might endure in defiance of expectations. Finally, Clarke’s characters, often criticized as bland, actually are merely reticent, and the isolated lifestyles they adopt--remaining distant or alienated from their families and relying upon connections to broader communities and long-distance communication to ameliorate their solitude--not only reflect Clarke’s own personality, as a closeted homosexual and victim of a disability, but they also constitute his most important prediction, since increasing numbers of twenty-first-century citizens are now living in this manner.

Lingua Cosmica: Science Fiction from around the World consists of eleven scholarly essays on contemporary authors (born 1950 or later) of science fiction who publish in languages other than English, or who publish from the English-speaking “periphery”: i.e., outside the United States, the United Kingdom, and Anglophone Canada. Each essay examines one author, making a case for their importance internationally and contextualizing their work within the science-fictional traditions of their own culture and those of the genre globally (themes, tropes, tendencies, subgenres, etc.). Each also offers an in-depth analysis of a major work or works. The book thus identifies major contemporary authors of science fiction outside the “center” of the English-speaking world and presents them to students and scholars in the Anglophone world. The scholars respond to questions such as: Who are these authors, and why are they important? What innovative thematic material or formal elements do they offer? What unique elements from their culture do they bring to the genre? How do they dialogue with the history of the genre, and how do they fit into the contemporary SF scene? The authors studied are Angélica Gorodischer from Argentina, Yves Meynard and Jean-Louis Trudel writing collaboratively as Laurent McAllister (Francophone Canada), Liu Cixin (China), Daína Chaviano (Cuba), Johanna Sinisalo (Finland), Jean-Claude Dunyach (France), Andreas Eschbach (Germany), Sakyo Komatsu (Japan), Olatunde Osunsanmi (Nigerian American), Jacek Dukaj (Poland), and Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky (Russia/USSR).

This biocritical study of J. G. Ballard is the first book to account for the entire life and work of the eccentric, prolific SF author. Ballard began his career publishing short stories in SF magazines. Rather than explore outer space, his fiction explores “inner space,” drawing on the aesthetics of Surrealism and Freudian psychoanalysis. In the 1960s, he became associated with the New Wave movement in SF, which eschewed the principles of pulp SF in favor of literary modernism. Ballard’s oeuvre maps the unfolding of the mediapocalypse from the dawn of the Space Age into the 21st century; pathologized by the technology of electronic media, his characters are chronically harrowed by an implosion of real and cinematic landscapes as they struggle to find agency from the “death of affect” incited by the forces of late capitalism. Some scholarship has tried to remove Ballard from SF, arguing that he abandoned the genre halfway through his career, especially after publishing the fictional autobiography Empire of the Sun. As this book avows, however, Ballard began as, and always remained, a SF writer.