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Like Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, science fiction author Alfred Bester started his career as a pulp writer and finished it as a Grand Master, but he followed a far more curious path to the field’s highest honor than either of his big-name contemporaries. He focused on SF only intermittently yet, as a result, developed a distinctive, outsider approach that opened up avenues for cutting-edge vanguards such as New Wave and cyberpunk. Making extensive use of Bester’s unpublished correspondence, this book carefully examines Bester’s entire career, giving particular attention to how his work across mediums, combined with his love of modernist and decadent authors, shaped his groundbreaking approach to science fiction. During the 1950s, Bester crossbred pulp aesthetics and high style to explosive effect, producing landmark novels and stories that crackled with excess and challenged the assumptions of Golden Age science fiction. His focus on language as a plot device and a tool for world-building, and his use of modernist style in the service of science-fictional extrapolation left the field changed forever. The book argues that what Bester brought to SF was not a radically new template but an idiosyncratic self-reflexivity about the writing and reading protocols of the genre that put the field into a highly productive and transformative dialogue with itself.

This is the first book-length study of the entire oeuvre of Scottish novelist Iain Banks. While it concentrates on the science fiction as by Iain M. Banks, in particular his novels of the Culture, it demonstrates stylistic, structural, thematic and political links between these and the supposedly realist novels. It places his work in the context of contemporary Scottish literature, the Scottish fantastic, looks at his deliberate overturning of the usual cultural and political norms associated with space opera, and proposes that the Culture novels contain a counter-narrative to the usual utopian readings.

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.