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The Judas Rose
By Suzette Haden Elgin, Julie Vedder. 1987
An instant cult classic, and groundbreaking forerunner to Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale. Native Tongue Trilogy revealed to its audiences…
a frightening future world where the women of Earth are once again property.In Volume II of the trilogy, the women have at last decided to spread the language using the Roman Catholic church. But when a handful of priests discover the plot, they move to stamp it out with their own female agent, Sister Miriam Rose. But Sister Miriam has plans of her own. . . .Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine
By Susan Merrill Squier. 2004
Embryo adoptions, stem cells capable of transforming into any cell in the human body, intra- and inter-species organ transplantation--these and…
other biomedical advances have unsettled ideas of what it means to be human, of when life begins and ends. In the first study to consider the cultural impact of the medical transformation of the entire human life span, Susan Merrill Squier argues that fiction--particularly science fiction--serves as a space where worries about ethically and socially charged scientific procedures are worked through. Indeed, she demonstrates that in many instances fiction has anticipated and paved the way for far-reaching biomedical changes. Squier uses the anthropological concept of liminality--the state of being on the threshold of change, no longer one thing yet not quite another--to explore how, from the early twentieth century forward, fiction and science together have altered not only the concept of the human being but the contours of human life. Drawing on archival materials of twentieth-century biology; little-known works of fiction and science fiction; and twentieth- and twenty-first century U. S. and U. K. government reports by the National Institutes of Health, the Parliamentary Advisory Group on the Ethics of Xenotransplantation, and the President's Council on Bioethics, she examines a number of biomedical changes as each was portrayed by scientists, social scientists, and authors of fiction and poetry. Among the scientific developments she considers are the cultured cell, the hybrid embryo, the engineered intrauterine fetus, the child treated with human growth hormone, the process of organ transplantation, and the elderly person rejuvenated by hormone replacement therapy or other artificial means. Squier shows that in the midst of new phenomena such as these, literature helps us imagine new ways of living. It allows us to reflect on the possibilities and perils of our liminal lives.Native Tongue
By Suzette Haden Elgin, Susan Squier. 1984
Called "fascinating" by the New York Times upon its first publication in 1984, Native Tongue won wide critical praise and…
cult status, and has often been compared to the futurist fiction of Margaret Atwood. Set in the twenty-second century, the novel tells of a world where women are once again property, denied civil rights and banned from public life. Earth's wealth depends on interplanetary commerce with alien races, and linguists ---a small, clannish group of families ---have become the ruling elite by controlling all interplanetary communication. Their women are used to breed perfect translators for all the galaxies' languages.Nazareth Chornyak, the most talented linguist of the family, is exhausted by her constant work translating for trade organizations, supervising the children's language education, running the compound, and caring for the elderly men. She longs to retire to the Barren House, where women past childbearing age knit, chat, and wait to die. What Nazareth comes to discover is that a slow revolution is going on in the Barren Houses: there, word by word, women are creating a language of their own to free them from men's control."Native Tongue brings to life not only the possibility of a women's language, but a rationale for one,"--Village Voice"Elgin takes up more than linguistics, of course--everything from religion to sex...the story is absolutely compelling."--Women's Review of BooksSuzette Haden Elgin is author of twelve science fiction novels and is widely know for her best-selling series The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense and for The Grandmother Principles. She is director of the Ozark Center for Language Studies and is professor emerita of linguistics at San Diego State University.Susan Squier is Julia Brill professor of English and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University.Notes From Underground
By Eric Bogosian. 1993
Swastika Night
By Daphne Patai, Katharine Burdekin. 1985
Published in 1937, twelve years before Orwell's 1984, this novel projects a totally male-controlled fascist world that has eliminated women…
as we know them. They are breeders, kept as cattle, while men in this post-Hitlerian world are embittered automatons, fearful of all feelings, having abolished all history, education, creativity, books, and art. Not even the memory of culture remains. The plot centers on a "misfit" who asks, as readers must, "How could this have happenned?" Ann J. Lane calls the novel a "brilliant, chilling dystopia." "This is a powerful, haunting vision of the inner and outer worlds of male violence."-Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume One, 1884-1933I. Asimov: A Memoir ("robots En El Tiempo" De I. Asimov Ser.)
By Isaac Asimov. 1994
Arguably the greatest science fiction writer who ever lived, Isaac Asimov also possessed one of the most brilliant and original…
minds of our time. His accessible style and far-reaching interests in subjects ranging from science to humor to history earned him the nickname "the Great Explainer. "I. Asimovis his personal story--vivid, open, and honest--as only Asimov himself could tell it. Here is the story of the paradoxical genius who wrote of travel to the stars yet refused to fly in airplanes; who imagined alien universes and vast galactic civilizations while staying home to write; who compulsively authored more than 470 books yet still found the time to share his ideas with some of the great minds of our century. Here are his wide-ranging thoughts and sharp-eyed observations on everything from religion to politics, love and divorce, friendship and Hollywood, fame and mortality. Here, too, is a riveting behind-the-scenes look at the varied personalities--Campbell, Ellison, Heinlein, Clarke, del Rey, Silverberg, and others--who along with Asimov helped shape science fiction. As unique and irrepressible as the man himself,I. Asimov is the candid memoir of an incomparable talent who entertained readers for nearly half a century and whose work will surely endure into the future he so vividly envisioned.Great Secret, The
By L. Ron Hubbard. 2008
Boldly go to worlds where no one has gone before. Fanner Marston was raised a slave as a child, became…
a petty street thief as a teen, and now masters his own craft and crew as a grown man. He's also gone completely mad. Driven by privation, with a vicious greed and slavering lust for power, Marston alone of forty men has survived the perilous trek through a blistering desert to the magical city of Parva, where legend says a secret awaits which will give him absolute control over the Universe. However, Marston finds the key to all power is not at all what he expected. . . ALSO INCLUDES THE SCIENCE FICTION STORIES "SPACE CAN," "THE BEAST" AND "THE SLAVER""Tremendous attention to detail ... audiences will find themselves captivated from beginning to end."--Publishers Weekly starred reviewBattlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
By L. Ron Hubbard. 2002
Suspense, politics, war, humor and intergalactic finance. A towering masterwork of science fiction adventure and one of the best-selling science…
fiction novels of all time, L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth opens with breathtaking scope on an Earth dominated for 1,000 years by an alien invader and man is an endangered species. From the handful of surviving humans a courageous leader emerges Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, who challenges the invincible might of the alien Psychlo empire in a battle of epic scale, danger and intrigue with the fate of the Earth and of the universe in the tenuous balance. "Tight plotting, furious action and have at'em entertainment." --Kirkus ReviewJohn Brunner
By Jad Smith. 2012
Under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, John Brunner (1934-1995) was one of the most prolific and influential science fiction…
authors of the late twentieth century. During his exemplary career, the British author wrote with a stamina matched by only a few other great science fiction writers and with a literary quality of even fewer, importing modernist techniques into his novels and stories and probing every major theme of his generation: robotics, racism, drugs, space exploration, technological warfare, and ecology. In this first intensive review of Brunner's life and works, Jad Smith carefully demonstrates how Brunner's much-neglected early fiction laid the foundation for his classic Stand on Zanzibar and other major works such as The Jagged Orbit, The Sheep Look Up, and The Shockwave Rider. Making extensive use of Brunner's letters, columns, speeches, and interviews published in fanzines, Smith approaches Brunner in the context of markets and trends that affected many writers of the time, including Brunner's uneasy association with the "New Wave" of science fiction in the 1960s and '70s. This landmark study shows how Brunner's attempts to cross-fertilize the American pulp tradition with British scientific romance complicated the distinctions between genre and mainstream fiction and between hard and soft science fiction and helped carve out space for emerging modes such as cyberpunk, slipstream, and biopunk.Greed
By L. Ron Hubbard. 2008
Captivating new worlds. Once there had been a single government of Earth controlled by the western races, but the long-oppressed…
people of Asia finally struck back with a "cohesion projector." In an instant, the device established a solid, invisible wall of space--creating a dividing line between the superpowers, with the Asiatic Federation inside and the United Continents outside.Both powers are tenuously perched on the brink of war until George Marquis Lorrilard comes along. A sometime lieutenant of the pitiful handful of space guards known as the United Continents Space Navy, he's used the experience to become a space exploiter. Far less driven by altruism than by the ferocious thirst and hunger of greed, Lorrilard sets a course to change forever the fate of Earth and the stars. ALSO INCLUDES THE SCIENCE FICTION STORIES "FINAL ENEMY" AND "THE AUTOMAGIC HORSE""...enjoyable, entertaining, and lighthearted..."--BooklistUrsula K. Le Guin: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series)
By Ursula K. Le Guin, David Streitfeld. 2019
“Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” —Ursula K. Le Guin…
When she began writing in the 1960s, Ursula K. Le Guin was as much of a literary outsider as one can be: a woman writing in a landscape dominated by men, a science fiction and fantasy author in an era that dismissed “genre” literature as unserious, and a westerner living far from fashionable East Coast publishing circles. The interviews collected here—spanning a remarkable forty years of productivity, and covering everything from her Berkeley childhood to Le Guin envisioning the end of capitalism—highlight that unique perspective, which conjured some of the most prescient and lasting books in modern literature.Today the names of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, all regular contributors to…
the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the first half of the twentieth century, are recognizable even to casual readers of the bizarre and fantastic. And yet despite being more popular than them all during the golden era of genre pulp fiction, there is another author whose name and work have fallen into obscurity: Seabury Quinn.Quinn’s short stories were featured in well more than half of Weird Tales’s original publication run. His most famous character, the supernatural French detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, investigated cases involving monsters, devil worshippers, serial killers, and spirits from beyond the grave, often set in the small town of Harrisonville, New Jersey. In de Grandin there are familiar shades of both Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and alongside his assistant, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, de Grandin’s knack for solving mysteries-and his outbursts of peculiar French-isms (grand Dieu!)-captivated readers for nearly three decades.Collected for the first time in trade editions, The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, edited by George Vanderburgh, presents all ninety-three published works featuring the supernatural detective. Presented in chronological order over five volumes, this is the definitive collection of an iconic pulp hero. The first volume, The Horror on the Links, includes all of the Jules de Grandin stories from "The Horror on the Links” (1925) to "The Chapel of Mystic Horror” (1928), as well as an introduction by George Vanderburgh and Robert Weinberg.A Feeling of Wrongness: Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture
By Joseph Packer, Ethan Stoneman. 2018
In A Feeling of Wrongness, Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman confront the rhetorical challenge inherent in the concept of pessimism…
by analyzing how it is represented in an eclectic range of texts on the fringes of popular culture, from adult animated cartoons to speculative fiction.Packer and Stoneman explore how narratives such as True Detective, Rick and Morty, Final Fantasy VII, Lovecraftian weird fiction, and the pop ideology of transhumanism are better suited to communicate pessimistic affect to their fans than most carefully argued philosophical treatises and polemics. They show how these popular nondiscursive texts successfully circumvent the typical defenses against pessimism identified by Peter Wessel Zapffe as distraction, isolation, anchoring, and sublimation. They twist genres, upend common tropes, and disturb conventional narrative structures in a way that catches their audience off guard, resulting in belief without cognition, a more rhetorically effective form of pessimism than philosophical pessimism.While philosophers and polemicists argue for pessimism in accord with the inherently optimistic structures of expressive thought or rhetoric, Packer and Stoneman show how popular texts are able to communicate their pessimism in ways that are paradoxically freed from the restrictive tools of optimism. A Feeling of Wrongness thus presents uncharted rhetorical possibilities for narrative, making visible the rhetorical efficacy of alternate ways and means of persuasion.Grasses of a Thousand Colors
By Wallace Shawn. 2009
"Among living American writers for the theater today, Wallace Shawn is among the most respected by his peers and championed…
by serious critics."--Don Shewey"The play is bound to delve further into the world that Shawn began to explore so precipitously nearly thirty-five years ago: one filled with ideas, wherein the action is the domestication of cruelty."--The New YorkerGrasses of a Thousand Colors is a poetic epic that tells the story of a scientist (Ben), his wife (Cerise), and his two mistresses (Robin and Rose), as they fend for their lives in a world much like ours, yet one savagely close to extinction. Due to the scientific manipulation of the world's crops, a destructive system for which Ben is partly responsible, there is very little nourishment left to be had, except for those most privileged and connected. Despite the dying off of most of the world, these characters manage to survive, at times tasting the good life, admiring the beauties of nature, feasting on animalistic sex, and finding love. The play raises issues of redemption, forgiveness, and responsibility as it recounts a somewhat passionate, erotic adventure story.Wallace Shawn is the author of Our Late Night (winner of the OBIE Award for Best Play), Marie and Bruce, Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Designated Mourner, The Fever, and the screenplay for My Dinner with Andre, in which he starred. Grasses of a Thousand Colors, Shawn's first full-length play in ten years, will be produced in the United Kingdom and the United States in 2009. Shawn is a well-known film and television actor. He resides in New York City.Westwind: The classic lost thriller
By Ian Rankin. 2019
It always starts with a small lie. That's how you stop noticing the bigger ones.After his friend suspects something strange…
going on at the launch facility where they both work - and then goes missing - Martin Hepton doesn't believe the official line of "long-term sick leave"...Refusing to stop asking questions, he leaves his old life behind, aware that someone is shadowing his every move.The only hope he has is his ex-girlfriend Jill Watson - the only journalist who will believe his story.But neither of them can believe the puzzle they're piecing together - or just how shocking the secret is that everybody wants to stay hidden...A gripping, page-turning suspense masterclass - experience the brilliance of the iconic Ian Rankin.Report from Planet Midnight (Outspoken Authors)
By Nalo Hopkinson. 2012
Infused with feminist, Afro-Caribbean views of the science fiction and fantasy genres, this collection of offbeat and highly original works…
takes aim at race and racism in literature. In "Report from Planet Midnight," at the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts, an alien addresses the crowd, evaluating Earth's "strange" customs, including the marginalization of works by nonwhite and female writers. "Message in a Bottle" shows Greg, an American Indian artist, befriending a strange four-year-old who seems wise beyond her years. While preparing an exhibition, he discovers that the young girl is a traveler from the future sent to recover art from the distant past—which apparently includes his own work. Concluding the book with series editor Terry Bisson's Outspoken Interview, Nalo Hopkinson shares laughs, loves, and top-secret Caribbean spells.As you ride down the intergalactic bike path, you come to a crossroads. Which path will you take? Your choice…
could determine your future, or the future of all humanity, forever. These twelve stories explore a variety of intersections set in distant, outlandish, or disturbingly realistic futures and dimensions—all involving bicycles and the breaking of gender stereotypes. A bicycle race spans a rift between worlds. A teenager learns a valuable lesson from her prepper mom. A young fruit seller gets closer to her dream of becoming an astronaut. An overwhelmed mom finds unexpected solace at a bicycle collective. And much more! Contributors include Tuere T.S. Ganges, Gretchin Lair, Ayame Whitfield, Julia K. Patt, Elly Bangs, Osahon Ize-Iyamu, Monique Cuillerier, Kat Lerner, Hella Grichi, and Summer Jewel Keown, with illustrations by Elly Bangs and Paul Abbamondi.Science/Fiction Collections: Fantasy, Supernatural and Weird Tales
By Lee Ash. 1983
Science/Fiction Collections offers different views and attitudes toward Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature and descriptions of a variety of collections.…
Written during a time when Science Fiction and Fantasy writings had just gained widespread popularity, it offers suggestions and considerations for approaching any special collection dealing with a relatively new field.Lost Empress
By Sergio De La Pava. 2018
"Ambitious, affecting, intelligent, plangent, comic, kooky and impassioned. I've read a lot of novels this year, between judging the Man…
Booker prize and the Granta Best of Young British Novelists, and I've yearned for this kind of exuberant, precise fiction" Stuart Kelly, Guardian on A Naked SingularityIt would take something huge to put Paterson, New Jersey on the map.But Nina Gill is determined to do just that. She is the daughter of the ageing owner of the Dallas Cowboys and the well-kept secret to their success. Shocked when her brother inherits the team, leaving her with the Paterson Pork, New Jersey's only Indoor Football League franchise, she vows to take on the N.F.L. and make her new team the pigskin kings of America.Meanwhile, Nuno DeAngeles - a brilliant criminal mastermind - contrives to be thrown into Rikers Island prison to commit one of the most audacious crimes of all time. Now he's on the inside, he has two good reasons to get out. But how does a person of culture go about breaking out of the penal system when the whole of the land of the free is addicted to keeping him in it?Without knowing it, or ever having met, Nina and Nuno have already had a profound effect on each other's lives. As his bid for freedom and her bid for sporting immortality reach crisis point, their stories converge in the countdown to an epic conclusion. Thrilling, touching, insightful and shockingly hilarious, De La Pava's extraordinary novel gets under the skin and into the minds of a vast cast of characters from the fringes of society - immigrants, exiles and outsiders.Genus Homo
By L. Sprague DeCamp, P. Schuyler Miller. 1950
Twenty-five men and women against a world of evolution gone mad!Here is the vivid story of their adventures and terrors…
- the monster in the forest - the city of giant beavers - and the secret of the incredible race that had supplanted mankind.