Edging into the Future

by Hollinger, Veronica; Gordon, Joan

• ISBN13: 9780812218046
• ISBN10: 0812218043
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

Summary

Edging into the Futureexplores contemporary science fiction literature and media as imaginative expressions of an already science-fictional present and as literal descriptions of postmodern culture. Thirteen noted scholars and writers, including Brian Attebery, Gwyneth Jones, and Gary K. Wolfe, provide an overview of the state of contemporary science fiction and emphasize the diversity of ways in which science fiction as a narrative mode and as a social discourse comments upon contemporary cultural, political, and technological transformations. As the essays inEdging into the Futuredemonstrate, science fiction is both symptomatic of cultural disruption and change and an expression of our desire to give shape and meaning to that change. These essays examine a variety of science fiction forms, from literature to rock 'n' roll, and from film to anime and hypermedia, exploring such topics as generic transformation, the relationship of the body to technology, gender and sexuality, the construction of both individual and communal subjects, and the contemporary sense of an ending. They point to the intriguing directions in which science fiction continues to develop, while demonstrating that the challenge for the genre today is less to extrapolate a distant future than to keep up with a permanently mutable present in which genres, subjects, bodies, communities, and futures are all in flux. The essays in this collection, representing a multiplicity of perspectives, are bound together by their common focus on science fiction literature and media as forms of cultural expression uniquely suited to address the pressures and promises of contemporary culture.

Author Biography

Veronica Hollinger is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Trent University in Ontario. Joan Gordon is Associate Professor of Literature at Nassau Community College. Together they coedited the volume Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Edging into the Future

Genre Implosion

Evaporating Genre: Strategies of Dissolution in the Postmodern Fantastic

Omniphage: Rock 'n' Roll and Avant-Pop Science Fiction

Synthespians, Virtual Humans, and Hypermedia: Emerging Contours of Post-Sf-Film

Imploded Subjects and Reinscripted Bodies

Staying with the Body: Narratives of the Posthuman in Contemporary Science Fiction

"But Aren't Those Just ... You Know, Metaphors?": Postmodern Figuration in the Science Fiction

Sex/uality and the Figure of the Hermaphrodite in Science Fiction; or, The Revenge

Mutant Youth: Posthuman Fantasies and High-Tech Consumption in 1990s Science Fiction

"Going Postal": Rage, Science Fiction, and the Ends of the American Subject

Reimagined Apocalypses and Exploded Communities

Apocalypse Coma

Kairos: The Enchanted Loom

Dead Letters and Their Inheritors: Ecospasmic Crashes and the Post-Mortal Condition in Brian Stableford's Histories of the Future

Utopia, Genocide, and the Other: Science Fiction Explores the Truly Monstrous

Dis-Imagined Communities: Science Fiction and the Future of Nations

Notes

Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.