Red Planets

by Berger, Harris M.

• ISBN13: 9780819569134
• ISBN10: 0819569135
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-09-08
• Publisher: Wesleyan Univ Pr

Summary

Science fiction and socialism have always had a close relationship. Many science fiction novelists and filmmakers have used the genre to examine explicit or implicit Marxist concerns. Red Planets is an accessible and lively account, which makes an ideal introduction to anyone interested in the politics of science fiction. The volume covers a rich variety of examples from Weimar cinema to mainstream Hollywood films, and novelists from Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, and Thomas Disch to Ursula K. Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ken MacLeod, and Charles Stross. Contributors include Matthew Beaumont, William J. Burling, Carl Freedman, Darren Jorgensen, Rob Latham, Iris Luppa, Andrew Milner, John Rieder, Steven Shaviro, Sherryl Vint, and Phillip Wegner.

Author Biography

MARK BOULD teaches film and literature at the University of the West of England. He is the author of Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City (2005) and The Cinema of John Sayles (2008), and coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009). CHINA MIEVILLE is an independent researcher and novelist. He won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Perdido Street Station (2000) and Iron Council (2004), the British Fantasy Award for The Scar (2002), and the Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book for Un Lun Dun (2007).

Table of Contents

Series Preface	p. ix
Introduction: Rough Guide to a Lonely Planet, from Nemo to Neo	p. 1
Things To Come
The Anamorphic Estrangements of Science Fiction	p. 29
Art as 'The Basic Technique of Life': Utopian Art and Art in Utopia in The Dispossessed and Blue Mars	p. 47
Marxism, Cinema and some Dialectics of Science Fiction and Film Noir	p. 66
Spectacle, Technology and Colonialism in SF Cinema: The Case of Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World	p. 83
When Worlds Collide
The Singularity is Here	p. 103
Species and Species-Being: Alienated Subjectivity and the Commondification of Animals	p. 118
Ken MacLeod's Permanent Revolution: Utopian Possible Worlds, History and the Augenblick in the Fall Revolution Quartet	p. 137
Back to the Future
'Madonna in moon rocket with breeches': Weimar SF Film Criticism during the Stabilisation Period	p. 159
The Urban Question in New Wave SF	p. 178
Towards a Revolutionary Science Fiction: Althusser's Critique of Historicity	p. 196
Utopia and Science Fiction Revisited	p. 213
Afterword Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory	p. 231
Appendices	p. 249
About the Contributors	p. 280
Index	p. 283
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