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The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction
The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction explores the relationship between the ideas and themes of American science fiction and their roots in the American cultural experience. Science fiction in America has long served to reflect the country's hopes, desires, ambitions, and fears. The ideas and conventions associated with science fiction are pervasive throughout American film and television, comics and visual arts, games and gaming, and fandom, as well as across the culture writ large. Through essays that address not only the history of science fiction in America but also the influence and significance of American science fiction throughout media and fan culture, this companion serves as a key resource for scholars, teachers, students, and fans of science fiction.
eBook
The Cambridge companion to American science fiction
\"The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction explores the relationship between the ideas and themes of American science fiction and their roots in the American cultural experience. Science fiction in America has long served to reflect the country's hopes, desires, ambitions, and fears. The ideas and conventions associated with science fiction are pervasive throughout American film and television, comics and visual arts, games and gaming, and fandom, as well as across the culture writ large. Through essays that address not only the history of science fiction in America but also the influence and significance of American science fiction throughout media and fan culture, this companion serves as a key resource for scholars, teachers, students, and fans of science fiction\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Five Suicides of Martin Eden
[...]the inevitable penalty of overstimulation, exhaustion, opened the gates of civilization to its great enemy, ennui-the stale and flat weariness where man delights not, nor woman either, when all things are vanity and vexation, and life seems not worth living except to escape the bore of dying.\" [...]suicide itself-as a choice, as an act, and as the outcome of a peculiar kind of cognitive process-is a significant thematic element in London's novel.2 Four hypotheses emerge from this observation about the centrality of suicide to the novel Martin Eden: 1.Suicide (both specifically in relation to the character of Martin Eden, and conceptually as a human response to certain internal and external forces) is one of the central elements or themes driving the plot of the novel Martin Eden. 2. [...]the operation of human consciousness is a recurring subject or motif in Martin Eden, and the plot of the novel ultimately resolves itself in an act that is a by-product of a henidical mental process that culminates in a conceptual representation of the act of suicide in the consciousness of the title character, which, in turn, leads to the successful engagement of the human will to perform the act of suicide which concludes the novel. [...]Huxley notes that knowledge does not extend beyond our states of consciousness-everything we \"know\" we know because it falls within the range of our individual consciousness. [...]Huxley leaves us in this essay in a position that I believe the American literary naturalists found intriguing: the recognition that self-awareness, self-identity, and individual human consciousness is fundamental to our experience, and everything we know is filtered through this prism, but that the human will itself is not free, for we live in a deterministic environment.
Journal Article
Jack London, \The Sea-Wolf\, and the Natural History of Love
What I will argue, however, is that in developing the love story between Humphrey Van Weyden and Maud Brewster, Jack London was working out some of the implications of an array of ideas informing the intellectual climate of his time. [...]there is, at least, an intellectual framework-rooted in Darwinian sexual selection, but moving beyond Descent of Man-that frames and contexmalizes this charming bit of sentiment that concludes The Sea-Wolf Love is the thorn in the side of the evolutionary theorists of the nineteenth century who grappled, as Darwin did in The Descent of Man (1871), with the \"sex problem.\" [...]common and simple natures fall in love very easily, and find no difficultly in replacing the object of their love by another; while delicate and complex natures find it a long and tedious task to discover their ideal or anything approximating it, in real life, and in giving it a successor if they happen to lose it\" (252). Wolf's violent, Nietzschean will expresses itself in attempted rape, which triggers the desperate desertion of the Ghost by Hump and Maud. [...]in the second half of \"The Natural History of Love,\" Nordau critiques the literature of the era (in ways foreshadowing the all-out assault in Degeneration a few years later) for its degenerate por- trayais of love, which, in turn, give unsuspecting readers very false pictures of love and of healthy, normal romantic and sexual interaction between individuals. For Nordau, the purpose of love is rooted in the \"consciousness of incompleteness, the longing for the possession of what is needed to supplement the individual, physically, morally and mentally, to form the perfect whole, the source of new life\" (253). [...]driven together by the propinquity effect and supported by the laws of affinity, in each other Hump and Maud find a love that allows them to balance self-love and love of others-and thus they emerge at the end of the novel positioned for survival in the vast evolutionary drama of nature.
Journal Article
Introduction: Naturalism and Science Fiction
In Butler's story, those who suffer with dgd are driven by biological and psychological urges that resist logic and reason-they are urges encoded in one's genes. [...]we find that human agency is compromised by genetic markers inherited from one's parents. For all of their common intellectual and thematic interests, the scholarship that has emerged in the past century concerning the connection between literary naturalism and science fiction is, for all practical purposes, simply nonexistent. Because of their surface dissimilarities (detailed and relentless analysis of human documents in richly textured social environments, on the one hand; space aliens and interstellar travel, on the other), critics in these fields have tended to write about literary naturalism or science fiction, but generally not about both at the same time. Yet all of the connections have been there: science fiction's reliance on evolutionary theory as a way to domesticate the alien and deal with variations in human growth and development on the macro scale, the emergence of the Utopian novels-e.g., Bellamy's Looking Backward, Howells's Λ Traveler from Altruria, Gilman's Herland-side-by-side with the classic phase of literary naturalism and their mutual use of evolutionary theory, Jack London's repeated experiments with speculative fiction in The Star Rover, \"The Scarlet Plague,\" \"The Red One,\" \"Goliah,\" \"The Unparalleled Invasion,\" and more. Transhumanism, cybernetic theory, ecocritical approaches to literature, animal and animality studies, perspectives on alterity, utopian/dystopian analysis, alloplastic and autoplastic approaches to human environments, commodity fetishization, xenophobia, the anthropic principle, evolution and natural selection, social Darwinism, theories of accelerating change, and perspectives on human discovery and invention-concepts such as these may provide new perspectives on the relationship between literary naturalism and science fiction.
Journal Article