<P>As the world undergoes daily transformations through the application of technoscience to every aspect of life, science fiction has become an essential mode of imagining the horizons of possibility. However much science fiction texts vary in artistic quality and intellectual sophistication, they share in a mass social energy and a desire to imagine a collective future for the human species and the world. At this moment, a strikin ...
<P>Early science fiction has often been associated almost exclusively with Northern industrialized nations. In this groundbreaking exploration of the science fiction written in Latin America prior to 1920, Rachel Haywood Ferreira argues that science fiction has always been a global genre. She traces how and why the genre quickly reached Latin America and analyzes how writers in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico adapted science fiction ...
<P>Award-winning novelist Samuel R. Delany has written a book for creative writers to place alongside E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Lajos Egri's Art of Dramatic Writing. Taking up specifics (When do flashbacks work, and when should you avoid them? How do you make characters both vivid and sympathetic?) and generalities (How are novels structured? How do writers establish serious literary reputations today?), De ...
<P>Jules Verne, celebrated French author of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days, wrote over 60 novels collected in the popular series «Voyages Extraordinaires.» A handful of these have never been translated into English, including Invasion of the Sea, written in 1904 when large-scale canal digging was very much a part of the political, economic, and military strategy of the world's imperial po ...
<P>Carl Freedman traces the fundamental and mostly unexamined relationships between the discourses of science fiction and critical theory, arguing that science fiction is (or ought to be) a privileged genre for critical theory. He asserts that it is no accident that the upsurge of academic interest in science fiction since the 1970s coincides with the heyday of literary theory, and that likewise science fiction is one of the most t ...
Yuri Konikov becomes an unwitting subject for a bioengineered technology that transforms him into an enhanced, privately owned Corporate Agent. The Russian Alliance Corporation wanted an army of agents, but after repeated failures they canceled the project. All traces of the technology must be eliminated, including their only successful super agent. ...
In 525 B.C., the Persian king Cambyses sent fifty-thousand soldiers across the conquered Egyptian desert to take an oasis city not far from where the Libyan border stands today. According to Greek history, a hurricane-force sandstorm struck near the end of their six-hundred-mile trek. The army-all fifty thousand men-vanished without a single trace. Fast forward to 1986. A British archaeological team, sent to the edge of the Great Sand Sea to exh ...
Nordengland im 9. Jahrhundert. Die christlichen Sachsen versuchen ihr Land und ihren Glauben gegen die heidnischen Wikinger zu verteidigen. Der zehnjahrige Furstensohn Uhtred kampft gegen die danischen Eroberer. Ragnar, ihr Anfuhrer, ist vom Mut des Jungen in der Schlacht so beeindruckt, da? er ihn verschont. Uhtred wachst als sein Ziehsohn bei den Nordmannern auf. Jahre spater droht nun auch Wessex, das letzte der funf angelsachsischen Konigrei ...
"Shahnameh: The Epic of Kings" is the epic poem of the Persian poet Ferdowsi which tells of the mythological and historical past of Persia from the creation of the world up until the Islamic conquest in the seventh century. Written between 977 and 1010 AD, the «Shahnameh» is a captivating story of the ancient world and details much of Persia's history, culture, and ancient religions. The Helen Zimmern prose translation of the «Shahname ...
