Academic literature on the topic 'American Science fiction'

Treating science fiction, critics have taught us to understand that the field shrugged itself out of the swamp of its pulp origins in two great evolutionary metamorphoses, each associated with a uniquely visionary magazine editor: Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell Jr. Paul Carter, to cite one critic among many, makes a case that Hugo Gernsback's magazines were the first to suggest thatscience fiction was not only legitimate extrapolation… [but] might even become a positive incentive to discovery, inspiring some engineer or inventor to develop in the laboratory an idea he had first read about in one of the stories. (5)Another, critic and author Isaac Asimov, argues that science fiction's fabledGolden Age began in 1938, when John Campbell became editor of Astounding Stories and remolded it, and the whole field, into something closer to his heart's desire. During the Golden Age, he and the magazine he edited so dominated science fiction that to read Astounding was to know the field entire. (Before the Golden Age, xii)Critics arrive at such understandings not only by surveying the field but also — perhaps more importantly — by studying, accepting, modifying, or even occasionally rejecting the work of other critics. This indirect and many-voiced conversation is usually seen as a self-correcting process, an informal yet public peer review. Such interested scrutiny has driven science fiction (SF) criticism to evolve from the letters to the editor and editorials and mimeographed essays of the past to the nuanced literary history of today, just as, this literary history states, those firm-minded editors helped SF literature evolve from the primordial fictions of Edgar Rice Burroughs into the sophisticated constructs of William S. Burroughs.

Abstract: This essay seeks to establish a broader conceptual framework for studying the historical development of Latin American science fiction and its recent turn—in a genre usually focused on other times and worlds—to references to the past and present of Latin American history and culture. Valuable current studies of Latin American science fiction have been devoted primarily to the history of the genre itself and to tropes that have recurred in certain periods of the development of Latin American science fiction, such as cyborgs, androids, and zombies. Few have been devoted to the issues and forces at play in the current rise not only of science fiction in Latin America but of a recognizably Latin American form of science fiction. Through readings focused on the role of history and time in representative Latin American science fictional narratives of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, from the Argentine Juana Manuela Gorriti and the Chilean Jorge Baradit to the Cuban Yoss, the pervasiveness of historicity, the view of indigenous knowledge as proto science (rather than superstition), and a penchant towards dystopias, horror, and the Gothic, are considered as possible defining traits of Latin American science fiction.

Abstract: The evolution of science fiction (SF) in Latin America has been affected concurrently by Northern genre norms and local literary and cultural realities, leading to the development of science fictions unique to the region. Modern genre SF was not imported wholesale to Latin America from the North, nor was it created in a vacuum. So how did the genre transition in Latin America in the 1940s from the relative trough in SF production in the interwar period to the Golden Age of the decades that followed? Adolfo Bioy Casares is perhaps the closest thing we have to an influencer and a bellwether of this moment in genre history. Bioy's ability to juxtapose science and science fictions past and present, to balance plot-driven and experimental writing, and to create new genre hybrids make his work emblematic of this turning point in the evolution of Latin American SF, which I am calling the "Morel hinge." This article considers the theoretical underpinnings of the Morel hinge through an examination of four prologues by Borges and Bioy Casares and illustrates it with a discussion of Bioy's 1944 short story "La trama celeste."

In the dreams our stuff is made of, Thomas M. Disch talks about the influence and pervasiveness of science Fiction in American culture and asserts the genre's power in “such diverse realms as industrial design and marketing, military strategy, sexual mores, foreign policy, and practical epistemology” (11-12). A few years earlier, Sharona Ben-Tov described science fiction as “a peculiarly American dream”—that is, “a dream upon which, as a nation, we act” (2). Recently, Kim Stanley Robinson has claimed that “rapid technological development on all fronts combined to turn our entire social reality into one giant science fiction novel, which we are all writing together in the great collaboration called history” (1-2). While such diagnostic statements may ring true to American ears, they cannot be taken at face value in the context of Hellenic culture. Despite the unprecedented speed with which the Greeks absorb and consume both the latest technologies (like satellite TV, video, CD and DVD players, electronic games, mobile and cordless phones, PCs, and the Internet) and Hollywood's science fiction blockbuster films, neither technology per se nor science fiction has yet saturated the Greek mind-set to a degree that makes daily life a science-fictional reality. Greek politicians do not consult science fiction writers for military strategy and foreign policy decisions or depend on imaginary scenarios to shape their country's future. Contemporary Hellenic culture does not acquire its national pride from mechanical devices or space conquest. Contrary to the American popular belief that technology is the driving force of history, “a virtually autonomous agent of change” (Marx and Smith xi), the Greek view is that a complex interplay of political, economic, cultural, and technoscientific agencies alters the circumstances of daily life. No hostages to technological determinism, modern Greeks increasingly interface with high-tech inventions, but without locating earthly paradise in their geographic territory and without writing their history or shaping their social reality as “one giant science fiction novel.”