A definite look at the state of science fiction studies today that surveys the field from Hugo Gernsbach to the present.

In this new retrospective collection spanning almost forty years, Pilgrim Award- and Collector's Award-winning fantasy novelist, critic, and bibliographer Robert Reginald contributes forty-five essays on writers of fantastic literature, including such major and minor figures as: Piers Anthony, Edwin Lester Arnold, Margaret Atwood, John Kendrick Bangs, Leslie Barringer, John Bellairs, Arthur Byron Cover, Lindsey Davis, Alexander de Comeau, Daphne du Maurier, R. Lionel Fanthorpe, H. Rider Haggard, Charlotte Haldane, Edward Heron-Allen, Eleanor M. Ingram, Vernon Knowles, Katherine Kurtz, Andrew Lang, Fritz Leiber, Bruce McAllister, Ward Moore, Robert Nathan, Sir Henry Newbolt, William F. Nolan, John Norman, Keith Roberts, Michael Reaves, Brian Stableford, and George Zebrowski. Also included is a comprehensive bibliography and history of the publications of Starmont House, Inc., and FAX Collector's Editions, a selection of reviews and obituaries, a bibliography, and detailed index. This unique literary collection will prove of interest both to students and researchers alike. This second edition features fifteen new pieces, including the author's earliest published critique (1968), and a number of original autobiographical reflections on his life and career penned shortly after his heart attack in 2003.

Bringing together a group of original essays concerning major writers of science fiction whose careers had begun by the end of World War II, this volume covers Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, C. L. Moore, Clifford D. Simak, Olaf Stapledon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jack Williamson.

First Published in 2002. This volume is about Science Fiction, its criticisms and teaching and covers the rise of science-fiction as a study and genre, looking at the work of H.G Wells, and the themes of epic, fable, language, cultures, its sociology, as a romance, and of a working daydream.

In 1959, at the age of 22, Joanna Russ published her first science fiction story, "Nor Custom Stale," in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. In the forty-five years since, Russ has continued to write some of the most popular, creative, and important novels and stories in science fiction. She was a central figure, along with contemporaries Ursula K. Le Guin and James Tiptree, in revolutionizing science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, and her 1970 novel, The Female Man, is widely regarded as one of the most successful and influential depictions of a feminist utopia in the entire genre. The Country You Have Never Seen gathers Joanna Russ's most important essays and reviews, revealing the vital part she played over the years in the never-ending conversation among writers and fans about the roles, boundaries, and potential of science fiction. Spanning her entire career, the collection shines a light on Russ's role in the development of new wave science fiction and feminist science fiction, while at the same time providing fascinating insight into her own development as a writer.

Imagining the Unimaginable examines popular fiction's treatment of the Holocaust in the dystopian and alternate history genres of speculative fiction, analyzing the effectiveness of the genre's major works as a lens through which to view the most prominent historical trauma of the 20th century. It surveys a range of British and American authors, from science fiction pulp to Pulitzer Prize winners, building on scholarship across disciplines, including Holocaust studies, trauma studies, and science fiction studies. The conventional discourse around the Holocaust is one of the unapproachable, unknowable, and the unimaginable. The Holocaust has been compared to an earthquake, another planet, another universe, a void. It has been said to be beyond language, or else have its own incomprehensible language, beyond art, and beyond thought. The 'othering' of the event has spurred the phenomenon of non-realist Holocaust literature, engaging with speculative fiction and its history of the uncanny, the grotesque, and the inhuman. This book examines the most common forms of nonmimetic Holocaust fiction, the dystopia and the alternate history, while firmly positioning these forms within a broader pattern of non-realist engagements with the Holocaust.