Reprint: Transcension

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Damien Broderick

Okay, we’ve spent some time talking about hard sf, but how about the idea that sf is the literature of ideas? Let’s start with this review of Transcension by Damien Broderick, which was published in The New York Review of Science Fiction 168, August 2002.

Reprint: Histories of the Future

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Alan Sandison, Alasdair Spark, Beatrice Battaglia, Brian Baker, Bruce Brasington, Charles E. Gannon, Damien Broderick, David Seed, E.M. Forster, Frederic Jameson, H.G. Wells, Harry Harrison, Hugo Gernsback, I.F. Clarke, Ken MacLeod, Robert Crossley, Robert Dingley, Tom Shippey

Today a piece of criticism about criticism. This review of Histories of the Future: Studies in Fact, Fantasy and Science Fiction edited by Alan Sandison and Robert Dingley was first published in Foundation 83, Autumn 2001.

Texts and Contexts

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Adam Roberts, critical theory, Damien Broderick, Darko Suvin, Francis Godwin, Henry Neville, J.G. Ballard, John Clute, Margaret Cavendish

Back at the beginning of the month I read a book called Speaking with the Dead for review in The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, even though the book has practically nothing to do with science fiction or fantasy. It is devoted to a rather esoteric point of New Historicism (the whole book is built around one sentence in a work by Stephen Greenblatt) and I don’t want to say much more about it here since the review will be appearing in JFA. But I found myself considering one intriguing question in relation to the study of sf prompted by this book: why does so little sf criticism employ the tools of New Historicism?

Four books

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Damien Broderick, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Willa Cather, William Boyd

Another catch-up.