Reprint: Whose History

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Adam Roberts, Aldous Huxley, Carolyn See, China Mieville, Darko Suvin, David Karp, Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Erskine Childers, George Orwell, George R. Stewart, Gordon R. Dickson, H.G. Wells, Hugo Gernsback, Ignatius Donnelly, Joanna Russ, Johannes Kepler, Jules Verne, Karel Capek, Kenneth Mackay, Margaret Atwood, Mark Bould, Mary E. Bradley Lane, Mary Shelley, Michael Crichton, Philip K. Dick, Pierre Benoit, Robert Heinlein, Sherryl Vint, Stanislaw Lem, Stephen Baxter, Strugatsky Brothers, Thomas M. Disch, Yevgeny Zamiatin

This review of The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction by Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint was first published in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Volume 23, issue 2, 2012:

Notes on Northrop Frye’s Theory of Genres

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Anthony Trollope, Aristotle, Daniel Defoe, Darko Suvin, Emily Bronte, George Borrow, Henry Fielding, Henry James, Herman Melville, J.D. Salinger, Jane Austen, Jonathan McCalmont, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Conrad, Laurence Sterne, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Niall Harrison, Northrop Frye, Paul Graham Raven, Robert Burton, Thomas Love Peacock, William Shakespeare

Three years ago, almost to the day, Maureen Kincaid Speller and I had lunch with Niall Harrison, Jonathan McCalmont and Paul Graham Raven. During the course of the lunch, Maureen mentioned that she was reading Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. The upshot was, we decided to read the book together, and take turns blogging about it. The first three parts of this exercise were published on Maureen’s blog, Paper Knife: Maureen on ‘Polemical Introduction’; Paul Graham Raven on ‘First Essay: Historical Criticism; Theory of Modes’; and Niall Harrison on ‘Second Essay: Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols’. For various reasons, the exercise ground to a halt at that point. But I have just unearthed my own notes on Fourth Essay: Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres, and thought it worth while presenting them here.

What follows is partly written up, but mostly in note form. But I think there is perhaps some interesting stuff nonetheless, if only because it shows the shaping and development of my own ideas on the subject. Quotations are from the Penguin 1990 edition.

Reprint: Nebula Awards Showcase 2004

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A.E. Van Vogt, Adam-Troy Castro, Alexei Panshin, Allen Steele, Anna Kavan, Anthony Boucher, Arthur Sellings, Bob Shaw, Brian Aldiss, Carol Emshwiller, Charles Stross, Damon Knight, Darko Suvin, Frederik Pohl, Groff Conklin, Harlan Ellison, Harry Harrison, Jack McDevitt, Jerry Oltion, John Wyndham, Katherine MacLean, Lesley What, Megan Lindholm, Mervyn Peake, Michael Swanwick, Molly Gloss, Neil Gaiman, Peter Jackson, Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Richard Chwedyk, Sharon Lee, Ted Chiang, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Willis E. McNelly, Willy Ley

I haven’t actually included any anthologies in my reprints so far, even though I have reviewed an awful lot of them. So I thought I should include one today. This review of Nebula Awards Showcase 2004 edited by Vonda N. McIntyre was, I think, written for The New York Review of Science Fiction, but I can’t find a record of it being published. So this may be its first appearance.

Reprint: Against a Definition of Science Fiction

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Damon Knight, Darko Suvin, Farah Mendlesohn, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jane Austen, John Crowley, Kelly Link, Ludwig Wittgenstein, m john harrison, Monty Python, Raymond Carver, Robert Heinlein, Samuel R. Delany, Steve Erickson, Steven Millhouser, T.S. Eliot

This is a revised version of a talk that I gave to a joint meeting of the Science Fiction Foundation and the British Science Fiction Association on 27 June 2009. This revised version was then published in World Literature Today, May-June 2010.

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?