Impossibility Fiction: Alternativity, Extrapolation, Speculation

Portada
Derek Littlewood, Peter Stockwell
Rodopi, 1996 - 211 páginas
Impossibility fiction is an 'intergenre' that has recently been the resort of many writers searching for new ways of understanding and expressing the real world of the imagination, making use of fantasy, alternative history and science fiction. Coping with ideas that are both impossible and realistically constructed is the ultimate contemporary challenge of our technology. The chapters of this book move towards establishing appropriate readings that allow contemporary readers to negotiate unreality, a skill that the end of the millennium is making inevitably necessary. Such strategies have long been the preserve of literary and cultural study, and here a number of well-regarded scholars and some new to the field make their contribution to an area that has become increasingly important in recent years. From Mary Shelley to Philip K. Dick, Iain M. Banks to J.G. Ballard, taking in African-American science fiction, Jurassic Park, and Kurt Vonnegut, and exploring issues of alternative history and ideology, feminism, the holocaust, characterisation, and impossible geography, this collection is an important source-book for all those interested in the literature, culture and philosophy of realistic impossible worlds.

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Contenido

Introduction
3
Alternativity
11
T H White Arnold Bax and the Alternative History of Britain
25
Feminist Science Fiction And
37
The Case of Philip
45
Extrapolation
57
Silence and Awkwardness in Representations of the Jewish
75
George S Schuyler and the Fate of Early AfricanAmerican
87
On the Subversion of Character in the Literature of Identity
107
Neurographer Mark Jones
127
Lost in Space? Exploring Impossible Geographies James
147
Mary Shelleys The Last Man The End of the World as
163
Jurassic Park and the Generic Paradox in Science Fiction
177
Uneasy ReadingsUnspeakable Dialogics Derek Littlewood
191
Index
208
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Página 106 - I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just ; that his justice cannot sleep forever ; that considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events ; that it may become probable by supernatural interference ! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.
Página 207 - This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.
Página 207 - His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris...
Página 63 - Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical. Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy syntax...
Página 83 - There was an old woman who lived In a shoe, She had so many children, she didn't know what to do.
Página 119 - And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?
Página 68 - PHLEBAS the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss. A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool. Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Página 192 - Science fiction is a branch of fantasy identifiable by the fact that it eases the 'willing suspension of disbelief on the part of its readers by utilizing an atmosphere of scientific credibility for its imaginative speculations in physical science, space, time, social science, and philosophy.

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