Palgrave History of Science Fiction

Ab de Vos · 06 Mar 2018, 22:46 · from 2018-March.txt.gz

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From: foxyab at casema.nl (Ab de Vos)
Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2018 22:46:05 -0000
Subject: (urth) Palgrave History of Science Fiction
Message-ID: <9cec3317-ddf7-471f-3157-e17e77fdd8da at casema.nl>

Adam Roberts is a literature professor as well as a science fiction writer.

In his "The History of Science Fiction" he devotes a short chapter to 
Wolfe which he concludes by relating Wolfe to his (Roberts) main thesis 
throughout the book: "Wolfe not only revisits many of the conventions of 
20th-century SF, he goes further back than that, tapping into the deep 
roots of the genre, interrogating the many ways in which notions of 
salvation are inflected by our much broader materialist understanding of 
the cosmos."(page 439)

After treating preliminaries his history starts in chapter 4: 
"Seventeenth century SF". Central is the dialectic between matter, 
spirit and technology. Very interesting. His chapter on Wolfe contains, 
I believe, some errors. He says for instance:"Horn may or may not, 
mutate? into a new form of life across the course of the trilogy. "(page 
438) Anybody ring a bell. I thought Silk was Horn but didn't want to 
give him up because then he Horn would be dead as they were sharing the 
same body.

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