Publisher's Synopsis
These eleven challenging critical essays on late Victorian and modern science fiction focus primarily on the critical analyses of specific works in the light of current critical theory and debates about the social function and relevance of science fiction. Authors analysed include Morris, Stoker, Lem, Wyndham, Herbert and LeGuin. An appreciation by Sanislaw Lem, the foremost post-war science fiction writer, of H.G.Wells's "War of the Worlds" and a section on recent feminist science fiction and science fiction criticism completes the collection. A broad spectrum of critical and theoretical approaches are employed, but the book's main thrust is to seek to develop modes of explicating science fiction's social location as a literary genre in contemporary western society.