Visions and Re-Visions: (Re)constructing Science Fiction

Renowned science fiction scholar Robert M. Philmus offers in Visions and Revisions a fresh and provocative literary analysis of science fiction writing. He critically examines the works of some of the most prominent writers to have written in the genre-including Evgeny Zamiatin, Karel Capek, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Stanislaw Lem, along with English-language authors from H.G. Wells to Ursula Le Guin-and reveals how their works illustrate the fundamental elements of science fiction writing. The former editor of Science Fiction Studies, Philmus casts his expert eye on a diverse range of short stories and novels by the premier arbiters of the craft, with close readings that draw upon the theories of New Criticism as well as post-Modern. Featuring essays such as "Stanislaw Lem's Futurological Congress as a Metageneric Text," "Kurt Vonnegut: Historiographer of the Absurd: The Sirens of Titan," "Ursula K. Le Guin and Time's Dispossession," and "Time Out of Joint: The World(s) of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle," the volume provides an in-depth textual examination that reveals why science fiction is a "revisionary genre." Visions and Revisions will be of immense value to scholars of literature and science fiction studies.