The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (Routledge Companions) [Hardcover]

‘Well designed for reference, for serendipitous browsing, or for systematic study, The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction will be welcomed by novice and veteran scholars alike.’– Carl Freedman, Louisiana State University, USA

'This title should serve as a base for future updates that will continue to enrich knowledge and appreciation of science fiction...Highly recommended.' – Choice

'The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction will, one day soon, become an indispensable guide to sf's history, breadth, and depth for the genre's scholars, authors, and aficionados... The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction to a crucial addition to sf scholarship.  The book most directly appeals to the genre's academic surveyors, but non-scholars will find it fascinating, intelligent, and debatable information in its pages.  This publication's comprehensive, incisive, and useful entries make me wish the Companion a long and prosperous (shelf) life.' – Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction is a comprehensive overview of the history and study of science fiction. It outlines major writers, movements, and texts in the genre, established critical approaches and areas for future study. Fifty-six entries by a team of renowned international contributors are divided into four parts which look, in turn, at:

• history – an integrated chronological narrative of the genre’s development
• theory – detailed accounts of major theoretical approaches including feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, postcolonialism, posthumanism and utopian studies
• issues and challenges – anticipates future directions for study in areas as diverse as science studies, music, design, environmentalism, ethics and alterity
• subgenres – a prismatic view of the genre, tracing themes and developments within specific subgenres.

Bringing into dialogue the many perspectives on the genre The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and the future of science fiction and the way it is taught and studied.

From the introduction:

The "History" section is divided by mode - prose fiction, film, television, comics, material culture - and organized by (rough) chronology so as to highlight a sense of the genre at specific historical conjunctures without sacrificing medium specificities. Some chapters do overlap slightly, but this is entirely appropriate as neither history nor media - nor our experience of them - are so neatly arranged. And although this is a substantial volume, we have not been able to include all that we would have liked - such as chapters on the longer history of sf, automata, radio, military planning, fashion, toys and games, UFOs and abduction narratives, futurology, the history of science, or sf art.

The "Theory" section examines the genre through the well-established perspectives and methodologies of sf scholarship. Some, such as marxism, feminism, and utopian studies, laid the foundations for the academic study of the genre, while others played a dominant role in establishing media-specific critical approaches, such as the psychoanalytic theory underpinning much of the work on sf film. Some, such as nuclear criticism, are predominantly associated with a particular historical conjuncture, while others, such as postmodernism, played a significant role in bringing sf texts to wider attention, both popular and scholarly. Taken together, the chapters in this section situate sf within the major critical frameworks that have shaped its study.

The "Issues and Challenges" section proposes and explores elements of a future agenda for the study of sf. it provides an overview of theoretical approaches and methodologies that have not yet proven central to the study of sf, but which offer valuable tools for thinking about and understanding the genre. The chapters in this section are equally and simultaneously concerned with what sf can offer to scholars working within these paradigms. Some of the approaches highlighted in this section have recently been taken up in sf studies (e.g., music, environmentalism, science studies), and while some chapters draw attention to synergies between sf and well-established methodologies (e.g., Young adult fiction, ethics and alterity), others introduce emergent areas of scholarship whose affinities with sf are promising (e.g., animal studies, digital games). in the next edition of this Companion, it may be that chapters currently in the third section will have moved to the second.

The "Subgenres" section focuses on different kinds of sf, each with its own distinct history and thematic concerns, and supplements the "History" section by identifying and elucidating techniques or themes that have developed and transformed across historical periods. our selections are intended to cut across more than a century of sf, rather than being confined to a particular period. For example, while the New Wave and cyberpunk movements are dealt with in their specific historical contexts, by examining space opera as a subgenre it is easer to discern how such typically uncritical fantasies of imperialist expansion in the 1930s were reformulated in the 1990s as a vehicle for critiquing the politics of empire.

Mark Bould is Reader in Film and Literature at the University of the West of England. Co-editor of Science Fiction Film and Television, his books include Film Noir (2005), Parietal Games (2005) and The Cinema of John Sayles (2008), Neo-noir (2009) and Red Planets (2009). Andrew M. Butler is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. The editor of An Unofficial Companion to the Novels of Terry Pratchett (2007) and Christopher Priest: The Interaction (2005), he has also written Pocket Essentials on Philip K. Dick (2000, 2007), Cyberpunk (2000), Terry Pratchett (2001), Film Studies (2002, 2005, 2008), and Postmodernism (2003). He co-edits Extrapolation. Adam Roberts is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the author of Science Fiction (2000) and The History of Science Fiction (2006). His most recent sf novels are Gradisil (2006), Land of the Headless (2007), Splinter (2007) and Swiftly (2008). Sherryl Vint is Assistant Professor of English at Brock University. She is the author of Bodies of Tomorrow (2007) and is currently completing Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal. She co-edits Extrapolation, Science Fiction Film and Television, and Humanimalia.