Eric S. Rabkin

Covers fantastic narrative from ancient myths to modern science fiction in more than fifty tales which represent man's imagination in etiology, entertainment, and wonder

Myths, Tales, and Stories

Fantastic Worlds

Masterpieces Of The Imaginative Mind

Martin Harry Greenberg

Joseph D. Olander

Writers have created fictions of social per­fection at least since Plato’s Republic. Sir Thomas More gave this thread of intel­lectual history a name when he called his contribution to it Utopia, Greek for no place. With each subsequent author cog­nizant of his predecessors and subject to altered real-world conditions which sug­gest ever-new causes for hope and alarm, “no place” changed. The fourteen essays presented in this book critically assess man’s fascination with and seeking for “no place.” “In discussing these central fictions, the contributors see ‘no place’ from di­verse perspectives: the sociological, the psychological, the political, the aesthetic. In revealing the roots of these works, the contributors cast back along the whole length of utopian thought. Each essay stands alone; together, the essays make clear what ‘no place’ means today. While it may be true that ‘no place’ has always seemed elsewhere or elsewhen, in fact all utopian fiction whirls contemporary ac­tors through a costume dance no place else but here.”—from the Preface The contributors are Eric S. Rabkin, B. G. Knepper, Thomas J. Remington, Gorman Beauchamp, William Matter, Ken Davis, Kenneth M. Roemer, Wil­liam Steinhoff, Howard Segal, Jack Zipes, Kathleen Woodward, Merritt Abrash, and James W. Bittner.

Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction

No Place Else

The essays selected by the editors to ex­plore these apocalyptic visions are: “The Re­making of Zero: Beginning at the End,” by Gary K. Wolfe; “The Lone Survivor,” by Robert Plank; “Ambiguous Apocalypse: Transcendental Versions of the End,” by Robert Galbreath; “World’s End: The Imag­ination of Catastrophe,” by W. Warren Wagar; “Man-Made Catastrophes,” by Brian Stableford; and “The Rebellion of Nature,” by W. Warren Wagar. Wolfe sees in these postholocaust narra­tives a central attraction—“the mythic power inherent in the very conception of a remade world.” This power derives from three sources: the emergence of a new order from the ashes of the old system, and thus a kind of denial of death; the reinforcement of one set of values as opposed to another; and as something always replaces whatever was destroyed, a promise that nothing can anni­hilate humanity.

The End of the World

George Edgar Slusser

Gary Westfahl

These nineteen original essays seek to recontextualize the subject of immortality, examining its influence as an ancient human aspiration while at the same time considering new scientific advances and their impact on life and literature. Grouped in three broad categories, the essays provide key information about and concepts of immortality, examine science fiction stories and scientific research to consider the prospects and possible effects of achieving immortality, and discuss immortality and life extension as literary themes. The topics the essays focus on, as well as the perspectives of the contributors, range widely: genetics, cryonics, Marxism, Darwinism, cyberspace, feminist writing, religion, Italian science fiction, film, children's literature, video games, and comic books.

Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy

Immortal Engines

Robert Scholes

A concise guide to the intellectual, social, and scientific elements that comprise the history and background of science fiction, to the genre's main developments, and to its most significant writers

History, Science, Vision

Science Fiction

Colin Greenland

Seventeen essays discuss Nineteen Eighty-Four, novels about the future, the ways people view the future, and the nature of history

Science Fiction Confronts the Future

Storm Warnings

These 16 essays from the fifth annual J. Lloyd Eaton Conference at the Univer­sity of California, Riverside, seek to come to grips with science fiction’s core, the core at which “science must ulti­mately seem to outweigh the fiction.” Never before has hard SF been the topic of such extended discussion by such qualified people. The dialogue con­stitutes new (and potentially shocking to a traditional literary critic) modes of lit­erary criticism, modes that take into ac­count the impact of scientific specula­tion and method on our culture and on the ways our culture invents stories and myths. Essayists include writer/scientist pro­fessors Robert L. Forward, David Brin, and Gregory Benford. Noted critics and writers with scientific backgrounds or interests include: James Gunn, Frank McConnell, George Guffey, John Hunt­ington, Paul Carter, Patricia Warrick, Paul Alkon, Robert M. Philmus, David Clayton, Eric S. Rabkin, Herbert Suss­man, Michael Collings, and George E. Slusser.

Hard Science Fiction

Science fiction stories dealing with the effects of technology on civilization include authors ranging from Jonathan Swift and Nathaniel Hawthorne to Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison

A Historical Anthology

Stories contains a variety of extremely high quality narratives and makes their interconnections and study accessible. In comparison to similar anthologies, Stories has more total pieces (137), and more lengthy novellas (5). It presents graphic narratives, verse narratives, Bible stories, fairy tales, non-Western teaching tales, pre- Renaissance classics, and children's literature along with many selections by women and minority authors, and stories from around the world.

An Anthology and an Introduction

Stories

Gluttony and starvation, pleasure and pain, growth and decay. These and other extremes of our condition related to food, though all but banned from the "civilized" tables of mainstream fiction, are ideal topics for the "undomesticated," free-roaming modes of fantasy. As acts and ideas, food and eating are fundamental to all that makes us human and dominate our symbolic realms of art, literature, and cuisine. These essays show us the power of speculative modes of fiction to help us look anew at prehistorical and psychomythical attitudes toward food and eating; historical Western-cultural attitudes toward the material fact of food and the necessity of eating; and the relationship between attitudes toward food and how, how much, when, and where we eat. The contributors come from a variety of backgrounds, including anthropology, film, and French, Russian, English, and medieval literature. Ranging in their focus from shamans to cannibals, utopias to social Darwinism, muscle magazines to supermarket tabloids, the contributors discuss the theory and practice of science fictional eating; the dialectic, at the level of eating, between individual needs and collective norms; and the ways that eating habits and the availability and choice of food serve to contextualize and demarcate modern fictional genres. In addition to discussing such writers as C. S. Lewis, Stephen King, Octavia Butler, Jonathan Swift, and Anne Rice, the contributors also consider such films as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast.

Eating and the Eaten in Fantasy and Science Fiction

Foods of the Gods

The impetus behind this collection of original essays is the tension between the aesthetic emphasis on stylistics in science fiction and fantasy writing and the critical limitations imposed by prevailing literary theory. From a variety of perspectives, the contributors show how a new, or expanded, set of methods and models can enrich critical exchange within the genre and between it and other types of fiction. The focus of the book is not entirely on critical restraints but also on the genre's robustly subversive, creative drive--its unwillingness or inability to pause for critical validation. The essays examine the proliferation of stylistic acts and experiments in science fiction and fantasy writing as assess the genre's revolutionary qualities: its reordering of narrative priorities, inversion of consecrated categories, and elevation of "minor" devices.

Aesthetic Technique and the Creation of Fictional Worlds

Styles of Creation

Eighteen essays plus four examples from the ninth annual J. Lloyd Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature at the University of California, Riverside. The concept of mindscape, Slusser and Rabkin explain, allows critics to focus on a single fundamental problem: "The constant need for a relation between mind and some being external to mind." The essayists are Poul Anderson, Wendy Doniger O' Flaherty, Ronald J. Heckelman, David Brin, Frank McConnell, George E. Slusser, James Romm, Jack G. Voller, Peter Fitting, Michael R. Collings, Pascal J. Thomas, Reinhart Lutz, Joseph D. Miller, Gary Westfahl, Bill Lee, Max P. Belin, William Lomax, and Donald M. Hassler. The book concludes with four authors discussing examples of mindscape. The participants are Jean-Pierre Barricelli, Gregory Benford, Gary Kern, and David N. Samuelson.

Mindscapes, the Geographies of Imagined Worlds

What exactly is the fantastic? In the twentieth-century world, our notions of what is impossible are assaulted every day. To define the nature of fantasy and the fantastic, Eric S. Rabkin considers its role in fairy tales, science fiction, detective stories, and religious allegory, as well as in traditional literature. The examples he studies range from Grimm's fairy tales to Agatha Christie, from Childhood's End to the novels of Henry James, from Voltaire to Robbe-Grillet to A Canticle for Leiboivitz. By analyzing different works of literature, the author shows that the fantastic depends on a reversal of the ground rules of a narrative world. This reversal signals most commonly a psychological escape, often from boredom, to an unknown world secretly yearned for, whose order, although reversed, bears a precise relation to reality. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Fantastic in Literature

Howard V. Hendrix,

George Slusser

Seventeen wide-ranging essays explore the evolving scientific understanding of Mars, and the relationship between that understanding and the role of Mars in literature, the arts and popular culture. Essays in the first section examine different approaches to Mars by scientists and writers Jules Verne and J.H. Rosny. Section Two covers the uses of Mars in early Bolshevik literature, Wells, Brackett, Burroughs, Bradbury, Heinlein, Dick and Robinson, among others. The third section looks at Mars as a cultural mirror in science fiction. Essayists include prominent writers (e.g., Kim Stanley Robinson), scientists and literary critics from many nations.

Essays on the Red Planet in Fiction and Science

Visions of Mars

This collection of fifteen original essays offers new perspectives on armed conflict as a central aspect of science fiction and fantasy writing. Looking past the superficial conventions associated with ray guns and aliens, swords and sorcerers, the contributors show how writers in the genre today are not so much imagining war more fully as they are completely re-imagining it. Science fiction and fantasy writing is no longer mired in epic or chivalric models but is responding to new and more complex "real-world" motivations for armed aggression: advances in weaponry, shifts in the theaters of war, and changes in battlefield conditions. Most of the papers were presented at the annual J. Lloyd Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, the field's most prestigious international gathering. The trend throughout the book is away from critical interest in stories of spatial or territorial conquest and toward works that deal with topics related to wars of temporal logistics and the internationalization of the combat zone, including urban street violence, gender conflicts, and resistance to runaway technology. The essays range from studies of the semantics and linguistics of warfare in science fiction to a critique of Osip Senkovsky's Fantastic Journeys of Baron Brambeus; from writer Joe Haldeman's assessment of the impact of his Vietnam experiences on his fiction to inquiries into a shared author/reader agenda in novels concerning potential mass destruction, including Stephen King's Dead Zone and M. J. Engh's Arslan. The collection also charts new directions in writing, such as the anti-apocalyptic science fiction of Samuel R. Delany, and embraces new modes of presentation, particularly computer animation and the bande dessinee, or illustrated narrative, as exemplified by French novelist Phillippe Druillet's La Nuit. Musician Bob Marley, film actor/directors Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Lee, and the cyberpunk film classics Terminator and the Road Warrior series are among other topics discussed. Together, the essays reinforce the editors' contention that the true function of these fantasies and science fictions is neither nostalgia nor fancy, but analysis. The contributors treat the texts they examine as a means not of playing war games but of understanding the role of war in the present and the future.

Armed Conflict in Science Fiction and Fantasy

Fights of Fancy

The second edition of Eric S. Rabkin's study of the life and work of Arthur C. Clarke.

Arthur C. Clarke

These 17 essays from the seventh annual J. Lloyd Eaton Conference examine the relationship between fantasy and science fiction. They propose that fantasy and science fiction are not isolated commercial literary forms, but instead are literary forms worthy of the recognition reserved for traditional literature. Discussion of genre identification ranges from the standard forms of literary criticism embodied in Aristotle’s mimesis and poesis to innovative and possibly controversial points of view such as a theory of humor, a philosophy of time, and a detailed analysis of Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat. The essays provide not only a detailed study of literary elements but also the historical treatment of the material, its commercial use, and its relationship to similar literary forms such as the gothic tale and horror fiction. While few of the essayists agree with one another, they all contribute creative insights to the debate.

Eric S. Rabkin

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