Stefan Rabitsch

Clear all moorings, one-half impulse power and set course for a mare incognitum... A popular culture artifact of the New Frontier/Space Race era, Star Trek is often mistakenly viewed as a Space Western. However, the Western format is not what governs the worldbuilding of Star Trek, which was, after all, also pitched as “Hornblower in space.” Star Trek is modeled on the world of the “British Golden Age of Sail” as it is commonly found in the genre of sea fiction. This book re-historicizes and remaps the origins of the franchise and subsequently the entirety of its fictional world—the Star Trek continuum—on an as yet uncharted transatlantic bearing.

Star Trek and the British Age of Sail

Michael Fuchs

Stefan L. Brandt

Contributions by Carl Abbott, Jacob Babb, Marleen S. Barr, Michael Fuchs, John Glover, Stephen Joyce, Sarah Lahm, James McAdams, Cynthia J. Miller, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Chris Pak, María Isabel Pérez Ramos, Stefan Rabitsch, J. Jesse Ramírez, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Andrew Wasserman, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, and Robert Yeates Metropolis, Gotham City, Mega-City One, Panem’s Capitol, the Sprawl, Caprica City—American (and Americanized) urban environments have always been a part of the fantastic imagination. Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror focuses on the American city as a fantastic geography constrained neither by media nor rigid genre boundaries. Fantastic Cities builds on a mix of theoretical and methodological tools that are drawn from criticism of the fantastic, media studies, cultural studies, American studies, and urban studies. Contributors explore cultural media across many platforms such as Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, the Arkham Asylum video games, the 1935 movie serial The Phantom Empire, Kim Stanley Robinson’s fiction, Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One, the vampire films Only Lovers Left Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Water Knife, some of Kenny Scharf’s videos, and Samuel Delany’s classic Dhalgren. Together, the contributions in Fantastic Cities demonstrate that the fantastic is able to “real-ize” that which is normally confined to the abstract, metaphorical, and/or subjective. Consequently, both utopian aspirations for and dystopian anxieties about the American city become literalized in the fantastic city.

American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror

Fantastic Cities

Wilfried Elmenreich

Martin Gabriel

John N.A. Brown

For 50 years, Star Trek has been an inspiration to its fans around the world, helping them to dream of a better future. This inspiration has entered our culture and helped to shape much of the technology of the early 21st Century. The contributors to this volume are researchers and teachers in a wide variety of disciplines; from Astrophysics to Ethnology, from English and History to Medicine and Video Games, and from American Studies to the study of Collective Computing Systems. What the authors have in common is that some version of Star Trek has inspired them, not only in their dreams of what may be, but in the ways in which they work - and teach others to work - here in the real world. Introduced with references to Star Trek films and television shows, and illustrated with original cartoons, each of the 15 chapters included in this volume provides insights into research and teaching in this range of academic fields.

Stefan Rabitsch

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