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"The book overflows with insights, striking readings, provocative stances, productive ambiguities, and eminently quotable phrases..."—Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction Studies
A major critical work from one of the preeminent voices of science fiction scholarship
As the world undergoes daily transformations through the application of technoscience to every aspect of life, science fiction has become an essential mode of imagining the horizons of possibility. However much science fiction texts vary in artistic quality and intellectual sophistication, they share in a mass social energy and a desire to imagine a collective future for the human species and the world. At this moment, a strikingly high proportion of films, commercial art, popular music, video and computer games, and non-genre fiction have become what Csicsery-Ronay calls science fictional, stimulating science-fictional habits of mind. We no longer treat science fiction as merely a genre-engine producing formulaic effects, but as a mode of awareness, which frames experiences as if they were aspects of science fiction. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction describes science fiction as a constellation of seven diverse cognitive attractions that are particularly formative of science-fictionality. These are the “seven beauties” of the title: fictive neology, fictive novums, future history, imaginary science, the science-fictional sublime, the science-fictional grotesque, and the Technologiade, or the epic of technsocience’s development into a global regime.
Endorsements:
“Csicsery-Ronay brings together a wealth of material to demonstrate the transformative power of the ‘seven beauties.’ Highly recommended for all readers interested in the ways in which science fiction relates to our past, present, and possible futures.”—N. Katherine Hayles, author of Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary
“This remarkable book is full of fascinating ideas, resolutely stripped of academic jargon, and a worthy addition to the growing body of work devoted to deciphering the ancient ancestry and the many-faceted aesthetic of science fiction.”—Gwyneth Jones, author of Bold as Love
Click here for TABLE OF CONTENTS
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ISTVAN CSICSERY-RONAY JR. is a professor of English at DePauw University, where he teaches courses in world literature and science fiction. He is coeditor of the journal Science Fiction Studies and the book Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams (2007).
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