Preface Chronological Contents
Alternative Thematic Contents
A Brief Introduction to Science Fiction and Its History
A Selective Guide to Science Fiction Research
1. Alien Encounters
H.G. Wells, from The War of the Worlds (1898)
Stanley G. Weinbaum, A Martian Odyssey (1934)
Fredric Brown, Arena (1944)
Ray Bradbury, Mars Is Heaven! (1948)
Sonya Dorman, When I Was Miss Dow (1966)
Ursula K. Le Guin, Vaster Than Empires and More Slow (1971)
Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild (1984)
Greg Egan, Wang's Carpets (1995)
Michael Swanwick, Slow Life (2002)
Critical Contexts for Alien Encounters
Simone de Beauvoir, from The Second Sex (1949)
Carl Gustav Jung, The Shadow (1951)
Frantz Fanon, The Fact of Blackness (1952)
2. Artificial Life
E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Sandman (1816)
Mary Shelley, from Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818; 1831)
Karel Capek, R.U.R. (1921)
Isaac Asimov, Liar! (1941)
Philip K. Dick, Second Variety (1953)
Kate Wilhelm, "Baby, You Were Great!" (1967)
James Tiptree, Jr., The Girl Who Was Plugged In (1973)
William Gibson, Burning Chrome (1985)
Maureen McHugh, Nekropolis (1994)
Ken Liu, The Algorithms for Love (2004)
Critical Contexts for Artificial Life
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919; 1924)
Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra (1981)
Donna J. Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century (1985; 1991)
3. Time
Jules Verne, Master Zacharius (1854)
Miles J. Breuer, The Gostak and the Doshes (1930)
C.L. Moore, Vintage Season (1946)
Robert A. Heinlein, "All You Zombies — " (1959)
Robert Silverberg, When We Went to See the End of the World (1972)
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Lucky Strike (1984)
Connie Willis, At the Rialto (1989)
Ted Chiang, Story of Your Life (1998)
Benjamin Rosenbaum, Start the Clock (2004)
Critical Contexts on Time
Jean-Paul Sartre, from Being and Nothingness (1943)
Edward Hallett Carr, The Historian and His Facts (1961)
Michio Kaku, To Build a Time Machine (1994)
4. Utopias and Dystopias
Yevgeny Zamyatin, from We (1921)
A.E. van Vogt, The Weapon Shop (1942)
Damon Knight, Country of the Kind (1955)
Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman (1965)
Joanna Russ, When It Changed (1972)
John Varley, The Persistence of Vision (1978)
Mike Resnick, Kirinyaga (1988)
Geoff Ryman, Dead Space for the Unexpected (1994)
Nalo Hopkinson, Something to Hitch Meat to (2001)
Critical Contexta for Utopias and Dystopias
Hannah Arendt, Ideology and Terror: a Novel Form of Government (1951)
William H. Whyte, The Tests of Conformity (1956)
Fredric Jameson, Progress versus Utopia; or Can We Imagine the Future? (1982)
5. Disasters and Apocalypses
Camille Flammarion, from Omega: The Last Days of the World (1893)
Alfred Bester, Adam and No Eve (1941)
Arthur C. Clarke, The Nine Billion Names of God (1953)
J.G. Ballard, Terminal Beach (1964)
Stanislaw Lem, How the World Was Saved (1967)
Sakyo Komatsu, Take Your Choice (1967; tr. 1987)
C.J. Cherryh, Cassandra (1978)
Ian McDonald, Recording Angel (1996)
William Sanders, When This World Is All on Fire (2001)
Critical Contexts for Disasters and Apocalypses
Mircea Eliade, from The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949; 1954)
Susan Sontag, The Imagination of Disaster (1965)
Paul Boyer, "The Whole World Gasped" (1985)
6. Evolutions
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rappaccinis Daughter (1844)
John W. Campbell, Jr., Twilight (1934)
Olaf Stapledon, from Star Maker (1937)
Lewis Padgett, Mimsy Were the Borogoves (1943)
Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon (1959)
Roger Zelazny, For a Breath I Tarry (1966)
Samuel R. Delany, Driftglass (1967)
Greg Bear, Blood Music (1983)
Terry Bisson, Bears Discover Fire (1990)
Critical Context for Evolutions
Stephen Jay Gould, Nonmoral Nature (1982)
Marvin Minsky, Will Robots Inherit the Earth? (1994)
Steven Johnson, The Myth of the Ant Queen (2002)