|
Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (Popular Fiction) | 
| Author: Damien Broderick
Publisher: Routledge
Category: Book
Buy New: $37.95
Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 1810004
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 216
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0415097894
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.087620905
EAN: 9780415097895
ASIN: 0415097894
Publication Date: December 21, 1994
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Reading by Starlight explores the characteristics in the writing, marketing and reception of science fiction which distinguish it as a genre. Damien Broderick explores the postmodern self-referentiality of the sci-fi narrative, its intricate coded language and discursive encyclopaedia'. He shows how, for perfect understanding, sci-fi readers must learn the codes of these imaginary worlds and vocabularies, all the time picking up references to texts by other writers. Reading by Starlight includes close readings of paradigmatic cyberpunk texts and writings by SF novelists and theorists including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Patrick Parrinder, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Varley, Roger Zelazny, William Gibson, Fredric Jameson and Samuel R. Delaney. Damien Broderick is an award-winning freelance writer who published his first collection of stories as an undergraduate, has since written eight SF novels, and recently completed a PhD in the semiotics of SF writing.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Hardly for everyone, but amazing for a few of you July 27, 2003
Anthony D Ravenscroft (Santa Fe, NM United States)
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
This is a stuffy, stodgy, & all in all difficult book, a mammoth dissertaion on a confluence of somewhat obscure subjects. That's why I knocked it down a star.But, basically, it's also a lucid and frighteningly thorough study of what (for lack of a better term) I will call "literarily serious science fiction." It keeps slipping into a paean to the godhood of Samuel R Delany -- but since I would hardly be one to argue with that, this is hardly a black mark. (You *do* own at least one Delany novel... right? No? Bad puppy.) In backhanded fashion, this book also forms a central node for attempts to define that horribly overworked & vague term from the 1990s, "postmodern." Don't even try to read this unless you are Very Serious about Delany, modern literature, or science fiction -- preferably all three. But if that's you, then you need to read this book, probably four or five times.
|
|
|
Can't find the right gift? Try a Gift Certificate
| |
