Böcker i Liverpool Science Fiction Text-serien

In this major study of the work of Joanna Russ, Jeanne Cortiel gives a clear introduction to the major feminist issues relevant to Russ's work and assesses its development. The book will be especially valuable for students of SF and feminist SF, especially in its concern with the function of woman-based intertextuality. Although Cortiel deals principally with Russ's novels, she also examines her short stories, and the focus on critically neglected texts is a particularly valuable feature of the study. "I recommend this book to any reader interested in Russ's fiction, or in women's science fiction generally."--Science Fiction Studies

At the heart of this stimulating and provocative study is a science fiction story by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon-Bradley, 1916-1987) about a brother and a sister (and 58 other human beings) who encounter an alien while on a starship traveling to discover a habitable planet. The book includes an outline of Tiptree's work and of her remarkable life as the only child of jungle explorers, as a painter, an American agent during and after World War II, an experimental psychologist, and a female science fiction writer in male disguise.

The study of French science fiction - even in France - remains an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. This is the first book-length study to take into account both French and Anglo-American intellectual trends, theories, and SF scholarship and apply them to a corpus of French works. It shows how contemporary French SF imagines two broad philosophical inquiries into the powerful, yet terrifying geological age of the Anthropocene: posthumanism and transhumanism. While the posthumanist perspective calls attention to the interdependence and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of life, the transhumanist view of coping with the Anthropocene offers more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of the human imagination. Given the history of philosophical thought's entanglement with literature in France, French SF can tell us a lot about this existential crisis of Anthropos as both destroyer and savior of worlds and bodies alike. With a focus on encounters between humans, nonhumans, and posthumans in selected works, this book investigates both the immaterial (the psychological state of the mind) and material (the body) stakes of posthumanist or transhumanist thinking in French SF.