Solar flares : science fiction in the 1970s / Andrew M. Butler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Butler, Andrew M., author.

Series:

Liverpool science fiction texts and studies.

Liverpool science fiction texts and studies ; 43

Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Science fiction--History and criticism.

Science fiction.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 302 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Science fiction produced in the 1970s has long been undervalued, dismissed by Bruce Sterling as "confused, self-involved, and stale." The New Wave was all but over and Cyberpunk had yet to arrive. The decade polarised sf - on the one hand it aspired to be a serious form, addressing issues such as race, Vietnam, feminism, ecology and sexuality, on the other hand it broke box office records with Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien and Superman: The Movie. Across the political spectrum, writers perceived a series of invisible enemies: radicals addressed the ideological structures of racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, pollution and capitalism and the possibility of new social structures, whereas conservatives feared the gains made by the civil rights movement, feminism, gay liberation, independence movements, ecology and Marxism and the perceived threats to the nuclear family. Sf would never be the same again. Beginning with chapters on the First sf and New Wave authors who published during the 1970s, Solar Flares examines the ways in which the genre confronted a new epoch and its own history, including the rise of fantasy, the sf blockbuster, children's sf, pseudoscience and postmodernism. It explores significant figures such as Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler. From Larry Niven's Ringworld to Thomas M. Disch's On Wings of Song, from The Andromeda Strain to Flash Gordon and from Doctor Who to Buck Rogers, this book reclaims seventies sf writing, film and television - alongside music and architecture - as a crucial period in the history of science fiction.

Contents:

The ends of first sf : pioneers as veterans

After the new wave : after science fiction?

Beyond Apollo : space fictions after the moon landing

Big dumb objects : science fiction as self-parody

The rise of fantasy : swords and planets

Home of the extraterrestrial brothers : race and African American science fiction

Alien invaders : Vietnam and the counterculture

This septic isle : post-imperial melancholy

Foul contagion spread : ecology and environmentalism

Female counter-literature : feminism

Strange bedfellows : gay liberation

Saving the family? Children's fiction

Eating the audience : blockbusters

Chariots of the gods : pseudoscience and parental fears

Towers of Babel : the arcitecture of sf

Ruptures : metafiction and postmodernism.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 02 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

1-78138-798-2

1-78138-922-5

1-84631-779-7

OCLC:

827212682