Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science And Science Fiction In Interwar America

Author: John Cheng

Throughout this list, we've tended to steer clear of too many academic books on sf. There are an awful lot out there now, and some of them are very good indeed, but they also tend to be rather dense and full of jargon, and unless you're really into that style of writing you'll probably get more out of the more approachable books we've listed. Let's face it, if you're feeling brave you'll find a great deal that's interesting and informative in something like Archaeologies of the Future by Fredric Jameson, but you enter at your own risk, it is not easy reading. Nevertheless, there are a few academic titles that have earned a place in any sf fan's library, and Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction is definitely one of them. We pointed out earlier how important feminism had become in any understanding of science fiction. Well the other recent theory that has been just as productive has been postcolonialism. It's hardly surprising when you think of how many sf works are basically about things like race, dominance, invasion, conquest and other key issues in postcolonial thought. And Rieder lays it all out in this survey of sf from Victorian scientific romance to the Second World War, from King Solomon's Mines and The War of the Worlds to The Puppet Masters and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If you want to understand current critical thinking about science fiction, then there had to be at least one book on the list about post colonialism, and this is easily the most readable and the most informative.