Category: General and Theory

Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), xxii + 540 pp. £25.95 hb. ISBN 978-0-674-03357-3. George Levine, winner of the BSLS book prize for 2008, reviews On the Origin of Stories, shortlisted for the BSLS book prize for 2009: The recent upsurge…

Frank McConnell, The Science of Fiction and the Fiction of Science: Collected Essays on SF Storytelling and the Gnostic Imagination, ed. by Gary Westfahl (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2009). xii+212 pp. £28.95 hb. ISBN 978-0-7864-3722-1. The J. Lloyd Eaton conferences on science fiction and fantasy have been held annually at the University of California,…

Harold Fromm, The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). x+299 pp. £18.00 hb. ISBN 9780801891298. Walter Benjamin maintained that the writer should use ‘I’ only in personal letters, but in The Nature of Being Human Harold Fromm does not hesitate to personalise his eco-critical discourse, producing a…

Philip Coleman (ed.), On Literature and Science: Essays, Reflections, Provocations (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), 270pp. £50hb. ISBN: 978-1846820717. Reading a medievalist on the relations between The Canterbury Tales and sci-fi is not an enticing prospect: “Chaucer, technology and the rise of science fiction in English” sounds like the most egregious piece of shoe-horning since Cinderella’s…

Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). xvii + 368 pp. £15.99 pb. ISBN 978-0230546912. Ever since the definitive Clute and Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction appeared some fifteen years ago, there has been a need—now amply supplied by Adam Roberts—for a new narrative history of the genre…

Sharon Ruston (ed.), Literature and Science. Vol. 61. Essays and Studies 2008. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008). 188 pp. £30.00. ISBN 978-1843841784. Special offer: Order Literature and Science through the BSLS and receive a 25% discount. Just fill in this form (pdf) and send it to Boydell & Brewer to receive your discount. In his…

Mark L. Brake and Neil Hook, Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science (Macmillan, 2008), 265pp. £16.99 hb. ISBN 978-0-230-01980-5. When Mark Brake and Neil Hook claim, in Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science, that Johannes Kepler’s Somnium had “grasped the bond between life forms and habitat” two centuries before…