Science Fiction

Abstract

There has been a trend for introductory texts on science fiction (SF) criticism to start by announcing that SF is now an increasingly respected genre within academia, with its own canonical texts, major scholars, historical traditions, and theoretical perspectives. An increasing influx of publications, conferences, academic courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, doctorate dissertations, and annual awards would seem to testify to this claim. Even further indications of the recognition of the genre’s respectability, the argument goes, lies in the fact that “mainstream” authors now adopt motifs and conventions of the genre within their own writing, when not embracing it wholeheartedly, including Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and Kazuo Ishiguro, to name a few. But it is now time to move beyond this approach to introducing SF that, even unconsciously, reproduces dominant assumptions about cultural value, generic integrity, and canon formation that encourage an almost apologetic tone or the need to justify “Why SF?” in academia. The wide range of sources included in this bibliography demonstrate a complex, diverse, multilayered and ever-expanding corpus of critical work extending across numerous academic disciplines, whose emergence and expansion over the last few decades has been so rapid that it has caught up with or even surpassed other established areas of academic inquiry with a much longer history within the university. To use a concept much favored within the field over the last couple of decades, the singularity of science fiction criticism has already happened. This annotated bibliography is aimed at both the uninitiated scholar or student and the academic who specializes in the area, as it provides a list of introductory works, textbooks, and readers—a publication format that witnessed a sudden upsurge during the 2000s. The list will also attract the attention of readers with an interest in historicist approaches or theorizations from the perspective of cultural studies of identity, specifically gender and race.