Science Fiction Elements Research Articles

Blurring Gender Lines in Readers’ Advisory for Young Adults

Literacy behaviors that we used to think were gendered are crossing genders now. Whether it is due to changes in gender expectations or changes in how writers are addressing teen readers, we are seeing boys who exhibit literacy behaviors that have been associated with girls and vice versa. In this article, Beth Brendler explores the shift in reading behaviors among girls and boys, reflecting on many examples of current, popular fiction to provide examples of that cross gender lines. Brendler draws on her past experience as a practicing librarian and head of the youth services department at a public library in Wisconsin. Her teaching interests include youth services in libraries, literacy education, children's literature, and adolescent literature.--Editor How often do you hear both children and adults refer to texts as boy books or girl books? Thinking of literature in those terms is the result of early research on gender and literacy. (1) About forty years ago, in the light of concerns about girls being overlooked in the classroom, researchers began to examine the ways males and females took up literature. Now the concerns are about a literacy gender gap that leaves boys behind. Both issues have asked educators and researchers to look at reading as a gendered practice. Literacy has been gendered based on the cultural expectations of males and females in our society, and literacy practices have been studied through the lens of those cultural assumptions. Early researchers in gender and literacy reported that children thought in terms of girl books and boy books and that girls tended to respond to texts via their emotions and feelings about the characters in books, while boys connected to what the characters did in the story. (2) They found that females were more focused on the relationships and romantic elements in a text, and males were more drawn to action and adventure. (3) Girls were thought to be more likely to enjoy fiction, particularly realistic fiction that depicts relationships and employs strong character development, while boys often chose to read fiction with action or humor over that emphasize relationships between characters. (4) Boys were more likely to enjoy graphic novels, nonfiction, and digital media than girls. (5) In addition, research indicated that children and teens preferred protagonists that are of the same gender as the reader. (6) While those studies were enlightening and contributed much to the field of literacy, there have been societal changes over the last few decades that have affected gender beliefs. Research shows that men and women display increasingly less differentiation in their sex role attitudes. (7) The Millennial generation, born between 1980 and 2000, has been viewed as more inclusive, empathetic and tolerant in their social outlook. (8) This has paved the way for many of today's teenagers to reject the idea of gender as a determinant of societal roles. While we will still encounter readers with more traditional preferences, much of our teen clientele may have new attitudes toward what they prefer to read. The key to improving readers' advisory is to approach every reader as an individual, recognizing that there is as much diversity within gender as across genders. YOUNG ADULT FICTION THAT DEFIES GENDER RULES This gender diversity is evident in the popularity of some types of adolescent literature. We are seeing more fiction that appeals to both genders. New offerings often combine action/ adventure with romance, paranormal, fantasy, and science fiction elements. Twenty-two of the twenty-eight nominations for 2013 Teens' Top Ten Titles were either fantasy or science fiction, long considered male genres. (9) These usually have central characters of both genders. We are seeing more intelligent, capable, athletic heroines; however, they rarely stand alone. There are usually one or two male characters that provide motivation and conflict for the female protagonist. …

Fantasy in Modern Egyptian Drama

This paper is an attempt to spotlight the Arabic dramatic works in modern Egypt ( produced during the second half of the twentieth century and a little after), that are based on fantasy aspects. These plays are usually mingled with elements of science fiction, mirabilia, fairytales, travel journeys, animal stories, utopian dreams, dystopian nightmares. A few Egyptian playwrights have experimented in both science and dark fantasy mixed with folkloric and mythic components. This study highlights these fantasy plays, featuring: Tawfiq alHakim’s Ahl el-Kahf ( The People of the Cave,1933), Shhrazad (Scheherazade,1934), Al-Mukhrij ( The Film Director), Bayt al-Naml ( The House of Ants ), Nahr al-Junun ( The River of Madness,1935), Rehla ela al-Ghad ( Voyage to Tomorrow), Not a Thing out of Place (1966), Awdat el-Shabab ( The Return of Consciousness,1974), Sha’er ala el-Qamar ( A Poet on the Moon), Taqreer Qamary ( A Lunar Report), ElSultan El-Ha’er ( The Sultan’s Dilemma,), Izis(Isis,1955), Al-Ta’am li-kul fam ( Food for Every Mouth,1963); Saad Makkawi’s al-Maiet wal-Haii ( The Living Dead,1973), Lutfi Al-Khuli’s al-Aranib (The Rabbits,1964), No’man Ashur’s Lu’bat al-Zamen (Time Game,1980); Farouk Khorshid’s Habazlem Bazaza ( The Wines of Babylon,1967); Ali Salim’s Il-Nas illi fill-Sama’l-Tamina ( The People in the Eighth Heaven, 1963), Yusuf Idris’s al-Jins al-Thalith (The Third Sex,1971), and other marvelous plays.

La destrucción de todas las cosas de H. Hiriart: un (nuevo) apocalipsis mexicano

La destruccion de todas las cosas (1992) by Hugo Hiriart belongs to a group of apocalyptic works of fiction easily detectable in the Mexican literary production between the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. This paper aims at highlighting how the novel, describing the tragic end of the Mexican Civilization caused by an alien attack, blends together science fiction elements with references to the Spanish Conquest and its main events and characters, often adopting ? in a new perspective ? the stylistics and writing techniques of the Sixteenth-Century chronicles. Further objective of the paper is to analyze Hiriart’s reflections on the present and past condition of Mexico, which show the collapse of the revolutionary dream with irony and dark humor, and identify the decline of values in its political and cultural context as a cause of the new destruction of Mexico City.

Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns, Supernatural and Science Fiction Elements in Novels, Pulps, Comics, Films, Television and GamesPaulGreen. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009.

Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns, Supernatural and Science Fiction Elements in Novels, Pulps, Comics, Films, Television and GamesPaulGreen. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009.

“Unreal” Gender Messages in Late 90s Women-Centered Action Dramas

The rise of women-centered action drama series such as Buffy, The Vampire Slayer (1995-2002), Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001), and Charmed (1998-2002), in the late 90s was seen as feminist progress by some thanks to the shows’ powerful lead female hero characters, yet the issue of women’s emerging power is still at play in contemporary fiction series such as these. A critique can be made of these programs that the heroines are not “real” because the shows often contain some fantastical or science-fiction elements, which potentially limits the power of their “real” feminist messages.The lead female characters of Buffy and Charmed women have supernatural powers; Xena takes place in an ancient Greece where the heroine has regular contact with Gods, monsters and other mythical creatures. Furthermore, beyond this unreal “reality”, some of the strongest messages about femininity and masculinity come from episodes in which there is a second degree of fantasy. These are episodes in which the characters are not living their real, everyday lives, but when the characters literally, through various plot devices, are someone else or live a different reality, such as when they are shown in a parallel universes, in a dream state, in an alternative future or past reality, in a fairytale, or when they are under a spell.While alternate realities and identities of Buffy, XWP and Charmed involve change of appearance, there is often also an element of fantasy or magic involved that transforms more than the characters’ outfit. Some of the strongest messages about femininity and masculinity are produced through the character’s “other” identities as well. This paper will thus explore some of devices used to create these identities, and some of the messages contained within the episodes in which this other reality/identity of the characters is found. What “real” messages are proposed in this alternate version of “reality,” which is twice distanced from actual reality — first by the fantasy premise of the series, and second by a fantasy version of that “reality”? Do they fulfill a role of liberation or of containment?

In a month of thirteen films: A Fassbinder diary

ABSTRACTFassbinder's films provoke on multiple levels, often challenging a spectator's very capacity to respond. In a short time he produced a system of images startling, interrelated and tantalizingly incomplete. A cinema of such excess resists efforts at easy containment. This viewing diary attempts to address a number of themes within the work: the roles of the body; the flirtation with genre; the border crosser; the figure of the singer; the elements of science fiction.

Fictions of the Global

If, as Benedict Anderson has argued, the realist novel has a particularly close relationship to the nation, what kind of narrative form would be best suited to transnational or even global fictions? This essay proposes a few answers to this question by looking first at what Roger Ebert has called “hyperlink cinema,” a form that emerging directors like Alexandro Gonzáles Iñárritu have used to connect narratives set in widely disparate locations (the film Babel is my case in point). The essay then analyzes David Mitchell's Ghostwritten as a “hypertext” novel, pointing out how its thematic concerns and formal structures, especially its concern with point of view and language, make this novel a global fiction of sorts. The novel's often criticized science fiction elements in particular can be elucidated, I argue, by Ulrich Beck's utopian observation that “it is the future, not the past” that integrates the cosmopolitan age.

TRUTH AND AUTHENTICITY IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORICAL CULTURE: AN INTRODUCTION TO HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION AND HISTORICAL TRUTH*

The contributors to this Theme Issue analyze the construction of historical truth and authenticity in five different types of historical representations that play an important role in contemporary historical culture. The six genres/media in question are historical novels, historiography, photography, feature films, video games, and museum exhibits. Since it is always easy to deconstruct other people's historical truths, the contributors focus on a representation of the past that they themselves find particularly compelling and truthful. Thus all authors play a dual role. On the one hand, they show us how a particular text or visual representation works and what sleights of hand are employed to fabricate reality-effects in different cul tural settings. On the other hand, they celebrate the success of a text and its creators who have influenced the historical consciousness of many consumers, including the authors themselves. As a result, the contributors are not offering smug deconstruc tions of historical representations produced by allegedly theoretically naive histori ans and other practitioners of history. Instead, the essays engage in probing, open ended, and self-reflexive dialogues on the question of historical truth that are based on sympathetic, close readings of a wide range of cultural artifacts. In an attempt to foster interdisciplinary intellectual interplay, all essays focus on representations of historical events that have often served as benchmarks in theoretical discussions about historiography, historical culture, and the ethics of historical representation. Five essays deal with representations of World War II and the Holocaust and one with representations of the history and legacy of slavery in the U.S. Ann Rigney discusses the extraordinary success of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaugh terhouse Five in shaping cultural memories of the bombing of Dresden. Rigney highlights the novel's generic hybridity and its innovative narrative design. Slaughterhouse Five is part fairy tale, part autobiographical testimony; it com bines elements of science fiction with passages that read like children's literature. The resulting ontological potpourri undermines chronological and logical lin earity and provides exceptional insight into the sensual experience of war through a literary performance of traumatic memory. In this fashion the novel has become

"Emotions-Only" versus "Special People": Genre in fan discourse

This essay looks at genre as a complex set of discursive threads running unevenly through production, TV text, and fan reception. Through a case study of the reception of fan favorite Roswell, this essay interrogates the role of genre in spectatorship. In its mixing of teen and science fiction elements, Roswell trod upon contested generic spaces, eliciting strong reaction from its viewers. Connections between genre and gender came to the fore, as producer commentary linked science fiction with male audiences and teen romance with female audiences. Fans responded with analyses that greatly complicated and at times overtly rejected industrial suppositions regarding the gendered work of genre. Through these fan conversations, we can witness the complexity of genre as discursive thread moving through not only TV texts but also multivariant fan responses. I intend this essay to work at two levels. My analysis of fan responses to Roswell models the possibilities of a close study of genre discourse. At the same time, my case study probes the nature of genre in fan engagement, as genre discourses intersect with other fan concerns such as character identification, perceptions of textual quality, and questions of gender representation. While we cannot necessarily look to fan accounts for proof of how viewers engage with genre, they do tell us how fans frame their engagement with genre, how they incorporate genre into their performance of fannishness, and how they perform and thus enact genre itself as a shared cultural process.

‘THE METAPHYSICAL FABRIC THAT BINDS US’

Minority Report is in many ways a typical detective thriller wrapped up in a science-fiction setting. The science-fiction elements are evident in the futuristic architecture mixed with the more recognisable town houses and apartment blocks, as well as the technologies of travel, entertainment and crime detection. The detective thriller elements reside in the figure of John Anderton who discovers corruption at the heart of the force he has made his life. The two genres merge most effectively, and visibly, in the depiction of detection technologies whose powerful effect is displayed in the opening minutes of the film. By the year 2054 it has become possible to predict murders, and a Pre-Crime Unit exists with the sole purpose of preventing murder. The display of futuristic technology is interesting not only because of how the filmmakers behind Minority Report foresee an extension of surveillance culture, but also because the depiction of these technologies suggests innovative interactions between performance, actors and space. In order to address this I develop an argument introducing the ideas of performative space and proprioception, as these allow a means of articulating the distinct spatial arrangements of Minority Report.

Rereading Christa Wolf's "Selbstversuch": Cyborgs and Feminist Critiques of Scientific Discourse

In her seminal Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway invokes the cyborg, that hybrid of organism and machine, as a figure for a subversive feminist practice. Haraway breaks with traditional feminist approaches that have relied on Western origin myths and dualistic thought.1 Instead of rejecting or avoiding the male-dominated fields of technology and science, Haraway, by embracing the figure of the cyborg, calls on women to actively shape scientific and technological developments. This call resonates with Christa Wolf's story Selbstversuch, in which a female scientist participates in and critically comments on a biochemically induced sex-- change experiment. Wolf's story combines elements of science fiction and bio-technological discourse-two areas in which cyborgs abound. Thus Selbstversuch provides an ideal framework for critical reflections on the relationship between gender and science in general and on Haraway's feminist reading of the cyborg figure in particular.2 The main protagonist in Selbstversuch assumes a double role: she is a scientist who prepares and subsequently undergoes the experiment, and who writes the classified research report during the experiment (this official report is merely alluded to in the text); and she is the first-person narrator and of the story Selbstversuch: zu einem Protokoll-a on the official scientific report.3 She writes this treatise in hindsight, i.e., after breaking off the experiment and transforming herself back into a woman. In this critical commentary, ironic and personal in tone, she addresses her professor, who functions rhetorically also as the embodiment of male-dominated scientific discourse. The reference in the story's subtitle to a Traktat (treatise)-traditionally representing a scientific or philosophical argument-illustrates the narrator's objective: to challenge established scientific conventions from within. The narrator's ironic comment, [es gibt] nichts Komischeres [...] als Frauen, die Traktate schreiben (SV 86-87;4 there is nothing funnier than women who write treatises, SE 215) indicates the social sanctions (ridicule) for female authorship of a male-dominated genre and hence the transgressive character of her undertaking. Supplementing the classified research report with a treatise penned by a female author accomplishes three things. First, by adopting the perspective of the usually silenced subject of the experiment, this appendix questions the exclusive truth claim of the scientist-embodied in the official report. Second, the treatise gives voice to another traditionally silenced subject position: that of the female scientist who no longer adheres to an androcentric position. Thus the female subject/scientist takes control not only of her body (by breaking off the experiment), but also of the way the experiment is interpreted. Third, by breaking the secrecy code of the classified report, the treatise brings out into the open the moral void left by the report. As I will illustrate later in the article, the treatise ultimately calls for a different approach to the sciences, one that considers the ethical and social implications of bio-technological research not as separate from but as part and parcel of its epistemological foundation. Wolf wrote Selbstversuch in 1972(5), situating the story twenty years into the future-in the year 1992. Yet from today's perspective, the story takes place in the recent past and the experiment has indeed lost some of its science-fiction dimensions due to advances in the field of bio-technology, especially in the areas of genetic engineering and reproductive technologies. Even the 1989 film adaptation of Selbstversuch produced by DEFA and directed by Jochen Vogel in the last year of the GDR's existence demonstrates the extent to which reality has caught up with the sci-fi character of the original text. The only part of the film that remains unreal is the technology of the actual sex change (induced through a series of injections). …

Speaking in Tongues: An Interview with Science Fiction Writer Nalo Hopkinson

In 1998, Nalo Hopkinson joined the ranks of Black science fiction writers like Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, and Steven Barnes, among others. The Jamaican-born Hopkinson is the daughter of the late Slade Hopkinson, the Guyanese actor, poet, and playwright who was part of Derek Walcott's Trinidad Theatre Workshop. Hopkinson spent her first sixteen years living in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana. For the past twenty-three years she has resided in Toronto, Canada. She infuses the tropes of science fiction and fantasy with Caribbean folklore and culture. In 1997 she won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest for Brown Girl in the Ring (Warner Books, 1998) and is a recipient of an Ontario Arts Council Foundation award for emerging writers; the Locus Award, First Novel Category; and the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Hopkinson's first novel also made the preliminary ballot for the Nebula Award. Brown Girl is a post-Holocaust novel set in the twenty-first century inner city of Toronto, which has suffer ed an economic collapse. The novel chronicles the struggles of one woman, Ti-Jeanne, to reconcile her individuality as a young North American woman and unwed mother with the group orientation of her Afro-Caribbean ancestry, which includes a nascent ability as a mystic. Hopkinson's second novel, Midnight Robber, will appear from Warner Books in March, 2000. Set on a Caribbean-colonized planet and told in a hybrid creole, it is a science fictional allegory for displacement and exile. She counts African American science fiction writers Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler among the writers whose work has inspired her. (Delany was one of the writers-in-residence when Hopkinson attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop at Michigan State University in 1995.) Hopkinson is currently editing The Dub Side, an anthology of Caribbean fabulist fiction. This interview is based on Hopkinson's answers to a series of interrogatories which I presented to her in February, 1999, about Brown Girl and about her perspective as the newest (then) Black science fiction writer and the newest (still) Black female science fiction writer. Rutledge: Why are you a writer of Black fantasy? Hopkinson: Because it's better than being a writer of purple prose? I'm a writer. I'm predominantly black. I write fantasy (actually, I say speculative because my work can include elements of science fiction, fantasy, dark fantasy, horror, and magic realism). I'm not a writer of black fantasy. (I go into that more below.) Rutledge: How long have you been interested in Black fantasy? What do you know of your predecessors like Butler, Delany, Saunders, Barnes, and others? Hopkinson: I think perhaps we're using the word fantasy in different ways, so I need some clarification. Are you using it as an umbrella term for all the genres of fantastical writing? I'm accustomed to hearing it used to name one specific genre. According to the classifications with which I'm familiar, Butler writes science fiction, not fantasy. Delany has written both. Saunders' Imaro trilogy was sword and sorcery (i.e., a sub-genre of fantasy). Barnes writes futuristic action adventure as well as having co-written hard sf with people such as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Tananarive Due has been dubbed a horror author. I don't know Virginia Hamilton's work very well, but she has published young adult science fiction as well as collections of African American folktales. I've read some form of fantastical literature since I was a tot, be it folktales or Homer's Iliad, so I gravitated naturally toward the sf shelves. Some time in my 20s I saw a photograph of Chip Delany, with whose work I'd fallen in love on first encountering it, and realized that he was black. I'd never heard of such a thing before. I wept. It felt as though my universe had just doubled in size. Though my life was surrounded with Caribbean writers of color (my father and his friends), none of them wrote sf. …

Science-fiction, the early years: a full description of more than 3,000 science-fiction stories from earliest times to the appearance of the genre magazines in 1930: with author, title, and motif indexes

In this volume the author describes more than 3000 short stories, novels, and plays with science fiction elements, from earliest times to 1930. He includes imaginary voyages, utopias, Victorian boys' books, dime novels, pulp magazine stories, British scientific romances and mainstream work with science fiction elements. Many of these publications are extremely rare, surviving in only a handful of copies, and most of them have never been described before. Each of the entries is exhaustive, with bibliography, including previous periodical publications, and a full summary of the story, with historical and critical comments. Author biographical data, where available, accompanies each item. An appendix surveys ideas and systems that have proved important in early science fiction, such as Atlantis, Fourierism, the single tax, Theosophy, the hollow earth, the open polar seas and similar concepts. The text also includes title, author, date and magazine indexes as well as a 65-page motif and thematic index. The author's introduction aims to provide a fresh understanding of the nature of science fiction and its origins, and contains an exhaustive analytical table of science fiction motifs as they fit into the conceptual scheme of the sciences. In addition to its obvious value to the field of science fiction, the book covers many powerful issues in American cultural history - feminism, racial and ethnic prejudices, crank scientific theories, extreme social and economic systems, occult ideas, and descriptions of varying attitudes toward science and advanced technology.