Paratexts

Introductions to Science Fiction and Fantasy

By: James Gunn

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Hardcover | 18 April 2013

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Hardcover
242 Pages

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23.04 x 16.05 x 2.29

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In addition to his distinguished career as a professor of English, James Gunn has also been a prolific writer whose body of work includes several novels and critical analyses of science fiction. In the mid-1980s, Easton Press began publishing a series of leather-bound collector editions called "Masterpieces of Science Fiction," and "Masterpieces of Fantasy," which featured some of the most important works in these genres. Gunn was commissioned to write introductions to these works, which allowed him to pay tribute to many authors who inspired and influenced him. In Paratexts: Introductions to Science Fiction and Fantasy, Gunn has collected the most significant essays produced for the Easton series, along with prefaces the author wrote for reprints of his own novels. Cited here are some of the most significant authors and works of 19th and 20th century science fiction and fantasy, including H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, George Orwell's 1984, Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, C. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, David Brin's The Postman, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, Stephen King's The Dead Zone, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, Anne McCaffrey's Dragon's Eye, Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber, Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars, Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn, John Crowley's Little, Big, and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Drawing upon Gunn's lifetime of work in the field, these introductions include analyses of the individual works and the fields in which they were written. Gunn also briefly discusses each novel's significance in the science fiction canon. Collected here for the first time, these prefaces and introductions provide readers with insight into more than seventy novels, making Paratexts a must read for science fiction and fantasy aficionados.

Industry Reviews

This book contains introductions and prefaces written by the author for a series of leather-bound collector editions by Easton Press in the mid-1980s called Masterpieces of Science Fiction and Masterpieces of Fantasy, along with a series called Signed First Editions of Science Fiction. They are compiled into this volume, along with reprinted prefaces for 13 of the author's own books. These prefaces and introductions are of value in their own right, as compilations of historical and genre-specific timepieces related to the growth and popularity of science fiction and fantasy from the 1980s onward; putting them all into one volume, as a timeline for these genres as well as a glimpse into the author's own writing and scholarship on the topics, is a gem for science fiction and fantasy readers, especially since many of these books have since become classics in the literature. * American Reference Books Annual *

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