Parabolas of Science Fiction

"In this excellent collection of critical essays, Attebery and Hollinger have recruited a talented stable of known and emerging scholars to pursue implications of the parabola as a metaphor for science fiction. ... The resulting collection justly deserves the editors' claim that the volume provides a 'significant addition to science fiction scholarship with implications that go well beyond the single genre' through 'a detailed study of what is generally considered to be a key defining characteristic of the [SF] genre. Parabolas of Science Fiction rewards not only scholars of science fiction, but any scholar who is concerned with genre theory."--Sarah Canfield Fuller, SFRA Review

"In this excellent collection of critical essays, Attebery and Hollinger have recruited a talented stable of known and emerging scholars to pursue implications of the parabola as a metaphor for science fiction. The resulting collection justly deserves the editors' claim that the volume provides a 'significant addition to science fiction scholarship with implications that go well beyond the single genre' through 'a detailed study of what is generally considered to be a key defining characteristic of the [SF] genre. Parabolas of Science Fiction rewards not only scholars of science fiction, but any scholar who is concerned with genre theory."--Sarah Canfield Fuller, SFRA Review

"Parabolas of Science Fiction eschews formula, preferring instead to signpost routes through a territory for others to explore the linguistic and formal features and strategies that underpin the dialogical nature of sf. The metaphor of the parabola offers a convenient handle that encapsulates the idea of the borrowings conducted by sf, along with the parable-like connection of sf to the contemporary world. As such, it is a valuable consolidation of several orientations to sf, and perhaps other genre fictions."--Chris Pak, Foundation

"Parabolas of Science Fiction is the first substantial effort in many years to think about science fiction in relation to the theorization of genre. It also has a usefully broad historical, geographical, and critical range."--Mark Bould, University of the West of England

"Parabolas of Science Fiction is the first substantial effort in many years to think about science fiction in relation to the theorization of genre. It also has a usefully broad historical, geographical, and critical range."--Mark Bould, University of the West of England

"Parabolas of Science Fiction offers the comprehensive critical paradigm--if not the Grand Unifying Theory--that lets us conceive and better understand the multiple collaborations, convergences, intersections, and mergings of texts, themes, agendas, concerns, and quirks represented in the grand megatextual archive of science fiction itself."--Brooks Landon, University of Iowa