Visions and Revisions

Renowned science fiction scholar Robert M. Philmus offers in "Visions and Revisions" a fresh and provocative literary analysis of science fiction writing. He critically examines the works of some of the most prominent writers to have written in the genre - including Evgeny Zamiatin, Karel Capek, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Stanislaw Lem, along with English-language authors from H.G. Wells to Ursula Le Guin - and reveals how their works illustrate the fundamental elements of science fiction writing. The former editor of Science Fiction Studies, Philmus casts his expert eye on a diverse range of short stories and novels by the premier arbiters of the craft, with close readings that draw upon the theories of New Criticism as well as post-Modern. Featuring essays such as Stanislaw Lem's "Futurological Congress as a Metageneric Text", Kurt Vonnegut's "Historiographer of the Absurd: The Sirens of Titan", Ursula K. Le Guin and Time's "Dispossession", and "Time Out of Joint: The World(s)" as well as Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle", the volume provides an in-depth textual examination that reveals why science fiction is a revisionary genre. "Visions and Revisions" will be of immense value to scholars of literature and science fiction studies.