Histories of the Future: Studies in Fact, Fantasy and Science Fiction [Hardcover]

This collection of interdisciplinary essays examines some of the ways in which writers, artists, film-makers, strategists and political thinkers have imagined the future over the last two centuries. Although a number of contributions discuss 'mainstream' science fiction, the collection's emphasis is not on any single genre, but rather on the ways in which different histories - technological, cultural, military, ideological - generate and inform different modes of speculation about things to come. These histories also disclose that our patterns of expectation are much influenced by our relationship to the past.List of Plates Preface Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Introducing the Future: The Dawn of Science Fiction Criticism; H.Harrison History in SF: What (Hasn't Yet) Happened in History; K.MacLeod The Ruins of the Future: Macaulay's New Zealander and the Spirit of the Age; R.Dingley Celluloid Scientists: Futures Visualised; R.D.Haynes Losing the Sense and Space: Forster's The Machine Stops and Jameson's Third Machine Age; B.Battaglia Boys, Battleships, Books: The Cult of the Navy in US Juvenile Fiction, 1898-1919; B.Brasington American Dreams and Edwardian Aspirations: Technological Innovation and Temporal Uncertainty in Narratives of Expectation; C.E.Gannon Filing the Future: Reporting on World War Three; D.Seed The Map of the Apocalypse: Nuclear War and the Space of Dystopia in American Science Fiction; B.Baker A New World Made to Order: Making Sense of the Future in a Global Era; A.Spark Sign, Symbol, Power: The New Martian Novel; R.Crossley Starship Troopers, Galactic Heroes, Mercenary Princes: The Military and its Discontents in Science Fiction; T.Shippey Terrible Angels: Science Fiction and the Singularity; D.Broderick IndexALAN SANDISON is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of New England, NSW. His publications include The Wheel of Empire (1967), The Last Man in Europe (1974: later revised andló2