Author : Ben Bova
Publisher : Smithsonian Books (DC)
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 47,34 MB
Release : 1992-01-17
Category : Science
ISBN :
A history of flights from the imagination of ancient cave pictographs to the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Author : Dina Nayeri
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 429 pages
File Size : 18,7 MB
Release : 2013-01-31
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 110160199X
From the author of Refuge, a magical novel about a young Iranian woman lifted from grief by her powerful imagination and love of Western culture. Growing up in a small rice-farming village in 1980s Iran, eleven-year-old Saba Hafezi and her twin sister, Mahtab, are captivated by America. They keep lists of English words and collect illegal Life magazines, television shows, and rock music. So when her mother and sister disappear, leaving Saba and her father alone in Iran, Saba is certain that they have moved to America without her. But her parents have taught her that “all fate is written in the blood,” and that twins will live the same life, even if separated by land and sea. As she grows up in the warmth and community of her local village, falls in and out of love, and struggles with the limited possibilities in post-revolutionary Iran, Saba envisions that there is another way for her story to unfold. Somewhere, it must be that her sister is living the Western version of this life. And where Saba’s world has all the grit and brutality of real life under the new Islamic regime, her sister’s experience gives her a freedom and control that Saba can only dream of. Filled with a colorful cast of characters and presented in a bewitching voice that mingles the rhythms of Eastern storytelling with modern Western prose, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea is a tale about memory and the importance of controlling one’s own fate.
Author : Adilifu Nama
Publisher : University of Texas Press
Page : 213 pages
File Size : 17,64 MB
Release : 2010-01-01
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0292778767
Winner, Rollins Book Award, Southwest Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2008 Science fiction film offers its viewers many pleasures, not least of which is the possibility of imagining other worlds in which very different forms of society exist. Not surprisingly, however, these alternative worlds often become spaces in which filmmakers and film audiences can explore issues of concern in our own society. Through an analysis of over thirty canonic science fiction (SF) films, including Logan's Run, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Back to the Future, Gattaca, and Minority Report, Black Space offers a thorough-going investigation of how SF film since the 1950s has dealt with the issue of race and specifically with the representation of blackness. Setting his study against the backdrop of America's ongoing racial struggles and complex socioeconomic histories, Adilifu Nama pursues a number of themes in Black Space. They include the structured absence/token presence of blacks in SF film; racial contamination and racial paranoia; the traumatized black body as the ultimate signifier of difference, alienness, and "otherness"; the use of class and economic issues to subsume race as an issue; the racially subversive pleasures and allegories encoded in some mainstream SF films; and the ways in which independent and extra-filmic productions are subverting the SF genre of Hollywood filmmaking. The first book-length study of African American representation in science fiction film, Black Space demonstrates that SF cinema has become an important field of racial analysis, a site where definitions of race can be contested and post-civil rights race relations (re)imagined.
Author : Natalija Majsova
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 10,81 MB
Release : 2021-04-28
Category : History
ISBN : 1793609322
This book interrogates the relations between nostalgias of today and past utopias in the context of the space age of the 20th century and its cinematic representations in the USSR and in post-Soviet Russia. Once an enthusiastic projection, then a promising and uncanny present, and eventually an assemblage of nostalgic signifiers, in the history of world cinema, this space age has been linked primarily to the genre of science fiction. Here, aspects of the space age such as humanity’s imminent expansion to space, interplanetary travel, contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, and intergalactic governance and economy were both celebrated and critically interrogated as cosmopolitan ideals and nation-branding strategies. This book presents the contemporary relevance of this genre as heritage and legacy, archive and canon, and a nest of forgotten ideals and warnings, as well as nostalgic anchoring points. The author analyzes over 30 Soviet science fiction films, foregrounding their structures of utopia and their evolution over time, in order to trace both their transnational positionalities, transmedial resonance, and impact on post-Soviet Russian films about the space age. Concepts, crucial to the understanding of space futures of the past, such as utopianism, otherness, liminality, and no(w)stalgia are activated to draw out the fictional tenants of the memory of the Soviet space age, and to establish the limits and potentialities of Soviet (exra)terraformative ambitions.
Author : Wesley A. Kort
Publisher :
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 22,17 MB
Release : 1985
Category : Fiction
ISBN :
Author : E.C. Tubb
Publisher : Gateway
Page : 121 pages
File Size : 16,90 MB
Release : 2011-09-29
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0575107510
Far from Earth, on a ship carrying the 13th and 14th generations of descendants from the original crew, life is short. You are born, learn the tasks needed to keep the ship running, help breed and train the next crew - and your death is ordered by the computer in charge. Gregson, chief of the psych-police, makes sure the computer's death-sentences are carried out quickly and painlessly. His duty is a sacred trust. He knows the intricacies of the system, how it works . . . and how it can be subverted. He is growing old. Rebellious. He also knows his name will soon come up in the computer for elimination. And he has no intention of carrying out his own death-sentence!
Author : Vivian Carol Sobchack
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 37,34 MB
Release : 1997
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780813524924
This text attempts to shape definitions of the American science fiction film, studying the connection between the films and social preconceptions. It covers many classic films and discusses their import, seeking to rescue the genre from the neglect of film theorists. The book should appeal to both film buff and fans of science fiction.
Author : Giovanni Caprara
Publisher : Willowdale, Ont. : Firefly Books
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 44,87 MB
Release : 2000
Category : Astronautics
ISBN :
Discusses the different space stations from the Star Wars station to the International Space Station.
Author : Rob Kitchin
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 32,45 MB
Release : 2005-12-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780826479204
Science fiction - one of the most popular literary, cinematic and televisual genres - has received increasing academic attention in recent years. For many theorists science fiction opens up a space in which the here-and-now can be made strange or remade; where virtual reality and cyborg are no longer gimmicks or predictions, but new spaces and subjects. Lost in space brings together an international collection of authors to explore the diverse geographies of spaceexploring imagination, nature, scale, geopolitics, modernity, time, identity, the body, power relations and the representation of space. The essays explore the writings of a broad selection of writers, including J.G.Ballard, Frank Herbert, Marge Piercy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mary Shelley and Neal Stephenson, and films from Bladerunner to Dark City, The Fly, The Invisible Man and Metropolis.
Author : Micaiah Johnson
Publisher : Del Rey
Page : 351 pages
File Size : 25,65 MB
Release : 2020-08-04
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0593135067
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • An outsider who can travel between worlds discovers a secret that threatens the very fabric of the multiverse in this stunning debut, a powerful examination of identity, privilege, and belonging. WINNER OF THE COMPTON CROOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE LOCUS AWARD • “Gorgeous writing, mind-bending world-building, razor-sharp social commentary, and a main character who demands your attention—and your allegiance.”—Rob Hart, author of The Warehouse ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—NPR, Library Journal, Book Riot Multiverse travel is finally possible, but there’s just one catch: No one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying—from disease, turf wars, or vendettas they couldn’t outrun. Cara’s life has been cut short on 372 worlds in total. On this dystopian Earth, however, Cara has survived. Identified as an outlier and therefore a perfect candidate for multiverse travel, Cara is plucked from the dirt of the wastelands. Now what once made her marginalized has finally become an unexpected source of power. She has a nice apartment on the lower levels of the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City. She works—and shamelessly flirts—with her enticing yet aloof handler, Dell, as the two women collect off-world data for the Eldridge Institute. She even occasionally leaves the city to visit her family in the wastes, though she struggles to feel at home in either place. So long as she can keep her head down and avoid trouble, Cara is on a sure path to citizenship and security. But trouble finds Cara when one of her eight remaining doppelgängers dies under mysterious circumstances, plunging her into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and her future in ways she could have never imagined—and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her world but the entire multiverse. “Clever characters, surprise twists, plenty of action, and a plot that highlights social and racial inequities in astute prose.”—Library Journal (starred review)
