Lost in Space: Geographies of Science Fiction

Rob Kitchin & James Kneale

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Publisher: Continuum

Published: Jan 2, 2001

Description:

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.

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Review

"Science fiction's distinctive settings help to denaturalize commonsense understandings of space, making it a useful vehicle for meditations on the more mundane and familiar spaces of the "real" world. Essays in this collection, written mostly by academics specializing in geography, probe science fiction novels and films on themes like the threat of technological invasion to bodily integrity, patriarchal relations in horror movies, and colonization of Mars as an exploration of ecological theory." - American Literature

About the Author

Rob Kitchin is Lecturer in Human Geography at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.James Kneale is Lecturer in Human Geography at University College London.