The Big Book of Science Fiction: The Ultimate Collection (Black lizard) - Softcover

 
9781101910092: The Big Book of Science Fiction: The Ultimate Collection (Black lizard)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1101910097 ISBN 13: 9781101910092
Verlag: Vintage, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Quite possibly the GREATEST science-fiction collection of ALL TIME—past, present, and FUTURE! • "Nearly 1,200 pages of stories by the genre’s luminaries, like H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as lesser-known authors." —The New York Times Book Review

What if life was never-ending? What if you could change your body to adapt to an alien ecology? What if the Pope was a robot? Spanning galaxies and millennia, this must-have anthology showcases classic contributions from H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Octavia Butler, and Kurt Vonnegut alongside a century of the eccentrics, rebels, and visionaries who have inspired generations of readers. Within its pages, find beloved worlds of space opera, hard SF, cyberpunk, the new wave, and more. Learn the secret history of science fiction, from literary icons who wrote SF to authors from over 25 countries, some never before translated into English. In THE BIG BOOK OF SCIENCE FICTION, literary power couple Ann and Jeff VanderMeer transport readers from Mars to Mechanopolis, planet Earth to parts unknown. Read the genre that predicted electric cars, travel to the moon, and the modern smart phone. We’ve got the worlds if you’ve got the time.
 
Including:
· Legendary tales from Isaac Asimov and Ursula LeGuin!
· An unearthed sci-fi story from W.E.B. DuBois!
· The first publication of the work of cybernetic visionary David R. Bunch in 20 years!
· A rare and brilliant novella by Chinese international sensation Liu Cixin!

Plus:
· Aliens!
· Space battles!
· Robots!
· Technology gone wrong!
· Technology gone right!

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ANN VANDERMEER currently serves as an acquiring fiction editor for Tor.com, Cheeky Frawg Books, and weirdfictionreview.com. She was the editor-in-chief for Weird Tales for five years, during which time she was nominated three times for the Hugo Award, winning one. Along with multiple nominations for the Shirley Jackson Award, she also has won a World Fantasy Award and a British Fantasy Award for co-editing The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Other projects have included Best American Fantasy, three Steampunk anthologies, and a humor book, The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. Her latest anthologies include The Time Traveler’s Almanac, Sisters of the Revolution, an anthology of feminist speculative fiction and The Bestiary, an anthology of original fiction and art.
 
 
JEFF VENDERMEER's most recent fiction is the New York Times-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), which Entertainment Weekly included on its list of the top ten novels of 2014 and which prompted the New Yorker to call the author “the weird Thoreau.”  The series has been acquired by publishers in 34 other countries. Paramount Pictures/Scott Rudin Productions acquired the movie rights and Annihilation won both the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award for best novel. VanderMeer’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Atlantic.com, and the Los Angeles Times. A three-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, he has also edited or coedited many iconic fiction anthologies, taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference and the Miami International Book Fair, lectured at MIT, Brown, and Library of Congress, and serves as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen writing camp located at Wofford College. His forthcoming novel is Borne.

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What if life was neverending? What if you could change your body to adapt to an alien ecology? What if the pope were a robot? Spanning galaxies and millennia, this must-have anthology showcases classic contributions from H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Octavia E. Butler, and Kurt Vonnegut, alongside a century of the eccentrics, rebels, and visionaries who have inspired generations of readers. Within its pages, you'll find beloved worlds of space opera, hard SF, cyberpunk, the New Wave, and more. Learn about the secret history of science fiction, from titans of literature who also wrote SF to less well-known authors from more than twenty-five countries, some never before translated into English. In The Big Book of Science Fiction, literary power couple Ann and Jeff VanderMeer transport readers from Mars to Mechanopolis, planet Earth to parts unknown. Immerse yourself in the genre that predicted electric cars, space tourism, and smartphones. Sit back, buckle up, and dial in the coordinates, as this stellar anthology has got worlds within worlds.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

From the Introduction
 
Since the days of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells, science fiction has not just helped define and shape the course of literature but reached well beyond fictional realms to influence our perspectives on culture, science, and technology. Ideas like electric cars, space travel, and forms of advanced communication compa­rable to today’s cell phone all first found their way into the public’s awareness through science fiction. In stories like Alicia Yánez Cossío’s “The IWM 100” from the 1970s you can even find a clear prediction of Information Age giants like Google—and when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, the event was a very real culmina­tion of a yearning already expressed through science fiction for many decades.

Science fiction has allowed us to dream of a better world by creating visions of future soci­eties without prejudice or war. Dystopias, too, like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, have had their place in science fiction, allowing writers to comment on injustice and dangers to democracy. Where would Eastern Bloc writers have been without the creative outlet of science fic­tion, which by seeming not to speak about the present day often made it past the censors? For many under Soviet domination during those decades, science fiction was a form of subver­sion and a symbol of freedom. Today, science fiction continues to ask “What if?” about such important topics as global warming, energy dependence, the toxic effects of capitalism, and the uses of our modern technology, while also bringing back to readers strange and wonder­ful visions.

No other form of literature has been so rel­evant to our present yet been so filled with visionary and transcendent moments. No other form has been as entertaining, either. But until now there has been no definitive and complete collection that truly captured the global influ­ence and significance of this dynamic genre—bringing together authors from all over the world and from both the “genre” and “literary” ends of the fiction spectrum. The Big Book of Science Fiction covers the entire twentieth cen­tury, presenting, in chronological order, sto­ries from more than thirty countries, from the pulp space opera of Edmond Hamilton to the literary speculations of Jorge Luis Borges, from the pre-Afrofuturism of W. E. B. Du Bois to the second-wave feminism of James Tiptree Jr.—and beyond!

What you find within these pages may sur­prise you. It definitely surprised us.
 
 
WHAT IS THE “GOLDEN AGE” OF SCIENCE FICTION?

Even people who do not read science fiction have likely heard the term “the Golden Age of Science Fiction.” The actual Golden Age of Sci­ence Fiction lasted from about the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, and is often conflated for general readers with the preceding Age of the Pulps (1920s to mid-1930s). The Age of the Pulps had been dominated by the editor of Amazing Stories, Hugo Gernsback. Sometimes called the Father of Science Fiction, Gernsback was most famously photographed in an all-encompassing “Isolator” author helmet, attached to an oxygen tank and breathing apparatus.

The Golden Age dispensed with the Isola­tor, coinciding as it did with the proliferation of American science fiction magazines, the rise of the ultimately divisive editor John W. Camp­bell at Astounding Science Fiction (such strict definitions and such a dupe for Dianetics!), and a proto-market for science fiction novels (which would only reach fruition in the 1950s). This period also saw the rise to dominance of authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, C. L. Moore, Robert Heinlein, and Alfred Bester. It fixed science fiction in the public imagination as having a “sense of wonder” and a “can-do” attitude about science and the universe, sometimes based more on the earnest, naïve covers than the actual content, which could be dark and complex.

But “the Golden Age” has come to mean something else as well. In his classic, oft-quoted book on science fiction, Age of Wonders: Explor­ing the World of Science Fiction (1984), the iconic anthologist and editor David Hartwell asserted that “the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12.” Hartwell, an influential gatekeeper in the field, was making a point about the arguments that “rage until the small of the morning” at science fiction conventions among “grown men and women” about that time when “every story in every magazine was a master work of daring, original thought.” The reason readers argue about whether the Golden Age occurred in the 1930s, 1950s, or 1970s, according to Hartwell, is because the true age of science fiction is the age at which the reader has no ability to tell good fiction from bad fiction, the excellent from the terrible, but instead absorbs and appreciates just the wonderful visions and exciting plots of the stories.

This is a strange assertion to make, one that seems to want to make excuses. It’s often repeated without much analysis of how such a brilliant anthology editor also credited with bringing literary heavyweights like Gene Wolfe and Philip K. Dick to readers would want to (inadvertently?) apologize for science fiction while at the same time engaging in a senti­mentality that seems at odds with the whole enterprise of truly speculative fiction. (Not to mention dissing twelve-year-olds!)

Perhaps one reason for Hartwell’s stance can be found in how science fiction in the United States, and to some extent in the United King­dom, rose out of pulp magazine delivery sys­tems seen as “low art.” A pronounced “cultural cringe” within science fiction often combines with the brutal truth that misfortunes of ori­gin often plague literature, which can assign value based on how swanky a house looks from the outside rather than what’s inside. The new Kafka who next arises from cosmopolitan Prague is likely to be hailed a savior, but not so much the one who arises from, say, Crawford­ville, Florida.

There is also something of a need to apolo­gize for the ma-and-pop tradition exemplified by the pulps, with their amateurish and eccen­tric editors, who sometimes had little formal training and possessed as many eccentricities as freckles, and who came to dominate the American science fiction world early on. Sometimes an Isolator was the least of it.

Yet even with regard to the pulps, evidence suggests that these magazines at times enter­tained more sophisticated content than gener­ally given credit for, so that in a sense an idea like “the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12” undermines the truth about such publications. It also renders invisible all of the complex sci­ence fiction being written outside of the pulp tradition.
Therefore, we humbly offer the assertion that contrary to popular belief and based on all of the evidence available to us . . . the actual Golden Age of Science Fiction is twenty-one, not twelve. The proof can be found in the con­tents of this anthology, where we have, as much as possible, looked at the totality of what we think of “science fiction,” without privileging the dominant mode, but also without discard­ing it. That which may seem overbearing or all of a type at first glance reveals its individuality and uniqueness when placed in a wider con­text. At third or fourth glance, you may even find that stories from completely different tra­ditions have commonalities and speak to each other in interesting ways.
 
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Verlag
Vintage
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101910097
ISBN 13 
9781101910092
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
1216
Herausgeber
VanderMeer Jeff, Vandermeer Ann
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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