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A short conclusion emphasizes the uniqueness of Ballard’s oeuvre and addresses his legacy as one of the few genuine innovators in the SF genre, the conventions of which he consistently challenged and destabilized throughout his long career. Ballard’s reach extends beyond SF into other kinds of literature and media, ranging from cinema, television and the visual arts to philosophy, cultural theory and music. There is an active fan base of Ballardians, accomplished artists and intellects who include some of his earliest reviewers and critics. Ballard will always be an icon of SF against which other authors measure themselves.

One feature of the spread of solution-focused (SF) approaches over the past fifteen years has been the many applications found in the area of management and organizational change. In many ways, this is not a surprising development; the pragmatic and effective nature of the approach matches the desire for efficient ways to make progress found in most organizations. From the time of early experiments in the mid-1990s, the SF approach has become increasingly influential. While controlled studies are possible in the field of therapy, applications in the organizational sphere are much more often carried out on an ad hoc basis; the main concern is to make progress, and whatever helps to do this is welcomed. There is far less emphasis on recording, writing up, and publishing accounts of the work. This chapter outlines some of the ways in which SF ideas have been used in management thus far.

In “‘Great Wall Planet’: Estrangements of Chinese Science Fiction,” Veronica Hollinger offers a few observations about Chinese SF, specifically in terms of its potential to defamiliarize what scholars have begun to refer to as “global science fiction.” She suggests five ways in which Chinese SF can estrange a taken-for-granted Anglo-American mainstream: 1) as an “alien” cultural product; 2) as a product of China’s “rise” as a global superpower; 3) as the product of an “alternate” cultural history; 4) as representative of something called “global science fiction”; and 5) as a kind of “second-language” version of the discourse of Anglo-American globalization. She uses fictional works by Liu Cixin and Han Song to emphasize her points.

Takayuki Tatsumi, in “Race and Black Humor: From a Planetary Perspective,” uses the literary concept of black humor to frame his discussion of race and humanity on a global scale. Starting with a racist joke concerning Hurricane Katrina, Tatsumi traces a conspiracy theory that blames this weather event on the Japanese Yakuza to develop his multi-ethnic literary analysis. From this point, Tatsumi focuses on Brian Aldiss’s short story “Another Little Boy” (1966) and how the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki transmute debates on white supremacy, counter-racism, nationalism, technology, and global racial metaphors. In his closing argument, black humor is brought to bear on Japanese-American relations as Tatsumi considers transpacific writers and transpacific imagination.

Stephen Hong Sohn, in “‘Perpetual War”: Korean American Speculative Fiction, Militarized Technogeometries, and Yoon Ha Lee’s ‘Wine,’” investigates the look and feel of Korean American SF in its present shape. Sohn identifies how militarized tehcnogeometries, defined as the presence of and reference to soldiers, armies, battles, skirmishes, casualties, bombings, and other elements of war, become fundamental to the ways that a science fictional Korea overlays the historical and social contexts in which South and North Korea actually exist—ever under the peril of territorial dissolution. Sohn then shifts focus by analyzing Yoon Ha Lee’s “Wine” (2014) through the lens of militarized technogeometries to demonstrate how Korea materializes through its relationships to perpetual war.

Bradford Lyau, in “Many Paths, One Journey: Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem Novels,” carefully places Cixin Liu’s Three Body trilogy within both Chinese and Western literary traditions before offering a brief critical analysis of the first two books, where humanity struggles against an impending alien invasion and how humanity also faces its destiny. These two resonances with Western literature, both popular and elite, invite the reader to consider Liu’s novel’s different literary roots: 1) American genre science fiction, 2) the philosophical tale as it emerged in the West, 3) the role of philosophy in Chinese literature, and 4) Chinese science fiction.

Through her essay “The Mako Mori Fan Club,” Cait Coker examines the subversive nature of Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013) by utilizing fan works as sources of viable criticism to decenter the white American male action hero with a Japanese heroine. To this end, Coker delves into the major motifs of Pacific Rim fandom online and considers its relationship with a film that seemingly “failed” in the American market but exploded internationally, even prompting a sequel slated for 2017. She also reflects on how the depictions of close, but not necessarily romantic, relationships are celebrated in both the film and in fandom as illustrating a cooperative ideal generally not seen in popular, mainstream media.

The introduction examines how Bester’s unique approach challenged the paradigm of Golden Age science fiction. After a stint scripting comics and radio, Bester returned to the SF field in search of creative freedom; however, a conflict with legendary editor John W. Campbell over the story “Oddy and Id,” among other circumstances, prompted Bester to assume the stance of an outsider and write against the grain of the Astounding ethos, which he came to regard as escapist and scientistic. Bester wanted to write “arrest” fiction “full of romantic curiosity” that left ample opportunity for the reader to cogenerate meaning and experience the euphoria of raw imagination. Bester’s approach is discussed in terms of Roland Barthes’s distinction between “readable” and “writable” fiction.

The introduction situates Ballard in a historical context and draws a blueprint of the book. Uninterested in worn-out Golden Age themes of space exploration and alien invasion, Ballard wanted to marshal the SF genre in a new direction; instead of pointing it at the stars, he would point it at the human psyche and our intricate, uncanny technologies of desire. The concept of inner space (and its surreal depiction) is central to his oeuvre, which does not accord with genre SF but is decidedly science fictional, consistently employing rational novums that defamiliarize and alienate readers in the context of conceivable, technologically advanced dystopias. Harnessing the machinery of late capitalism, Ballard attempts to de-fuse and remake the SF apparatus while commenting on the postmodern human condition.

This chapter provides a concerted overview of Ballard’s short story production and publication, foregrounding key collections, among them The Voices of Time,The Terminal Beach, Vermillion Sands, Myths of the Near Future andWar Fever. It also accounts for articles, essays, reviews, introductions and other nonfiction texts written throughout his life to subsidize his income from fiction. While Ballard’s novels contain the real meat of his legacy, his stories are crucial building blocks, test sites for his craft and the emergent flows of inner space as well as seedlings for book-length works. Before appearing in the aforementioned iconic collections, they were printed mainly in British SF magazines such as New Worlds, Science Fantasy, Ambit andInterzone.

The texts under consideration in this chapter include Ballard’s first four novels, all of which involve different types of global cataclysms and fall into the apocalyptic subgenre of SF: The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World. The latter three are inner-spatial narratives that center on one man’s terrestrial and psychological journey through a dystopian “landscape of decline and desire”; all three protagonists are “becoming-Adams” who seek transcendence by navigating their respective new Edens, “gardens of ruin” that hold the promise of demolition and re-birth. Wind, on the other hand, is a “cozy catastrophe” full of clichés that Ballard wrote to jumpstart his career, although it is much better than some critics (and Ballard himself) have given it credit for.

Ballard’s most well-known novels are unpacked in this chapter. It is divided into two sections: the first regarding the experimental, postmodern The Atrocity Exhibition, the second regarding Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise, which formulate a “cultural disaster trilogy.” Crash has been called the first “pornographic SF novel” and derives from the “condensed novels” that comprise Atrocity. They sparked controversy and have received more critical attention than anything else in his canon, which, for years, was wrongly totalized via their designs and themes. Whereas the books in chapter 3 concern the effects of nature on the psyche, the books discussed here concern the effects of culture on the psyche, exploring how electronic media, consumer-capitalism and urbanity construct and pathologize subjectivity.

With his introduction, “Coloring Race in Science Fiction,” Isiah Lavender, III provides answers to why he and others study race and racism in SF, that invoking race and racism in an outwardly white genre is necessary. Coloring science fiction is an absolute and radical commitment because skin color matters in visions of the future. SF has charted a few of the alternatives for this unknown territory, and the change presents both opportunities and challenges for society to establish new values.

Patrick B. Sharp, in “Questing for an Indigenous Future: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony as Indigenous SF,” critiques the colonial imagination that produced both modern science and the “grammar of race” that codes all non-whites as incapable of contributing to the futures promised by science fiction by focusing on Silko’s use of illness and witchery to evoke the Cold War logic of nuclear apocalypse. Sharp explores how Silko uses the traditional Laguna concept of cyclical time, how Silko imagines the interconnectedness between all races, and how Silko thwarts the narrative of apocalypse, providing the foundation for an indigenous future that can heal the damage brought about by the colonial imagination.

This chapter tells the author’s beginnings in dance in high school and her developing dance training as an undergraduate at San Francisco State University. She also probes the unique qualities of the SF Bay Area in the latter 60s, specifically as it relates to the Black Arts Movement-West, the hippie counterculture movement, and black militancy leading to the formation of Oakland’s Black Panther Party and the SF State Strike for Ethnic Studies. She shows how she situated dance as her unique revolutionary statement and took this approach when leaving the US for Europe as a young woman.

This chapter shows that cortical auditory response mechanisms are organized in a much more complex way than was encompassed by the concept of a dual cortical auditory area. Within the central auditory region there appear to be four complete representations for the cochlea, which correlate in some degree with the four principal cytoarchitectural divisions of Rose—the suprasylvian fringe area (SF), auditory area I (AI), auditory area II (AII), and Area Ep. These auditory areas were discovered by Woolsey and Walzl by presenting results on stimulating electrically small bundles of cochlear nerve fibers in the spiral osseous lamina, obtained by recording electrical potential changes evoked locally in the cerebral cortex.

This chapter explores the history of science fiction in relation to religious ideas about cosmology, human nature, fate, and techno-science. Documenting the evolution of the literary genre from ‘classic’ authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Hugo Gernsback, and Isaac Asimov, to the rise of ‘cyberpunk’ authors such as William Gibson, the chapter examines the relationship of these authors with religious movements such as Theosophy, modern occultism, and New Age spirituality. The chapter argues that science fiction (and science-fictionalized everyday life) constitutes a form of religion outside religious contexts – a secularized, commercially driven religiosity, based on a shared vocabulary of ‘wonder’, ‘awe’, ‘amazement’, ‘redemption’, and ‘salvation’.