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This chapter examines the boom years of science fiction magazines that began in 1952, which saw the publication of seven new science fiction and fantasy magazines in the United States. It was in 1952 that three new digest magazines appeared within three months of each other: If: Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantastic, and Space Science Fiction. The end of the science fiction boom came with the demise of the pulp magazines that hit the field in 1954. During the 1940s the pulp magazine faced stiff competition not only from the comic books, but also from paperback pocketbooks. The pocketbook emerged as a significant part of publishing with the success of Penguin Books in Britain and Pocket Books in the United States. Pocket Books were soon joined by Avon Books and other publishers, few of which published science fiction as a recognised genre.

From 1955 to the end of the 1950s, science fiction experienced its most turbulent period. All of the pulp magazines had almost disappeared by the middle of the decade, as their readers began to explore other avenues. Competition for science fiction magazines came from everywhere: comics, digest magazines, paperbacks, men's magazines, cinema, radio, and television. At the same time, science fiction was becoming more topical and relevant every day due to advances in science, especially with the dawn of the space age in October 1957. These factors provided science fiction a wider and more appreciative readership, to which the magazines had to respond while facing the challenge of their opposition. This chapter examines the consequences of all these factors for the turbulent science fiction magazine market from 1956 to 1960. Among the magazines that existed during the period were Astounding Science, Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Science Fiction Stories, Science Fiction Quarterly, Satellite SF, Michael Shayne Mystery Magazine, and Science Fiction Adventures.

Chapter 2 shows in a compressed, somewhat truncated way, the unique history of science fiction (sometimes called speculative fiction). This chapter also shows some of the myriad theoretical approaches that have been used in the study of science fiction over time. It then demonstrates how those approaches have been used by giving close readings of science fiction texts intended for young adults. This is in an effort to show the difference between science fiction and dystopian literature. It shows that it is a literature directly concerned with the subject’s encounter with the o/Other.

This chapter details the early life of John Brunner. Brunner had first meaningful encounter with science fiction (SF) when grandfather's rare 1898 Heinemann edition of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898) ended up misshelved in his playroom. At six and a half years old, Brunner read it, adorned its endpapers with Martian fighting-machines, and that was that. By nine, Brunner was a full-fledged SF addict. During his final term at Cheltenham College in the fall of 1951, Brunner's first printed story appeared alongside fiction by A. Bertram Chandler, Kenneth Bulmer, and Manly Banister in Walt Willis' celebrated fanzine Slant. Though only a page long, “The Watchers” (1951) leaves little doubt that the seventeen-year-old Brunner began his career as a devoted idealist. In April 1966, Brunner became the first recipient of the British Science Fiction Association's Fantasy Award.

The introduction of the book sets up the idea that genres are like tools, and they can be used to do certain work on and for the reader. It sets up the argument that dystopian works have different use values than science fiction works.

This chapter examines a final case study, the TRPG Numenera. It finds in writers such as China Miéville and Gene Wolfe precursors of how literary studies can inform and understanding of the imaginary worlds found in a game like Numenera. Miéville, for example, finds roots for his Bas Lag trilogy in elements from TRPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, articulating a granular style of textured detail like that found in the best of Lovecraft. With Wolfe, this chapter reads his blending of science fiction and fantasy elements, especially how he embraces a magical impulse. Numenera incorporates these elements into a post-anthropocene setting that imagines a post-human far future. Its cosmicism, though, lacks the pessimism of Lovecraft or a writer like Thomas Ligotto, who this chapter sees as moving beyond Lovecraft, yet retaining much of his insistence in resisting drawing the ultimate horror. This chapter ends by arguing that realized worlds such as those inspired by Lovecraft, e.g. Numenera, can also be seen in the first season of the HBO series True Detective, a series that valorized a pulp fantasism, yet refused to acknowledge it in the end.

In this review of David Brin’s Glory Season, Jones foregrounds the issues that arise when feminism is looked at from a male perspective. She criticises the text for presenting a feminist utopia so clearly designed by a man and analyses the sexual stereotyping that comes out of it.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s Nebula award-winning novel The Windup Girl (2009) sets up a dialectical situation which it then disrupts. This is important for two reasons. First, dialectic formations are often also assemblages or networks, meaning that their constituent parts are defined by how they interact with each other rather than by the essence which is withdrawn from such interactions. In the previous chapter, symbiosis was seen as a powerful tool for change. However, the way it was described often bordered on a dialectical structure, as did the doubling of double-vision and the contradiction of crisis energy. The Windup Girl offers a different strategy, the short circuit. In brief, this means that one of the terms of a symbiosis disrupts the symbiosis. This disruption takes the form of spatial and temporal tensions, as described above and developed below.

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’.

Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 (40k) intellectual property is a tabletop war game, but it also has developed a complex narrative that describes the imaginary realized world in which the game is played. This chapter examines key elements within this ‘lore’ as an example of how a cohesive realized world emerges. It focuses on a seminal ‘origins’ event, the Horus Heresy, that occurred roughly ten-thousand years prior to the current game setting’s timeline. It examines how key moments, such as the defeat of Horus and the wounding of the Emperor began as brief comments in sourcebooks but, through the work of authors within its shared universe, expanded into detailed narratives. It also focuses on a few other key moments, such as those detailed in the Beast Arises series and the Gathering Storm storyline.

This chapter considers the representation of gender in the late 1970s and 1980s in the so-called blockbuster era, focusing specifically on the science fiction genre. The aural dimension of these types of films immediately conjures up ideas of space, technology and other worlds and thus potentially appear as acoustically distinct from the experimental or avant-garde nature of New Hollywood or the loud, pervasive sounds of weaponry, shouting and male camaraderie in war films, which, as previously discussed, explored alternative representations of masculinity in mainstream US cinema. Financially, the most successful American films to emerge in the post-New Hollywood era were Hollywood blockbusters. These films, which were popular from the late 1970s onwards, saw a return to classical movie formulas and genres which, according to some scholars, also saw the re-emergence of strong male heroes and passive female characters and thus a noticeable return to binary representations of gender.