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This chapter studies the response of rationalist writers to the claims of theologians arguing that their ideology lacked any sense of a wider purpose to human life. It is argued that to replace the spiritual dimension of religion, authors such as H. G. Wells, J. B. S. Haldane, and J. D. Bernal appealed to the possibility that the human race could in future develop a collective mentality and spread this awareness throughout the cosmos by space travel. Their ideas thus anticipated themes developed by later science-fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke in his 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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.

This chapter looks at the ways technologized bodies are designed and engineered, and especially how these processes are gendered. It argues that it is vital to understand the logic and techniques of design and engineering given that many disability experiences are produced through the intersection between body and technology, and the chapter analyses science and speculative fiction and film in which artificial, robotic and cyborg bodies are designed and produced, outlining how this production needs to be understood through a disability lens. The chapter will focus on texts where women are engineered, but also where they undertake the engineering; it also asserts that a disability-inflected conception of female engineering animates contemporary cultural production, highlighting the ideas of subject and community this produces.

Bradbury’s successful 1977 stage adaptation of The Martian Chronicles with Terrence Shank and Paul Gregory opens chapter ten and leads into Bradbury’s fully realized understanding of Hamlet while attending Jack O’Brien’s production at San Diego’s Globe Theater. The chapter examines Bradbury’s influential Saturday Review essay “The God in Science Fiction,” which continues his exploration of the spiritual intersection between science and science fiction. His significant Los Angeles Times review of Close Encounters of the Third Kind embraced the film’s global spiritual implications. The chapter goes on to document Bradbury’s grief over the loss of friends Loren Eiseley, Edmond Hamilton, and Leigh Brackett, and his willingness to guarantee completion of Brackett’s Empire Strikes Back screenplay. She lived to complete it and acknowledge their enduring friendship.

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.

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.

Bradbury’s 1999 induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame opens chapter 36. That year he also received the George Pal Memorial Award from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films, followed in 2000 by a National Book Foundation Medal. His November 1999 stroke and subsequent loss of sight in his left eye did not prevent him from attending this ceremony, or from finally gathering his half-century-old stories of the supernatural Elliot family into a novelized story collection, From the Dust Returned. The chapter closes with Bradbury’s cautions against the loss of freedom of the imagination; these thoughts had resurfaced in his new book’s inter-chapter bridges and in his letter to Leon Uris reflecting on the mid-century climate of fear.

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’.

Bradbury’s honors soon included the Mark Twain Literary Award and a screenwriting award founded in his name by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Chapter 31 continues through Bradbury’s unsuccessful attempt to interest Ted Turner in a new film adaptation of Fahrenheit 451, and his keynote fundraising address to support the Challenger Center for Science Education. In June 1993, screenings of Bradbury films were featured in the American Film Institute’s 7th annual International Film Festival. The various lectures, engagements, and circulating film projects continued to draw time and creativity away from story writing; chapter 31 concludes with an accounting of his low story production and his lack of success with magazines beyond specialty markets.