Science fiction loves strangeness. It relishes
oddities, even when it piles on fear and dystopian
loathing. The technical term for a fascination with the
strange and alien is xenophilia, just as the term for a
terror of the strange is xenophobia. At its core, then,
science fiction is...Xeno Fiction. So science fiction
seeks out the strange, roams far from home in space and
time, looks with avid eagerness upon the ways of the
Others, human or alien. It participates, in brilliantly
lighted imagination, in their strange lives. In this
second gathering from Van Ikin's critical journal,
Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature,
writers of the alien are investigated with wit and
insight. G. Travis Regier follows the Other into its own
home, accompanying those experts in the alien, C. J.
Cherry and Samuel R. Delany. In the book's long key
essay, Terry Dowling pursues the Art of Xenography as
exemplified by Jack Vance's "General Culture" novels.
Three expert commentators look into Booker Prize-winner
Peter Carey's postcolonial and postmodern frolics into
alternative realities. And the Xeno fictions of Isaac
Asimov, Greg Egan, Mary Gentle, Ursula K. Le Guin, Naomi
Mitchison, Neal Stephenson, and Stanley Weinbaum are
read as their road maps into the strange. Eleven
revealing essays on speculative fiction by some of the
best critics in the field.
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