Reading By Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (popular Fictions)

READING BY STARLIGHT Science fiction’s impact on popular culture has been striking. Yet sf’s imaginative texts often baffle or dismay readers trained to enjoy only the literary or ‘canonical’. Reading by Starlight explores those characteristics in the writing, marketing and reception of science fiction which distinguish it as a mode. Damien Broderick analyses the postmodern self-referentiality of science fiction narrative, its intricate coded language and discursive ‘encyclopaedia’. He shows how, for rich understanding, sf readers must learn the codes and vernacular of these imaginary worlds, while absorbing the ‘lived-in futures’ generated by the overlapping intertexts of many sf writers. Reading by Starlight includes close readings of cyberpunk and other postmodern texts, and writings by such sf novelists and theorists as Brian Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, Christine Brooke-Rose, Arthur C.Clarke, Samuel R.Delany, William Gibson, Fredric Jameson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Vivian Sobchack, Darko Suvin, Michael Swanwick, Tzvetan Todorov and John Varley. Damien Broderick, author of The Architecture of Babel: Discourses of Literature and Science, is an award-winning writer who sold his first collection of stories at 20, has published eight novels and holds a PhD in the semiotics of science, literature and science fiction. POPULAR FICTIONS SERIES Series editors: Tony Bennett Professor of Cultural Studies School of Humanities Griffith University Graham Martin Professor of English Literature Open University In the same series Cover Stories: Narrative and ideology in the British spy thriller by Michael Denning Lost Narratives: Popular fictions, politics and recent history by Roger Bromley Popular Film and Television Comedy by Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik Popular Fiction: Technology, ideology, production, reading Edited by Tony Bennett The Historical Romance 1890–1990 by Helen Hughes The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis by Barbara Creed Reading the Vampire by Ken Gelder READING BY STARLIGHT Postmodern science fiction Damien Broderick London and New York First published 1995 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1995 Damien Broderick All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any storage or information retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Broderick, Damien. Reading by starlight: postmodern sci