- Home
- literary criticism
- fiction
- Parabolas of Science Fiction
Essays about the inherently collaborative nature of science fiction
As a geometric term, parabola suggests a narrative trajectory or story arc. In science fiction, parabolas take us from the known to the unknown. More concrete than themes, more complex than motifs, parabolas are combinations of meaningful setting, character, and action that lend themselves to endless redefinition and jazzlike improvisation. The fourteen original essays in this collection explore how the field of science fiction has developed as a complex of repetitions, influences, arguments, and broad conversations. This particular feature of the genre has been the source of much critical commentary, most notably through growing interest in the "sf megatext," a continually expanding archive of shared images, situations, plots, characters, settings, and themes found in science fiction across media. Contributors include Jane Donawerth, Terry Dowling, L. Timmel Duchamp, Rachel Haywood Ferreira, Pawel Frelik, David M. Higgins, Amy J. Ransom, John Rieder, Nicholas Ruddick, Graham Sleight, Gary K. Wolfe, and Lisa Yaszek.
Parabolas of Science Fiction – Brian Attebery and Veronica Hollinger
PART I: INTRODUCING PARABOLAS
Fictional Parabolas: Jazz, Geometry, and Generation Starships – Brian Attebery
Dancing with Scheherazade: Some Reflections in the Djinni's Glass – Terry Dowling
Breaking the Frame – Graham Sleight
PART II: PARABLES OF POLITICS AND POWER
Katherine MacLean's Short Science Fiction and Cytology: Science as Parabola – Jane Donawerth
Second Contact: The First Contact Story in Latin American Science Fiction – Rachel Haywood Ferreira
Parabolas of SFQ: Canadian Science Fiction in French and the Making of a "National" Subgenre – Amy J. Ransom
The Domestic SF Parabola – Lisa Yaszek
PART III: PARABLES OF REMEDIATION
Mad Scientists, Chimps, and Mice with Human Brains: Collapsing Boundaries in Science Fiction – L. Timmel Duchamp
Coded Transmissions: Gender and Genre Reception in The Matrix – David M. Higgins
The Mad Scientist, the Failed Experiment, and the Queer Family of Man: Sirius, Frankenstein, and the SF Stockroom – John Rieder
Back to the Filthy Workshop: "Faithful" Film Adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein – Nicholas Ruddick
PART IV: PARABOLIC FUTURES
The Future of the Past: Science Fiction, Retro, and Retrofuturism – Pawe Frelik
Babylon Revisited: Alternate Cosmologies from Farmer to Chiang – Gary K. Wolfe
Science Fiction as Archive Fever – Veronica Hollinger
Notes
Works Cited
Contributors
Index
BRIAN ATTEBERY is the editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts and a professor of English at Idaho State University. His books include Decoding Gender in Science Fiction and Strategies of Fantasy. VERONICA HOLLINGER is coeditor of the journal Science Fiction Studies and of The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. She is a professor of cultural studies at Trent University, Ontario.
"In this excellent collection of critical essays, Attebery and Hollinger have recruited a talented stable of known and emerging scholars to pursue implications of the parabola as a metaphor for science fiction. ... The resulting collection justly deserves the editors' claim that the volume provides a 'significant addition to science fiction scholarship with implications that go well beyond the single genre' through 'a detailed study of what is generally considered to be a key defining characteristic of the [SF] genre. Parabolas of Science Fiction rewards not only scholars of science fiction, but any scholar who is concerned with genre theory."
~Sarah Canfield Fuller, SFRA Review
""In this excellent collection of critical essays, Attebery and Hollinger have recruited a talented stable of known and emerging scholars to pursue implications of the parabola as a metaphor for science fiction. The resulting collection justly deserves the editors' claim that the volume provides a 'significant addition to science fiction scholarship with implications that go well beyond the single genre' through 'a detailed study of what is generally considered to be a key defining characteristic of the [SF] genre. Parabolas of Science Fiction rewards not only scholars of science fiction, but any scholar who is concerned with genre theory.""
~Sarah Canfield Fuller, SFRA Review
""Parabolas of Science Fiction eschews formula, preferring instead to signpost routes through a territory for others to explore the linguistic and formal features and strategies that underpin the dialogical nature of sf. The metaphor of the parabola offers a convenient handle that encapsulates the idea of the borrowings conducted by sf, along with the parable-like connection of sf to the contemporary world. As such, it is a valuable consolidation of several orientations to sf, and perhaps other genre fictions.""
~Chris Pak, Foundation
"Parabolas of Science Fiction is the first substantial effort in many years to think about science fiction in relation to the theorization of genre. It also has a usefully broad historical, geographical, and critical range."
~Mark Bould, University of the West of England
"Parabolas of Science Fiction offers the comprehensive critical paradigm—if not the Grand Unifying Theory—that lets us conceive and better understand the multiple collaborations, convergences, intersections, and mergings of texts, themes, agendas, concerns, and quirks represented in the grand megatextual archive of science fiction itself."
~Brooks Landon, University of Iowa
"Parabolas of Science Fiction is the first substantial effort in many years to think about science fiction in relation to the theorization of genre. It also has a usefully broad historical, geographical, and critical range."
~Mark Bould, University of the West of England