Bücher der Reihe Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon

The videogame series Mass Effect is a remarkable rarity not only for being an original science-fictional franchise of recent vintage that has risen to such prominent commercial and critical success in popular culture but also for pushing the canonical boundaries of how science fiction as a genre will be experienced and understood in the future. This book analyzes the significance of the game for an understanding of the evolving SF genre and articulates an explanatory framework to limn its landmark reception in videogame history. This book both synthesizes the burgeoning body of scholarship on Mass Effect for a readership unfamiliar with either the game or the critical conversation on its salient importance, while simultaneously, for readers already invested in the science-fiction and videogame scholarship, mounting an extended inquiry as to why Mass Effect has served as such a representative milestone in videogame and genre history. The book should appeal to veteran science-fiction and videogame scholars and students as well as a wide variety of fans, consumers, gamers, and general readers.

In this comprehensive study of The Stars My Destination, D. Harlan Wilson makes a case for the continued significance of Alfred Bester¿s SF masterwork, exploring its distinctive style, influences, intertextuality, affect, and innovation as well as its extensive metafictional properties. In Stars, Bester established himself as a son of the pulp-SF and high-modernist writers that preceded him and a forefather to the New Wave and cyberpunk movements that followed his lead. Wilson¿s study depicts Bester as an SF insider as much as an outlier, writing in the spirit of the genre but breaking with the fixation on hard science in favor of psychological interiority, literary experimentation, and adult themes. The book combines close-readings of the novel with broader concerns about contemporary media, technoculture, and the current state of SF itself. In Wilson¿s view, SF is a moribund artform, and Stars foresaw the inevitable science fictionalization of our benighted world. With scholarly lucidity and precision, Wilson shows us that Stars pointed the way to what we have (un)become.

This book offers an in-depth analysis of Janelle Monáe¿s Dirty Computer, an Afrofuturist project that appeared simultaneously as a concept album and a visual album or ¿emotion picture¿ in spring 2018. In the previous decade, Janelle Monáe has developed into a global media personality who effortlessly unites speculative world-building with social and political activism. Across the intersecting album and film that together make up Dirty Computer, Monáe brings together the science-fictional themes that informed her previous work, resulting in a powerfully focused artistic and political statement. While the music on the album can be enjoyed as an accessible collection of pop tracks, the accompanying film, music videos, and media paratexts add layers of meaning that combine speculative world-building with anti-racist activism. This unique convergence of energies, ideas, and media platforms has made Dirty Computer a new classic of Afrofuturist science fiction.

This book offers an in-depth analysis of Janelle Monae's Dirty Computer, an Afrofuturist project that appeared simultaneously as a concept album and a visual album or "emotion picture" in spring 2018.