Scotland as Science Fiction

Caroline McCracken-Flesher (Ed.)

2011
208 pages
ISBN 9781611483741
Aperçus

Out of the mainstream, but ahead of the tide, that is Scottish Science Fiction. Science Fiction emphasizes "progress" through technology, advanced mental states, or future times. How does Scotland, often considered a land of the past, lead in Science Fiction? "Left behind" by international politics, Scots have cultivated alternate places and different times as sites of identity so that Scotland can seem a futuristic fiction itself.

This book explores the tensions between science and a particular society that produce an innovative science fiction. Essays consider Scottish thermodynamics, Celtic myth, the rigors of religious "conversion," Scotland's fractured politics yet civil society, the country's languages of alterity (Scots, Gaelic, allegory, poetry), and the lure of the future. From Peter Pan and Dr. Jekyll to the poetry of Edwin Morgan and the worlds of Muriel Spark, Ken MacLeod, or Iain M. Banks, Scotland's creative complex yields a literature that models the future for Science Fiction.

Contributors: John Corbett, Cairns Craig, Ian Duncan, John Garrison, Lisa Harrison, J. Derrick McClure, Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Gavin Miller, Alison Phipps, Alan Riach, Carla Sassi, Matthew Wickman.

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Reviews

"This provocative study meets the challenge head-on."
--J. Walker, CHOICE, May 2012.

"The various themes covered by these essays clearly suggest a diverse and complex treatment of science fiction within Scottish literature. Of major importance is the obvious use of multiple approaches to writers of the genre. The contributing scholars look not only at the place of specific works by Scottish authors in the science fiction literary tradition, but also at how science, language, and political issues have played a contributing role in shaping the material."
--Amber N. Slaven; Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Volume XXV, No. 2-3 (2014)

About the editor:

Caroline McCracken-Flesher is Professor of English at University of Wyoming.

Distributed by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

Paperback: 9781611484267; eBook: 9781611483758