Gary Westfahl

"This critical history comprehensively examines science fiction films that portray space travel realistically by having characters wear spacesuits. It discusses classics; innumerable films which gesture toward realism but betray that goal with melodramatic villains, low comedy, or improbably monsters; the distinctive spacesuit films of Western Europe, Russia and Japan; and America's televised Apollo 11 moon landing (1969)"--Provided by publisher.

Two reporters looking for a story in the outer reaches of the Solar System come upon a derelict spaceship. Inside, they find the only inhabitant, a beautiful young woman who has been imprisoned for a thousand years in suspended animation, suspended but aware for the whole time. Together they set off on a grand adventure across the vastness of space and time in a search for a race known as the Cosmic Engineers on a mission to save the universe.

Gluttony and starvation, pleasure and pain, growth and decay. These and other extremes of our condition related to food, though all but banned from the "civilized" tables of mainstream fiction, are ideal topics for the "undomesticated," free-roaming modes of fantasy and science fiction. As acts and ideas, food and eating are fundamental to all that makes us human and dominate our symbolic realms of art, literature, and cuisine. These essays show us the power of speculative modes of fiction to help us look anew at prehistorical and psychomythical attitudes toward food and eating; historical and Western-cultural attitudes toward the material fact of food and the necessity of eating; and the relationship between attitudes toward food and how, how much, when, and where we eat.

"An examination of science fiction editor and author Hugo Gernsback's career, summarizing the science fiction theories of Gernsback and his successors, and for the first time offers detailed studies of his rarest periodicals. An analysis of his ground-breaking novel, Ralph 124C 41+: a romance of the Year 2660, is also offered"--Provided by publisher

"This is a sustained argument about the idea of science fiction by a renowned critic. Overturning many received opinions and sacred cows, it is both controversial and stimulating." "Much of the controversy arises from Westfahl's resurrection of Hugo Gernsback - for decades a largely derided figure - as the true creator of science fiction. Following an initial demolition of earlier critics, Westfahl argues for Gernsback's importance. His argument is fully documented, showing a much greater familiarity with early American science fiction, particularly magazine fiction, than previous academic critics or historians. After his initial chapters on Gernsback, he examines the way in which the Gernsback tradition was adopted and modified by later magazine editors and early critics. This involves a re-evaluation of the importance of John W. Campbell to the history of science fiction which is possibly as important as his re-evaluation of Gernsback, as well as a very interesting critique of Robert Heinlein's Beyond the Horizon, one of the seminal texts of American science fiction. In conclusion, Westfahl uses the theories of Gernsback and Campbell to develop a descriptive definition of science fiction and he explores the ramifications of that definition."--BOOK JACKET.