Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon provides short introductions to key works of science fiction and fantasy (SFF) speaking to why a text, trilogy, or series matters to SFF as a genre as well as to readers, scholars, and fans. These books aim to serve as a go-to resource for thinking on specific texts and series and for prompting further inquiry. Each book will be less than 30,000 words and structured similarly to facilitate classroom use. Focusing specifically on literature, the books will also address film and TV adaptations of the texts as relevant. Beginning with background and context on the text’s place in the field, the author and how this text fits in their oeuvre, and the socio-historical reception of the text, the books will provide an understanding of how students, readers, and scholars can think dynamically about a given text. Each book will describe the major approaches to the text and how the critical engagements with the text have shaped SFF. Engaging with classic works as well as recent books that have been taken up by SFF fans and scholars, the goal of the series is not to be the arbiters of canonical importance, but to show how sustained critical analysis of these texts might bring about a new canon. In addition to their suitability for undergraduate courses, the books will appeal to fans of SFF.
More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/16580
Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination
A Critical Companion
Cover illustration: Pattern © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
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The infinite worlds of science fiction and fantasy (SFF) dance along the borders between the possible and the impossible, the familiar and the strange, the immediate and the ever-approaching horizon. Speculative fiction in all its forms has been considered a genre, a medium, a mode, a practice, a compilation of themes, or a web of assertions. With this in mind, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon offers an expansive and dynamic approach to thinking SFF, destabilizing notions of the canon, so long associated with privilege, power, class, and hegemony. We take canon not as a singular and unchallenged authority but as shifting and thoughtful consensus among an always-growing collective of readers, scholars, and writers.
The cultural practice and production of speculation has encompassed novels, stories, plays, games, music, comics, and other media, with a lineage dating back at least to the nineteenth-century precursors through to the most recent publications. Existing scholarship has considered some of these media extensively, often with particular focus on film and TV. It is for this reason that Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy will forgo the cinematic and televisual, aspiring to direct critical attention at the other nodes of SFF expression.
Each volume in the series introduces, contextualizes, and analyzes a single work of SFF that ranges from the acknowledged “classic” to the should-be-classic, and asks two basic, but provocative, questions: Why does this text matter to SFF? and Why does (or should) this text matter to SFF readers, scholars, and fans? Thus, the series joins into conversation both with scholars and students of the field to examine the parameters of SFF studies and the changing valences of fundamental categories like genre, medium, and canon. By emphasizing the critical approaches and major questions each text inspires, the series aims to offer “go-to” books for thinking about, writing on, and teaching major works of SFF.
“This monograph demonstrates several reasons why Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination remains one of the most fascinating SF novels ever, even 65 years after it was first published. There are, for example, the book’s ‘proto-cyberpunk style’ and ‘pyrotechnic’ plot, its strange antihero, Gully Foyle, its connections to other works, including Frankenstein, its representation of a twenty-fifth century society that often seems all too familiar, and its essential plot element, the transformation of Bester’s ‘stereotype Common Man’ into a Promethean figure at the novel’s end. For anyone interested in Alfred Bester, Wilson’s book is essential reading.”
—Patrick A. McCarthy, Professor of English, University of Miami, USA, and author of The Riddles of Finnegans Wake (1980)
“Alfred Bester was essentially writing parody during his great period, parody of a field he loved for the very contempt it was able to instill and extract from him. It was the junkiness of science fiction which enthralled him—his stories and his two great novels bestow the armament of junk upon narrative. In this dazzling study of The Stars My Destination, D. Harlan Wilson shows us how Bester took the eviscerated, glowing heart of the artichoke and pronounced it as torn from heaven.”
—Barry N. Malzberg, author of Beyond Apollo (1972) and Galaxies (1975)
“D. Harlan Wilson’s study is the perfect example of how rigorous literary scholarship can shine a light on a forgotten text and really put it front and center for a contemporary readership. Connecting Alfred Bester’s experimental novel of the 1950s through intertextual lines, Wilson uncovers the rhizome that is the SF megatext: from monomyth to mad scientist, from Frankenstein to Neuromancer, from Joyce’s modernism to Wells’ scientific romances, from proto-SF to cyberpunk. And the best thing is that Wilson remains true to his subject of study, mirroring Bester’s ‘pyrotechnic’ style in his scholarship. This monograph is a rush of densely packed readings and analyses, giving the story of Gully Foyle its due in the history of science fiction, and revealing its contemporary importance.”
—Lars Schmeink, Liverhulme Visiting Professor, University of Leeds, UK, and author of Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society, and Science Fiction (2016)
is an American novelist, playwright, editor, critic, and college professor. He is the author of over 30 book-length works of fiction and nonfiction, many of which have won literary awards, and hundreds of his essays, reviews, and stories have appeared in journals, magazines, and anthologies across the world in multiple languages. Website: dharlanwilson.com. Twitter & Instagram: @DHarlanWilson.