Table of Contents

• Key to Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Swift, Zamyatin, and Orwell and the Language of Utopia
• 2. Generic Configurations of A Story of the Days to Come
• 3. Re-visions of The Time Machine
• 4. Stanislaw Lem’s Futurological Congress as a Metageneric Text
• 5. Karel Capek’s Can(n)non of Negation
• 6. Olaf Stapledon’s Tragi-Cosmic Vision
• 7. C. S. Lewis and the Fictions of ‘Scientism’
• 8. Kurt Vonnegut, Historiographer of the Absurd: The Sirens of Titan
• 9. Jorge Luis Borges and the Labyrinths of Time
• 10. ‘Elsewhere Elsewhen Otherwise’: Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomic Tales
• 11. Ursula K. Le Guin and Time’s Dispossession
• 12. Time Out of Joint: The World(s) of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle
• Afterword: A Revisionary Construction of Genre, with Particular Reference to Science Fiction
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

About the Author

Robert M.. Philmus is an acclaimed SF scholar and writer. Before retiring he was a Professor of English at Concordia University. He is also a former editor of the highly influential SF publication Science Fiction Studies.

Reviews

Philmus succeeds in illuminating every work he discusses ... The result is ... some of the best close readings of SF texts that I have seen in a long time, but also a sustained contribution to the theory of genre and to the theory of literature itself.