The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

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THEVISUAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION
There has never been anything like it! This book is the first to bring together the multifarious world of science fiction under one cover. It adopts a completely fresh approach to defining and presenting the different strands which go to make up the complex and controversial subject of science fiction - the most challenging branch of modern literature. It is the comprehensive guide for which serious students, fans, enthusiastic readers and newcomers have been waiting so long.
Unique to this volume is the flow-chart which presents in diagrammatic form the whole progress of the genre since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. Significant events are shown year-by«year in an easily assimilated format, tracing the exhilarating flight-path of science fiction in its upward rush to spur the human imagination to grapple with the futu re and rise to the challenge of the stars.
Fundamentally a work of reference, the book also embodies the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

THEVISUAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION
There has never been anything like it! This book is the first to bring together the multifarious world of science fiction under one cover. It adopts a completely fresh approach to defining and presenting the different strands which go to make up the complex and controversial subject of science fiction - the most challenging branch of modern literature. It is the comprehensive guide for which serious students, fans, enthusiastic readers and newcomers have been waiting so long.
Unique to this volume is the flow-chart which presents in diagrammatic form the whole progress of the genre since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. Significant events are shown year-by«year in an easily assimilated format, tracing the exhilarating flight-path of science fiction in its upward rush to spur the human imagination to grapple with the futu re and rise to the challenge of the stars.
Fundamentally a work of reference, the book also embodies the personal touch (so much a part of the science fiction movement), in the form of individual introductions contributed by many of the world's leading writers. On a deeper, philosophical level the opinions of other noted authors are included in a section devoted to the motivations underlying the creation of the sf story.
Also treated in detail are the media through which the genre has successfully reached its ever-growing public, now a vast international body of devotees which ranges through every level of society and across all age-brackets.
The rise offandom, punctuated by numerous feuds and changes of direction, occupies a further section together with accounts of the fringe cults associated with science fiction and a review of the growing interest in the genre noticeable in the critical and academic fields. A survey of the work of the principal sf illustrators over the last fifty years is amply supported by the examples which appear throughout the book, graphically bringing to life the far-reaching dreams which have done so much to stimulate the sense of wonder that is basic to science fiction.
For those interested in the many concerns of science fiction - its exploration of future possibilities within the areas of the human and physical sciences, of religion, politics, and the speculative fields of para-psychology and the evolution of man - this book will prove to be invaluable. Nobody interested In the vast variety within science fiction can afford to be without this encyclopedia. Vissza