Geoffrey Charles Ryman is a Canadian writer of science fiction, fantasy, slipstream and historical fiction.
Posthumanism or post-humanism is an idea in continental philosophy and critical theory responding to the presence of anthropocentrism in 21st century thought. It encompasses a wide variety of branches, including:
- Antihumanism: a branch of theory that is critical of traditional humanism and traditional ideas about the human condition, vitality and agency.
- Cultural posthumanism: a branch of cultural theory critical of the foundational assumptions of humanism and its legacy that examines and questions the historical notions of "human" and "human nature", often challenging typical notions of human subjectivity and embodiment and strives to move beyond archaic concepts of "human nature" to develop ones which constantly adapt to contemporary technoscientific knowledge.
- Philosophical posthumanism: a philosophical direction that draws on cultural posthumanism, the philosophical strand examines the ethical implications of expanding the circle of moral concern and extending subjectivities beyond the human species.
- Posthuman condition: the deconstruction of the human condition by critical theorists.
- Posthuman transhumanism: a transhuman ideology and movement which, drawing from posthumanist philosophy, seeks to develop and make available technologies that enable immortality and greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities in order to achieve a "posthuman future".
- AI takeover: A variant of transhumanism in which humans will not be enhanced, but rather eventually replaced by artificial intelligences. Some philosophers and theorists, including Nick Land, promote the view that humans should embrace and accept their eventual demise as a consequence of a technological singularity. This is related to the view of "cosmism", which supports the building of strong artificial intelligence even if it may entail the end of humanity, as in their view it "would be a cosmic tragedy if humanity freezes evolution at the puny human level".
- Voluntary Human Extinction, which seeks a "posthuman future" that in this case is a future without humans.
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. She was first published in 1959, and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books. Frequently described as an author of science fiction, Le Guin has also been called a "major voice in American Letters". Le Guin said she would prefer to be known as an "American novelist".
Utopian and dystopian fiction are genres of speculative fiction that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction portrays a setting that agrees with the author's ethos, having various attributes of another reality intended to appeal to readers. Dystopian fiction offers the opposite: the portrayal of a setting that completely disagrees with the author's ethos. Some novels combine both genres, often as a metaphor for the different directions humility can take depending on its choices, ending up with one of two possible futures. Both utopias and dystopias are commonly found in science fiction and other types of speculative fiction.
Teresa de Lauretis is an Italian author and Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her areas of interest include semiotics, psychoanalysis, film theory, literary theory, feminism, women's studies, lesbian- and queer studies. She has also written on science fiction. Fluent in English and Italian, she writes in both languages. Additionally, her work has been translated into sixteen other languages.
Riddley Walker (1980) is a science fiction novel by American writer Russell Hoban, first published in 1980. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science fiction novel in 1982, as well as an Australian Science Fiction Achievement Award in 1983. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1981.
A book review is a form of literary criticism in which a book is merely described or analyzed based on content, style, and merit. A book review may be a primary source, opinion piece, summary review or scholarly review. Books can be reviewed for printed periodicals, magazines and newspapers, as school work, or for book websites on the Internet. A book review's length may vary from a single paragraph to a substantial essay. Such a review may evaluate the book on the basis of personal taste. Reviewers may use the occasion of a book review for an extended essay that can be closely or loosely related to the subject of the book, or to promulgate their own ideas on the topic of a fiction or non-fiction work.
Brian Attebery is an American writer and emeritus professor of English and philosophy at Idaho State University. He is known for his studies of fantasy literature, including The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin (1980) and Strategies of Fantasy (1992) which won the Mythopoeic Award. Attebery is also editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, for which he received the World Fantasy Award in 2021. He has also won the IAFA Award for distinguished scholarship and the Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement.
Nancy Katherine Hayles is an American postmodern literary critic, most notable for her contribution to the fields of literature and science, electronic literature, and American literature. She is professor and director of graduate studies in the program in literature at Duke University.
Extrapolation is an academic journal covering speculative fiction, established in 1959. It was the first journal in its field and is published by Liverpool University Press.
D. Harlan Wilson is an American novelist, short-story writer, critic, playwright and English professor. His body of work bridges the aesthetics of literary theory with various genres of speculative fiction, with Wilson also being recognized as one of the co-founders of bizarro fiction." Among his books is the award-winning novel Dr. Identity, the two-volume short story collection Battle without Honor or Humanity, a monograph on John Carpenter’s They Live and a critical study of the life and work of J. G. Ballard.
Scott Bukatman is a cultural theorist and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University. Bukatman's research examines how popular media and genres "mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience."
Science fiction studies is the common name for the academic discipline that studies and researches the history, culture, and works of science fiction and, more broadly, speculative fiction.
Fiona Kelleghan is an American academic and critic specializing in science fiction and fantasy. She was a metadata librarian and a cataloguer at the University of Miami's Otto G. Richter Library. She left the university in 2011.
Gary K. Wolfe is an American science fiction editor, critic and biographer. He is an emeritus Professor of Humanities in Roosevelt University's Evelyn T. Stone College of Professional Studies.
Andrea Hairston is an African-American science fiction and fantasy playwright and novelist. Her novel Redwood and Wildfire won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for 2011. Mindscape, Hairston's first novel, won the Carl Brandon Parallax Award and was short-listed for the Philip K. Dick Award and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Hairston was one of the Guests of Honor at the science fiction convention Wiscon in May 2012.
Jonardon Ganeri, FBA, is a philosopher, specialising in philosophy of mind and in South Asian and Buddhist philosophical traditions. He holds the Bimal Matilal Distinguished Professorship in Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He was Global Network Professor in the College of Arts and Science, New York University, previously having taught at several universities in Britain. Ganeri graduated from Churchill College, Cambridge, with his undergraduate degree in mathematics, before completing a DPhil in philosophy at University and Wolfson Colleges, Oxford. He has published eight monographs, and is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy. He is on the editorial board of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Philosophy East & West, Analysis, and other journals and monograph series. His research interests are in consciousness, self, attention, the epistemology of inquiry, the idea of philosophy as a practice and its relationship with literature. He works on the history of ideas in early modern South Asia, intellectual affinities between India and Greece, and Buddhist philosophy of mind, teaches courses in the philosophy of mind, the nature of subjectivity, Buddhist philosophy, the history of Indian philosophical traditions, and supervises graduate students on South Asian philosophical texts in a cross-cultural context. He is a prominent advocate for an expanded role for cross-cultural methodologies in philosophical research, and for enhanced cultural diversity in the philosophical curriculum. Jonardon Ganeri is the inventor of the idea of "cosmopolitan philosophy" as a new discipline within philosophy.
Karen L. Hellekson is an American author and scholar who researches science fiction and fan studies. In the field of science fiction, she is known for her research on the alternate history genre, the topic of her 2001 book, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time, and has also published on the author Cordwainer Smith. In fan studies, she is known for her work on fan fiction and the culture of the fan community. She has co-edited two essay collections on fan fiction with Kristina Busse, and in 2008, co-founded the academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, also with Busse.
Kingsley Widmer (1925–2009) was an American literary critic.
The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders is an English language reference work on science fiction and fantasy, published in 2005 by Greenwood Press. It was edited by Gary Westfahl and consists of three volumes of 200 entries each. The first two volumes contain entries organized by themes, such as "Aliens in Space", "Asia" or "Rats and Mice", while the third volume lists works such as novels and films which the are considered defining for the science fiction and fantasy genres.
