Quiet, Too Quiet
Cixin Liu's "The Dark Forest" takes up the Fermi Paradox as one of its central narrative and thematic problems....
Gerry Canavan
Gerry Canavan is an associate professor in the English department at Marquette University, teaching 20th- and 21st-century literature. His research projects include Science Fiction and Totality, as well as co-editing The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction and the journal Science Fiction Film and Television. His edited collection of critical essays, Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, is available from Wesleyan University Press. He is also the author of Octavia E. Butler from the University of Illinois Press’s Modern Masters of Science Fiction series.
Articles
The Warm Equations
"Aurora" and "Seveneves" break us out of our supremely well-rehearsed habit of apocalypse and let us see the option of a different future than permanent, hopeless standoff....
“There’s Nothing New / Under The Sun, / But There Are New Suns”: Recovering Octavia E. Butler’s Lost Parables
THE BAD NEWS is waiting for us on the first page of the first chapter of Octavia E. Butler’s 1998 science fiction novel Parable of the Talents. “I have read,” writes one of the book’s four narrators, “that the ...
Knowing No One’s Listening
The Unpublished Miscellanea of Octavia E. Butler: Part One of a Two Part Series ...
No Dads: Cuckolds, Dead Fathers, and Capitalist Superheroes
IN HIS SEMINAL “The Myth of Superman” (still one of the finest essays on superheroes ever written), Umberto Eco identifies anti-narrative as the key to the superhero’s long-term appeal. Superman is at once a timeless mythic archetype ...
Struggle Forever
ldquo;SORRY, BUT IT'S TRUE. It has to be said: the stars exist beyond human time, beyond human reach. We live in this little pearl of warmth surrounding our star; outside it lies a vastness beyond comprehension. The solar system is ...
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fdev.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2014%2F06%2Fcover-of-parable-of-the-sower.jpg)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fdev.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2014%2F06%2Fimg-unexpected-stories_131501761085.jpg)
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fdev.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2013%2F07%2F1339663197.jpg)