Political science fiction
By: edited by Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox.
Contributors: Hassler, Donald M.; Wilcox, Clyde, 1953-
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Columbia, S.C
Language: eng
Number of pages: 256
Subjects: Science fiction -- History and criticism.; Politics in literature.; Utopias in literature.
Description: Political Science Fiction examines the close relationship between politics and science fiction and shows how much of the former is grounded in the latter. Sixteen science fiction writers and critics join forces to offer an anthology that explores a diversity of futuristic literature, from the novels of H. G. Wells to Star Trek: The Next Generation, and a spectrum of ideas, from the libertarianism of Robert A. Heinlein to the feminism of Ursula K. LeGuin and Sheri S. Tepper.

As the science fiction writer Frederik Pohl observes in the lead essay, the contributors collectively find science fiction to be either implicitly or explicitly political by its very nature.

Equally divided between essays that analyze science fiction texts as literature and essays that discuss them as models of political science theory and practice, the collection reveals the propensity of fiction writers to center their works on particular governmental structures. Other essays reveal the ways in which science fiction speaks to the study of international relations, such as the support for realist ideology found in the enormous genre of interspecies war novels and stories.

Of particular interest to viewers of Star Trek, three essays deal specifically with the depiction of alien governments, gender identity, and isolationism in both the original and the new television series.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The politics of prophecy / Frederik Pohl; title: Swift, Pohl, and Kornbluth : publicists anatomize newness / Donald M. Hassler; title: H.G. Wells's A modern utopia as a work in progress / June Deery; title: State, heterotropia : the political imagination in Heinlein, Le Guin, and Delany / Neil Easterbrook; title: The I-We dilemma and a "utopian unconscious" in Wells's When the sleeper wakes and Le Guin's The lathe of heaven / Carol S. Franko; title: No future! cyberpunk, industrial music, and the aesthetics of postmodern disintegration / Patrick Novotny; title: Prince versus prophet : Machiavellianism in Frank Herbert's Dune epic / Peter Minowitz; title: Feminist utopian fiction and the possibility of social critique / Josephine Carubia Glorie; title: Governing the alien nation : the comparative politics of extraterrestials / Clyde Wilcox; title: Reality transfigured : the Latin American situation as reflected in its science fiction / Ingrid Kreksch; title: "In every revolution, there is one man with a vision" : the governments of the future in comparative perspective / Paul Christopher Manuel; title: Military, democracy, and the state in Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers / Everett Carl Dolman; title: Gender Identity in Star Trek / Kathy E. Ferguson, Gilad Ashkenazi, and Wendy Schultz; title: "We Owe It to Them to Interfere" : Star Trek and U.S. Statecraft in the 1960s and the 1990s / Mark P. Lagon.