Fictional space: Essays on contemporary science fiction

by Tom Shippey

Is there a "postmodern" science fiction?. What is "cyberpunk?". What is going to happen to fiction in the next millennium?. How has science fiction coped with the big letdowns of the 1970s and 1980s, from the energy crisis to the NASA failures? These questions, and others, are asked and answered in this collection of eight essays by British and American critics focusing on science fiction's recent past, its contemporary relevance, and its attitudes to the immediate future. The case is made throughout for the genre's distinctive and novel literary effects, ranging from a new rhetoric of words and figures to a new ideology of "disfigured" myths and images. The book marks a new initiative for this distinctively modern form of 20th century literature.

227 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Thomas Alan Shippey is a British medievalist, a retired scholar of Middle and Old English literature as well as of modern fantasy and science fiction. He is considered one of the world's leading academic experts on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien about whom he has written several books and many scholarly papers. His book The Road to Middle-Earth has been called "the single best thing written on Tolkien".

Shippey's education and academic career have in several ways retraced those of Tolkien: he attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, became a professional philologist, occupied Tolkien's professorial chair at the University of Leeds, and taught Old English at the University of Oxford to the syllabus that Tolkien had devised.

He has received three Mythopoeic Awards and a World Fantasy Award. He participated in the creation of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, assisting the dialect coaches. He featured as an expert medievalist in all three of the documentary DVDs that accompany the special extended edition of the trilogy, and later also that of The Hobbit film trilogy.

Also publishes as T.A. Shippey.