Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s [Paperback]

The politics of science fiction books, films and television in the 1970s.Science fiction produced in the 1970s has long been undervalued, dismissed by Bruce Sterling as confused, self-involved, and stale . The New Wave was all but over and Cyberpunk had yet to arrive. The decade polarised sf - on the one hand it aspired to be a serious form, addressing issues such as race, Vietnam, feminism, ecology and sexuality, on the other hand it broke box office records withStar Wars,Close Encounters of the Third Kind,AlienandSuperman: The Movie. Beginning with chapters on the First sf and New Wave authors who published during the 1970s,Solar Flaresexamines the ways in which the genre confronted a new epoch and its own history, including the rise of fantasy, the sf blockbuster, children's sf, pseudoscience and postmodernism. It explores significant figures such as Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler. From Larry Niven'sRingworldto Thomas M. Disch'sOn Wings of Song, fromThe Andromeda StraintoFlash Gordonand fromDoctor WhotoBuck Rogers, this book reclaims seventies sf writing, film and television - alongside music and architecture - as a crucial period in the history of science fiction.Acknowledgements
Prologue
1. The Ends of First Sf: Pioneers as Veterans
2. After the New Wave: After Science Fiction?
3. Beyond Apollo: Space Fictions after the Moon Landing
4. Big Dumb Objects: Science Fiction as Self-Parody
5. The Rise of Fantasy: Swords and Planets
6. Home of the Extraterrestrial Brothers: Race and African American Science Fiction
7. Alien Invaders: Vietnam and the Counterculture
8. This Septic Isle: Post-Imperial Melancholy
9. Foul Contagion Spread: Ecology and Environmentalism
10. Female Counter-Literature: Feninism
11. Strange Bedfollows: Gay Liberation
12. Saving the Family: Children's Fiction
13. Eating the Audience: BloclS9