Traversing Dimensions

This booklist coincides with the exhibit, "Traversing Dimensions: An Exploration of Diversity in Science Fiction". All of these books are available for checkout at the Perry Castañeda Library at the University of Texas at Austin. Look up the title in our library catalog to find a book and begin your journey.

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Elysium (2014)

Jennifer Marie Brissett

Received the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award Special Citation  A Finalist for the 2015 Locus Award for Best First Novel

A computer program etched into the atmosphere has a story to tell, the story of two people, of a city lost to chaos, of survival and love. The program's data, however, has been corrupted. As the novel's characters struggle to survive apocalypse, they are sustained and challenged by the demands of love in a shattered world both haunted and dangerous.

"Wow! Jenn Brissett's new novel Elysium from Aqueduct Press is a knockout. The writing and structure of the book are so accomplished, I'm amazed this is a first novel. The style flows and draws you into the fiction and keeps you there -- poetic in its imagery but simultaneously economical. It's a science fiction, post-apocalyptic, tale, a love story, but not your dumb old man's love story. A love story for a new age. The structure of the novel was the most startling thing to me -- a complex construction that never comes across as complicated. The effect is like a magic trick. Great characters that make the adventure worth the journey. I hope reviewers don't miss this one.'' --Jeffery Ford, author of Crackpot Palace and The Shadow Year

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Conversations with Octavia Butler (2009)

Consuela Francis (editor)

Octavia Butler (1947-2006) spent the majority of her prolific career as the only major black female author of science fiction. Winner of both the Nebula and Hugo Awards as well as a MacArthur "genius" grant, the first for a science fiction writer, Butler created worlds that challenged notions of race, sex, gender, and humanity. Whether in the postapocalyptic future of the Parable stories, in the human inability to assimilate change and difference in the Xenogenesis books, or in the destructive sense of superiority in the Patternist series, Butler held up a mirror, reflecting what is beautiful, corrupt, worthwhile, and damning about the world we inhabit.

In interviews ranging from 1980 until just before her sudden death in 2006, Conversations with Octavia Butler reveals a writer very much aware of herself as the "rare bird" of science fiction even as she shows frustration with the constant question,"How does it feel to be the only one?" Whether discussing humanity's biological imperatives or the difference between science fiction and fantasy or the plight of the working poor in America, Butler emerges in these interviews as funny, intelligent, complicated, and intensely original.

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Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure

Kathryn Allan (editor)

In science fiction, technology often modifies, supports, and attempts to 'make normal' the disabled body. In this groundbreaking collection, twelve international scholars – with backgrounds in disability studies, English and world literature, classics, and history – discuss the representation of dis/ability, medical 'cures,' technology, and the body in science fiction. Bringing together the fields of disability studies and science fiction, this book explores the ways dis/abled bodies use prosthetics to challenge common ideas about ability and human being, as well as proposes new understandings of what 'technology as cure' means for people with disabilities in a (post)human future.

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Race in American Science Fiction (2011)

Isiah Lavender III (editor)

Noting that science fiction is characterized by an investment in the proliferation of racial difference, Isiah Lavender III argues that racial alterity is fundamental to the genre’s narrative strategy. Race in American Science Fiction offers a systematic classification of ways that race appears and how it is silenced in science fiction, while developing a critical vocabulary designed to focus attention on often-overlooked racial implications. These focused readings of science fiction contextualize race within the genre's better-known master narratives and agendas. Authors discussed include Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and Ursula K. Le Guin, among many others.

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Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction (2016)

Isiah Lavender III (editor)

Black and Brown Planets embarks on a timely exploration of the American obsession with color in its look at the sometimes contrary intersections of politics and race in science fiction.

The contributors, including De Witt D. Kilgore, Edward James, Lisa Yaszek, and Marleen S. Barr, among others, explore science fiction worlds of possibility (literature, television, and film), lifting blacks, Latin Americans, and indigenous peoples out from the background of this historically white genre.

This collection considers the role of race and ethnicity in our visions of the future. The first section emphasizes the political elements of black identity portrayed in science fiction from black America to the vast reaches of interstellar space framed by racial history. In the next section, analysis of indigenous science fiction addresses the effects of colonization, helps discard the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovers ancestral traditions in order to adapt in a post-Native-apocalyptic world. Likewise, this section explores the affinity between science fiction and subjectivity in Latin American cultures from the role of science and industrialization to the effects of being in and moving between two cultures. By infusing more color in this otherwise monochrome genre, Black and Brown Planets imagines alternate racial galaxies with viable political futures in which people of color determine human destiny.

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Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction (2017)

Isiah Lavender III (editor)

Isiah Lavender III's Dis-Orienting Planets amplifies critical issues surrounding the racial and ethnic dimensions of science fiction. This edited volume explores depictions of Asia and Asians in science fiction literature, film, and fandom with particular regard to China, Japan, India, and Korea.

Dis-Orienting Planets highlights so-called yellow and brown peoples from the constellation of a historically white genre. The collection launches into political representations of Asian identity in science fiction's imagination, from fear of the Yellow Peril and its racist stereotypes to techno-Orientalism and the remains of a postcolonial heritage. Thus the essays, by contributors such as Takayuki Tatsumi, Veronica Hollinger, Uppinder Mehan, and Stephen Hong Sohn, reconfigure the very study of race in science fiction.

A follow-up to Lavender's Black and Brown Planets, this new collection expands the racial politics governing the renewed visibility of Asia in science fiction. One of the few on this subject, the volume probes Gary Shteyngart's novel Super Sad True Love Story, the acclaimed film Cloud Atlas, and Guillermo del Toro's monster film Pacific Rim, among others. Dis-Orienting Planets embarks on a wide-ranging assessment of Asian representations in science fiction, upon the determination that our visions of the future must include all people of color.

With contributions by: Suparno Banerjee, Cait Coker, Jeshua Enriquez, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Malisa Kurtz, Stephanie Li, Bradford Lyau, Uppinder Mehan, Graham J. Murphy, Baryon Tensor Posadas, Amy J. Ransom, Robin Anne Reid, Haerin Shin, Stephen Hong Sohn, Takayuki Tatsumi, and Timothy J. Yamamura

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Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood in the Land of the Future (2004)

M. Elizabeth Ginway

"Science fiction, because of its links to science and technology, is the consummate literary vehicle for examining the perception and cultural impact of the modernization process in Brazil. Because of the centrality of the role played by the military dictatorship (1964-85) in imposing industrialization and economic development policies on Brazil, this book examines the genre in the periods before, during, and after the dictatorship, encompassing the years 1960-2000.

The analysis shows that a reading of Brazilian science fiction based on its use of paradigms of Anglo-American science fiction and myths of Brazilian nationhood provides a unique look into Brazil's modern metamorphosis as it finds itself on the periphery of the globalized world."

"The three periods studied here correspond roughly to the 1960s, the '70s, and the '80s to the present. The earliest group of authors produces mostly antitechnological, apolitical science fiction, as a way of affirming myths of Brazilian identity. Here, the deconstruction of myths of the feminine and of racial democracy provides the basis for the analysis of Brazil's notion of national identity.

In the seventies, a second group of authors uses science fiction to protest the military regime, creating dystopian worlds in which the myths of Brazilian culture serve as touchstones to criticize various ills associated with urbanization, industrialization, and repression. In the analysis of these texts, the insights of ecofeminism are employed to demystify the conflation of the land with women found in the nostalgic construction of Brazilian identity characteristic of this period.

The third group, emerging in the mideighties after the dictatorship, offers a more complex, postmodern view of Brazilian society, its continuing social problems, and the phenomenon of globalization. Reading these texts as allegories of modernization enriches the understanding of both the genre of science fiction and the experience of modernity itself."

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Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas (2017)

Kency Cornejo et al.

Mundos Alternos looks at science fiction in the Americas through a transcultural perspective, grounded in an understanding of “Latinidad” expressed through shared hemispheric experiences in language, culture and visual expression.

If a Latin American science fiction is said to exist, the texts in this volume interrogate where that Latin America, and its science-fiction imagination, might be located. In addition to focusing on specific regions in North, Central and South America, the book’s essays cross time and space, illuminating Soviet influence in Cuba, the impact of American pop culture in Mexico and the cross-pollination of European avant-garde aesthetics in Brazil. Mundos Alternos will be an indispensable resource for contemporary art curators working on Latin America, science-fiction scholars interested in visual interpretations of the genre and readers interested in science fiction, art, Latin America and the diaspora.

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We (1921)

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Translated from original Russian by Natasha Randall Foreword by Bruce Sterling   Written in 1921, We is set in the One State, where all live for the collective good and individual freedom does not exist. The novel takes the form of the diary of mathematician D-503, who, to his shock, experiences the most disruptive emotion imaginable: love. At once satirical and sobering—and now available in a powerful new translation—We is both a rediscovered classic and a work of tremendous relevance to our own times.

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Мы: История фейл стейт полицейского государства в дистопическом будущем) Russian Edition (1921)

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Russian Edition

Translated Title: "We: The History of the Police Fail State in a Dystopian Future"

Categories: Fiction, Dystopian, Romance, Science Fiction, Violence in Society.

Description: A novel about social and psychological violence in the "society of equals", in which the human personality is reduced to a personal "number" and a given program of actions.

We is generally considered to be the grandfather of the satirical futuristic dystopia genre.

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How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2011)

Charles Yu

From a 5 Under 35 winner, comes a razor-sharp, hilarious, and touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space-time.   Every day in Minor Universe 31 people get into time machines and try to change the past. That's where Charles Yu, time travel technician, steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he's not taking client calls, Yu visits his mother and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. The key to locating his father may be found in a book. It's called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and somewhere inside it is information that will help him. It may even save his life.

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Zone One (2012)

Colson Whitehead

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad

A pandemic has devastated the planet, sorting humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. After the worst of the plague is over, armed forces stationed in Chinatown’s Fort Wonton have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street—aka Zone One. Mark Spitz is a member of one of the three-person civilian sweeper units tasked with clearing lower Manhattan of the remaining feral zombies. Zone One unfolds over three surreal days in which Spitz is occupied with the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD), and the impossible task of coming to terms with a fallen world. And then things start to go terribly wrong…

At once a chilling horror story and a literary novel by a contemporary master, Zone One is a dazzling portrait of modern civilization in all its wretched, shambling glory.

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Byte Beautiful: Eight Science Fiction Stories (1985)

James Tiptree Jr.

Short stories by an award-winning science fiction writer include adventures in outer space and the world of the future.

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Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000)

Sheree Renée Thomas

This volume introduces black science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction writers to the generations of readers who have not had the chance to explore the scope and diversity among African-American writers.

The earliest story in Dark Matter is acclaimed literary author Charles W. Chesnutt's "The Goophered Grapevine" (1887), in which an aging ex-slave tells a chilling tale of cursed land to a white Northerner buying a Southern plantation. In "The Comet" (1920), W.E.B. Du Bois portrays the rich white woman and the poor black man who may be the only survivors of an astronomical near-miss. In George S. Schuyler's "Black No More" (1931), an excerpt from the satirical novel of the same name, an African American scientist invents a machine that can turn blacks white. More recent reprints include science fiction master Samuel R. Delany's Nebula Award-winning "Aye, and Gomorrah..." (1967), which delineates the socio-sexual effects of asexual astronauts; Charles R. Saunders's heroic fantasy "Gimmile's Songs" (1984), in which a woman warrior encounters a singer with a frightening, compelling magic in ancient West Africa; MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Octavia E. Butler's powerful "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" (1987), in which the cure for cancer creates a terrifying new disease of compulsive self-mutilation; and Derrick Bell's angry, riveting "The Space Traders" (1992), in which aliens offer to trade their advanced technology to the U.S. in exchange for its black population. Other reprints include "Ark of Bones" (1974) by author-poet-folklorist Henry Dumas; "Future Christmas" (1982) by master satirist Ishmael Reed; "Rhythm Travel" (1996) by playwright-poet-critic Amiri Baraka (who has also written as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amiri Baraka); and "The African Origins of UFOs" (2000) by London-based West Indian author Anthony Joseph.

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Transcendent 2: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction (2017)

Bogi Takacs (2017)

As with the first volume of Transcendent, Lethe Press has worked with a wonderful editor to select the best work of genderqueer stories of the fantastical, stranger, horrific, and weird published the prior year. Featuring stories by Merc Rustad, Jeanne Thornton, Brit Mandelo, and others, this anthology offers time-honored tropes of the genre--from genetic manipulation to zombies, portal fantasy to haunts--but told from a perspective that breaks the rigidity of gender and sexuality. A winner for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Transgender Fiction!

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Transcendent: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction

There are fantastical stories with actual transgender characters, some for whom that is central and others for whom that isn't. And there are stories without transgender characters, but with metaphors and symbolism in their place, genuine expressions of self through such speculative fiction tropes as shapeshifting and programming. Transgender individuals see themselves in transformative characters, those outsiders, before seeing themselves as human protagonists. Those feelings are still valid. But though the stories involve transformation and outsiders, sometimes the change is one of self-realization. This anthology will be a welcome read for those who are ready to transcend gender through the lens of science fiction, fantasy, and other works of imaginative fiction.

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The City of Devi (2013)

Manil Suri

From the author of The Death of Vishnu, "a big, pyrotechnic…ambitious…ingenious" (Wall Street Journal) novel. Mumbai has emptied under the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation; gangs of marauding Hindu and Muslim thugs rove the desolate streets; yet Sarita can think of only one thing: buying the last pomegranate that remains in perhaps the entire city. She is convinced that the fruit holds the key to reuniting her with her physicist husband, Karun, who has been mysteriously missing for more than a fortnight.

Searching for his own lover in the midst of this turmoil is Jaz―cocky, handsome, and glib. "The Jazter," as he calls himself, is Muslim, but his true religion has steadfastly been sex with men. Dodging danger at every step, both he and Sarita are inexorably drawn to Devi ma, the patron goddess who has reputedly appeared in person to save her city. What they find will alter their lives more fundamentally than any apocalypse to come.

A wickedly comedic and fearlessly provocative portrayal of individuals balancing on the sharp edge of fate, The City of Devi brilliantly upends assumptions of politics, religion, and sex, and offers a terrifying yet exuberant glimpse of the end of the world.