Content area
Full text
The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Arthur B. Evans et al., eds. Middletown, Connecticut. Wesleyan University Press. 2010. xviii + 767 pages. $39.95. isbn 978-0-8195-6955-4
Readers who know science fiction (sf) largely from movies, television, or video games are in for a revelatory treat. The stories in The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction reveal modern, written sf to be a mature, flexible, often sophisticated way to tell tales whose concerns are those of realistic literature- ethics; community; communication across boundaries of race, gender, and power; preservation of personal integrity and authenticity; and what it means to be human-but whose focus is the impact of science and technology. This focus makes sf superbly suited to our world today. Science fiction, the editors write, "considers human life-what people are-in terms of what science knows. . . ."
The singular strategy of sf, how its way of telling stories differs from that of other fiction, is to transport readers into imaginary but possible other worlds that are connected by logical extrapolation to the reader's world....