"Whereas science fiction asks What if? questions about technology and the human future, Youngquist asks What if? questions about the genre itself. What if the essential discourse of science fiction is less apparent than commonly supposed? What if, beyond their overt extrapolations, our most valuable SF authors have been concomitantly conducting Gedanken experiments designed to illuminate capitalism s discontents, the ... Read moresemiotics of eroticism, the limits of consensus reality, the mutability of the body, and the intricate web of power relationships that constitute postindustrial society? Youngquist s insightful and philosophically grounded answers will beguile students of Mary Shelley, Alfred Bester, J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delany, William Gibson, Octavia Butler, and a dozen other supreme practitioners of speculative literature." - James Morrow, author of The Last Witchfinder and Shambling Towards Hiroshima Show Less