Gerry Canavan
Biographic Data
| ID | 976679 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gerry Canavan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gerry |
| FAMILY NAME | Canavan |
| SIGNATURE | CANAVAN G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Marquette University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Tolkien Against the Grain
With over 150 million copies sold, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is one of the best-selling prose narratives of the twentieth century and remains beloved by fans across the globe. The genre-defining story it tells of an unlikely provincial hero fated to save the world from destruction—and the close-knit, multi-species fellowship that aids him on his quest—has become the template for countless imitators in fantasy and science fiction, to …
The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945
Providing a comprehensive overview of American thought in the period following World War II, after which the US became a global military and economic leader, this book explores the origins of American utopianism and provides a trenchant critique from the point of view of those left out of the hegemonic ideal. Centring the voices of those oppressed by or omitted from the consumerist American Dream, this book celebrates alternative ways of thinking…
The Anthropocene and Ecosophy
Popularized by Paul Crutzen, the “Anthropocene” names the present geological era, when the effects of human activity on the environment are becoming visible in the planet’s geological, climatological, and fossil record. Much contemporary science fiction (sf) film frames itself as a response to climate change and related ecological crises, visualizing transformations in the global climate, while suggesting how we might counter such trends. These f…
Uneven Futures
Essays on speculative/science fiction explore the futures that feed our most cherished fantasies and terrifying nightmares, while helping diverse communities devise new survival strategies for a tough millennium. The explosion in speculative/science fiction (SF) across different media from the late twentieth century to the present has compelled those in the field of SF studies to rethink the community's identity, orientation, and stakes. In this …
Annual Awards, Science Fiction Research Association
Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene
This article takes up science-fictional visions of the future against the “deep time” of the Anthropocene in order to explore the possibilities for utopia that remain in an era that only seems capable of producing necrofuturological dread. The piece surveys a wide range of contemporary literature and film; the key prose authors discussed are Octavia E. Butler, Margaret Atwood, Ernest Callenbach, and Kim Stanley Robinson. These texts are used to i…
Mass Markets
612 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) Finnish Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research. The journal, which publishes two issues each year, provides an open-access international forum for scholarly exchanges on science fiction, fantasy, other speculative genres, and issues current in the field. Fafnir welcomes contributions from a wide range of perspectives. The editors are particularly interested in innovative (yet rigorous) appro…
SFRA Award Winners
527 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE “One of my favorite items showed up in the mail one year. It’s a little Halloween tree that you hang pumpkins and ghosts on. Ray bought a bunch of these trees for his friends that year. You can see the price tag is still on the box. He bought it at Kmart for $6.99. He just loved Halloween,” she says. One of her fondest memories is Bradbury’s book signing at a DragonCon in Atlanta. The event organizers didn’t have anyo…
Comics Grow Up
Once a garish, juvenile embarrassment, superheroes have escaped from the margins of Western culture to become the dominant paradigm for blockbuster entertainment in our moment. In 2019 alone, Avengers: Endgame (dir. Anthony and Joe Russo) pushed the record-breaking tradition of the hyperpopular Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise to its highest heights yet, becoming the number one highest-grossing movie of all time after taking in $2.79 billion a…
The Cambridge History of Science Fiction
The first science fiction course in the American academy was held in the early 1950s. In the sixty years since, science fiction has become a recognized and established literary genre with a significant and growing body of scholarship. The Cambridge History of Science Fiction is a landmark volume as the first authoritative history of the genre. Over forty contributors with diverse and complementary specialties present a history of science fiction …
Eden, Just Not Ours Yet
The last chapter of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Talents (1998) sees an aged Lauren Olamina in 2090, surrounded by several of her most devoted disciples at the launch of the first Earthseed m
Human Programming
It was easier, in some ways, when we were immortal souls temporally housed in material bodies, endowed with radical free will, and awaiting transmigration to some other plane of existence after death. Modern science has dramatically winnowed the possibilities for any autonomous space of the mind that could be independent of the body; indeed, we sometimes struggle in the other direction, with too many material explanations (evolutionary pressures,…
Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson (b. 1952) was born in Waukegan, Illinois, but moved to California as a small child, where he has since lived most of his life. Robinson attended the University of California, San Diego, and received a BA in literature in 1974. He earned a PhD in English from UC San Diego in 1982 for his dissertation on the novels of Philip K. Dick, for which the famous Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson served as a committee member. The …
Cambridge History of Science Fiction
Research in the Octavia E. Butler Archive
The Principle of Hope in the Anthropocene
Transhumanism
Reviewed by: Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopia by Andrew Pilsch Gerry Canavan (bio) Andrew Pilsch, Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017, 244 pp. $27.00 paper. If anything can compete with imminent ecological apocalypse as the dominant futurology of our time—no sure thing—it is surely the utopian notion of a coming technol…
Interview
You Can't Trust Planets”
CFP
Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling
Star Wars has reached more than three generations of casual and hardcore fans alike, and as a result many of the producers of franchised Star Wars texts (films, television, comics, novels, games, and more) over the past four decades have been fans-turned-creators. Yet despite its dominant cultural and industrial positions, Star Wars has rarely been the topic of sustained critical work. Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling offers a…
Obey, Consume
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction
A Dread Mystery, Compelling Adoration”
Using research undertaken at the Olaf Stapledon archive at the University of Liverpool, this article explores the tension between cosmopolitan optimism and cosmic pessimism that structures Stapledon's 1937 novel Star Maker, and asks whether the novel succeeds in solving the philosophical problems that first spurred Stapledon to write it. I conclude, unhappily, that it does not: while an impressive achievement, and despite a surface optimism, the …
Science Fiction and/as Theology
Octavia E. Butler
I began writing about power because I had so little," Octavia E. Butler once said. Butler's life as an African American woman-an alien in American society and among science fiction writers-informed the powerful works that earned her an ardent readership and acclaim both inside and outside science fiction. This book offers a critical and holistic consideration of Butler's career. Drawing on Butler's personal papers, the book tracks the false start…
Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling
Star Wars has reached more than three generations of casual and hardcore fans alike, and as a result many of the producers of franchised Star Wars texts (films, television, comics, novels, games, and more) over the past four decades have been fans-turned-creators. Yet despite its dominant cultural and industrial positions, Star Wars has rarely been the topic of sustained critical work. Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling offers a…
Eden, Just Not Ours Yet
The last chapter of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Talents (1998) sees an aged Lauren Olamina in 2090, surrounded by several of her most devoted disciples at the launch of the first Earthseed m
Capital as Artificial Intelligence
This article examines science-fictional allegorizations of Soviet-style planned economies, financial markets, autonomous trading algorithms, and global capitalism writ large as nonhuman artificial intelligences, focussing primarily on American science fiction of the Cold War period. Key fictional texts discussed include Star Trek , Isaac Asimov's Machine stories, Terminator , Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952), Charles Stross's Accelerando (2005…
American Literature Invites Submissions
Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction; Black Frankenstein
Hope, But Not for Us
Decolonizing the Future
A Literature of Transgression and Subversion
Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation
Science fiction, wrote Darko Suvin in “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” is “the literature of cognitive estrangement”—the genre that arises out of the dialectical encounter between that which is real and that which is imagined, impossible or yet to be.1 The estrangements of science fiction defamiliarize our empirical, everyday reality, motivating through the depiction of radical difference a new and profound rerecognition of our surr…
Defined by a Hollow
This review considers Darko Suvin’s recent career anthology Defined by a Hollow with respect to debates about the relevance of Marxism and utopian critique in the context of a global neoliberal hegemony that (twenty years after Fukuyama) still imagines itself as the ‘end of history’. Suvin’s work suggests that the relationship between Marxism and aesthetics in such times is not simply a quirk of the academy, but is in fact a politically necessary…
The Anthropology of the Future
The Anthropology of the Future Gerry Canavan (bio) A review of Arjun Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. New York: Verso, 2013. Arjun Appadurai’s latest collection of essays, The Future as Cultural Fact, begins with a concession. He writes that he has had occasion to learn from critics of his 1996 book, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, “who found it too celebratory, perhaps even breathl…
The Politics of Adaptation Conference
Superseding Cyberpunk
Keen, Sober, and Smart
Missing Octavia
The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction
The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction explores the relationship between the ideas and themes of American science fiction and their roots in the American cultural experience. Science fiction in America has long served to reflect the country's hopes, desires, ambitions, and fears. The ideas and conventions associated with science fiction are pervasive throughout American film and television, comics and visual arts, games and gaming, a…
Reinventing the Wheel
Capital as Artificial Intelligence
This article examines science-fictional allegorizations of Soviet-style planned economies, financial markets, autonomous trading algorithms, and global capitalism writ large as nonhuman artificial intelligences, focussing primarily on American science fiction of the Cold War period. Key fictional texts discussed include Star Trek , Isaac Asimov's Machine stories, Terminator , Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952), Charles Stross's Accelerando (2005…
Obey, Consume
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction
A Dread Mystery, Compelling Adoration”
Using research undertaken at the Olaf Stapledon archive at the University of Liverpool, this article explores the tension between cosmopolitan optimism and cosmic pessimism that structures Stapledon's 1937 novel Star Maker, and asks whether the novel succeeds in solving the philosophical problems that first spurred Stapledon to write it. I conclude, unhappily, that it does not: while an impressive achievement, and despite a surface optimism, the …
Science Fiction and/as Theology
Octavia E. Butler
I began writing about power because I had so little," Octavia E. Butler once said. Butler's life as an African American woman-an alien in American society and among science fiction writers-informed the powerful works that earned her an ardent readership and acclaim both inside and outside science fiction. This book offers a critical and holistic consideration of Butler's career. Drawing on Butler's personal papers, the book tracks the false start…
Interview
You Can't Trust Planets”
CFP
Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling
Star Wars has reached more than three generations of casual and hardcore fans alike, and as a result many of the producers of franchised Star Wars texts (films, television, comics, novels, games, and more) over the past four decades have been fans-turned-creators. Yet despite its dominant cultural and industrial positions, Star Wars has rarely been the topic of sustained critical work. Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling offers a…
Cambridge History of Science Fiction
Art (25 works) · History (17 works) · Art history (15 works) · Literature (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction (13 works) · Politics (10 works)