Worlds Enough and Time: Explorations of Time in Science Fiction and Fantasy

(Hardback)

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Considers how imaginative works involving time travel reflect ongoing scientific concerns and examine the human condition. With our lives firmly controlled by the steady pace of time, humans have yearned for ways to escape its constraints, and authors have responded with narratives about traveling far into the past or future, reversing the flow of time, or creating alternate universes where Napoleon was triumphant at Waterloo or the South won the Civil War. Writers ranging from Dante and Lewis Carroll to Philip K. Dick and Martin Amis have probed into the workings of time, and an overwhelming desire to master time reverberates throughout popular culture. This book considers how imaginative works involving time and time travel reflect ongoing scientific concerns and examine the human condition. The scope of the volume is unusually wide, covering such topics as Dante, the major novels of the 19th century, and stories and films of the 1990s. The book concludes with a lengthy bibliography of short stories and novels, films and television programs, and nonfiction works that feature time travel or speculations about time. With a roster of contributors that includes several of the field's major scholars, this book offers many new insights into this fascinating subject.

Reviews

.,."fascinating reading, and certainly makes you want to track down the cited works...make sure that your local public library acquires a copy."-Fantasy & Science Fiction
...fascinating reading, and certainly makes you want to track down the cited works...make sure that your local public library acquires a copy.-Fantasy & Science Fiction
Recommended for anyone with a professional interest in time travel as a fictional device.-Science Fiction Studies
Time in general and time travel in particular have been central themes in speculative fiction... Worlds Enough and Time is a useful and lively contribution to the discussion....Recommended for academic libraries serving lower-division undergraduates through faculty and even for some secondary school libraries.-Choice
..."fascinating reading, and certainly makes you want to track down the cited works...make sure that your local public library acquires a copy."-Fantasy & Science Fiction
"Recommended for anyone with a professional interest in time travel as a fictional device."-Science Fiction Studies
"Time in general and time travel in particular have been central themes in speculative fiction... Worlds Enough and Time is a useful and lively contribution to the discussion....Recommended for academic libraries serving lower-division undergraduates through faculty and even for some secondary school libraries."-Choice

Author Bio

GARY WESTFAHL teaches at University of California, Riverside. GEORGE SLUSSER is Professor of Comparative Literature at University of California, Riverside. DAVID LEIBY is an independent scholar.