Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West

Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2006. Hardcover. Fine/Near Fine. Signed by Author(s). Inscribed by author on title page. Black cloth boards with red lettering on spine. Interior is clean and unmarked. Dust jacket DJ in archival sleeve. 230 pp. 9 x 6 inches. An examination of the treatment of frontier and pioneer life in works of science fiction, including homesteading, community building, mining, and other themes familiar with western historians. Considering these common threads, this is the first book to explore the ways that science fictions writers have drawn directly on narratives of the American West to frame their visions of the future. Abbott details the overlap of science fiction and western fiction, especially relating to their mutual interest in and concerns about frontier expansionism; he reveals an unsuspected common ground that informs the writings of both camps. He reviews the work of many Hugo and Nebula Award winners (as well as popular film and television series), including Robert Heinlein, Fritz Lieber, Ursula Le Guin, William Gibson, Octavia Butler, Pamela Sargent, Jonathan Lethem, and C. J. Cherryh. Carl Abbott, in addition to being an avid science fiction reader, is a professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University. Contents: 1) Introduction: Launching Pads. 2) Beyond Alaska: Sourdoughs, Lunies, Belters, and Other Tough Guys. 3) Science Projects. 4) Johnny Appleseed, John Wayne, and Homesteading on the Extraterrestrial Frontier. 5) Frontier Democracy. 6) On the Urban Edge. 7) Information Everywhere: Pacific Destinies in the Twenty-First Century. 8) Bigger than Texas! Americans, Our Wests, and Science Fiction. Notes.