Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of speculative fiction dealing with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, extraterrestrials in fiction. Science fiction explores the potential consequences of scientific other various innovations, has been called a "literature of ideas." "Science fiction" is difficult to define as it includes a wide range of concepts and themes. James Blish wrote: "Wells used the term to cover what we would today call'hard' science fiction, in which a conscientious attempt to be faithful to known facts was the substrate on which the story was to be built, if the story was to contain a miracle, it ought at least not to contain a whole arsenal of them."Isaac Asimov said: "Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology." According to Robert A. Heinlein, "A handy short definition of all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world and present, on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method."Lester del Rey wrote, "Even the devoted aficionado or fan—has a hard time trying to explain what science fiction is," and that the reason for there not being a "full satisfactory definition" is that "there are no delineated limits to science fiction."
Author and editor Damon Knight summed up the difficulty, saying "science fiction is what we point to when we say it." Mark C. Glassy described the definition of science fiction as U. S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart did with the definition of pornography: "I know it when I see it." Science fiction had its beginnings in a time when the line between myth and fact was arguably more blurred than the present day. Written in the 2nd century CE by the satirist Lucian, A True Story contains many themes and tropes that are characteristic of contemporary science fiction, including travel to other worlds, extraterrestrial lifeforms, interplanetary warfare, artificial life; some consider it the first science-fiction novel. Some of the stories from The Arabian Nights, along with the 10th-century The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter and Ibn al-Nafis's 13th-century Theologus Autodidactus contain elements of science fiction. Products of the Age of Reason and the development of modern science itself, Johannes Kepler's Somnium, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, Cyrano de Bergerac's Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and The States and Empires of the Sun, Margaret Cavendish's "The Blazing World", Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Ludvig Holberg's Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum and Voltaire's Micromégas are regarded as some of the first true science-fantasy works.
Indeed, Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan considered Somnium the first science-fiction story. Following the 18th-century development of the novel as a literary form, Mary Shelley's books Frankenstein and The Last Man helped define the form of the science-fiction novel. Brian Aldiss has argued. Edgar Allan Poe wrote several stories considered science fiction, including "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" which featured a trip to the Moon. Jules Verne was noted for his attention to detail and scientific accuracy Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea which predicted the contemporary nuclear submarine. In 1887, the novel El anacronópete by Spanish author Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau introduced the first time machine. Many critics consider H. G. Wells one of science fiction's most important authors, or "the Shakespeare of science fiction." His notable science-fiction works include The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds. His science fiction imagined alien invasion, biological engineering and time travel.
In his non-fiction futurologist works he predicted the advent of airplanes, military tanks, nuclear weapons, satellite television, space travel, something resembling the World Wide Web. In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs published A Princess of Mars, the first of his three-decade-long planetary romance series of Barsoom novels, set on Mars and featuring John Carter as the hero. In 1926, Hugo Gernsback published the first American science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in which he wrote: By'scientifiction' I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision... Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading—they are always instructive, they supply knowledge... in a palatable form... New adventures pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow... Many great science stories destined to be of historical interest are still to be written...
Posterity will point to them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but progress as well. In 1928, E. E. "Doc" Smith's first published work, The Skylark of Space, written in collaboration with Lee Hawkins Garby, appeared in Amazing Stories. It is called the first great space opera; the same year, Philip Francis Nowlan's original Buck Rogers story, Armageddon 2419 appeared in Amazing Stories. This was followed by the first serious science-fiction comic. In 1937, John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding Science Fiction, an event, sometimes conside
Crime fiction
Crime fiction is a literary genre that fictionalises crimes, their detection and their motives. It is distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as historical fiction or science fiction, but the boundaries are indistinct. Crime fiction has multiple subgenres, including detective fiction, courtroom drama, hard-boiled fiction and legal thrillers. Most crime drama does not feature the court room. Suspense and mystery are key elements. One of the earliest stories in which solving a crime is central to the story is Oedipus Rex, in which the search for the murderer of the previous king, leads to the downfall of the current one. Another early example of crime fiction is gong’ an fiction in China, which involved government magistrates who solved criminal court cases and first appeared in colloquial stories of the Song dynasty. An early example of a crime story is the medieval Arabic tale of "The Three Apples", one of the tales narrated by Scheherazade in the One Thousand and One Nights.
In this tale, a fisherman discovers a heavy locked chest along the Tigris river and he sells it to the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, who has the chest broken open only to find inside it the dead body of a young woman, cut into pieces. Harun orders his vizier, Ja'far ibn Yahya, to solve the crime and find the murderer within three days, or be executed if he fails his assignment; the story has been described as a "whodunit" murder mystery with multiple plot twists. The story has detective fiction elements; the earliest known modern crime fiction is E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1819 novella Mademoiselle de Scudéri. There is Thomas Skinner Sturr's anonymous Richmond, or stories in the life of a Bow Street Officer. Better known are the earlier dark works of Edgar Allan Poe, his brilliant and eccentric detective C. Auguste Dupin, a forerunner to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, appeared in works such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Mystery of Marie Roget", "The Purloined Letter". With his Dupin stories, Poe provided the framework for the classic detective story.
The detective’s unnamed companion is the narrator of the stories and a prototype for the character of Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes stories. Wilkie Collins' epistolary novel The Woman in White was published in 1860, while The Moonstone is thought to be his masterpiece. French author Émile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq laid the groundwork for the methodical, scientifically minded detective; the evolution of locked room mysteries was one of the landmarks in the history of crime fiction. The Sherlock Holmes mysteries of Arthur Conan Doyle are said to have been singularly responsible for the huge popularity in this genre. A precursor was Paul Féval, whose series Les Habits Noirs features Scotland Yard detectives and criminal conspiracies; the best-selling crime novel of the nineteenth century was Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, set in Melbourne, Australia. The evolution of the print mass media in the United Kingdom and the United States in the latter half of the 19th century was crucial in popularising crime fiction and related genres.
Literary'variety' magazines like Strand, McClure's, Harper's became central to the overall structure and function of popular fiction in society, providing a mass-produced medium that offered cheap, illustrated publications that were disposable. Like the works of many other important fiction writers of his day—e.g. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens—Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared in serial form in the monthly Strand magazine in the United Kingdom; the series attracted a wide and passionate following on both sides of the Atlantic, when Doyle killed off Holmes in The Final Problem, the public outcry was so great, the publishing offers for more stories so attractive, that he was reluctantly forced to resurrect him. In Italy, local authors began to produce crime mysteries in the 1850s. Early translations of English and American stories and local works were published in cheap yellow covers and thus the genre was baptized with the term "Libri gialli" or yellow books; the genre was outlawed by the Fascists during WWII but exploded in popularity after the war influenced by the American hard-boiled school of crime fiction.
There emerged a group of mainstream Italian writers who used the detective format to create an anti-detective or postmodern novel in which the detectives are imperfect, the crimes unsolved and clues left for the reader to decipher. Famous writers include Leonardo Sciascia, Umberto Eco, Carlo Emilio Gadda. In Spain, The Nail and other Tales of Mystery and Crime was published by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón in 1853. Crime fiction in Spain took on some special characteristics that reflected the culture of the country; the Spanish writers emphasized the corruption and ineptitude of the police and depicted the authorities and the wealthy in negative terms. In China, modern crime fiction was first developed from translations of foreign works from the 1890s. Cheng Xiaoqing, considered "The Grand Master" of twentieth-century Chinese detective fiction, translated Sherlock Holmes into classical and vernacular Chinese. In the late 1910s, Cheng began writing his own detective fiction series, Sherlock in Shanghai, mimicking Conan Doyle’s style but reappropriating to a Chinese audience.
During the Mao era, crime fiction was suppressed and Soviet-styled and anti-capitalist. In the post-Mao era, crime fiction in
The Weird
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories is an anthology of weird fiction edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Published on 8 May 2012, it contains 110 short stories and short novels. At 1,152 pages in the hardcover edition, it is the largest single volume of fantastic fiction published, according to Locus; the editors' object in publishing The Weird was to provide, through its contents, a comprehensive definition of "the Weird", a type of fiction that their introduction describes as "as much a sensation"—one of terror and wonder—"as a mode of writing", as a type of fiction that entertains while expressing readers' dissatisfaction with, uncertainty about, reality. To that end, The Weird includes works that range from fantasy, science fiction and mainstream literature "with a slight twist of strange", but it amounts, according to The Guardian, to "a history of the horror story"; the editors limited their chronologically ordered collection to fiction from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, avoided including stories focusing on tropes of the horror genre such as zombies and werewolves, to highlight what they considered the Weird's innovative qualities.
To cover the genre comprehensively, they commissioned original translations of, among others, works by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Michel Bernanos, Julio Cortázar and Georg Heym. The anthology contains the following works: The introduction notes that certain stories were not included because of problems with obtaining the reproduction rights, but that the editors considered these stories as an extension of the anthology: Philip K. Dick's The Preserving Machine, J. G. Ballard's The Drowned Giant, Gabriel García Márquez's A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings and Otsuichi's The White House in the Cold Forest; the anthology was well received by reviewers from the Financial Times, who called it an "authoritative" representation of weird fiction, the San Francisco Chronicle, who considered that the volume's broad range of authors proved that "the bizarre and unsettling belong to no one race, country or gender" and Publishers Weekly, who characterized it as a "standard-setting compilation" and a "deeply affectionate and respectful history of speculative fiction’s blurry edges".
Locus magazine's reviewer noted that the anthology's chronological order allowed the reader to construct a "fossil record" of the Weird's evolution. He wrote that its broad geographical scope made noticeable the distinct traditions of English-language weird fiction, which depict the "eruption of the inexplicable into meticulously ordered realities", the traditions represented by many translated works, whose cultures are more grounded in folklore and mythology, or which resist a Western impulse toward rationalism and realism. Damien Walter, writing for The Guardian in a pastiche of the genre's style, warned of "the madness of the many authors contained in its pages and inhuman determination of its'editors'", prophesying that "Soon the chrysalid will form, The Weird itself will burst into the world as a radiant winged moth of metaphysical doom!"The Weird received the British Fantasy Award for best anthology in 2012
Système universitaire de documentation
The système universitaire de documentation or SUDOC is a system used by the libraries of French universities and higher education establishments to identify and manage the documents in their possession. The catalog, which contains more than 10 million references, allows students and researcher to search for bibliographical and location information in over 3,400 documentation centers, it is maintained by the Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education. Official website
Experimental literature
Experimental literature refers to written work—usually fiction or poetry—that emphasizes innovation, most in technique. The first text cited in this category is Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; this text occurs so early in the standard history of the novel that one can't refer to its "breaking" conventions that had yet to solidify. But in its mockery of narrative, its willingness to use such graphic elements as an all-black page to mourn the death of a character, Sterne's novel is considered a fundamental text for many post-World War II authors. However, Sterne's work was not without detractors in its time. Tristram Shandy did not last." Denis Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, drew many elements from Tristam Shandy, a fact not concealed in the text, making it an early example of metafiction. In the 1910s, artistic experimentation became a prominent force, various European and American writers began experimenting with the given forms. Tendencies that formed during this period became parts of the modernist movement.
The Cantos of Ezra Pound, the post-World War I work of T. S. Eliot and plays by Gertrude Stein, were some of the most influential works of the time, though James Joyce's Ulysses is considered the most important work of the time; the novel influenced not only more experimental writers, such as Virginia Woolf, but less experimental writers, such as Hemingway. The historical avant-garde movements contributed to the development of experimental literature in the early and middle 20th century. In the Dadaist movement, poet Tristan Tzara employed newspaper clippings and experimental typography in his manifestoes; the futurist author F. T. Marinetti espoused a theory of "words in freedom" across the page, exploding the boundaries of both conventional narrative and the layout of the book itself as shown in his "novel" Zang Tumb Tumb; the writers and artists associated with the surrealist movement employed a range of unusual techniques to evoke mystical and dream-like states in their poems and prose works.
Examples include the collaboratively written texts Les Champs Magnétiques and Sorrow for Sorrow, a "dream novel" produced under hypnosis by Robert Desnos. By the end of the 1930s, the political situation in Europe had made Modernism appear to be an inadequate, aestheticized irresponsible response to the dangers of worldwide fascism, literary experimentalism faded from public view for a period, kept alive through the 1940s only by isolated visionaries like Kenneth Patchen. In the 1950s, the Beat writers can be seen as a reaction against the hidebound quality of both the poetry and prose of its time, such hovering, near-mystical works as Jack Kerouac's novel Visions of Gerard represented a new formal approach to the standard narrative of that era. American novelists such as John Hawkes started publishing novels in the late 1940s that played with the conventions of narrative; the spirit of the European avant-gardes would be carried through the post-war generation as well. The poet Isidore Isou formed the Lettrist group, produced manifestoes and films that explored the boundaries of the written and spoken word.
The OULIPO brought together writers and mathematicians to explore innovative, combinatoric means of producing texts. Founded by the author Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais, the group included Italo Calvino and Georges Perec. Queneau's Cent Mille Millards de Poèmes uses the physical book itself to proliferate different sonnet combinations, while Perec's novel Life: A User's Manual is based on the Knight's Tour on a chessboard; the 1960s brought a brief return of the glory days of modernism, a first grounding of Post-modernism. Publicity owing to an obscenity trial against William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch brought a wide awareness of and admiration for an extreme and uncensored freedom. Burroughs pioneered a style known as cut-up, where newspapers or typed manuscripts were cut up and rearranged to achieve lines in the text. In the late 1960s, experimental movements became so prominent that authors considered more conventional such as Bernard Malamud and Norman Mailer exhibited experimental tendencies.
Metafiction was an important tendency in this period, exemplified most elaborately in the works of John Barth and Jorge Luis Borges. In 1967 Barth wrote the essay The Literature of Exhaustion, sometimes considered a manifesto of postmodernism. A major touchstone of this era was Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which became a bestseller. Important authors in the short story form included Donald Barthelme, and, in both short and long forms, Robert Coover and Ronald Sukenick; some well-known experimental writers of the 1970s and 1980s were Italo Calvino, Michael Ondaatje, Julio Cortázar. Calvino's most famous books are If on a winter's night a traveler, where some chapters depict the reader preparing to read a book titled If on a winter's night a traveler while others form the narrative and Invisible Cities, where Marco Polo explains his travels to Kubla Khan although they are accounts of the city in which they are chatting. Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid uses a scrapbook style to tell its story while Cortázar's Hopscotch can be read with the chapters in any order.
Argentine Julio Cortázar and the naturalized Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, both Latin American writers who have created masterpieces in experimental literature of 20th and 21st century, mixing dreamscapes and ficti
West Texas
West Texas is a loosely defined part of the U. S. state of Texas encompassing the arid and semiarid lands west of a line drawn between the cities of Wichita Falls and Del Rio. There is no consensus on the boundary between West Texas. While most Texans understand these terms, no boundaries are recognized and any two individuals are to describe the boundaries of these regions differently. Walter Prescott Webb, the American historian and geographer, suggested that the 98th meridian separates East and West Texas. C. Greene proposed. West Texas is subdivided according to distinct physiographic features; the portion of West Texas that lies west of the Pecos River is referred to as "Far West Texas" or the "Trans-Pecos", a term first introduced in 1887 by Texas geologist Robert T. Hill; the Trans-Pecos lies within the most arid portion of the state. Another part of West Texas is the Llano Estacado, a vast region of high, level plains extending into Eastern New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle. To the east of the Llano Estacado lies the “redbed country” of the Rolling Plains and to the south of the Llano Estacado lies the Edwards Plateau.
The Rolling Plains and the Edwards Plateau subregions act as transitional zones between eastern and western Texas. The counties included in the West Texas region vary depending on the organization; the Texas Counties.net website acknowledges the variations, includes 70 counties in its definition, based on the five principal metropolitan areas it contains: El Paso, Abilene, Midland/Odessa, San Angelo. The counties included are Andrews, Borden, Brown, Castro, Coke, Comanche, Crane, Crosby, Dawson, Deaf Smith, Eastland, Ector, El Paso, Floyd, Garza, Hale, Hockley, Hudspeth, Jeff Davis, Kent, King, Lamb, Lubbock, Martin, Mason, McCulloch, Midland, Motley, Parmer, Pecos, Randall, Reeves, Schleicher, Shackelford, Sterling, Sutton, Terrell, Throckmorton, Tom Green, Val Verde, Ward and Yoakum; some of the smaller West Texas cities and towns include: Alpine, Anthony, Canutillo, Crane, Fort Davis, Fort Bliss, San Elizario, Fort Stockton, Hale Center, Kermit, Levelland, Marathon, Marfa, McCamey, Monahans, Pampa, Horizon City, Rankin, Slaton, Snyder and Van Horn.
West Texas receives much less rainfall than the rest of Texas and has an arid or semiarid climate, requiring most of its scant agriculture to be dependent on irrigation. This irrigation, water taken out farther north for the needs of El Paso and Juarez, has reduced the once mighty Rio Grande to a stream in some places dry at times. Much of West Texas has rugged terrain, including many small mountain ranges while there are none in other parts of the state. Except for the Trans-Pecos region, West Texas has become well known as a stronghold for conservative politics; some of the most Republican counties in the United States are located in the region. Former U. S. President George W. Bush spent most of his childhood in West Texas; the Panhandle and several counties in or west of Midland were one of the first areas of Texas to abandon the state’s “Solid South” Democratic roots. The Rolling Plains to the east remained Democratic for longer: Walter Mondale in 1984 when losing Texas by 27.50 percentage points carried five counties in this region.
However, since 2000 this region has swung rapidly towards the Republican Party due to its population’s intransigent opposition to the liberal social policies of the Democratic Party and by 2016 has become nearly so Republican as the Panhandle. Major industries include livestock and natural gas production, textiles such as cotton, and, because of large military installations such as Fort Bliss, the defense industry. West Texas has become notable for its numerous wind turbines producing clean, alternative electricity; as of 2018, the West Texan economy is in an economic period, described as the "West Texas oil boom". West Texas does not have major league sports teams. Instead the region has college teams such as Texas Tech Red Raiders and UTEP Miners, which play in NCAA Division I, NCAA Division II teams of the West Texas A&M Buffaloes, the Texas–Permian Basin Falcons, the Lubbock Christian Chaparrals and Lady Chaps. El Paso hosts the El Paso Chihuahuas, a AAA baseball team and Midland hosts the Midland RockHounds, a Double-A baseball team.
Oddly in the heat ravaged climate of West Texas, the winter sport of ice hockey can be found in the city of Odessa through a Tier II junior ice hockey team playing out of the North American Hockey League called the Odessa Jackalopes. In 2019, The San Antonio Missions will move to continue play at the Double-A level. "West of the Pecos" has become a metaphor for the universe of westerns. "Fastest draw west of the Pecos" and similar superlatives are a cliche, the title character of Chisum observed ”There’s no law west of Dodge, no God west of the Pecos”. See West of the Pecos. Photos of West Texas West Texas Vacation Guide - Texas Outside
