Lost in Space

Rob Kitchin is Lecturer in Human Geography at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. James Kneale is Lecturer in Human Geography at University College London.

• Lost in Space. The way it wasn't: alternative histories, contingent geographies Geography's conquest of history in the diamond age'. Space, technology and neal stephenson's science fiction. Geographies of power and social relations in marge piercy's he, she and it'. The subjectivity of the near future: geographical imaginings in the work of J. G. Ballard 7. Tuning the self: city space and SF horror movies. Science fiction and cinema: the hysterical materialism of pataphysical space. An invention without a future, a solution without a problem: motor pirates, time machines, and drunkenness on the screen. What we can say about nature: familiar geographies, science fiction, and popular physics. Murray Bookchin on mars: the production of nature in Kim Stanley Robinson's mars trilogy. In the belly of the monster: Frankenstein, food, factishes, and fiction.

"Science fiction's distinctive settings help to denaturalize commonsense understandings of space, making it a useful vehicle for meditations on the more mundane and familiar spaces of the "real" world. Essays in this collection, written mostly by academics specializing in geography, probe science fiction novels and films on themes like the threat of technological invasion to bodily integrity, patriarchal relations in horror movies, and colonization of Mars as an exploration of ecological theory." - American Literature