Fin-de-Siecle Fictions, 1890s/1990s: Apocalypse, Technoscience, Empire - Tapa dura

Winner: Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book of the Year Award 2014 University of California, Riverside, USA

"A portrait of centuries' ends, of catastrophic denouements and apocalyptic rebirths, Fin de Siècle Fictions, 1890s-1990s brings to life the millennial preoccupations characteristic of the emergence and consolidation of global capitalism and technoscientific Empire. The range of texts from HG Wells to Octavia Butler, future war fiction to Star Trek, lost world fiction to The X-Files and contexts with which it engages is impressive." Dr Mark Bould, University of the West of England, UK

H.G. Wells wanted his epitaph to be 'God damn you all, I told you so'. But how accurate were his predictions of industrial warfare and global conflict, especially as his descriptions of an aerial bombing of New York in War in the Air has been compared to the terrorist attacks of 9/11? Did the late Victorians really 'discover the future' or did the 1990s simply recycle the 1890s? At the aftermath of 2012, this book is 'looking backward' and identifies startling connections between the apocalyptic fantasies of the last two centuries' ends and traces intriguing links between Nietzsche and chaos theory, Dracula and The X-Files, the Borg Queen and H. Rider Haggard's Ayesha, among others.