Different Engines
How science drives fiction and fiction drives science
Neil Hook and Mark L. Brake
 |
Downloadable
author pictures and jackets |
|||||||||||
Description
Since its emergence in the seventeenth century, science fiction has been a sustained, coherent and subversive check on the promises and pitfalls of science. In their turn, invention and discovery have forced fiction writers to confront the nature and limits of reality. Different Engines traces the way in which we've imagined the future.
Author Biographies
Reverend NEIL HOOK is Associate Lecturer in Science Fiction at the University of Glamorgan, UK, and an Anglican priest in the Welsh mountains. Neil’s research focuses on Seventeenth and Eighteenth-century science fiction. His international lecturing and writing on these subjects was recently profiled in the BBC’s Science Fiction Britannia series. He spends his academic life reminding people that science fiction is fun and shouldn’t be taken seriously and his parish work reminding people that God is fun and should be taken seriously.
Professor MARK BRAKE holds a chair in science communication at the University of Glamorgan, UK, where he founded the world’s first degree program on the historical interplay between space, science and culture. As an astrobiology and science fiction expert, he appears on and writes for TV and radio most weeks, including BBC, Sky Movies and the Discovery Channel; he is a consultant to the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle and the Australian Centre for Astrobiology. A founder member of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute Communication Group, Mark feels we’ll only settle the life on Mars debate by visiting the surface with a shovel.