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Full Description
Given the extensive influence of
the 'transport revolution' on the past two centuries (a time when trains,
trams, omnibuses, bicycles, cars, airplanes, and so forth were invented), and
given science fiction's overall obsession with machines and technologies of all
kinds, it is surprising that scholars have not paid more attention to transportation
in this increasingly popular genre. Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles
is the first book to examine the history of representations of road transport
machines in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century American science
fiction. The focus of this study is on two machines of the road that have been locked in a constant, often bitter, struggle with one another: the
automobile and the bicycle. With chapters ranging from the early
science fiction of the pulp magazine era in the 1920s and 1930s, to the postcyberpunk of the 1990s and more recent media of the 2000s
such as web television, zines, and comics, this book argues that science
fiction by and large perceives the car as anything but a marvelous invention of
modernity. Rather, the genre often scorns and ridicules the automobile and
instead promotes more sustainable, more benign, more restrained
technologies of movement such as the bicycle.
Contents
Introduction
1. Perfectibility and Techno-Optimism in the Pulp Era
2. Murderous Cars, Space Bikes, and Alien Bicycles in the Golden Age
3. Electric Cars, Auto-Dueling, and Bike Shares in the New Wave
4. Messenger Skateboards and Messenger Bikes in Postcyberpunk
5. Staying Mobile in the Post-Apocalyptic World
6. Kids on Bikes in 1980s Nostalgia Texts
Conclusion
