Ximena Gallardo C. and C. Jason Smith. New York: Continuum, 2004. <www.continuumbooks.com> Amazon.com
Alien Woman examines the construction of sex and gender in the four science fiction films comprising the Alien saga, Alien, Aliens, Alien3, and Alien Resurrection, starring Sigourney Weaver. Alien (1979) introduced audiences to their first enduring, self-reliant female hero, Lt. Ripley. Subsequent writers and directors of Alien films in the 1980s and 1990s, left to grapple with a strong female protagonist, re-envision Ripley to express and promote changing ideas about gender, sex, the female body, and woman�s place in the late 20th century. Thus, the Alien saga becomes an important site for the discussion and study of the formation of sex and gender systems, the refashioning of the female body, and the creation and commodification of the female hero. Alien Woman focuses on how each revision of �Lt. Ellen Ripley� informs our understanding, not only of women in science fiction, but also our views of women and gender roles over the past three decades.
Marcus LiBrizzi
From the article abstract: The vampire, an archetypal figure who pops up in many myths from around the world, is most familiar to Western audiences in the form Bram Stoker's Dracula and Anne Rice's Lestat - aristocratic bloodsucking immortals of unholy origin. In more paranoid circles, vampires have been re-imagined as a race of alien beings called the Annunaki, who have traveled from beyond to control and colonize the planet Earth (in fact, they've been in control for quite a while now). Looking at the conspiracy theories of underground celebrity David Icke, Marcus LiBrizzi offers his own theory about the meaning of these horrific beings for a world caught in the grip of a grand economic reorganization. Linking these myths to the realities of transnational capital and the Network Society, LiBrizzi is able to craft his own compelling narrative about the horrors of the New World Order.
www.reconstruction.ws
Geoff Klock. New York: Continuum, 2002.
In this book, Geoff Klock presents a study of the Third Movement of superhero comic books. He avoids, at all costs, the temptation to refer to this movement as "Postmodern," "Deconstructionist," or something equally tedious. Analyzing the works of Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, and Grant Morrison among others, and taking his cue from Harold Bloom, Klock unearths the birth of self-consciousness in the superhero narrative and guides us through an intricate world of traditions, influences, nostalgia and innovations - a world where comic books do indeed become literature.
http://www.continuumbooks.com
Published in Post.human.ous, Reconstruction 4.3 (Summer 2004):
"Toward a Posthuman Ethics." Dongshin Yi.
Setting a posthuman ethics as a goal toward which the collaboration of posthumanism and ethics must move, Yi points out that the collaboration is detained because current debates on the cyborg harbor on the question of representations and consider how political, social and cultural problems of the human are reconfigured, and possibly resolved, by the cyborg. Thus, the debates are bound to be retrospective in approach and circular in direction, as they fail to recognize new possibilities that the cyborg may present. Arguing that the failure indicates the cyborg is being understood only as representational or as partial (meaning, as of human-extensions), and believing that such recognition should come with the presence of a fully conscious cyborg, Yi's essay postulates the real-world existence of Yod, a cyborg in Marge Piercy's He, She and It, and examines how its existence could affect three philosophical areas of the current debates on the cyborg.
"Dead Astronauts, Cyborgs, and the Cape Canaveral Fiction of J.G. Ballard:A Posthuman Analysis." Melanie Rosen Brown. Melanie Rosen Brown explores the ways in which the so-called "Cape Canaveral" short stories of J.G. Ballard anthologized in the collection Memories of the Space Age exemplify the promises of posthumanity as articulated by posthuman theorists such as Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. Although Ballard's fiction is viewed by many as a needlessly pessimistic and derogatory portrayal of NASA's space program, viewed through a posthuman lens, Ballard's fiction instead reveals him to be optimistic about the future of space exploration -- cautiously optimistic, but optimistic nonetheless. Ballard's fiction portrays a culture clearly not ready to do away with the human in favor of some new mechanized being; however, in Ballard's worlds, the human is no longer enough either. Only through the merging of technology and humanity -- a hybrid of posthuman and human -- does the world continue to spin for either Ballard's posthuman astronauts or his Earth-bound humans who are capable of escaping the planet only through fugues of space and time.