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Jad Smith

Born:
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: Smith lives in Southern Illinois.

Biography: Jad Smith is Associate Professor of British Literature and Cultural Studies.


Awards:

Primary Literary Genre(s): Non-Fiction; Other

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

Email: jdsmith3@eiu.edu
Website: http://www.eiu.edu/english/faculty.php?id=jdsmith3
Jad Smith on WorldCat : http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=jad+smith


Selected Titles

Alfred Bester
ISBN: 9780252099076 OCLC: 957264942

Alfred Bester's classic short stories and the canonical novel The Stars My Destination made him a science fiction legend. Fans and scholars praise him as a genre-bending pioneer and cyberpunk forefather. Writers like Neil Gaiman and William Gibson celebrate his prophetic vision and stylistic innovations. Jad Smith traces the career of the unlikeliest of SF icons. Winner of the first Hugo Award for The Demolished Man, Bester also worked in comics, radio, and TV, and his intermittent SF writing led some critics to brand him a dabbler. In the 1960s, however, New Wave writers championed his work, and his reputation grew. Smith follows Bester's journey from consummate outsider to an artist venerated for foundational works that influenced the New Wave and cyberpunk revolutions. He also explores the little-known roots of a wayward journey fueled by curiosity, disappointment with the SF mainstream, and an artist's determination to go his own way--

John Brunner /
ISBN: 0252078810 OCLC: 824655081

"Under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, John Brunner (1934-1995) was one of the most prolific and influential science fiction authors of the late twentieth century. He began his writing career in his teens, selling his first novel in 1951 and two stories to pulp magazines the year after. His career was both typical and exemplary. Typical, because to make a living he had to write continuously and for a readership in both Britain and the United States. Exemplary because he wrote with a stamina matched by only a few of the great science fiction writers, and with a literary quality of even fewer. He imported modernist techniques into his novels and stories and probed every major theme of his generation: robotics, racism, drugs, space exploration, technological warfare. Brunner also wrote about science fiction in essays and editorials that reveal his thoughts, tastes, and ambitions, and that reflect the changing appeal and value of science fiction over the last half of the twentieth century. The passage of time and the verdict of readers have established that at least two of his books--Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and The Sheep Look Up (1972)--have risen to the status of science fiction classics, the first for its depiction of the consequences of overpopulation and and the second for ecological collapse. These two novels and a shelf of others are well known to sf enthusiasts and scholars, but Brunner's massive output and use of multiple pseudonyms have defied a thoroughly scholarly survey of his career until now. Smith's book will be the first intensive look at Brunner's life and works"--

 

 

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