Jeremy Withers | Iowa State University (original) (raw)
Papers by Jeremy Withers
Routledge eBooks, Oct 31, 2022
Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles
This chapter focuses on several works from the ‘Golden Age’ of the 1950s in which bicycles promin... more This chapter focuses on several works from the ‘Golden Age’ of the 1950s in which bicycles prominently appear. After first examining cars and walking in some works by Ray Bradbury, the discussion turns to a novel by Robert A. Heinlein, a novelette by Poul Anderson, and a short story by Avram Davidson. This chapter argues that these three texts favor portrayals of ‘low-tech’ bicycles as pragmatic, reliable machines worthy of continued use and appreciation, and of bicycles as potent pieces of technology capable of inspiring awe.
Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles, 2020
This chapter focuses on several important postcyberpunk works from the 1990s by Neal Stephenson, ... more This chapter focuses on several important postcyberpunk works from the 1990s by Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling. All these works celebrate transportation technologies such as skateboards and bicycles, technologies that challenge the car and its dominance over the road. Furthermore, an interest in transport machines helps these texts demonstrate some of the key features that scholars have identified as setting postcyberpunk apart from the classic cyberpunk of the 1980s, as well as some of the features they see as building continuity between the two.
Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles, 2020
This final chapter focuses on one of the most recent and most popular trends happening right now ... more This final chapter focuses on one of the most recent and most popular trends happening right now in science fiction, the rise of a decidedly nostalgic form of science fiction. In particular, the trend examined in this chapter is one called ‘1980s-nostalgia science fiction’ and is made up of science fiction literary and screen texts from c. 2010-present that exhibit a profound fondness for or interest in the American 1980s. The three nostalgia texts that comprise the focus of this chapter are Super 8, Stranger Things, and Paper Girls. After first discussing what is one of the most influential texts for this 1980s-nostalgia science fiction – Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra Terrestrial – this chapter then analyzes how these nostalgia texts align themselves with Spielberg’s blockbuster film by demonizing motorized transport while simultaneously exalting the bicycle.
Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles, 2020
Chapter Three focuses on works from the New Wave era (c. 1960-1975) by Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan ... more Chapter Three focuses on works from the New Wave era (c. 1960-1975) by Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, and Ernest Callenbach. The primary goal of the chapter will be to highlight how some science fiction writers of the Sixties and Seventies responded to two important events related to transportation: the dramatic spike in annual automobile fatalities that began in the early-1960s and climaxed in the early-1970s, and the growing environmentalism of this era.
Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles, 2020
This chapter focuses on the pulp era (c. 1926-1940) of American science fiction and explores how ... more This chapter focuses on the pulp era (c. 1926-1940) of American science fiction and explores how a distinct techno-optimism dominated this era. This pulp era optimism is best exemplified by the influential editor Hugo Gernsback and the magazines he started: Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories. However, this chapter argues that many writers who appeared in Gernsback’s magazines stridently condemned the automobiles of their own time. Where their technological optimism manifests itself, then, is in their belief that the automobile is not worthy of abandonment and that a certain perfectibility resides in the machine.
Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles, 2020
This chapter examines how the rising popularity since the 1990s of works of postapocalyptic cli-f... more This chapter examines how the rising popularity since the 1990s of works of postapocalyptic cli-fi (i.e. climate change fiction) has provided science fiction writers a convenient opportunity to explore issues of mobility and transportation. After first examining an early postapocalyptic cli-fi work from the 1990s by Octavia E. Butler, the chapter then advances this book’s chronological analysis to some twenty-first century works of science fiction. In its discussion of a novel by Paolo Bacigalupi and one by Benjamin Parzybok, this chapter shows how more restrained modes of transport play a vital role during times of apocalypse in keeping a society functioning and keeping us as individuals from slipping into disempowerment.
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2010
Environmental History, 2013
Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts, 2012
Journal of Ecocriticism, 2012
This article examines the role of animals, as well as of veganism, in Jonathan Safran Foer's... more This article examines the role of animals, as well as of veganism, in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, his second novel which deals with the lingering trauma of 9/11. Although Foer took some readers by surprise with his overt ...
The Journal of Popular Culture, 2012
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2011
... The use of feathers in arrow manufacturing will be discussed in detail below. ↵3 On the exten... more ... The use of feathers in arrow manufacturing will be discussed in detail below. ↵3 On the extensive use of horses and other draft animals to move a medieval army's supplies, see Yuval Noah Harari, Strategy and Supply ... 24 See Kiser, Lisa J. Animal Economies: The Lives of St. ...
Bicycles have more cultural identities than many realize, functioning not only as literal vehicle... more Bicycles have more cultural identities than many realize, functioning not only as literal vehicles in a text but also as “vehicles” for that text’s themes, ideas, and critiques. In the late nineteenth century the bicycle was seen as a way for the wealthy urban elite to reconnect with nature and for women to gain a measure of personal freedom, while during World War II it became a utilitarian tool of the French Resistance and in 1970s China stood for wealth and modernization. Lately it has functioned variously as the favored ideological steed of environmentalists, a means of community bonding and aesthetic self-expression in hip hop, and the ride of choice for bike messenger–idolizing urban hipsters. Culture on Two Wheels analyzes the shifting cultural significance of the bicycle by examining its appearances in literary, musical, and cinematic works spanning three continents and more than 125 years of history. Bringing together essays by a variety of cyclists and scholars with myriad angles of approach, this collection highlights the bicycle’s flexibility as a signifier and analyzes the appearance of bicycles in canonical and well-known texts such as Samuel Beckett’s modernist novel Molloy, the Oscar-winning film Breaking Away, and various Stephen King novels and stories, as well as in lesser-known but equally significant texts, such as the celebrated Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Sacrifice and Elizabeth Robins Pennell’s nineteenth-century travelogue A Canterbury Pilgrimage, the latter of which traces the route of Chaucer’s pilgrims via bicycle.
Even though some scholars have identified important precursors to science fiction (hereafter abbr... more Even though some scholars have identified important precursors to science fiction (hereafter abbreviated as sf) in premodern genres such as epic, the fantastic voyage, and utopia, pre-Enlightenment eras are mostly absent in many critical discussions of the origins of – and the important influences on – recent sf. Additionally, many sf scholars and authors often emphasize the futurity of the genre, not its orientation and links to the past. For example, Harlan Ellison (whose story is a main focus of this essay) once defined sf as: “Anything that deals in even the smallest extrapolative manner with the future of man and his societies, with the futureof science and/or its effects on us.” However, earlier time periods such as the Middle Ages have indeed been quite fruitful for contemporary sf. This essay explores the many ways in which one of the most well-known works of medieval literature – Dante Alighieri's early fourteenth-century poem Inferno – served as a powerful influence on...
Routledge eBooks, Oct 31, 2022
Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles
This chapter focuses on several works from the ‘Golden Age’ of the 1950s in which bicycles promin... more This chapter focuses on several works from the ‘Golden Age’ of the 1950s in which bicycles prominently appear. After first examining cars and walking in some works by Ray Bradbury, the discussion turns to a novel by Robert A. Heinlein, a novelette by Poul Anderson, and a short story by Avram Davidson. This chapter argues that these three texts favor portrayals of ‘low-tech’ bicycles as pragmatic, reliable machines worthy of continued use and appreciation, and of bicycles as potent pieces of technology capable of inspiring awe.
Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles, 2020
This chapter focuses on several important postcyberpunk works from the 1990s by Neal Stephenson, ... more This chapter focuses on several important postcyberpunk works from the 1990s by Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling. All these works celebrate transportation technologies such as skateboards and bicycles, technologies that challenge the car and its dominance over the road. Furthermore, an interest in transport machines helps these texts demonstrate some of the key features that scholars have identified as setting postcyberpunk apart from the classic cyberpunk of the 1980s, as well as some of the features they see as building continuity between the two.
Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles, 2020
This final chapter focuses on one of the most recent and most popular trends happening right now ... more This final chapter focuses on one of the most recent and most popular trends happening right now in science fiction, the rise of a decidedly nostalgic form of science fiction. In particular, the trend examined in this chapter is one called ‘1980s-nostalgia science fiction’ and is made up of science fiction literary and screen texts from c. 2010-present that exhibit a profound fondness for or interest in the American 1980s. The three nostalgia texts that comprise the focus of this chapter are Super 8, Stranger Things, and Paper Girls. After first discussing what is one of the most influential texts for this 1980s-nostalgia science fiction – Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra Terrestrial – this chapter then analyzes how these nostalgia texts align themselves with Spielberg’s blockbuster film by demonizing motorized transport while simultaneously exalting the bicycle.
Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles, 2020
Chapter Three focuses on works from the New Wave era (c. 1960-1975) by Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan ... more Chapter Three focuses on works from the New Wave era (c. 1960-1975) by Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, and Ernest Callenbach. The primary goal of the chapter will be to highlight how some science fiction writers of the Sixties and Seventies responded to two important events related to transportation: the dramatic spike in annual automobile fatalities that began in the early-1960s and climaxed in the early-1970s, and the growing environmentalism of this era.
Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles, 2020
This chapter focuses on the pulp era (c. 1926-1940) of American science fiction and explores how ... more This chapter focuses on the pulp era (c. 1926-1940) of American science fiction and explores how a distinct techno-optimism dominated this era. This pulp era optimism is best exemplified by the influential editor Hugo Gernsback and the magazines he started: Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories. However, this chapter argues that many writers who appeared in Gernsback’s magazines stridently condemned the automobiles of their own time. Where their technological optimism manifests itself, then, is in their belief that the automobile is not worthy of abandonment and that a certain perfectibility resides in the machine.
Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles, 2020
This chapter examines how the rising popularity since the 1990s of works of postapocalyptic cli-f... more This chapter examines how the rising popularity since the 1990s of works of postapocalyptic cli-fi (i.e. climate change fiction) has provided science fiction writers a convenient opportunity to explore issues of mobility and transportation. After first examining an early postapocalyptic cli-fi work from the 1990s by Octavia E. Butler, the chapter then advances this book’s chronological analysis to some twenty-first century works of science fiction. In its discussion of a novel by Paolo Bacigalupi and one by Benjamin Parzybok, this chapter shows how more restrained modes of transport play a vital role during times of apocalypse in keeping a society functioning and keeping us as individuals from slipping into disempowerment.
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2010
Environmental History, 2013
Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts, 2012
Journal of Ecocriticism, 2012
This article examines the role of animals, as well as of veganism, in Jonathan Safran Foer's... more This article examines the role of animals, as well as of veganism, in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, his second novel which deals with the lingering trauma of 9/11. Although Foer took some readers by surprise with his overt ...
The Journal of Popular Culture, 2012
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2011
... The use of feathers in arrow manufacturing will be discussed in detail below. ↵3 On the exten... more ... The use of feathers in arrow manufacturing will be discussed in detail below. ↵3 On the extensive use of horses and other draft animals to move a medieval army's supplies, see Yuval Noah Harari, Strategy and Supply ... 24 See Kiser, Lisa J. Animal Economies: The Lives of St. ...
Bicycles have more cultural identities than many realize, functioning not only as literal vehicle... more Bicycles have more cultural identities than many realize, functioning not only as literal vehicles in a text but also as “vehicles” for that text’s themes, ideas, and critiques. In the late nineteenth century the bicycle was seen as a way for the wealthy urban elite to reconnect with nature and for women to gain a measure of personal freedom, while during World War II it became a utilitarian tool of the French Resistance and in 1970s China stood for wealth and modernization. Lately it has functioned variously as the favored ideological steed of environmentalists, a means of community bonding and aesthetic self-expression in hip hop, and the ride of choice for bike messenger–idolizing urban hipsters. Culture on Two Wheels analyzes the shifting cultural significance of the bicycle by examining its appearances in literary, musical, and cinematic works spanning three continents and more than 125 years of history. Bringing together essays by a variety of cyclists and scholars with myriad angles of approach, this collection highlights the bicycle’s flexibility as a signifier and analyzes the appearance of bicycles in canonical and well-known texts such as Samuel Beckett’s modernist novel Molloy, the Oscar-winning film Breaking Away, and various Stephen King novels and stories, as well as in lesser-known but equally significant texts, such as the celebrated Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Sacrifice and Elizabeth Robins Pennell’s nineteenth-century travelogue A Canterbury Pilgrimage, the latter of which traces the route of Chaucer’s pilgrims via bicycle.
Even though some scholars have identified important precursors to science fiction (hereafter abbr... more Even though some scholars have identified important precursors to science fiction (hereafter abbreviated as sf) in premodern genres such as epic, the fantastic voyage, and utopia, pre-Enlightenment eras are mostly absent in many critical discussions of the origins of – and the important influences on – recent sf. Additionally, many sf scholars and authors often emphasize the futurity of the genre, not its orientation and links to the past. For example, Harlan Ellison (whose story is a main focus of this essay) once defined sf as: “Anything that deals in even the smallest extrapolative manner with the future of man and his societies, with the futureof science and/or its effects on us.” However, earlier time periods such as the Middle Ages have indeed been quite fruitful for contemporary sf. This essay explores the many ways in which one of the most well-known works of medieval literature – Dante Alighieri's early fourteenth-century poem Inferno – served as a powerful influence on...
Bicycles have more cultural identities than many realize, functioning not only as literal vehicle... more Bicycles have more cultural identities than many realize, functioning not only as literal vehicles in a text but also as “vehicles” for that text’s themes, ideas, and critiques. In the late nineteenth century the bicycle was seen as a way for the wealthy urban elite to reconnect with nature and for women to gain a measure of personal freedom, while during World War II it became a utilitarian tool of the French Resistance and in 1970s China stood for wealth and modernization. Lately it has functioned variously as the favored ideological steed of environmentalists, a means of community bonding and aesthetic self-expression in hip hop, and the ride of choice for bike messenger–idolizing urban hipsters. Culture on Two Wheels analyzes the shifting cultural significance of the bicycle by examining its appearances in literary, musical, and cinematic works spanning three continents and more than 125 years of history.
Bringing together essays by a variety of cyclists and scholars with myriad angles of approach, this collection highlights the bicycle’s flexibility as a signifier and analyzes the appearance of bicycles in canonical and well-known texts such as Samuel Beckett’s modernist novel Molloy, the Oscar-winning film Breaking Away, and various Stephen King novels and stories, as well as in lesser-known but equally significant texts, such as the celebrated Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Sacrifice and Elizabeth Robins Pennell’s nineteenth-century travelogue A Canterbury Pilgrimage, the latter of which traces the route of Chaucer’s pilgrims via bicycle.
