Böcker av Gillian Polack

The culture we live in shapes us. We also shape the culture we live in. Stories we tell play critical roles in this shaping.The heart of cultural transmission is how stories and the way we shape knowledge come together and make a novel work. How do they combine within the novel? Genre writing plays a critical role in demonstrating how this transmission functions.Science fiction and fantasy illustrate this through shared traditions and understanding, colonialism, diasporic experiences, own voices, ethics, selective forgetting and silencing. They illuminate ways in which speculative fiction is important for cultural transmission.This study uses cultural encoding and baggage within speculative fiction to decode critical elements of modern English-language culture.

Some keys open doors to strange worlds...Melissa has a happy marriage but her everyday life is a constant battle against pain. She discovers that her artwork can produce magic, prompting her to apply for an artist''s retreat to a mysterious country house. Her old schoolfriends Bettina and Zelda are also at the same retreat. But neither the house nor their friendship is what they think. A mystical library, rapacious shadows, and keys to otherworldly rooms are the links to saving the house from destruction.A unique fantasy about people whose stories, with all their oddity and excitement, seldom make their way into novels.

Renowned artist Grania, famed as a painter of light, arrives in a sleek space ship from Lost Earth, ready to embrace New Ceres and its New Enlightenment in its entirety - its 18th century set up, its coffee houses, its gossipy salons, and its obsession with a low-level approach to tech . . . But is she really ready for its cutthroat society, its strange food issues or for Livia? Livia who toys with lives on a whim, and will stop at nothing to realize her dream society. When Grania marries Dal and sets up her own political salons the stage is set for a battle of wills and poisonous chaos ensues on a brand new world where everything old is new again. 

This book explores the nature of the author's relationship with history and fiction as well as the role history plays in fiction. Focusing on genre fiction, this study considers key issues in the relationship between history and fiction, such as how writers incorporate historical research and how they build worlds based in history.

In March 1305, a group of Australians and Americans arrive in medieval France. To be precise, they arrive in the Languedoc, near a village called Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert.The scientists want to save the world. Dr Artemisia Wormwood wants to save her sister. If she joins the time-travellers as their historian, her pay would cover treatment that might give her sister life.Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert is a desert of souls. Village, monastery, pilgrimage path, and legend; that's all there is. Perfect for scientists who have promised their work will not interfere with history. Those scientists have nine months and a dedication that defies reason. They won't tell Artemisia about their research. They don't want to hear her explanations about the world around them and about its people. Some of the scientists don't even want her there. Who needs an historian when the village looks like a gamer's dream? The villagers are disturbed by the strangers. Most of the strangers don't really care.Prepare for a bumpy ride with bad coffee.