Palmer, Christopher
Entry updated 12 August 2026. Tagged: Author, Critic.
(? - ) Australian academic, author and critic who for many years taught English literature at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Victoria; he retired in 2012. He began to publish work of direct sf interest with "Galactic Empires and the Contemporary Extravaganza: Dan Simmons and Iain M. Banks" in Science Fiction Studies for March 1999, and has contributed further essays to that magazine, to Extrapolation, and to anthologies of sf criticism. His first book-length work of such criticism was the Philip K Dick study Philip K Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern (2003). This was followed by Castaway Tales: From Robinson Crusoe to Life of Pi (2016), which discusses not only Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and the more or less realistic Robinsonade tradition which followed – such as Johann David Wyss's The Swiss Family Robinson (1812-1813) – but also several works of Fantastika by authors with entries in this encyclopedia. These include H G Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), identified as the most influential castaway tale after Robinson Crusoe itself, and stories by Brian W Aldiss, J G Ballard, Iain Banks, Gregory Benford, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Greg Egan, William Golding, Terry Pratchett, Cherry Wilder and Gene Wolfe and S Fowler Wright. An associated website [see under links below] usefully summarizes the book's coverage and extends it to further authors including Rex Gordon, Robert Louis Stevenson and Andy Weir.
A third nonfiction book, Apocalypse in Crisis: Fiction from "The War of the Worlds" to "Dead Astronauts" (2021) discusses the evolution of catastrophic fiction from early fears of Alien Invasion and unheralded one-off Disaster to the more complicated issues of Ecological ruin and Climate Change which have come to dominate the modern sf nightmares in which humanity is not only the victim but a complicit agent. [DRL]
Christopher Palmer
born Australia
works
nonfiction
- Philip K Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern (Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press, 2003) [nonfiction: hb/Corbis]
- Castaway Tales: From Robinson Crusoe to Life of Pi (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2016) [nonfiction: pb/]
- Apocalypse in Crisis: Fiction from "The War of the Worlds" to "Dead Astronauts" (Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press, 2021) [nonfiction: hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry