Rieder, John
Entry updated 15 April 2024. Tagged: Author, Critic.
(1952- ) US academic with the Department of English at the University of Hawaii from 1980 until he retired in 2018; a member of the editorial board of Extrapolation. His Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008) is an important study of the colonialism and Imperialism themes in sf (including Gothic SF) from its beginnings to the mid-twentieth century; among the authors discussed are Edwin A Abbott, Edward Bellamy, Edgar Rice Burroughs, John W Campbell, George Tomkyns Chesney, Arthur Conan Doyle, H Rider Haggard, Edmond Hamilton, W H Hudson, Richard Jefferies, Henry Kuttner, Alun Llewellyn, Jack London, A Merritt, Catherine L Moore, William Morris, Garrett P Serviss, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Olaf Stapledon and H G Wells.
Rieder's essay "On Defining SF, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History" (26 August 2013 Strange Horizons) won the Science Fiction Research Association's Pioneer Award. Further works of Genre SF relevance are Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (2017), which argues a Fantastika-inflected reception-response theory for the emergence of sf in the early nineteenth century, deprecating the assessment of texts in isolation; and Speculative Epistemologies: An Eccentric Account of SF from the 1960s to the Present (2021).
He received the SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship (more gracefully known as the Pilgrim Award before this year) in 2019. [DRL]
John Rieder
born 1952
works
nonfiction
- Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008) [nonfiction: in the publisher's Early Classics of Science Fiction series: hb/Howard V Brown]
- Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2017) [nonfiction: hb/hb/Elizabeth LaPensée]
- Speculative Epistemologies: An Eccentric Account of SF from the 1960s to the Present (Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press, 2021) [nonfiction: in the publisher's Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies series: hb/]
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