Rose, Mark
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author, Critic, Editor.
(1939- ) US academic and author whose assistance in preparing Kingsley Amis's New Maps of Hell (1960) was acknowledged by its author. An apocalyptic Post-Holocaust short story, "We Would See a Sign" in Spectrum 3 (anth 1963) edited by Amis and Robert Conquest, did not lead to a fiction career, and Rose remains best known in the sf field for Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction (1981) which, taking off from the Definition of SF as a form of romance in Anatomy of Criticism (1957) by Northrop Frye (1912-1991), redeploys the nineteenth-century confrontation between Man and Nature to define sf as expressing a conflict between the human and the nonhuman. Within the terms of this definition, which Rose uses as a conceptual (and inevitably partial) illumination of the field, he couches some of the most elegantly literate practical criticism of selected texts the genre has yet seen; the extended attention paid to Stanisław Lem and H G Wells remains useful. The anthologies Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (anth 1976) and Bridges to Science Fiction (anth 1980) with George Robert Guffey and George Edgar Slusser contain, perhaps inevitably, less striking material. [JC]
see also: Critical and Historical Works About SF; Eaton Award.
Mark Allen Rose
born New York: 4 August 1939
works
nonfiction
- Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981) [nonfiction: hb/Gwen Frankfeldt]
works as editor
- Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1976) [nonfiction: anth: hb/Stanley Wyatt]
- Bridges to Science Fiction (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980) with George Robert Guffey and George Edgar Slusser [nonfiction: anth: Eaton Conference Papers: hb/Gary Gore]
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