Yesterday I got a book in the mail. It doesn’t happen often these days, but one publisher I am always happy to hear from is Wesleyan, who produce some marvelous academic books about science fiction.

This week#s loot was a book called Vintage Visions, and subtitled (because academic books always have subtitles) Essays on Early Science Fiction. It has been put together by Arthur B. Evans who is an expert in the work of Jules Verne, but the book covers a wide range of different topics. The essays are all reprints, and some are not that new, but they all sound interesting. Andrea Bell has an essay about a Chilean novel dating from 1878; Rachel Haywood Ferreira surveys the roots of Latin American SF; and a piece by Susan Gubar about C.L. Moore that was a pioneering work in the study of feminist science fiction from 1980. Crunchy.