Exile from Space - Merril, Judith

. .

Biographie:
Judith Merril was one of the significant women writers, editors, and critics in twentieth-century science fiction. Born in 1923, she became associated with the Futurians, the influential New York circle that also included writers such as Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth, and others who helped shape modern science fiction. Merril wrote stories, novels, criticism, and anthologies, and she was especially important in widening the field's sense of what science fiction could do: not only adventure, technology, and extrapolation, but social speculation, gendered experience, psychological realism, literary experiment, and cultural critique.Her fiction includes That Only a Mother, one of the landmark stories of postwar science fiction, as well as Shadow on the Hearth, Outpost Mars and Gunner Cade with C. M. Kornbluth under the joint pseudonym Cyril Judd, and The Tomorrow People. She was also a major anthologist, editing the influential Year's Best S-F volumes and helping readers encounter a broader, more literary, and more socially engaged science fiction. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia lists Exile from Space as a novelette first appearing in Fantastic Universe in November 1956.Merril later moved to Canada, where she became an important advocate for speculative fiction and donated the collection that helped form what became the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy in Toronto. Her legacy rests not only on her own stories, but also on her role as a critic, editor, curator, and forceful advocate for a more ambitious science fiction....

Sommaire:
A young woman raised apart from Earth returns to the planet of her birth and discovers that origin, belonging, and humanity are not as simple as blood or geography. Judith Merril's Exile from Space begins with a strange homecoming: a girl born on Earth but raised elsewhere is sent back into human society as part of her education. Carefully prepared, imperfectly disguised, and uncertain of what she is meant to learn, she enters an ordinary world that is not ordinary to her at all. Cars, hotels, money, clothing, social customs, fear, desire, and attraction become part of an experiment whose emotional consequences no one has fully anticipated. First published in Fantastic Universe in November 1956, Exile from Space is a compact and quietly powerful work of classic science fiction. Merril turns the alien-contact premise inward, using estrangement, romance, and cultural observation to ask what makes a person human and what happens when identity is divided between two worlds. The result is not a gadget story, but a character-driven science fiction novelette shaped by exile, curiosity, love, and the painful discovery of belonging. This Positronic Books edition is well suited to readers of classic science fiction, women's science fiction, mid-century magazine fiction, alien-contact stories, and thoughtful speculative fiction about identity, culture, and emotional awakening. Explore other exciting Positronic Books devoted to classic science fiction, fantasy, and mystery....