Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Parabolas of Science Fiction -- Part I: Introducing Parabolas -- 1 Science Fictional Parabolas: Jazz, Geometry, and Generation Starships -- 2 Dancing with Scheherazade: Some Reflections in the Djinni's Glass -- 3 Breaking the Frame -- Part II: Parables of Politics and Power -- 4 Katherine MacLean's Short Science Fiction and Cytology: Science as Parabola -- 5 Second Contact: The First Contact Story in Latin American Science Fiction -- 6 Parabolas of SFQ: Canadian Science Fiction in French and the Making of a "National" Subgenre -- 7 The Domestic SF Parabola -- Part III: Parables of Remediation -- 8 Mad Scientists, Chimps, and Mice with Human Brains: Collapsing Boundaries in Science Fiction -- 9 Coded Transmissions: Gender and Genre Reception in The Matrix -- 10 The Mad Scientist, the Failed Experiment, and the Queer Family of Man: Sirius, Frankenstein, and the SF Stockroom -- 11 Back to the Filthy Workshop: "Faithful" Film Adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -- Part IV: Parabolic Futures -- 12 The Future of the Past: Science Fiction, Retro, and Retrofuturism -- 13 Babylon Revisited: Alternate Cosmologies from Farmer to Chiang -- 14 Science Fiction as Archive Fever -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Contributors -- Index.