"Keynote Jane Austen and the Brontës endure as the leading ladies of English literature, but why are these reclusive parsons' daughters the only ones we remember? Funny and fascinating, Shelley DeWees's nonfiction debut, Not Just Jane, revisits British history through the extraordinary lives and work of seven long-forgotten authoresses--and wonders why they, and so many others, faded into obscurity (and what we are missing because of it)"--

Features teacher notes and activities, videos and weblinks, historical documentation, key word definitions, and other immersive learning resources that support the classic novel about Jay Gatsby who tries to win back the woman he loved and lost.

At a time when speculative fiction seems less and less far-fetched, Margaret Atwood lends her distinctive voice and singular point of view to the genre in a series of essays that brilliantly illuminates the essential truths about the modern world. This is an exploration of her relationship with the literary form we have come to know as "science fiction," a relationship that has been lifelong, stretching from her days as a child reader in the 1940s,...

What if our creations turn against us? The idea of creating life has fascinated society since the earliest days of science fiction. The first installment of the four-part series, Robots transports viewers from the first steps of Frankenstein's monster to the threat provided by the Terminator and the world of Cyberspace. From HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey to the Cylons of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica and the world of The Matrix, this is a journey...

What if we could travel not just through space, but through time itself? If you could travel through time, would you change the past or the future? What if you found it couldn't be changed? What price does the time traveler - and the people they are closest to - pay? This is a journey from H. G. Wells' The Time Machine through ideas like The Grandfather Paradox and The Butterfly Effect to the professional time traveler that is the ever popular Doctor...

Space explores the deep sea inspiration for Avatar, finds out why Ursula K Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness and discovers how Stanley Kubrick was able to make 2001: A Space Odyssey seem so believable. In addition, the program looks at the way Dune and The Mars Trilogy embraced the challenge of world building and discusses the appeal of the beaten up 'dirty space' of Dark Star and Firefly . From Star Trek to Star Wars, this is a journey to...

In this compelling book of beloved heroines and the remarkable writers who created them, Erin Blakemore explores how the pluck and dignity of literary characters such as Anne Shirley, Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, Scarlett O'Hara, Scout Finch and Jo March can inspire women today.

"Science fiction is filled with spacecraft. On Earth, actual rockets explode over Texas while others make their way to Mars. But what are spacecraft, and just what can they teach us about imagination, ecology, democracy, and the nature of objects? Why do certain spacecraft stand out in popular culture? If ever there were a spacecraft that could be detached from its context, sold as toys, modeled, turned into Disney rides, parodied, and flit around...