ARB regularly posts updates about review copies—print and digital—received by the editors and available for review. We receive this as a result of editor-direct outreach to presses to inquire about specific books and topics, as well as via our page describing review copy policy, available here.
ARB has been offered a review copy of Gillian Polack’s Story Matrices: Cultural Encoding and Cultural Baggage in the Worlds of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Luna Press).
If you are interested in reviewing this book for ARB, please reach out to the editors using the form below to express your interest.
From the publisher:
The culture we live in shapes us. We also shape the culture we live in. Stories we tell play critical roles in this shaping.
The heart of cultural transmission is how stories and the way we shape knowledge come together and make a novel work. How do they combine within the novel? Genre writing plays a critical role in demonstrating how this transmission functions.
Science fiction and fantasy illustrate this through shared traditions and understanding, colonialism, diasporic experiences, own voices, ethics, selective forgetting and silencing. They illuminate ways in which speculative fiction is important for cultural transmission.
This study uses cultural encoding and baggage within speculative fiction to decode critical elements of modern English-language culture.
About the author:
Dr. Gillian Polack is a Jewish-Australian science fiction and fantasy writer, researcher and editor and is the winner of the 2020 A Bertram Chandler Award. Her 2019 novel The Year of the Fruit Cake won the 2020 Ditmar for best novel and was shortlisted for best SF novel in the Aurealis Awards. She wrote the first Australian Jewish fantasy novel (The Wizardry of Jewish Women). Gillian is a Medievalist/ethnohistorian, currently working on how novels transmit culture. Her work on how writers use history in their fiction (History and Fiction) was shortlisted for the William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism or Review.
Discover Gillian’s blog here, and follow her on Twitter.
If you are interested in reviewing this title for ARB, please fill out the form below, and let us know why you might be suited for it. While we welcome new writers, please point us towards any of your reviews or other writing if possible (personal blogs or Goodreads are fine). If there are multiple books or essays you’re interested in (see what we’ve Called for Review and have Available for Review), please list them in the order you’re interested in reviewing them.
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