title: The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction
author: Istvan Csicsery-Ronay
description: "The book overflows with insights, striking readings, provocative stances, productive ambiguities, and eminently quotable phrases..."--Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction Studies<br /><br />"Csicsery-Ronay writes clearly and usefully.... (He) provides a readable synthesis, mixing explication with advocacy, and providing examples from almost every domain in SF: it is a synthesis that almost anybody who teaches or writes about SF--or any critic who reads it for pleasure--may need." --Stephen Burt, Contemporary Literature<br /><br />"...after reading Seven Beauties, it is difficult to conceive of that which is not sf...Csiscery-Ronay offers a means of thinking about the appearance of sf elsewhere. For the readers, spectators and subjectiles of the twenty-first century, such an attempt to bridge the generic gulf could not be more timely. That this is a paradoxical bridge, one that folds into a mobius strip of returns, makes Seven Beauties only the more exciting, as it offers new tricks to the old dogs of genre theory."--Darran Jorgensen, Science Fiction film and Television
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  Table of Contents
  
   _ _Title Page__
  
   _ _Epigraph__
  
   _ _Praise__
  
   _1 - BETWEEN TIMID AND TIMBUKTU_
  
   _2 - CHEERS IN THE WIREHOUSE_
  
   _3 - UNITED HOTCAKE PREFERRED_
  
   _4 - TENT RENTALS_
  
   _5 - LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN HERO_
  
   _6 - A DESERTER IN TIME OF WAR_
  
   _7 - VICTORY_
  
   _8 - IN A HOLLYWOOD NIGHT CLUB_
  
   _9 - A PUZZLE SOLVED_
  
   _UNK, TURN SHIP UPSIDE DOWN._
  
   _10 - AN AGE OF MIRACLES_
  
   _I WAS A VICTIM OF A SERIES OF ACCIDENTS, AS ARE WE ALL._
  
   _11 - WE HATE MALACHI CONSTANT BECAUSE ..._
  
   _12 - THE GENTLEMAN FROM TRALFAMADORE_
  
   _ _EPILOGUE: REUNION WITH STONY__
  
   _ _BOOKS BY KURT VONNEGUT__
  
   _ _Copyright Page__
  
  FOR ALEX VONNEGUT, SPECIAL AGENT, WITH LOVE
  
  > > > > > > "Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand
  > miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules—and still there are some
  > misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress."
  
   _—RANSOM K. FERN_
  
  All persons, places, and events in this book are real. Certain