Reading by Starlight explores the characteristics in the writing, marketing and reception of science fiction which distinguish it as a genre.
Damien Broderick explores the postmodern self-referentiality of the sci-fi narrative, its intricate coded language and discursive `encyclopaedia'. He shows how, for perfect understanding, sci-fi readers must learn the codes of these imaginary worlds and vocabularies, all the time picking up references to texts by other writers.
Reading by Starlight includes close readings of paradigmatic cyberpunk texts and writings by SF novelists and theorists including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Patrick Parrinder, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Varley, Roger Zelazny, William Gibson, Fredric Jameson and Samuel R. Delaney.

Damien Broderick, author of The Architecture of Babel: Discourses of Literature and Science, is an award-winning writer who sold his first collection of stories at 20, has published eight novels and holds a PhD in the semiotics of science, literature and science fiction.

Part 1 Modern Science Fiction; Chapter 1 New World, New Texts; Chapter 2 Generic Engineering; Chapter 3 Genre or Mode?; Chapter 4 The Uses of Otherness; Chapter 5 Reading the Episteme; Chapter 6 Dreams of Reason and Unreason; Chapter 7 The Stars My Dissertation; Part 2 Postmodern Science Fiction; Chapter 8 Making Up Worlds; Chapter 9 Allography and Allegory; Chapter 10 Sf as a Modular Calculus; Chapter 11 The Multiplicity of Worlds, of Others; Chapter 12 The Autumnal City;