D Harlan Wilson

Auto/biographical literature has been theorized with metaphors that reflect its inherent instability as a form of truth-telling. The best auto/biographies exhibit a metanarrational awareness of this instability and favor the art of writing over the alleged “truth” of a life. The autobiographical nature of Philip K. Dick's novels and stories has spawned a sizable body of biographical texts, many of which are creative performances that give primacy to the artistic impulse. Most critical biographies about Dick, on the other hand, do not account for this dynamic; instead, they read the fiction as a symptom of the author’s notorious drug use and schizoid tendencies. Bolstered by scholarship on Auto/Biography and Science Fiction Studies as well as psychoanalytic theory, The Auto/Biographies of Philip K. Dick: Infinite Regressions surveys and analyzes the proliferation of "biotexts" written about the science-fiction icon, who consistently eroded the boundary between lived and imagined experience, turning his own precarious sense of reality into the generative engine for his fiction and the biographical mythology that continues to orbit his work.

D. Harlan Wilson's Strangelove Country is an original, dynamic study of Stanley Kubrick's relationship with science fiction that explores how the genre shaped his cinematic identity and how that identity reshaped the genre. Focusing on Kubrick's futurist trilogy-Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange-as well as his collaboration with Steven Spielberg on A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Wilson takes a unique approach that is at once scholarly and defiant of academic stodge. Specifically, he views the "Kubrickian consciousness" through the lens of schizoanalysis and filmosophy, methods of inquiry that he uses to probe how Kubrick's oeuvre forms a singular, autonomous, interstitial "filmind" distinct from the director, with its own manner of thinking, seeing, and being. Synthesizing film theory, critical analysis, and certain novelistic techniques, Wilson reaffirms Kubrick's status as one of the twentieth century's greatest auteurs while casting new light on the filmmaker's extraordinary contribution to the history of cinema.

D. Harlan Wilson's Strangelove Country is an original, dynamic study of Stanley Kubrick's relationship with science fiction that explores how the genre shaped his cinematic identity and how that identity reshaped the genre. Focusing on Kubrick's futurist trilogy-Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange-as well as his collaboration with Steven Spielberg on A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Wilson takes a unique approach that is at once scholarly and defiant of academic stodge. Specifically, he views the "Kubrickian consciousness" through the lens of schizoanalysis and filmosophy, methods of inquiry that he uses to probe how Kubrick's oeuvre forms a singular, autonomous, interstitial "filmind" distinct from the director, with its own manner of thinking, seeing, and being. Synthesizing film theory, critical analysis, and certain novelistic techniques, Wilson reaffirms Kubrick's status as one of the twentieth century's greatest auteurs while casting new light on the filmmaker's extraordinary contribution to the history of cinema.

In this comprehensive study of The Stars My Destination, D. Harlan Wilson makes a case for the continued significance of Alfred Bester’s SF masterwork, exploring its distinctive style, influences, intertextuality, affect, and innovation as well as its extensive metafictional properties. In Stars, Bester established himself as a son of the pulp-SF and high-modernist writers that preceded him and a forefather to the New Wave and cyberpunk movements that followed his lead. Wilson’s study depicts Bester as an SF insider as much as an outlier, writing in the spirit of the genre but breaking with the fixation on hard science in favor of psychological interiority, literary experimentation, and adult themes. The book combines close-readings of the novel with broader concerns about contemporary media, technoculture, and the current state of SF itself. In Wilson’s view, SF is a moribund artform, and Stars foresaw the inevitable science fictionalization of our benighted world. With scholarly lucidity and precision, Wilson shows us that Stars pointed the way to what we have (un)become.

Charting new territory in filmmaking technologies and Steven Spielberg’s oeuvre, Minority Report (2002) portrays a dystopian near-future that comments on our increasingly science-fictional world and pays homage to the history of SF cinema. In this comprehensive monograph, D. Harlan Wilson recounts the film's inception, production, reception, and afterlife since its release in 2002 while depicting it as a symptom of contemporary media pathology, post-9/11 paranoia, consumer-capitalist aggression, religious mania, and above all, the screen culture that has come to define the human condition. At the same time, Wilson explores the many self-reflexive flourishes that render the movie a commentary on Spielberg’s style and the precession of the SF genre.

In this comprehensive study of The Stars My Destination, D. Harlan Wilson makes a case for the continued significance of Alfred Bester’s SF masterwork, exploring its distinctive style, influences, intertextuality, affect, and innovation as well as its extensive metafictional properties. In Stars, Bester established himself as a son of the pulp-SF and high-modernist writers that preceded him and a forefather to the New Wave and cyberpunk movements that followed his lead. Wilson’s study depicts Bester as an SF insider as much as an outlier, writing in the spirit of the genre but breaking with the fixation on hard science in favor of psychological interiority, literary experimentation, and adult themes. The book combines close-readings of the novel with broader concerns about contemporary media, technoculture, and the current state of SF itself. In Wilson’s view, SF is a moribund artform, and Stars foresaw the inevitable science fictionalization of our benighted world. With scholarly lucidity and precision, Wilson shows us that Stars pointed the way to what we have (un)become.

Audiences were outraged by D. Harlan Wilson's first play, The Dark Hypotenuse, when it opened in Copenhagen in 2012. Not only did it bear the weird, estranging aesthetic that distinguishes his novels and short fiction, the play contained scenes where viewers were attacked by actors as well as a variety of endangered animals, among them an African elephant that was euthanized onstage. The Dark Hypotenuse appeared in Wilson's first collection of dramatic entertainments. This second collection includes his latest work in the field. In Jackanape, a murderous dinner jacket wreaks havoc on a community of innocent narcissists who struggle to stay alive while negotiating the rigors of the School of Life. The Fingermen portrays a support group whose members have each lost an index finger; their stories reveal their insecurities as much as the nonsense that typifies contemporary existence. In both cases, Wilson satirizes with a hammer, oscillating between hilarity and solemnity as he invites us to think about the relationship between self-delusion and (in)sanity.

In a future where cinema has usurped reality and there's nothing special about effects, an aging movie star takes on the role of a lifetime, growing the flesh of an otherworldly kaiju onto his body. At the same time, all of the roles he has played in the past fight for control of his psyche and identity as agents of the media prey upon him. The result is alcoholism, ultraviolence, psychosis . . . and the promise of eternal life. Combining the aesthetics of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, and D. Harlan Wilson's own experiences as a model, stuntman, standup comic, and stiltwalker, Outr satirizes the contemporary mediascape while depicting a world in which schizophrenia has become a normative condition. Like his revolutionary biographies of Adolf Hitler, Sigmund Freud, and Frederick Douglass, the novel is written in Wilson's signature "H rnblow r" prose and reaffirms the critical consensus that he is a genre unto himself.

Fiction. NATURAL COMPLEXIONS is a biting satire on modern life as lived online and virtually more than here and now, saturated by media idiocy and the closed circuits of celebrity status at every turn. Its masterful combination of hilarity and eeriness functions as a 21st-century upgrade of the Kafkaesque--both in its compressed epigraphic form and in its obsession with the (im)possibilities of the sacred. Is Wilson's book vying for a scandal? What would that, in 2018 America, even mean?

Prophetic short stories and apocalyptic novels like The Crystal World made J. G. Ballard a foundational figure in the British New Wave. Rejecting the science fiction of rockets and aliens, he explored an inner space of humanity informed by psychiatry and biology and shaped by surrealism. Later in his career, Ballard's combustible plots and violent imagery spurred controversy--even legal action--while his autobiographical 1984 war novel Empire of the Sun brought him fame. D. Harlan Wilson offers the first career-spanning analysis of an author who helped steer SF in new, if startling, directions. Here was a writer committed to moral ambiguity, one who drowned the world and erected a London high-rise doomed to descend into savagery--and coolly picked apart the characters trapped within each story. Wilson also examines Ballard's methods, his influence on cyberpunk, and the ways his fiction operates within the sphere of our larger culture and within SF itself.

Prophetic short stories and apocalyptic novels like The Crystal World made J. G. Ballard a foundational figure in the British New Wave. Rejecting the science fiction of rockets and aliens, he explored an inner space of humanity informed by psychiatry and biology and shaped by surrealism. Later in his career, Ballard's combustible plots and violent imagery spurred controversy--even legal action--while his autobiographical 1984 war novel Empire of the Sun brought him fame. D. Harlan Wilson offers the first career-spanning analysis of an author who helped steer SF in new, if startling, directions. Here was a writer committed to moral ambiguity, one who drowned the world and erected a London high-rise doomed to descend into savagery--and coolly picked apart the characters trapped within each story. Wilson also examines Ballard's methods, his influence on cyberpunk, and the ways his fiction operates within the sphere of our larger culture and within SF itself.