- ROSE, Mark
- (1939-)US academic and writer whose assistance in preparing New Maps of Hell (1960 US) was acknowledged by its author, Kingsley AMIS. An apocalyptic post- HOLOCAUST short story, "We Would See a Sign" in Spectrum 3 (anth 1963) ed Amis and Robert CONQUEST, did not lead to a fictioncareer, and MR remains best known in the sf field for Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction (1981) which, taking off from the DEFINITION OFSF as a form of romance in Anatomy of Criticism (1957 US) by Northrop Frye (1912-1991), redeploys the 19th-century confrontation between Man and Nature to define sf as expressing a conflict between the human and the nonhuman. Within the terms of this definition, which MR uses as a conceptual (and inevitably partial) illumination of the field, he couches some of the most elegantly literate practical criticism of selected texts the genre has yet seen. The anthologies Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (anth 1976) and Bridges to Science Fiction (anth 1980)with George R. Guffey and George Edgar SLUSSER contain, perhaps inevitably, less striking material.JCSee also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF.
Science Fiction and Fantasy Encyclopedia. Academic. 2011.