Books by Paul Youngquist
A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism (Discovering America)
Sun Ra said he came from Saturn. Known on earth for his inventive music and extravagant stage shows, he pioneered free-form improvisation in an ensemble setting with the devoted band he called the “Arkestra.” Sun Ra took jazz from the inner city to outer space, infusing traditional swing with far-out harmonies, rhythms, and sounds. Described as the father of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra created “space music” as a means of building a better future for American blacks here on earth.
A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism offers a spirited introduction to the life and work of this legendary but underappreciated musician, composer, and poet. Paul Youngquist explores and assesses Sun Ra’s wide-ranging creative output—music, public preaching, graphic design, film and stage performance, and poetry—and connects his diverse undertakings to the culture and politics of his times, including the space race, the rise of technocracy, the civil rights movement, and even space-age bachelor-pad music. By thoroughly examining the astro-black mythology that Sun Ra espoused, Youngquist masterfully demonstrates that he offered both a holistic response to a planet desperately in need of new visions and vibrations and a new kind of political activism that used popular culture to advance social change. In a nation obsessed with space and confused about race, Sun Ra aimed not just at assimilation for the socially disfranchised but even more at a wholesale transformation of American society and a more creative, egalitarian world.
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The Time Machine / the Invisible Man
by H.G. Wells, Paul Youngquist
Together in one indispensable volume, The Time Machine and The Invisible Man are masterpieces of irony and imaginative vision from H. G. Wells, the father of science fiction.
The Time Machine conveys the Time Traveller into the distant future and an extraordinary world. There, stranded on a slowly dying Earth, he discovers two bizarre races: the effete Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks—a haunting portrayal of Darwin’s evolutionary theory carried to a terrible conclusion.
The Invisible Man is the fascinating tale of a brash young scientist who, experimenting on himself, becomes invisible and then criminally insane, trapped in the terror of his own creation.
Convincing and unforgettably real, these two classics are consummate representations of the stories that defined science fiction—and inspired generations of readers and writers.
With an Introduction by John Calvin Batchelor
and an Afterword by Paul Youngquist
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