Myth Making Man : Myths of Human Evolution in the Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick, Doris Lessing and Octavia Butler

Myth Making Man is a study of the transmission of a set of scientific paradigms to the culture at large. These science-based cultural myths originate in the provisional and hypothetical language of research scientists, but with popularization, the story and images in the discourse come to assume progressively more prominence. Michael Prince focusses on three paradigms related to human evolution, paleoanthropology, eugenics-genetics, and Darwinian / Post-Darwinian evolution. The short fiction of Philip K. Dick is presented as an exemplar of this paradigm set as it was extant in early 1950s science fiction. The remainder of the book treats several Dick novels, the Canopus in Argos five book series by Doris Lessing, as well as Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series.