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ONE WAY OF UNDERSTANDING THE IMPORTANCE OF ROGER LUCKHURST'S contributions to sf studies is through Raymond Williams's 1958 essay "Culture is Ordinary," which defines culture as "a whole way of life" that includes social organisation and economic change as well as the artistic productions and rejects the high/low culture binary. Williams lambasts what he calls "this extraordinary decision to call certain things culture and then separate them, as with a park wall, from ordinary people and ordinary work." In his contributions ranging from a book on J. G. Ballard, The Angle Between Two Walls (1997), to an analysis of the rise of a professionalised culture of science in the Victorian era, The Invention of Telepathy (2002) , and his cultural history of the genre, Science Fiction (2005) , Luckhurst's work has consistently positioned our understanding of sf within a "whole way of life," breaking down the ghetto walls that isolate the genre.
Roger Luckhurst is Professor in the School of English and Humanities in Birkbeck College at the University of London. In addition to the books already mentioned, his work includes The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History (2000), co-edited with Sally Ledger; Science and Culture: Transactions and Encounters in the 19th Century (2002), co-edited with Josephine McDonagh; and special issues of New Formations, "Remembering the 90s" (2003), coedited with Joe Brooker; and of Science Fiction Studies, "Technoculture and...