Mark Rose is Director of the University of California at Irvine Humanities Research Institute and Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

[Rose] writes pleasantly and translucently in his important study, Alien Encounters...He persuasively argues that `the opposition of human versus inhuman...defines the field of interest within which science fiction as a genre characteristically operates'...He has something fresh and apposite to say, and goes a good way toward a ground-breaking definition of science fiction's characteristic concerns. These appear not only in the surface structures of science fiction, but also lurking within its subterranean metaphors.