Creation Stories: Reproductive Crisis and the “Birth / Abortive” of Science Fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay develops a genealogy of feminist science fiction as a revisionary reckoning with the enduring influence of patriarchal creation stories. Situating my reading practice in relation to the Dobbs decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion in the United States, I consider scenes in Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, and Lilith’s Brood in which characters negotiate fraught reproductive choices with acts of speculative story-telling. The allegorical embodiments of reproductive crisis, I argue, are monstrous, inscrutable figures—John Milton’s Chaos, Mary Shelley’s creature, and Octavia Butler’s Oankali-human hybrids—who stand for inherited violence but also the “abortive” potential of reproduction gone awry.