“I hate science fiction”: Genres and Planets in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper reconsiders the critical promotion of science fiction in the Anthropocene. It highlights the genre’s technocentrism and ethnocentrism, and its historical alliance with empire and globalisation, but specifically argues for the genre’s association with an emerging planetarity whose hegemonic dynamics are underscored by Matthew A. Taylor (2016), among others. The paper revisits Margaret Atwood’s distinction between science fiction and speculative fiction, and calls attention to theorisations of planetarity that are not premised on scale or totality, to raise the question of genre and planetarity in and beyond science fiction proper. As a literary illustration of how genre my bear upon planetary thinking, the paper examines Jeanette Winterson’s 2007 novel The Stone Gods, which varies genres, scales, and planets. In the novel, a critique of imperial, world-making, planetarity is implemented as a parody of science fiction, whereas a change of genre opens for a different understating/practice of planetarity.