Contemporary Science Fiction Research Articles

Social Reproductive Labor and Uto/Dystopia: An Analysis of Leila, Midnight Robber and Woman World

ABSTRACT Contemporary science fiction and speculative fiction with utopian/dystopian aspects from South Asia and the Caribbean have rarely been studied in tandem. Furthermore, no scholarly work has analyzed such texts produced under conditions of contemporary capitalism in the light of social reproduction theory which considers social reproductive labor that rejuvenates labor power. I study Leila (2017) by the Indian writer Prayaag Akbar, Midnight Robber (2000) by the Jamaican-born Nalo Hopkinson, and Woman World (2018) by the diasporic Indian writer Aminder Dhaliwal to connect social reproductive labor and utopianism and argue that social reproductive labor rejuvenates the labor power of utopian agents in social reproductive spaces such as homes, schools, hospitals, gardens etc. resisting dystopian conditions, nurturing hope, and rejuvenating utopian thinking. I question how utopianism is related to social reproductive labor in postcolonial contexts of the Global South, and propose that 1) dystopian scenarios are brought about by control of social reproductive spaces and 2) progress/betterment is actualized with renewal and rejuvenation via social reproductive labor. I contend that relating twenty-first-century utopianism to social reproduction is a valuable and novel approach, especially in postcolonial contexts where conditions of labor have been determined by complex histories of colonialism, enslavement, and indentured labor.

Utopian Science Fiction and Ethnic Future Imagination in Chinese Contemporary Science Fiction

Utopian science fiction, as a fusion of science fiction literature and utopian literature, integrates the construction of imagined interactions between people, technology, society, and the environment in future narratives. In doing so, it deepens the aesthetic value and social significance of science fiction literature. Chinese science fiction utopian future narratives use technological imagination to construct three models of expression. First, they re-examine the symbiotic patterns of technology, humanity, and time within the multiple dimensions of human subjectivity. Second, within the transformation of social structures, they reassess the subject and emotions, recognizing that the acceleration of social change has transformed human nostalgia into a series of rehearsals seeking future possibilities in the past. Third, within the dissolution of cultural politics, they reconsider space and the environment, reconstructing planetary existence through a model of deterritorialization. The imagined technological developments constitute the internal logic of Chinese science fiction utopian future narratives, suggesting that the future is an uncertain movement entangled with technology, time, space, and human nature. The confluence of technology, time, and humanity gives rise to people’s expectations and yearnings for eternal life. However, these three modes of narrating the future also lead us to return to Earth as the central theme, highlighting the planetary nature and reflecting on the meaning of existence.

Pliable facts and rigorous fictions: the cognitive persuasions of contemporary Latin American science fiction

ABSTRACT According to literary critic Darko Suvin, science fiction demonstrates a “supposedly factual” approach to imagining new worlds. In Latin America, however, the factual basis of lived experience from which such fictions are crafted has not always been taken as a given. This essay shows how contemporary Latin American science fiction makes use of the tensions derived from the encounter between the pliable nature of fact and the supposed rigor of cognitive logic through an analysis of two contemporary texts from the Hispanophone Caribbean: Puerto Rican writer Pedro Cabiya’s (1971) novel Malas hierbas (2010) and Cuban director Arturo Infante’s (1977) film El viaje extraordinario de Celeste García (2018). A fragmented zombie tale whose narrator may or may not be a zombie, Malas hierbas explores the science of zombification even as it draws upon both folklore and the corpus of zombie literature and film. El viaje extraordinario engages the genre conventions of romantic comedy and the Cuban emigration film, using the familiar landscape of these genres in the story of a group of Cubans who are invited to visit a distant planet. Cabiya’s and Infante’s texts keep the reader or spectator suspended in the liminal zone where truth is an open-ended series of multiple possibilities. As they reveal the constructed nature of facts and the narratives that support them, these texts illuminate the ways in which the possibilities around us are already the work of constructed fictions.

A Study of Robot Identity Writing in Isaac Asimov’s Fiction

Isaac Asimov, a famous contemporary American science fiction writer, constructs the identity of robots through describing entities and dialogues in his short story “The Last Question”. If we compare and analyze the author’s other short stories with conceptual metaphor theory and Bakhtin’s theory of dialogue, we will find that the author pushes the development of the storyline through the constructing the robot’s identity and the blurring of the boundaries, and from then on, maps the development of the relationship between man and machine and the course of its development. The purpose of this paper is to explore the special significance of the construction of robot identity and its contribution to the development of the narrative, as well as to analyze the expectations of the human-machine relationship embedded in the novel.

Environmental Crisis and Images of Desire in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and Pump Six and Other Stories

In the wake of mounting warnings from ecologists and other scientists, contemporary fiction writers have been alerting their readers to the environmental crisis as manifested in droughts, floods, wildfires, polar ice cap melting, rising sea levels, air, water, and soil pollution, species extinction, and a host of other ills. Within the realm of contemporary science fiction, Paolo Bacigalupi, a highly acclaimed American author, describes a world in the throes of catastrophic ecological change. Through his meticulously crafted narratives, Bacigalupi delivers a prophetic message, delineating environmental crises within the context of a posthuman world.Employing pertinent concepts derived from object-oriented ecological theory, this paper employs Jane Bennett’s notion of “vibrant matter”, Timothy Morton’s concept of “hyperobjects”, Stacy Alaimo’s theory of “trans-corporeality”, and Rob Nixon’s idea of “slow violence” to see how Bacigalupi engages in current discourses on the environmental crisis and images of desire in The Windup Girl and Pump Six and Other Stories. Bacigalupi presents grotesqueries against a background of multiple, post-apocalyptic disasters. While societal elites indulge in hedonistic experimentation, mega-corporations engage in genetic manipulation on humans, plants, and animals in pursuit of progress, aesthetic trends, profit, or survival. Humanity’s ongoing destruction of the planet in service to a consumer culture, along with the disastrous results of attempting scientific “fixes” without understanding the interconnecting causes or the scale of the phenomenon they are trying to “fix”, beg the question of whether science and technology will be able to prevent or ameliorate future ecological crises, or inadvertently precipitate even graver predicaments. Bacigalupi’s critique, illustrated through grim narratives replete with macabre examples, serves as a poignant exhortation, urging humans to meditate on and then prevent or mitigate the impending disasters of our own making.

The Representation of the Anthropocene in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction

Contemporary Chinese science fiction (SF) is preoccupied with the representation of the Anthropocene. Wu Ming-yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes (2011) and Hui Hu’s The Azure Tragedy (2018) are stand-out examples. In light of the framework of ecocriticism, it is found that both writers challenge long-seated anthropocentric thinking and practices in their catastrophic narration of human-induced plastic pollution in the marine environment, increased extinction of species by human overharvesting, and the human-induced general destruction of nature. Both connect natural disasters to human causes and reflect on human supremacy. The futuristic imaginations enabled by the SF genre effectively unfold the slow violence humanity commits and remains oblivious to. However, the criticism offered by the two authors is compromised to some extent. Hui Hu is optimistic about the new technology in dealing with anthropogenic eco-problems, while this technological triumph appears to sidestep the possibility of finding a more sustainable and once-and-for-all solution. Wu Ming-yi implies a new ethical perspective that rejects human centrality and reestablishes the human-nature relationship. On the other hand, he overlooks intra-human inequality in causing and forcing people to experience the eco-catastrophes. This article contributes to a new understanding of contemporary Chinese Anthropocene SF from an ecocritical perspective.

Kilbourn, R.J.A., & Empey, J.A. (Eds.). (2023). Feminist posthumanism in contemporary science fiction film and media. From annihilation to high life and beyond. Bloomsbury.

Feminist Posthumanism in Contemporary Science Fiction Film and Media strategically places itself within a consolidated and distinctly recognizable field by prioritizing science fiction as “the ideal venue for the exploration of [a] constellation of crucial themes” (1). These themes notably include HuManism and Anthropocentrism, along with their implications for the erasure or marginalization of ‘Woman’. Simultaneously, the book goes beyond mere placement within this established field, actively taking steps to advance and enrich the interconnections between feminist theory, posthumanist perspectives, and the expansive realm of science fiction. In doing so, it does not only acknowledge the centrality of science fiction in unraveling key societal themes, but it also contributes to the ongoing debate that seeks to bridge these critical frameworks for a more nuanced understanding of contemporary cultural narratives.

Концепции герметизма и гностицизма в современной научно-фантастической литературе

The aim of the research is to clarify the features of the interpretation of the concepts of hermeticism and gnosticism in science fiction in the late 20th and 21st centuries devoted to the problems of trans- and posthumanism. The paper examines the features of the integration of gnostic and hermetic ideas into modern English-language science fiction. The scientific novelty of the research lies in considering the works of contemporary science fiction writers (G. Egan, R. Sawyer, N. Stephenson, W. Gibson, Ch. Stross) and in identifying the main variants of how gnostic and hermetic themes are developed in the writings of these writers. The author sees the influence of gnostic and hermetic ideas in science fiction works devoted to the topic of transhumanist changes in the form of interventions in the human body at the biochemical level, the themes of mind scanning and digital immortality, and the rational observer of the Universe. As a result, it is proved that gnostic and hermetic elements in contemporary science fiction devoted to the problems of trans- and posthumanism allow writers to include the problematic of hypothetical technologies for improving human nature into the context of a centuries-old religious tradition.

The Bubble Metropolis: Manhattan Island Crises in Contemporary Science Fiction

As “the island at the center of the world,” Manhattan has inspired countless writers and has served as a spatial archetype in science fiction’s world-building. From the interdisciplinary perspective of literature and economics, this article discusses the crisis imagination of the “bubble metropolis” in five contemporary Manhattan-related science fiction novels including Cities in Flight (1970), The Blister (1975), Terminal World (2010), Zone One (2011), and New York 2140 (2017). The spatial variety of Manhattan Island in these science fiction novels is closely combined with its economic condition. The characters, plots, and spatial imagery of these novels gather to reflect the different stages of the operation of a bubble economy, illustrating a historical cycle of capitalism that can never be escaped. Manhattan Island has long been the symbol of the world’s rush for wealth. The fear of economic recession, environmental degradation, and class conflict have formed the special geographical features of the island in the future. The crisis imagination of the “bubble metropolis” also seeks to stimulate critical thinking on economic ethics, urban design, and high technology, calling for social justice and public welfare.

Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction

Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction

Envisioning Posthuman India: An Analysis of S.B Divya’s Machinehood

The contemporary technological epoch is witnessing the growth of posthuman discourse in science fiction novels as they focus on studying the future existence of humans and nonhumans. However, these posthuman insights and studies are mostly confined to Western sci-fi novels. The present study argues that contemporary Indian English science fiction optimistically deals with posthumanist concepts and shows how a harmonious existence is possible. The idea is delineated through S.B Divya’s debut novel Machinehood (2021), and it becomes a productive site to analyse posthuman India's future. The Borromean knot of human- achinenature in the novel delineates how this harmonious existence is possible. The study employs close reading and interpretation by using the concepts of “critical posthumanism” by Rosi Braidotti and “philosophical posthumanism” by Francesca Ferrando. The paper attempts to show how Divya deals with themes like advanced capitalism, neo-religion and sustainable environment, moving away from the conventional notions of anthropocentrism and how she unravels the potentials of posthumanism through symbiotic living.

Educational futures and social justice

This paper considers educational futures from the perspective of social justice. It takes as its framework futures studies, which looks at what is probable (what is likely to happen), what is possible (what could happen), and what is preferable (what we would like to see/make happen). It also makes the case for science fiction as a method of inquiry, arguing that science fiction is a useful method for determining what we think we might (or might not) want futures to look like, as well as where we think we are now. Science fiction, the paper argues, is as much about our anxieties about the present and where we might be headed as it is about any sort of futures we may ultimately arrive at. The paper draws from the works of well-known science fiction authors of color (WEB DuBois, Octavia Butler, NK Jemisin) as well as from lesser-known science fiction authors writing from American Indian, Latino/a/X, and LGBTQIA + communities. In so doing, the paper explores how science fiction has infiltrated the social imagination and how it leads to paths both dystopian (à la Elon Musk) and liberating (such as Afrofuturism). It concludes with examples of the probable, the possible, and the preferable in educational futures, drawing from contemporary science fiction stories centered on social justice.

Imagined reality, the liquid, dystopia, and virtuality in science fiction cinema: Don’t Worry Darling, a case study

The history of cinema has never shied away from the representation of the future, and beyond the abstract nature of the contemporary concept and its temporal fluctuations, the sheer profusion of scenarios and their different links to the very concept of the real have generated a wide range of futuristic film references, especially those conceptually linked to the dystopian. This article presents a case study of Don’t Worry Darling, directed by Olivia Wilde in 2022. It is a contemporary science fiction film proposal that condenses retro aestheticism and the American Way of Life with the historical proposals of science fiction and its forecasts about humanity’s connection or disconnection with sensory reality and the birth of virtuality. The analytical methodology, which links patriarchal dystopia, virtual reality and gender studies, is based on the analysis of differentiating elements that provide signs with which to question the reality of the experiences of the film’s main character and the environment that surrounds her. This research employs a qualitative analysis by means of case analysis with a dual approach: the audiovisual language and signs of gaps in the filmic reality created. Firstly, the audiovisual language will be analysed through the use of the decoupage technique and, secondly, the sequences that generate gaps in the filmic fiction and lead the spectator to realize that he or she is facing a simulation of reality will be organized. The anomalies identified and inferred have been subdivided for analysis into: unrealistic space/time (synchronizations and repetitions, duplications, spatial incongruities, logical errors and perfections), mediated reality and the eye metaphor and, finally, diegetic technological analysis.

Toward the Translation Zone of Solidarity and Hospitality Beyond Hate：On the Reception of “K-Literature” in Japan

The 2010s in Japan saw a boom in “hate books” inciting hatred toward Korea and China, along with the spread of hate speech against diverse minority groups and socially vulnerable people. Discrimination and oppression against women and minorities had emerged globally as a serious social issue during this period, as symbolized by the #MeToo movement and the BLM movement. This paper examines the meaning and potential of translation literature against this backdrop of an age of hatred. Since the Japanese translation of Cho Nam-ju’s novel <i>Kim Jiyoung, Born</i> 1982 became a bestseller in 2019, there has been a surge in the translation of Korean literature in Japan, known as the “K-literature” boom. Feminism is an important keyword in the active reception of Korean literature, and translation has mediated women’s solidarity against misogyny. Recently, Japanese readers have gained a great familiarity through magazines and translations with contemporary Korean feminist science fiction, a prominent feature of which is its subversive imagination that seeks symbiotic relationships between women, minorities, and non-human beings. It remains to be seen whether translation literature can build solidarity and hospitality among diverse Others transcending hate.

Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction, edited by Sarah Falcus and Maricel Oró-Piqueras

--- Submitted: 24 October 2023Published: 22 December 2023

Patior Ergo Sum: Data Surveillance and Necropolitics in Han Song’s Hospital Trilogy

The science fiction writer Han Song's trilogy Hospital, published between 2016 and 2018 in China, presents an eerie world of eternal pain within futuristic hospitals. With Michael Berry's translation coming out from January 2023, this work by one of the most well-known writers of contemporary Chinese science fiction is made available to an English readership. This article interrogates the nature of this pain which articulates not an impending risk of death but the patients’ inability to die. Through a process of datafication and digitalization, the patients are converted into streams of algorithmic codes and dehumanized as digital “profiles” to be collected, deposited, and re-accessed. These “profiles” become sophisticated enough to develop their own agency that replaces the patients as the targets of biopolitics, indicating an ontological transition that disempowers human beings and subjectivizes the meta-being of the patients’ digital “changelings.” I argue that this ontological transition signals a historical change in governmentality, epistemology, and political economy, gesturing towards new methods for the governance and commodification of populations in a discourse of patior ergo sum — I suffer, therefore I am.

From Urban Space to Cyberspace: A Research on Spatial Writing and Human-Android Relations in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. Dick takes the highly computerized but ruined Los Angeles of the United States after the post-apocalyptic war as the background and brings the cyberspace struggle between androids and humans as the novel's theme, sketching a cyberpunk society in which humans and androids fight against each other. The novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? invites people to think about cyberspace and human-androids subjectivity. Inspired by Slavoj Zizek's critical theory of cyberspace, this paper uses this science-fiction force as a text to explore how contemporary American science fiction reconstructs a revolutionary human-androids subject in cyberspace, challenging human subjectivity in the urban space. Faced with human-android coexistence, Dick affirms the coexistence of multiple subjects using equal dialogue, fully exploits the advantages of androids and humans, and constructs the subject with human-androids. Through an in-depth study of androids, this paper concludes that in a human-androids coexistence space, humans and androids should not be in a master-slave relationship; instead, they are each other's constitutive Other. Humans should try to break the boundary between self and others to accept a pluralistic and open subject.

Washed Ashore at High Tide: Music in Contemporary Science Fiction

Abstract Music, with its strong role in the politics of memory, has socialized the linguistically speculative, giving science fiction a groove that bends prose for queer, Black, and indie-minded futurity.

Contemporary Graphic Narratives of the End: Sketching an Ecopolitics of Disorientation and Solidarity through Sf Bande Dessinée

This article focuses on visions of the end in contemporary science fiction bande dessinée to explore the combined potentialities of the sf genre and the comics medium for imaginaries of world-rebuilding in the Anthropocene, and to develop an ecopolitics of disorientation and solidarity for a collapsing world. Bringing an ecocritical approach to queer and feminist theorizations of the politics of disorientation, it first discusses texts that draw (counter-)narratives of Anthropocenic futures, in which other-than-human agencies, spatialities and temporalities take centre stage in unsettling ways and collapse Western master narratives of the environment. In Jérémy Perrodeau’s Crépuscule, the non-linear storylines of an artificially created and now contaminated planet collide and assemble to disrupt the myth of a ‘virgin land’, rendering the erasure and slow re-inscription of genocidal and ecocidal violence. In Enki Bilal’s trilogy Coup de sang, it is the illusory hyper-separation of humans from nature that is dismantled through post-apocalyptic elemental graphics. The article then explores ways in which disorientation becomes fully productive as part of an ecopolitics when it is entwined with solidarity, a term that here extends beyond the human and is understood as a praxis of both care and resistance, drawing on ecofeminism and environmental philosophy. This is explored through Ludovic Debeurme’s trilogy Epiphania, which critiques and dissolves the human-animal boundary into enmeshed relationalities in sf visions toward multispecies communities and bodily and ethical mutations; and Jeanne Burgart Goutal and Aurore Chapon’s ReSisters, a choral narrative that makes use of comics’ potential for diffractive and participatory readings to draw the outlines of an ecofeminist uprising.

Urban Dystopia on Screen: The City, Architecture and Power in the Contemporary Science Fiction Film

This paper investigates the urban, architectural and spatial mise-en-scène of major western 21st-century science fiction film dystopias portraying urban societies under totalitarian rule. While extensive scholarship exists on architecture, the city and power and similarly on architecture, the city and film, the triad of architecture/city, film and power remains under-researched. This paper therefore concentrates on how power is mediated through built form on screen. It also investigates whether recurring visualizations and meaning(s) of built form concerning power can be observed. Considering key works about the built environment and its relation to power, this study also uses a semiological approach in order to assess the symbolic-metaphorical use of urban, architectural and spatial form. We assume that producers, directors, set-designers, screenwriters on one side and the film audience on the other ‘speak a similar language’ and share cultural codes and symbols. The frequent recurrence of specific urban, architectural and spatial visualizations in science fiction films which mediate specific meanings of power may be proof of a widespread, conscious or subconscious reading of these visualizations and understanding of their meaning(s) with regards to power – meanings which may therefore be deeply rooted in the culture of western societies.