Darko Suvin Research Articles

Science Fiction in the Post-occupation Iraqi Short Story in English Translation

English translations of Arabic literary works have interacted with -and possibly influenced- the Western context of science fiction literature. This thesis investigates how the English translations of post-occupation Iraqi short stories possibly contributed to the evolution of the Western science fiction genre. The study seeks to explain the relationship between post-2003 Iraqi literary works -that are a diverse range of corpus- as well as the possible influence of their translations and their counterparts in Anglophone literary systems. The research particularly focuses on Iraq +100 and The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq by Hassan Blasim. Blasim’s edited anthology, Iraq +100, is a prominent element in this study as it is analyzed to illustrate the interrelation between Arabic science fiction and Western traditions of this genre of fiction. As the roles of this edited anthology and short story collection are addressed and discussed in terms of the interaction between Anglophone and Arab literary systems, the study discusses the science fiction theories of Thomas Lombardo (2006) and Darko Suvin (2010). The primary objective of this study is to analyze the two selected books as they are introduced to the Western world and scrutinize how these books can be considered as a response to the evolution of the science fiction genre. Moreover, the translated works of post-occupation Iraqi short stories deal with the political and social impacts of the situation in Iraq after 2003. This thesis follows up by proposing that the anthologized English translations of these Arabic post-occupation Iraqi texts have contributed to the making of a dialogue between Arab and Western cultural and literary canons as well as traditions. The study also analyzes the short stories of the Iraqi writers, as illustrative of a specific expression of post-2003 Iraqi fiction that depicts the terror of violence in Iraq by delivering scenes of excessive violence in their texts. All in all, this study appears as an interdisciplinary work as it engages with translation studies, literary studies, history, and in a way, political science.

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.

Disputing the Deluge: Collected 21st-Century Writings on Utopia, Narration, and Survival by Darko Suvin (review)

Disputing the Deluge: Collected 21st-Century Writings on Utopia, Narration, and Survival by Darko Suvin (review)

Affordances of Fantasy

Abstract Each of the functions of fantasy described by J. R. R. Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” can be reframed through affordance theory into a kind of re-visioning. Such re-visioning is comparable to the formalist notion of defamiliarization or the science fiction technique that Darko Suvin called “cognitive estrangement.” Whereas science fiction projects alternative futures, fantasy's affordances allow writers to generate alternative worldviews grounded in real or invented mythic pasts. The initial move away from claiming to imitate reality allows fantasy writers to project inner experience onto an outer storyworld (there is no pathetic fallacy in fantasy), to depict multiple contradictory selves (housed within a single body or spread out over several characters), and to invite readers to consider alternatives to commonsense assumptions and seemingly inevitable social orders.

Towards an Anti-Antiutopia

This paper examines Darko Suvin’s and Kim Stanley Robinson’s assertion that the late-stage capitalism and neoliberalism of our world can be understood as an “antiutopia” that actively works to suppress the imagination of better futures. It argues that the relatively new science fiction sub-genre of solarpunk—which sets itself in direct opposition to the dystopian visions of the more well-known subgenre cyberpunk and imagines worlds that focus on the community rather than the individual, on environmental sustainability rather than environmental degradation, on social justice rather than subjugation and inequality, and on optimism rather than nihilism—offers some of the most promising paths toward the rejection of this antiutopia in favor of an anti-antiutopian (and therefore utopian) approach that actively works to bring about a better future. The paper suggests that the solarpunk futures currently emerging in literature, art, and online communities offer architects, landscape architects, and urban designers powerful inspiration for the future of our increasingly urban world. It examines a selection of short stories, novels, films, and other media—as well as innovative projects of urbanism—for examples of how embracing the practical utopianism of solarpunk can provide both visions of better worlds and potential paths for achieving them.

“Something Else Already Opening up.” The Utopian Impulse and the Novum of Disability in Missouri Williams’s The Doloriad

ABSTRACT The article focuses on a close analysis of The Doloriad, a 2022 debut novel by Missouri Williams. The post-apocalyptic text is read as a critical dystopia, which, while representing a destroyed world inhabited by degenerated humanity, implies a possibility of a better reality in the future. Examining the novel’s employment of disability in the context of disability studies, in particular, in view of the concept of narrative prosthesis, and employing Yi-Fu Tuan’s distinction between space and place to understand the core conflict between world orders and the characters associated with them, the author argues that The Doloriad can be perceived as an unusual text in which the utopian impulse is correlated with the novum (sensu Darko Suvin) of disability.

Carl Schmitt in Outer Space: On Cixin Liu's “Dark Forest”

Abstract Cixin Liu's science fiction trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past has sold more than 8 million copies and earned him the first Hugo Award to an Asian writer; it represents Chinese SF's breakout success in the anglophone fiction market. While his novels have received considerable popular acclaim, critics have yet to interrogate the troubling political vision they develop. The pivotal novum in the series—the new concept or creation, which Darko Suvin influentially identified as SF's chief mechanism for triggering “cognitive estrangement” in readers—is its “dark forest theory,” a set of governing axioms about life in outer space that make a necessary, inescapable hostility between different forms of organized life the fundamental political fact of the cosmos. This article argues that Carl Schmitt's political theory—his critique of liberalism, his investment in decisions made in a state of exception, and his core vision of politics as defined by the friend/enemy distinction—helps clarify the authoritarian currents in Liu's novels, as well as their break with several standards of characterization and narrative form conventional for realist fiction. By attempting to justify authoritarian order as the only adequate response to the existential cruelty of the cosmos, Liu's novels dramatize how Schmitt's notions about political enemies and heroic decisions in a state of emergency can serve to legitimate individual cruelty and collectively destructive warfare.

Antiutopianism, Social Darwinism, and Self-Preservation: Some Reflections

ABSTRACT This essay responds to Darko Suvin by focusing on his observations on selfhood and personality. Antiutopias are defined as narrative texts framed by fear and anxiety regarding the self-preservation of individuality and by subscription to the principle of relentless struggle for survival amid resource scarcity. The ambiguities that insinuate themselves within this framework include: first, the conflation of “self-preservation” with domination over others; second, the oscillation of self-preservation between a “biopolitical” pole and a “cultural” one. Turning to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, the article explicates why, in their view, “self-preservation” destroys “the very thing that is to be preserved.” The conclusion involves examining a few literary texts both as instances of the “pleasures of misery” imposed by the antiutopian obsession with “self-preservation,” and—contrastively—as ways of exploring the high cost and risk involved in a utopian transformation of selfhood beyond the dictates of “self-preservation.”

In Stanisław Lem's Orbit

In Stanisław Lem's Orbit

Disputing the Deluge: Collected 21st Century Writings on Utopia, Narration, and Survival by Darko Suvin (review)

Disputing the Deluge: Collected 21st Century Writings on Utopia, Narration, and Survival by Darko Suvin (review)

VIETNAMIZING THE TRALFAMADORIANS IN KURT VONNEGUT’S SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE

The goal of the paper is to explore Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five as a means of social criticism of the Vietnam War. Prior to analyzing the novel, we must establish the relation between Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of engaged literature and Darko Suvin’s view of science fiction as an ultimate literary alibi. Contrary to previous interpretations, the novel is viewed as a comment on the author’s contemporary society rather than the distant historical period of World War II or the spacially displaced world of the Tralfamadorians. Of primary interest will be the Tralfamadorian subplot of the novel which, by presenting the Tralfamadorians as American politicians, brings to attention the lack of interest and empathy for the lives of not only those who do not belong to their race/culture, but towards American citizens. The Tralfamadorian catchphrase “so it goes” is perceived as the government’s reaction to others’ suffering during the war, as well as its habit of ignoring issues, concealing information and showing complete disregard for its soldiers. Connecting the Tralfamadorian subplot to Vonnegut’s contemporary society, we aim to discover similarities between the attitude of the Tralfamadorians and the stance of American politicians during the Vietnam War, thus establishing a new reading of Vonnegut’s novel.

“The Moving Horizon Of Classless Harmonies” In Darko Suvin’s Poetry

The article discusses selected poetry by Darko Suvin against the background of his theoretical writings about science fiction, utopia and poetry. It argues that Suvin’s poetry estranges the ideological view of the present and history as an inevitable reproduction of injustice and alienation. The focus is on several poems included in the collections The Long March: Notes on the Way 1981–1984 (1987) and Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction, and Political Epistemology (2010), as well as in “Three Long Poems 2000–2016” (2016) and “Poems of Old Age (2002–17)” (2017) available on the author’s website.

Science Fiction and Native Epistemologies

Science Fiction and Native Epistemologies David M. Higgins (bio) Miriam C. Brown Spiers. Encountering the Sovereign Other: Indigenous Science Fiction. Michigan State UP, 2021. xl+143 pp. $39.95 pbk & ebk. Encountering the Sovereign Other argues that Indigenous science fiction approaches encounters with alterity from a richly ethical perspective informed by the spatial and communal grounding of tribally specific Native worldviews. If Euro-American colonial perspectives are often characterized by violent dynamics of abjection that define the self in contrast against an alien Other (and are driven by a spatial bias privileging outward expansion and a temporal emphasis on future-oriented progress), Miriam C. Brown Spiers suggests that tribally informed Indigenous worldviews, in contrast, can enable individuals “to accept the presence of an Other without feeling threatened, without getting swept up in a narrative of Progress and assimilation” (xxxviii). Furthermore, people with Indigenous values may be “more likely to allow lived experiences to inform their decisions, whereas those raised in Euro-American culture are more likely to try to force reality to fit into their preconceived notions of how the world should be” (xxxviii). This is a vital difference, Spiers argues, because it can engender dramatically different responses to encounters with alterity. She observes examples of this in Indigenous science fiction, where Native characters are often “better prepared to accept and respond to elements of cognitive estrangement than their non-Native counterparts” (xxx). When encountering what Darko Suvin describes as the “strange newness” of a science-fictional novum (Suvin 4), for example, Spiers notes that sf characters with conventional Euro-American worldviews “often refuse to acknowledge that a problem exists because it does not fit into their fixed notions of the world; meanwhile, Native characters recognize the presence of a novum, assess its effects on the community, and react accordingly” (xxx). Indigenous science fictions, in other words, envision ethical encounters with sovereign Others, and Native characters can often interact with strange Others in full and mutual reciprocity rather than reducing Others to mere negative reflections of the self. The book’s four chapters each offer close readings of key texts that exemplify this tendency. Spiers first examines The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan (1999) by William Sanders, a novel in which a Cherokee Gulf War veteran (Billy) and a Kazakh scientist (Janna) cultivate cross-cultural alliances and affinities in order to defeat a radiation monster summoned by colonialist New Age trash magic. Next, she turns her attention to Stephen Graham Jones’s It Came from Del Rio (2010), which tells the story of a US citizen named Dodd Raines who flees to Mexico after a failed bank robbery and eventually becomes a radiation monster himself after attempting [End Page 111] to smuggle moon rocks across the southern border. Raines’s transformation illuminates the coloniality of both race and citizenship, Spiers argues, and his journey provokes readers to recognize the personhood of Others who are dehumanized as they attempt to cross national boundaries. After this, she offers a reading of Field of Honor (2004) by D.L. Birchfield—a “shukha anumpa” or “Choctaw hogwash” alternate history in which a paranoid Vietnam veteran (Patrick Pushmataha McDaniel) discovers a hidden Choctaw community that has avoided removal to Oklahoma by retreating into underground caverns (49). This community, Ishtaboli, preserves Choctaw custom and heritage, eschews colonialist Euro-American cultural norms, and supports people from other non-Choctaw tribes by recognizing and honoring their unique cultures and traditions. Finally, Spiers concludes with a discussion of Riding the Trail of Tears (2011) by Blake M. Hausman, a story in which digital spirits (known as Little People or Nunnehi) subvert a VR re-enactment of Cherokee removal in order to help the novel’s protagonist (Tallulah) to disrupt the continuing cycle of violence that requires her to perform Native identity for tourists and endlessly repeat a debilitating narrative of Cherokee defeat and victimization. Spiers argues that the novel’s recognition of digital Cherokee as real people “reinforces an Indigenous perspective in which nonhuman creatures are recognized as peoples who are deserving of respect and compassion,” and this encourages readers to “acknowledge the humanity of the Other and respond ethically to the Other’s demand...

Two cheers for collapse? On the uses and abuses of the societal collapse thesis for imagining Anthropocene futures

ABSTRACT There is nothing new about predictions that climate change will cause serious social problems in the twenty-first century. However, in recent years, some tendencies in the environmental movement have made an even stronger assertion: the climate-induced collapse of industrial society is highly likely and may have positive consequences. This claim, which I term the collapse thesis, is associated with the deep adaptation movement in Britain and the collapsology movement in France. In this article, I analyse the work of key theorists associated with these movements to outline the core tenets of the societal collapse thesis. Responding to the criticisms directed against the idea of societal collapse, I partially defend the thesis by reading it as a form of science fiction. Following Darko Suvin’s notion of cognitive estrangement, it is argued that collapse encourages us to pinpoint the unstable ecological preconditions of everyday life and posit a new utopian world.

PHILIP K. DICK’S UBIK: A NATURAL POSSIBLE WORLD OF SCIENCE FICTION OR A SUPERNATURAL POSSIBLE WORLD OF FANTASY?

The article aims to explore whether the text of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik constructs a natural (physi- cally possible) or a supernatural (physically impossible) fictional world. According to Darko Suvin, one of the fundamental traits of science fiction is that its texts construct natural, physically possible fictional worlds. Readers of science fiction have often complained of Ubik, regarding it a confusing work, riddled with supernatural impurities and a lack of precise explanations. The betrayal of these expectations often casts doubt on whether this novel is science-fictional or a work of fantasy. If we aim to determine whether the fictional world of Ubik belongs to the possible worlds of science fiction, the theoretical framework for such a task can be found in Lubomir Doležel’s possible worlds theory. To do this, we must analyze the alethic constraints of the given fictional world, for those narrative modalities govern the formation of the fic- tional world’s physical laws and determine what is possible, impossible and necessary within its boundaries. If our analysis shows that the alethic constraints present in Ubik are analogous to the physical laws of the real world, we will prove that this fictional world is physically pos- sible and therefore possesses one of the fundamental traits of science fiction, naturalness. If our analysis shows otherwise, the fictional world of Ubik can be relegated to the supernatural, physically impossible worlds of fantasy.

Double Take

This article re-examines Darko Suvin’s concept of “cognitive estrangement.” Unlike the various criticisms of Suvin’s formulation that, charging it with inconsistency, seek to articulate a still purer Suvinism than Suvin himself managed, I propose that alternative definitions of those terms are implicit in Marx’s analysis of the value-form in Capital (1867–1894). The article thus reconstructs a Marxian “cognitive estrangement”; identifies its divergences from Viktor Shklovsky’s and Suvin’s conceptions; and, concluding with a reading of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), clarifies the practical differences the Marxian theorization entails in the act of interpretation itself.

Communism, Poetry: Communicating Vessels (Some Insubordinate Essays, 1999–2018)

Communism, Poetry: Communicating Vessels (Some Insubordinate Essays, 1999–2018)

New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory by Monika Kaup

Reviewed by: New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory by Monika Kaup Brent Ryan Bellamy Against the Linguistic Turn, Against New and Old Materialism, Ontology Now and Forever! Monika Kaup. New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory. Edinburgh UP, 2021. 346 pp. $29.95 pk & ebk, $130 hc. Monika Kaup's New Ecological Realisms builds on philosopher Markus Gabriel's claim that new realism is a periodizing term for what comes after postmodernity (196). Kaup launches an assault on the linguistic turn and offers admission to an exhibit on the "rehabilitation of ontology," conveying renewed interest in philosophical realism. Well worth the price of admission, Kaup's study provides a clarifying overview of the thinkers, their views, and their relationships, including but not limited to Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux. Kaup assembles four new realist theories to elaborate "realisms of organised wholes" (5) across her chapters: Bruno Latour's political ecology, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's autopoietic theory, Markus Gabriel's ontology of fields of sense, and Jean-Luc Marion's and Alphonso Lingis's return to phenomenology in the wake of poststructuralism. The book proceeds by way of comparative study to explore the suggestion that "grasping reality" requires "mapping worlds and exploring contexts" rather than "making a collection of everything that there is" (5). Kaup selects Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy (2003-2013), José Saramago's Blindness (1995), Octavia E. Butler's Parable books (1993-1998), and Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) precisely for their specific deployment of post-apocalyptic narrative. New Ecological Realisms argues that post-apocalyptic novels are a singular art form that reformulates how apocalyptic narrative works. Kaup relies on Derek Attridge's affirmation of the singularity of the literary artwork. Kaup writes, "Apocalyptic thinking is inherently ontological: it is about the world as a whole" (6). Moreover, she highlights the inevitability of narrative's drive to a specific predetermined end: "Its overt orientation towards an overall purposive design makes apocalypse the epitome of narrative as such" (57). In the case of Kaup's chapters, the novels discussed each envision "new collectives" that set aside "competition and domination" for "cooperation and ecology": "a trans-species ecological collective of human survivors and artificial species (Atwood); an organised society of the blind (Saramago); a post-apocalyptic religion built on loss and uprootedness (Butler); and a postapocalyptic self founded on passionate commitment (McCarthy)" (78). This is not a book about sf, although it will be of interest to some sf critics. Kaup relies on Darko Suvin's formulation of cognitive estrangement and holds with a distinction between serious sf and futuristic fairy tales. Colson Whitehead's Zone One offers an example of the latter, as Kaup claims that "the fantastic device of a zombie apocalypse serves as a means to evoke horror and serial combat of the action-adventure type rather than the critical [End Page 568] extrapolation of real-world trends" (65). American studies scholar Priscilla Wald's work on outbreak narratives appears in the book (176), as does Tom Moylan's concept of the critical utopia (222-23). Given Kaup's critique of the linguistic turn, it is no wonder that Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren (1974) is avoided here for its arch-postmodern inflections (despite its inarguable status as a singular text!), yet as Jessica Hurley reminds us in Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex (2020), Delany spent time in narratologist and fellow linguistic-turn traveler Frank Kermode's office writing Dhalgren. Kermode makes an appearance here as well, specifically for Kaup's theorization of postapocalyptic time. Though justified by Kaup's logic and methods, such selections remind me of film-studies scholar Rick Altman's observation of film genre writing: scholars can define genre precisely by how they select examples and which texts constitute edge cases. On my read, Kaup's decision about what information can count as meaningful given the discussion is discerning at best and idiosyncratic at worst. For instance, much care is given to narrate the intellectual history of Bruno Latour's oeuvre, yet Fredric Jameson, whose work presents serious challenges from a Marxist standpoint to the...

Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation by Tom Moylan

Reviewed by: Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation by Tom Moylan De Witt Douglas Kilgore Can We Be Utopian? Tom Moylan. Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 312 pp. $120 hc, $39.95 pbk, $35.95 ebk. [End Page 576] Tom Moylan publishes his latest book at a time of widespread disquiet in Western democracy. He does not sugarcoat his judgement that we live in a dystopia, a neoliberal capitalist world order in which "fascistic politicians, regimes, and mass movements are gaining ground and feeding official and individual rage," fattening on a bottomless pit of "virulent xenophobia" (1). Even as he mounts a Leftist utopian response to this emergency, Moylan speaks to widespread fears of the racist kleptocratic nationalism that has gained mainstream power. As a result, Becoming Utopian sits comfortably with other recent diagnoses such as philosopher Jason Stanley's How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018) and historian Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020). Moylan's project, however, is not simply to tell us that we are in trouble; he seeks to show us a way out. It is, perhaps, comforting that the path he blazes takes us through more than a half-century of his work in the imbricated fields of sf and utopian literature. The comfort comes from the familiarity of the path—we are not starting in the dark—and his trenchant belief that the philosophers, theorists, writers, and activists who labor in these fields have formulated ways of thinking and acting that are helpful for meeting the current emergency. At base, he argues that if we are to save ourselves from a dystopian world order, we must become utopian. Becoming Utopian may be read on its own, but it is also a valedictory text, assembled from more than three decades of publications in other venues. For those of us who have been following along, the book is most usefully read as the third volume of a trilogy. The first volume is Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (1986), in which Moylan links science fiction with the utopian tradition and identifies the critical utopia as an important modality within it. The second work is Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (2000), in which he introduces the critical dystopia as a forensic tool for understanding science fiction's engagement with the sociopathologies of the late twentieth century. These volumes influenced how a generation of sf scholars read and understood paradigmatic writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia E. Butler. Rounding out the trilogy, Becoming Utopian reminds us of that earlier work while reconnecting us to its theoretical architecture in Marxism, feminism, liberation theology, and political activism, all of which inform the author's life and scholarship. The result is not only an overview of critical debates around utopian desire and method but also a defense of contemporary science fiction as a medium through which we might model liberatory futures that are more than easily coopted prescriptions for lucrative media franchises. Being Utopian is not a book that you can consume in one sitting. While it reveals more of the writer than one generally expects from a technical treatise—I appreciated, for example, learning that Moylan comes from a Roman Catholic background similar to my own—it is densely packed and copiously footnoted, necessarily so. While his coverage of Ernst Bloch, Fredric Jameson, Ruth Levitas, Darko Suvin, Donna Haraway, and Kim Stanley Robinson is familiar territory for an sf or utopian studies scholar, [End Page 577] some of what he considers may not be. Moylan's deep engagement with the philosophical ground of liberation theology (and why it matters), for example, is revelatory, for this reader at least. It forced me to pay attention, to put the book down and seek further acquaintance with the Left of a Christian tradition overshadowed by the aggressive rise of white evangelical nationalism. As a valedictory text that is deeply retrospective, Becoming Utopia does not follow traditional monograph structure. It includes ancillary material that frames the central chapters, establishing its author's influence in sf...

Neoliberalism and Two Novels of Speculative Fiction from Singapore

This essay discusses two novels from Singapore—Tham Cheng-E’s Surrogate Protocol (2017) and Nuraliah Norasid’s The Gatekeeper (2017)—as speculative fiction (sf), a broader term for narratives that contain science fictional or fantastic qualities but are particularly invested in socio-political questions rather than resolutely celebrating a techno-scientific future. Through extrapolation and speculation, Singaporean speculative fiction snatches truth from the jaws of reality. Because these novels rely on imaginative speculation and extrapolation rather than historical verisimilitude and authenticity, they describe and invent a world that is similar to but a few steps removed from Singapore’s status quo. Such estrangement allows the novels to create a cognitive space in which readers can assess and question this status quo and sidestep the government’s out-of-bounds or OB markers. By extrapolating from Singapore’s present, they may evade a censorious state regime because their narratives imagine possible futures rather than revisit a politically sensitive past. Surrogate Protocol and The Gatekeeper raise questions about Singapore’s ethno-racial politics and state-sponsored promotion of biomedical technology and research. They employ technoscience and myth as novums (Darko Suvin’s term) to speculate about socio-cultural structures and strictures in Singapore. Although the novels do not offer explicit blueprints for socio-cultural change, through the cognitively estranging processes of extrapolation and speculation they question accepted norms regarding racialization, biopower, and gendered identities in Singapore. The novels’ protagonists try to resist the self-optimization called for by neoliberalism’s technology of subjectivity, even if they may eventually be compromised by its technology of subjection.