Science Fiction Research Articles

Holding space for strangeness: in favor of critical utopianism in urban geography

Abstract. What could urban geographers continue to learn and unlearn from critical utopianism and emancipatory futurities? This contribution seeks to recover transformative academic practices and work towards didactics of speculative estrangement. Specifically, I propose to draw on science and speculative fiction literature to support the revision of established geographical imaginations and epistemologies in a higher-education context.

Imagining an Alternative Future: Children’s Bodies in Wonder Boy (1988), Magic Watch (1990), and Mad Rabbit (1997)

Abstract Since China launched its reform and opening-up campaign, the country experienced significant economic growth and infrastructure expansion, which helped spur the release of numerous science fiction works. Among these works, Zhang Zhilu’s three children’s sf films presented an alternative future for Chinese children and teenagers. This essay contends that while these films portray children as integral to infrastructure and the construction of a market economy network, they opt for natural and playful growth driven by a longing for freedom and emotional connection, and by doing so they circumvent the predetermined and goal-oriented trajectory of social development.

“The Struggle of the Worlds”: the Representation of the Future War in the Soviet Science Fiction of the 1930s

In pre-revolutionary fiction, the struggle of the worlds was perceived mainly as a clash between earthlings and an extraterrestrial civilization. After the emergence of the Soviet state, the struggle between the Bolshevik and antiBolshevik worlds became one of the key themes in fiction. By the early 1930s, the formula “struggle of the worlds” existed in Russian literature both as fantastic and non-fantastic, reflecting a real social confrontation. However, the idea of a world revolution as the goal and result of the struggle of the worlds is actually eliminated from science fiction. The social struggle, which can transform into an interstate conflict, by the end of the 1930s turns into a war of the worlds, where the military clash between the USSR and a hostile state is the decisive factor. The changes taking place in the international arena led to the fact that in science fiction, too, England and France are replaced by Germany, Italy and Japan as the main opponents. In the war of the future the victory is determined not by heroism and national unity, but also by military and technical superiority. Along with the apparently fantastic weapons possessed by both the USSR and the enemies in the future, the writers described technical achievements, whose fantastic nature is not always noticeable even to a non-specialist contemporary, since some weapons that were fantastic in the late 1930s already became a reality during the Great Patriotic War. One of the distinctive features of the works of 1938–1939 about the future war is the minimal differentiation between the fantastic and non-fantastic. On the one hand, there is no war yet, on the other hand, the distance between the future and the present is practically absent, and the “effect of the future” is leveled due to image of reality that maximally corresponds to the present. This artistic technique helps to convey to the reader the confidence that victory is the logical conclusion of the present, and not a fantasy.

Phillip K. Dick: A Psychotic Prophet?

The clinical potential of creativity research remains largely unexplored. Philip K. Dick’s deeply personal writings, particularly his journal following a psychotic episode, provide a rare insight into the neuropsychological processes that drive creativity. His unique blend of psychological depth and philosophical science fiction has profoundly impacted literature and popular culture, securing his place as one of the leading science fiction authors of the 20th century. Drawing on his own experiences with mental illness, Dick delved into themes like ontological insecurity, psychosis, dissociation, and drug addiction. Considerable research has explored the connection between madness and creativity. Building on this, the essay will apply clinical nosology to diagnose Dick as a case study, aiming to uncover how his psychopathology influenced his life and creative output. The second part will review recent research on creativity, focusing on factors that enhance our understanding of the roots of his genius. Progressing the neuropsychology of creativity holds significant clinical, social, and economic promise

Swallowing the Whole: World, Planet, and Totality in the Planetary Fiction of H. G. Wells

Abstract: This essay examines the conflation between world and planet in H. G. Wells's turn-of-the-century science fiction. Writing when "world=planet" was not a given, Wells actively participated in the formation of the world-planet vocabulary across a range of genres and throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, I look into the planetary experiments of his early fiction, where the materially limited planet continually thwarts the writer's attempts to equate that planet to the world he wished to develop as the ultimate political unit. Emerging through such attempts is a divergence between world and planet that enables us to think about the individual, the world, and the planet all on a commensurate scale, in a manner that is strikingly—and perhaps also troublingly—similar to what recent environmental discourse asks of us today.

Chinese Modern Science Fiction Literature: Translation and Acceptance in Russia

Chinese Modern Science Fiction Literature: Translation and Acceptance in Russia

Aesthetic Study of Spatial Design in Denis Villeneuve’s Films

Canadian director Denis Villeneuve has carved a distinctive niche in the realm of science fiction cinema with his unique spatial design aesthetics. This paper examines his directorial works including Dune, Blade Runner 2049, and Arrival, exploring how he intricately reveals complex relationships among human emotions, societal structures, and future technologies through natural landscapes, architectural styles, and narrative temporality. Natural landscapes serve not merely as backgrounds but as profound mediators of emotional dialogue with characters. Architectural styles not only align with world-building but also embody technological practicality and functionality. Narrative temporality, employing non-linear structures, deepens inner struggles of characters and exploration of destiny. Villeneuve’s films dazzle not only visually but also provoke profound contemplation on human existence and cosmic significance.

Dystopian Futures and Posthuman Realities

Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland is a dystopian science fiction novel set in a near-future Cape Town, South Africa, which delves into the complex interplay between posthuman biopolitics, technology, authority, and the human body. This article examined the posthuman dimension through the lens of biopolitics. The article depicts the oppressive nature of pervasive surveillance and corporate control informed by the apartheid past, wherein four characters become entrapped in a society governed by these forces. Moreover, it demonstrates how the bodily integration of the regulatory technology derives from the racial idea of Western personhood, which intensifies the subjugation by altering subjects into posthuman entities. By adopting the Foucauldian theory of biopolitics as an analytical framework, this study traces the pivotal role played by biopolitics in the transformation of individuals into posthumans. The amalgamation of surveillance technologies and bioengineered enhancements leads to the commodification and perpetual manipulation of the subject, serving to uphold social order and preserve capitalist systems. The findings of this study shed light on the intensification of the control exerted by posthuman biopolitics, thereby contributing to the reconfiguration of the place of humans in academic discourse surrounding the intersection of power, technology, and the human body. By critically analysing the novel through the lens of Foucauldian theory, this article offers insights into the consequences of biopolitical control, underscoring the need for critical examination and discourse on the ethical implications of emergent posthuman societies in the Global South.

The Poetics of Journey to the West (2021): Disclosing a Way to Dwell in the World

Abstract Science fiction films and poetry are often assumed to be unrelated or even mutually opposed. Among Chinese science fiction films in recent years, Journey to the West is a uniquely poetic example. It offers a secular challenge to science fiction while simultaneously performing a dual construction of science fiction textually and thematically through poetic expressions – thereby expanding the genre boundaries and localized creation possibilities of science fiction films. This paper uses life-world philosophy to examine the film’s existential theme and analyzes the film’s science fiction poetic expressions through the theoretical perspectives of film poem, poetic thinking, poetry-film, and Chinese poetics, arguing that they illustrate and compensate for the limited meaning of the science fiction genre and scientific rationality itself, while exemplifying the ability of science fiction films to serve as a way of disclosing being-in-the-world.

Between Shenguai and Science: The Visual Imagination of Technical Objects in Republican China

Abstract This article first examines the technical objects in three Chinese graphic novels (lianhuanhua) during the Republican era: Scientific Investiture of the Gods (Kexue fengshenbang), Scientific Demon King (Kexue mowang), and Black Bat (Hei bianfu). I regard the visual construction of technical objects in these works as a prehistory of Chinese-styled science fiction films between the 1930s and 1940s. I argue that early Chinese science fiction films share the same resources of traditional shenguai xiaoshuo with these graphic novels in Republican China. Scrutinizing the information about several early Chinese science fiction films, I locate the visual imagination of technical objects in the context of Chinese art history combined with local and imported conventions. I attempt to answer the following questions about the visual construction of technical objects in Republican-era artworks: how does the visual tradition of shenguai xiaoshuo connect to graphic novels and films in Republican China? To what degree could the hybrid modernity of shenguai combined with Hollywood films become a unique legacy for visualizing the technical objects in Chinese science fiction arts?

Precog visions: Predicting the future with the Minority Report sociotechnical imaginary.

The 2002 film Minority Report regularly appears in tech press articles asking whether it 'predicted the future'. When such publications invoke the film as having 'predicted the future' or 'come true', what social and political claims are being made? How has Minority Report become a discursive tool for imagining, constructing, and criticizing sociotechnical worlds? In this paper, we evaluate the worldbuilding process and real-world trajectories of three technologies 'from' Minority Report, as refracted through the lens of tech journalism: gestural interfaces, targeted advertising, and predictive policing. We argue that science fiction does more than represent technologies; it participates in their social construction. Some technologies imagined in Minority Report operate as 'diegetic prototypes', and the journalistic witnessing public takes them up in complex ways, interpreting, misinterpreting, and remixing the technologies depicted in the film. We further argue that it is not only technologies that move between film and reality in this process, but entire sociotechnical imaginaries. We find that in tech beat interpretations of Minority Report, the interfaces between bodies and technologies reflect a Silicon Valley sociotechnical imaginary of disembodied cyborg subjects and deracialized surveillance that materially and discursively shapes how technologies depicted in the film are developed and received.

Looking Back at Wasteland(s): A Historiographic Metafictional Reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

Some moments can never become memories; on the contrary, every breath taken, every word uttered, and every gesture performed are reminiscent of them. Much as the past is said to be past, it never dies. Memories of war belong to this group of the past never past, as in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The novel centres on a traumatized survivor of the Dresden bombing of World War II with an untraditional, fragmented, surreal, and impressive narrative style and generic hybridity of science fiction and historiographic metafiction. Slaughterhouse-Five is an example of historiographic metafiction in that it presents the bombing as a historical fact combined with fictional characters and the author's self-references, experiences, and interpretation of the event. The novel is also a significant work with regard to trauma studies inasmuch as it portrays the effects of wars on human psychology, the traumatized protagonist of the novel, along with other characters, including the author himself. Vonnegut employs metafictional elements to display that people experiencing war trauma create figurative wastelands, their minds become confused and disorganized, and the line between reality and fiction blurs, and thereby, he challenges the conventional boundaries between fiction and history. In that regard, what follows is an attempt to demonstrate how wars turn landscapes and human beings into wastelands both literally and figuratively through not only the author’s but also the protagonist Billy Pilgrim’s experiences and, finally, how postmodernism could be a tool to demonstrate those traumas.

The Broken Human–Object Continuum: The Technological Future and Socialist Contradictions in Rhapsody of the Ming Tombs Reservoir (1958)

Abstract The third section of Rhapsody of the Ming Tombs Reservoir (Shisanling shuiku changxiangqu 十三陵水库畅想曲, 1958), the first film in Mao-era China to include elements of science fiction, envisions a technologically advanced future in the year 1978. While seemingly aligned with the rapid industrialization goal of the Great Leap Forward, the film’s techno-fantasy attracted blistering criticism. Focusing on the overlooked historical debate that followed the release of the film, this article argues that criticism regarding the visualization of a technological future reveals how seemingly legitimate imaginations of a communist future reflect internal contradictions within the socialist present. Reading the film and the debate it sparked within the context of technological development in the late 1950s, this article identifies one locus of criticism: the human–object relationship. During the construction of the reservoir, the film shows a harmonious human–object relationship, but the futuristic part of the film depicts that relationship as profoundly alienated. I argue that this discontinuity does not betray ignorance of or an intentional departure from socialist ideology; rather, it reflects ideological contradictions between intellectual and manual labor, egalitarianism and class difference, industrialization processes and revolutionary agendas. In its rhapsodic depiction of advanced devices that consolidate the division of knowledge, the film unintentionally lays bare a fundamental conflict that was undermining the socialist system in the real world.

A Palimpsest of Hong Kong Futures Across Three Fictions (1962–2046)

Abstract Hong Kong has been located in the future tense throughout various genres of writing and popular culture, serving as a model for free-market neoliberal thinkers, as a proof-of-concept for future national reunification and as the backdrop for techno-orientalist and cyberpunk narratives. Paradoxically, within recent Hong Kong cultural productions and civil society debates is often a strong sense of a foreclosed future. This paper traces three fictions that together navigate the shifting temporalization of Hong Kong, from Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 (2004), which adapts the pulp fiction writer frame narrative from Liu Yichang’s The Drunkard (1963). The film’s anachronistic 1960s SF unexpectedly finds its way into an emerging genre/movement as seen in the video essay Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD) by Lawrence Lek (2016). These three (science) fiction texts reveal Hong Kong as a palimpsest of temporalities – an impossible fiction of ‘50 years of no change’, which somehow still returns as a site from which to imagine the future.

A Multidimensional Interpretation of A New Story of the Stone Based on Corpus Analysis

As a traditional science fiction novel, A New Story of the Stone blends old and new elements. This study employs quantitative descriptions to reveal that the novel's language is rich, vivid, and concise. In terms of narrative features, the novel inherits the traditional Chinese chapter-novel structure and maintains a strong focus on scene descriptions. However, it also reflects Western influences by paying attention to the portrayal of characters' psychological activities. The novel's social utility is pronounced, as it celebrates the dissemination of advanced technology, pursues the ideal society, reflects on societal improvements, and critiques the current society and backward traditional culture.

Cinematic Science Fiction, Indigenous Mythology, and Multispecies Entanglement: An Ecological Reading of The Mermaid (2016)

Abstract In a time of anxiety about environmental annihilation and human extinction, many literary science fiction (sf) authors from the Sinophone area have explored and expressed their ecological concerns through depicting a devastated environment populated by supernatural beings. This article traces a similar trend in cinematic sf by analyzing the 2016 film The Mermaid (Meirenyu 美人鱼), a science-fictional fairy tale written and co-produced by Stephen Chow 周星驰. The choice of merfolk, half-human half-fish creatures employed in the movie, differs, but not completely, from Han Song’s 韩松 portrayal of “aquatic humans” (shuiqiren 水栖人) in his 2004 novel Red Ocean (Hongse haiyang 红色海洋). I believe that the marine humans present in both works, reminiscent of supernatural figures belonging to Chinese and global mythology that embody a harmonious relationship between humans and nature, can be read as an attempt to decolonize science fiction, via a symbolic display of multispecies entanglement.

Space Games: Ecologies of Scale and Technologies of Hope in Taiwan's OPUS Game Trilogy

Extending ecocritical game studies to the Sinophone (or Chinese-speaking) world, this article offers a close playing of three OPUS-themed science fiction videogames produced between 2016 and 2021 by Taiwanese indie developer SIGONO, exploring the games’ function as environmental texts and their relationship to Taiwanese literary and cultural studies. By asking the player to engage in shifts in scale and perspective from human to nonhuman, life to death, past to present, and enclosed to boundless space, the OPUS games serve as an effective way of understanding ecological intervention that promotes multiscalar awareness and asks what still can be done and what hope can be found when all has already been lost. In doing so, they demonstrate the ecocritical potential of science fiction videogames that feature an in-game environment many millions of light-years away from our current earth-bound realities.

“What is the truth?:” On teaching paradoxes, race, family, and the self with Octavia Butler’s Kindred

This article investigates the pedagogical power of teaching and learning alongside Octavia Butler’s Kindred. I examine the stories of students enrolled in a special topics undergraduate honors seminar centered on personal discovery, race, and family using grounded theory and narrative textual analysis. Students’ narratives reveal the ways Kindred and science fiction more generally offer opportunities for substantive culturally disruptive pedagogy (San Pedro, 2018) through sustained engagement with the mechanics of time travel, contending with impossible choices, and wrestling with contradictions and paradoxes. Learning from this course demonstrates the usefulness of Black feminist speculative pedagogy for building students’ capacity for naming what is (Ohman, 2021) and by extension disrupting and confronting the historical and contemporary legacies of racism and heteropatriarchy.

Astrobiology impression survey for public in Japan

Astrobiology, an interdisciplinary field, is gaining attention from astronomers. While Astronomy and Biology are well-recognized research fields in Japan, there have been no previous surveys to gauge public awareness of Astrobiology as a new research field. The term "life in the universe" is often associated with aliens in science fiction. To understand the awareness of Astrobiology in Japan and which fields are considered relevant to it, we conducted a survey of 2,000 members of the general public. The results revealed that about 80\% of the respondents had never heard of the word "Astrobiology". We also surveyed the awareness of words related to Astrobiology, including those commonly found in science fiction and the media. Based on the results from this survey, we aim to discuss strategies to increase awareness and outreach in Japan with regards to astrobiology as a new interdisciplinary research field.

Designing speculative nonhuman-robot scenarios: An artistic approach

In the rapidly evolving field of robotics, a new paradigm is emerging that goes beyond anthropocentric design and embraces the innate ingenuity of the natural world. This article seeks to unveil ecocentric and more-than-human approaches, along with innovative materials, in creating nonhuman robotic scenarios within an artistic framework. Building on the foundation laid by anthropomorphic concepts depicted in science fiction, this article seeks to show cutting-edge experiments and material applications that imagine potential more-than-human scenarios in a robotic context. By highlighting examples from robotics, soft robotics, plant neurobiology, and material research, the article aims to propose an alternative concept to anthropomorphism. It endeavors to offer an overview of cutting-edge scientific efforts, experimental designs, and material explorations, all of which converge toward the realisation of robotic scenarios inspired by the animal and natural kingdom.