Speculative Fiction Research Articles

Wayward lives and beautiful experiments

Saidiya Hartman’s 2021 Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments literally re-imagines the experience of young black women in 1910s New York, employing a method Hartman calls ‘critical fabulation’, in which—rather in the form of retconned speculative fiction—she teases out gaps in the archival record. Employing Hartman’s own call-and-response technique of rhetorical questions which spotlight the uncertain answers to questions about minoritized human experience, I ask: ‘How did the “light-skinned chorines” in multi-racial 1930s nightclub and theater culture create spaces of “beautiful experiment” within their day-to-day? How did the “noisy” dance of jazz reinscribe—or subtly subvert—the white racist gaze? What did the chorines think about all this?’ This creative non-fiction essay imagines responses.

Reincarnation of an Egyptian queen

This article proposes Nina Simone as an Afrofuturist artist who explores themes of utopia and dystopia in connection to posthuman discourses. Having established three main ways in which this is a speculative approach, it then explores gaps in existing theories of posthumanism and Afrofuturism. It also considers work that addresses the omission of female musicians in Afrofuturist theory and proposes alternative theories in the form of speculative fiction and Black utopias. The article discusses Simone’s frequent allusions to Egyptian myth, her self-identification as a ‘robot’ and her interest in other planets, planes and spheres. It argues that, beyond the unexplored parallels with ‘classic’ Afrofuturism, there is a sense of dystopianism, apocalypse and reterritorialization throughout Simone’s mature work. To explore these connections, three case studies are used: the 1969 album Nina Simone and Piano!, the song ‘22nd Century’, and Simone’s performance at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival.

Mycelium Matter(s) – Fictionalizing Human–Mushroom Relations

Through this paper, the author tries to explore a simple yet complex question: how do we decentralize the human presence in conversations about climate-change? To do so, this speculative climate 2ction is presented through the non-human narrative perspective of mycelium (fungi). The speculative fiction provides a space for re-thinking our ontological and epistemological strategies and categorizations of nature/culture division, as well as how we understand nature in relation to human.The speculative climate-fiction proposes a reconsideration of human in relation to nature/climate, through fungi. It further explores how sensory, bodily, and multimodal methodologies may work in interaction to produce new possibilities to explore the corporealities of human-nature relationships and how a non-anthropocentric understanding of climate-change can allow for an emerging engagement with a vast mesh of human and beyond-human agencies. Drawing inspiration from Sylvia Plath, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, and using Erin Manning’s understanding of a5ect as having a feltness that we often experience as a becoming-with, in this case, a becoming-with nature, the speculative-fiction (SF) is written as a dialogue between fungi and human. The SF also uses artwork created with mushrooms, fungal roots, as well as mushroom extracts, to exaggerate the presence of beyond-human beings in a new onto-epistemic strategy that reconsiders climate change and human–nature relationships.

Editor’s Note

We are excited to announce that ISLE 29.4 is almost a double issue. The volume opens with Rebecca S. Oh’s “Apocalyptic Realism: ‘A New Category of the Event,’” which examines how “apocalyptic realism both traces the ways in which world-ending closures are historically produced and the ways in which worlding goes on from within imposed forms of futurelessness.” Oh’s article “considers Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People as an example of apocalyptic realism.” Then, Swaralipi Nandi, in “Speculating the Carbon Rift: Capitalistic Dystopias and the Ecological-Noir in ‘Carbon,’” “analyze[s] Maitrey Bajpai and Ramiz Ilham Khan’s short film Carbon (2017) as a fictional resistance to the cultural amnesia of climate change.” Nandi also explores “the unsuitability of literary realism as a mode for the representation of climate change and the possibilities of speculative fiction as a narrative vehicle to convey the vagaries of a future thriving on present fossil capitalism.” Angelo Monaco’s article “Archives of Environmental Apocalypse in Sarah Moss’s Cold Earth: Archaeology, Viruses and Melancholia” focuses on how Moss’s novel Cold Earth (2009), which is set in the Arctic, is “concerned with the dread of obliteration and the yearning for recovering time” and how “archaeological excavation, environmental apocalypse, temporal disarray, and memory frictions function as archiving vehicles.” Staying in the polar regions, in “The Silent Continent? Textual Responses to the Soundscapes of Antarctica,” Carolyn Philpott and Elizabeth Leane study “the soundscapes of Antarctica—especially its silence—and their role in human experiences of the continent, as captured in written narratives from the ‘Heroic Era’ (1895–1922), when the continent was first explored on foot, to the present day” in order “to draw greater attention to the role of the sonic in human engagements with Antarctica and to the importance of written texts in capturing the essence and meaning of these experiences.”

Importance of Storytelling and Speculative Fiction in the Transition into A Posthuman Ecosystem

Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools the Homo sapiens species have at their disposal. Considered one of the oldest forms of art and an evolutionary adaptation for survival, storytelling will surely have an important role in the challenging transition into a posthuman ecosystem. This article argues that Homo sapiens will eventually evolve and fragment into other species much due to our natural proclivity towards enhancing technologies; we propose that empathic storytelling might be paramount to reduce otherness and othering in-between human, transhuman, and posthuman sentient beings. The importance of storytelling as a deterrent for othering future complex artificial intelligence, augmented humans, and posthuman species has not been properly explored and studied in-depth, therefore, we collected data and points of view on vital concepts pertinent to the discussion. This paper’s main goals are to contribute to the debate of storytelling and posthumanism and to understand how the action of telling empathic, appealing, and engaging stories, be it through books, moving images, or videogames could be used for the betterment of future societies and their relations. We concluded that by creating and disseminating big quantities of beautiful, touching, empathic, direct from the heart, speculative, truthful, and thought-provoking stories, in all available media, it is possible to combat the nefarious act of othering and prepare contemporary societies for the emergence of transhuman and posthuman species; we further argue that speculative fiction and audiovisual content production systematically explores concepts such as androids, artificial intelligence, cyborgs, robots, and what it means to be human, making them an efficient genre and media to achieve the above-mentioned inspiring goal of connecting people empathically and reducing future othering.

Ruins of the Future: Decaying Urban Landscapes in Richard Jefferies, J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter’s Speculative Fiction (After London, The Drowned World and The Passion of New Eve)

‘Tous les hommes ont un attrait secret pour les ruines’ (Chateaubriand 360) : Chateaubriand’s declaration conforms to his contemporaries’ fascination for the rediscovered ruins of Antiquity, but proves to be still relevant in contemporary speculative fiction. The scopic drive motivating the contemplation of fallen civilizations is centred around the image of decaying city landscapes. If Volney,1 Chateaubriand or Mary Shelley2 are notable example of this phenomenon spanning early to late Romanticism and provide a precedent of the ‘nostalgia for ruins’ (Huyssens, 6), the merging of this type of portrayal with speculative fiction has proved a fertile soil for socio-political and literary explorations of the ‘city’ in its political sense, as the readers get to contemplate the ruins of their present. The posterity of this tradition has acquired new meaning as the decay of the city mirrored contemporary anxieties—nuclear war being a central one after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which inspired numerous science-fiction tropes in both popular and critically acclaimed fiction. As Burton Pike phrases it, the twentieth century literary city came to ‘express the fragmentation of the very concept of community’ (viii). Indeed, the traditional division between the refined, civilised city and the vulgar, violent margins is reversed in contemporary speculative fiction: a ‘relapse into barbarism’3 in the city, pastoral wilderness in the countryside. Those innovative takes on the image of the city lay themselves open to ecocritical, dystopian and ontological readings. To do so, I will provide an analysis of Richard Jefferies’s After London (1911), which delves both into the pastoral description of new wild England and the effect of the traumatic ‘apocalypse’ turning Londoners into barbarians’ tribes; J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World is an example of what he calls ‘inner space’,4 the speculative nature of his story linking the ruins and toxicity of London with the disrupted individual and communal psyche of the survivors. Finally, Carter’s take on another iconic city, New York, offers another perspective on the ruins as symptom and mirror of a decaying humanity, as the apocalyptic metropolis becomes the locus of consumerist and sexual greed, a reversed mirror of John’s New Jerusalem.

Indigenous diasporas in speculative fiction: Writing through estrangement

AbstractThis article explores diasporic dimensions of Indigenous experiences and narratives on Turtle Island, by looking at the Indigenous speculative fiction novels The Back of the Turtle (2014) by Thomas King, The Marrow Thieves (2017) by Cherie Dimaline, and The Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018) by Waubgeshig Rice. The three evoke (post)apocalyptic or dystopic futures involving environmental crises and destruction. As Indigenous peoples have historically witnessed and experienced Apocalypse with colonization, both in the past and the present, speculative fiction provides fertile narrative ground to work with and through those legacies of devastation. I particularly focus on how these novels offer accounts of different forms of mobility that may be defined as diasporic. Often prompted by settler use and abuse of the land, and even the exploitation of Indigenous peoples as resource, the displacements and movements recorded in these stories trace routes of both oppression and resistance. These diasporas have fundamental political and historical significance, in that they highlight connections between past acts of colonialization and the violence of present‐day neoliberal capitalist practices. Simultaneously, speculating with estrangement in the form of the supernatural, apocalyptic or dystopic, serves as a mechanism to delineate decolonial stories of presence and survivance. These stories, while constantly referring to the past, also include motion towards possible better futures, countering Western notions of Indigenous peoples as static and futureless.

Arthurian Cosmopoiesis: Wolfram's Parzival

Offering five possible thematic pedagogical approaches to Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival (1200–1210), this article argues that the romance, often overlooked due to its complexity, is a rich and timely medieval work that will capture students' imaginations. We offer a practical guide for using the romance (or selected excerpts) to introduce students to current medieval studies approaches through its treatment of the Global Middle Ages, the medieval racial imagination, and the complexities of gender, and we explain how the social dynamics of Parzival' s narrative world-building recommend its inclusion in courses with topics such as medievalism, speculative fiction, and adaptation. (CN & AMR)

Chris Baker’s Kokopu Dreams: A Prophetic View of a Disrupted Post-Pandemic World

The global pandemic, with its multiple and far-reaching disruptions, has forced us to rethink and rewrite the world we live in. Chris Baker’s novel Kokopu Dreams (2000) sounds somehow prophetic today in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis. His work could be labelled as “speculative fiction” and placed among the umbrella categories of magic realism, science fiction and post-apocalyptic fiction. Set in Aotearoa New Zealand, the story focuses on the life of the few human survivors of a rapidly-spreading deadly illness caused by the rabbit calicivirus, illegally introduced into the country. The calicivirus has mutated and killed almost all the human population, who is now living in a land controlled by animals and spirits. The novel is also a template of transcultural writing, mixing Māori creation stories, Christian and Celtic mythologies, scientific issues and aspects of everyday life. Having grown up in a contact zone of different cultures―Baker is of Polynesian (Samoan), Anglo-Saxon and Celtic origin, but regards himself as a “Pacific” person―he shares that multiplicity of belonging which is a typical condition in the Pacific region today. Baker deals with a physical and cultural collective trauma, and the process of re-signification of the ethos in a bi-cultural country made of people of mixed ancestry, European and Māori. The re-elaboration of the epidemic experience is therefore based on both a Western rational representation and an indigenous mythical one.

Rewriting History Through Creative Writing

Rewriting history in creative writing involves reinterpreting, reimagining, or changing historical events, people, or periods in one's works of fiction. Authors may take a variety of approaches, from small alterations providing new insights to extensive changes deviating from history considerably. This critical rethinking of the past and its narrative representations can explore alternative histories, contest established views, and highlight the voices of people historically ignored. Several types of creative writing can be grouped under the definition of rewriting history, with each having its conventions and goals. Historical fiction, based on real historical artefacts or events, allows writers to imagine filling gaps left by historical records, making history relatable. Alternate history explores what might have been if critical moments in the past unravelled differently, challenging the inevitability of historical events. Speculative fiction, a popular style, blends real historical settings with fantastical ones, offering a perspective on historical possibilities informed by imagination. Historical revisionism in imaginative literature significantly influences collective memory and cultural identity, questioning existing narratives and exposing submerged histories. The paper is a modest attempt to unravel the fact of rewriting the history through creative writing.

Afterword: Anthropology and Science Fiction

SUMMARYAnthropology and science fiction are interlinked traditions of knowledge production and overlap in several different ways, not least by the fact that each of these practices was shaped by the colonial encounter. This afterword to the special section “The Ordinariness of Cross‐Time Relations: Anthropology, Literature, and the Science Fictional” addresses those linkages and suggests that anthropology as a discipline stands to gain from an engagement with speculative and science fiction, for instance, through a questioning of ethnographic realism. [science fiction, speculative fiction, social theory, colonialism, ethnographic realism]

Afterword: Uniquely Ordinary

SUMMARYIn this afterword, I compare the different ways the ordinary is invoked in the articles of the special section “The Ordinariness of Cross‐Time Relations: Anthropology, Literature, and the Science Fictional” and compare it to my own research experience in Havana, Cuba with writers of speculative fiction. I argue that the ordinary is something relative to the author's experience, as Alejo Carpentier describes in his writing on “lo real maravilloso,” and should be considered as having a utility in the communication process between creator and intended or ideal audience. This enables the information conveyed through the trope of the ordinary to be both far‐reaching and highly specific, depending on the author's intention. [writers, science fiction, quotidian, lo real maravilloso].

Epistemological Warfare and Hope in Critical Dystopia

This book is an application of the idea of critical dystopia to three understudied novels and the beginning of an argument about utopian desire itself. Emrah Atasoy, a prolific author who reviewed Turkish speculative fiction in a well-received 2021 Utopian Studies article, is modeling a search for hope in dystopian texts. In this book, derived from his dissertation, he examines three British novels written in three different eras of the twentieth century: Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937), Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed (1962), and P. D. James’s The Children of Men (1992). In each novel, Atasoy argues, the protagonists move from an ignorance that served the interest of the dystopian forces to a resistant knowledge that should be read as offering hope, both as resistance and as knowledge.The book is organized in a straightforward way, with an introduction, conclusion, and then three analytical chapters, one for each of the novels. The introduction is expansive, offering both brief surveys of the nature of utopia and dystopia and a recounting of a number of themes taken up by dystopian texts: education, politics, gender roles, family life, and more. Layered onto this is a discussion of theorizing around knowledge and power and the transition from ignorance to understanding. The chapters focused on the individual novels are all similarly expansive. Atasoy offers biographical information about the authors along with considerations of the primary social and political events to which the authors might be responding. The analyses of the novels focus primarily on the motivations of the protagonists, but interspersed in the plot summaries are narrative cul-de-sacs explaining particular textual details (for example, the discussion of Theo’s choice of the Greek statue of Diadoumenos as allocation to leave a note for the Warden [James, 37]). These little detours are often interesting but can be distracting from the primary analytic focus.The analyses themselves also cover a lot of territory. The middle section of the chapter on The Children of Men (118–34) includes discussions of power, eugenics, religion, sexuality, punishment, assisted suicide, and immigration. Each of these is used to elucidate modes of social and political control wielded by the Warden, but the sheer number of issues included in the fast-moving analysis left me wanting more. Atasoy’s analysis of Quietus nicely captures the ways in which James has created a world where the elderly are both encouraged and manipulated to end their lives for the good of the whole. This discussion fits especially well with the larger focus of his analysis on modes of social engineering. Fewer themes and more close readings like this one would have deepened the reading experience. But for anyone beginning a project on one of these novels, this book is a good place to start.This book begins and ends with the interesting contention that times of catastrophe diminish the literary production of utopia, and potentially the capacity for hope itself. While the point of this book is not to defend this claim empirically, it is one worth considering for any scholar of utopia, or any person interested in the potential of future change for the better. The book may underplay the fact of twentieth-century literary utopias (there is a brief discussion of the feminist utopias written in the 1970s and 1980s), but it is surely correct that there is an imbalance in the production of utopia in favor of dystopia. Utopias are more challenging to construct and potentially (especially in this day and time) less formulaic than dystopia, which is an increasingly popular (and marketable) genre.Kim Stanley Robinson noted in a recent interview that “[utopias] shape people’s conception of what’s possible that could be good in the future.”1 Atasoy’s book offers the possibility that a close reading of dystopian texts might well help us uncover other ways of finding out what future good is possible. By extolling the value of finding the hopeful in the dystopian text, he is asking utopian scholars to facilitate discovering the ways in which “the utopian enclave does exist in the dystopian world” (151).

When I Cry Into My Icosahedral Mermaid Womb, The Sea Cradles Me: Creating Imaginary Water Worlds For Suicidal Depression and Healing Through Multisensory Environments

Imagine a future where technology is liquid, where the human senses are entirely wet, foggy, mushy, and gooey. Where everything and everywhere is liquefied and watery. Where humans evolve into pluviophile (love of rain) and hydrophile species. Imagine what state our depressed and suicidal bodies would react to and sustain in this hyper-watery world. This thesis set out to reimagine and recreate my personal experiences with depression, anxiety, and suicidal behaviours through a wet, watery, emotional, and hyper-futuristic narrative. The project aimed to design and create a series of immersive multi-sensory environments that provide therapeutic and healing spaces for mental health and well-being. Thus I have been informed by my personal story through imaginary water worlds and speculative fiction writing as a method of inquiry. These immersive multi-sensory works explore various emerging creative technologies to help realise my thesis project, such as using sound, interactive installation, digital, and extended reality (XR) technologies. I have used my own body, bodily experience, and personal feelings as a storytelling tool and primary material for my master's project. Water plays a significant role in my creative research and practice. Also, it hugely influences my writing, providing therapeutic and healing qualities. The approach to my research has drawn from methodological perspectives, including autophenomenography, first-person narrative, sensory ethnography, and speculative fiction through creative practice. I am using 'water' as a metaphorical guideline for methodological approaches to tie together as one, connecting these bodies of watery perspectives into an oceanic methodology. The significance of the research is the engagement and immersion of the multi-sensory environments through creating imaginary water worlds that offer a space for others to swim, dive, and acknowledge these critical issues relating to mental health by sharing personal stories and connections to their own experiences.

Emotional Registers of Queer Representation: Gothic Expression in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Vivienne Medrano’s “Addict”

Queer representation in media often relies on a limited perspective built around identity visibility. Who or what is this made to serve? As with the unhappy queer archives Sara Ahmed explores in The Promise of Happiness, queerness is rendered as a surface level struggle for legitimacy in society and relationships, that far too often ends in melancholy or despair. While non-queer audiences indulge in a temporary alignment with a vicarious interpretation of queer experience, the queer audience is presented with an often melancholic or distressing representation of our racist, hetero-patriarchal, neoliberal capitalist present. Working within western canons assembled through the fetishising of liberal rationality, to be outside the scope of the liberal human subject is a wide and deep realm of the undefined and unknown. This is the home of speculative fiction and where the sprouts of popular media were seeded. The gothic, horror, and science fiction grew out of the artistic impulses that clash at the borderlands between the rational and irrational, known and unknown, subject and object, human and queer.
 The twisting meeting places of horror and queerness is experienced best within queer treatments of horror. A close reading of the queer emotional affects in the queer media products The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s “Floor Show” sequence and Hazbin Hotel’s music video “Addict,” demonstrates that queer representation is inclusively produced through emotional affects most visible in horror. Furthermore, the gothic and horror pastiche at work within these two particular segments shows Jack Halberstam’s low theory in action.

Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium by Rachel S. Cordasco

Reviewed by: Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium by Rachel S. Cordasco Michael A. Morrison Rachel S. Cordasco Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium Urbana. University of Illinois Press. 2021. 316 pages. DURING ROUGHLY THE first half of the twentieth century, the literature of the fantastic in English was subdivided into well-delineated genres—science fiction, fantasy, horror—with forms such as surrealism and magical realism lumped into the catch-all category "literature." In subsequent decades, however, these categorizations became increasingly inappropriate, as authors began to merge genres and mainstream authors began to incorporate tropes from various genres. Thus was born the collective cross-genre label "speculative fiction" (SF). This worldwide phenomenon is the topic of Rachel S. Cordasco's remarkable book, Out of This World. To appreciate this unique book, you need to be aware of its scope, content, and approach. For this is no mere annotated bibliography. Rather, each chapter is a guided tour through speculative fiction in translation (SFT) from a "source language" into English. Those fourteen languages are Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. Although a handful of works of SFT have been widely read since (at least) the 1871 translation of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), the first major wave of SFT began in the mid-twentieth century. Accordingly, Cordasco focuses primarily on books (not short stories) of SFT published since the 1960s. Each chapter begins with a short, invited introduction by an author, scholar, translator, or editor; these introductions provide a (very brief) contextual overview of SF in that chapter's source language. The rest of each chapter consists of discussions of individual SF texts that have been translated into English. In addition to providing brief plot information, Cordasco situates each book in the author's body of SFT and illuminates extraliterary influences that shaped the work and its selection for translation—also including, as appropriate, cultural and linguistic factors that affect translation. The most relevant such influences, unsurprisingly, are politics (Russian, Chinese), commerce (French, Czech), attitudes of the country's mainstream literary establishment toward SF (German, Korean), and influences of Western (anglophone) SF on the countries' SF (Finnish, German). Rather more surprisingly, some languages' inherent properties render translation into English especially difficult. An especially interesting example is modern Hebrew, whose structure and semantics differ radically from those of English. As Cordasco explains: "Hebrew is … a writing system in which the vowels are implicit. Thus, any given sentence [leaves] the reader to determine word function and meaning based on context or common sense." So, while the inherent nature of Hebrew "becomes a powerful strategy for reference and allusion, direction and misdirection, that can be so effective in SF," these very qualities "often lead more to obfuscation or fabulation than to clarity," a challenge for any translator. Most chapters treat a sequence of individual texts that constitute SFT from that chapter's source language. In others, where appropriate, Cordasco devotes a significant portion of a chapter to the oeuvre of a single, important, widely translated author. For example, a significant part of her chapter on Polish SFT concerns the works of Stanisław Lem, whose nineteen books of SFT encompass a bewildering range of topics and forms, from his science fiction novel Solaris (1961) to his collection of introductions to nonexistent books, Imaginary Magnitude (1984). To guide readers through this intriguing maze, Cordasco begins with an overview of Lem's primary themes. She then divides his translated works into three categories and begins discussion of each category by identifying their key concerns and qualities. All this sets the stage for treatment of individual works in that category. This approach is perfect for readers seeking to sample Lem's work but put off by their number and diversity. We live in something of a golden age for SFT, more and more of which is becoming available with every passing year. Beyond invaluable contributions of small presses, this abundance is due to the internet: blogs, ebooks, online translations, self-publishing, and so...

Жанровое разнообразие уральской фантастики начала ХХ века

The aim of the study is to identify the genre varieties of science fiction that developed in Russian regional literature in the early XX century. The paper examines the texts of Ural writers: “The Thunderstorm of the World” by I. Ryapasov, “On Another Planet” by P. Infantiev and “The Ethereal Vortex” by N. Novikov; analyses the genre varieties to which the published texts belong. The paper argues that three genre varieties developed in Russian literature at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries (adventurous speculative fiction, scientema and adventurous-philosophical speculative fiction), later combined into the term “science fiction”. Examples of scientema can be found in I. Ryapasov’s and N. Novikov’s works, at the same time, P. Infantiev’s novel can be attributed to adventurous-philosophical speculative fiction, since it explores the idea of contact with the Other. Scientific originality of the study lies in carrying out a genre analysis of the works by Ural science fiction writers published from 1901 to 1914, which has not been carried out before. As a result, it has been proved that one can find examples of all genre varieties of “science fiction” in early XX century Russian literature, two of which are represented in the creative work of regional authors. At the same time, the paper concludes that the romantic traditions of speculative fiction also had a significant impact on the development of speculative fiction at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries.

After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin by Thomas Connolly

Reviewed by: After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin by Thomas Connolly Anna McFarlane Posthumanism Before Posthumanism. Thomas Connolly. After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin. Liverpool UP, Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies, 2021. viii+ 227 pp. $130 hc. [End Page 558] The relationship between posthumanism and science fiction is well established. The project of posthumanism—to rethink the figure of the "human" and to find something that might come after that figure—has now developed into a critical posthumanism that does not simply try to think of what comes after the human, but thinks of posthumanism as a critical tool for deconstructing the human historically and aesthetically. Science fiction has never been far away from these developments. Donna Haraway famously drew on speculative fiction in her "Manifesto for Cyborgs" (1984), taking inspiration from authors such as Octavia Butler and Marge Piercy. N. Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman (1999) contains a critical reading of embodiment and transcendence in William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984). While this relationship between science fiction and (critical) posthumanism is suggestive, the tendency has been for scholars of posthumanism to draw upon contemporary sf texts, only occasionally recognizing the longer history of posthuman forms in the genre, perhaps through texts such as James Tiptree Jr.'s "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973) or Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953). In After Human, Thomas Connolly seeks to redress this oversight with a study of posthumanism in sf from the nineteenth century to the 1970s. He uses posthumanism as "a hermeneutical principle aimed at assessing the ideas, values, and notions that surround the human or non-human in these works" (21), a move described as analogous to Ernst Bloch's theory of the utopian function or Tom Moylan's concept of the "critical utopia." Connolly uses the figure of the Oncomouse™ as a way into the knotty terrain of critical posthumanism and its stakes. The Oncomouse™ is a genetically mutated mouse, created by a Harvard research laboratory and designed to produce tumors at an accelerated rate, allowing scientists to quickly produce cancerous growths for experimentation under lab conditions. This lifeform was trademarked upon its creation in the 1990s and became a focal point for cultural critics, who tended to view the Oncomouse™ as either "a Frankensteinian threat to the sanctity of human life, or as a locus of subversive resistance to the very techno-industries that created it" (12). Connolly aims to pave a third way that allows the relationship between "nature" and "culture" to be navigated in a more nuanced fashion. He begins by clearly mapping out the terrain of critical posthumanism in exceptionally clear writing. This is a contested and developing academic field, and Connolly is adept at honing in on the most important issues at stake and introducing readers to some of the key thinkers in the field, including Rosi Braidotti and N. Katherine Hayles. He then undertakes something of a whistlestop tour of some of critical posthumanism's philosophical forebears, with a particular focus on the appearance of techné and technicity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical thinking. Situating critical posthumanism within a longer philosophical tradition is clearly important to Connolly's project as he seeks out posthumanism avant la lettre in his chosen texts, and some of these figures doubtless loom large, particularly Martin Heidegger. Others, however, such as Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, are less significant for Connolly's study, [End Page 559] although name-dropping them here perhaps opens future lines of research in establishing the roots of critical posthumanism. Connolly's introduction is particularly strong in its description of the role that "new" or "vital" materialism has come to play in critical posthumanism. In Connolly's narrative, posthumanism becomes a tool for moving beyond the linguistic turn, for recognizing the importance of materiality and entanglement, becoming a place to query distinctions between the natural and the cultural, the individual and the "environment." Connolly's understanding of science fiction, then, as a literature habitually preoccupied with technology (17), allows him to weave sf and...

Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction by Sherryl Vint

Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction by Sherryl Vint

Impossible Dreaming: On Speculative Education Fiction and Hopeful Learning Futures

In this paper, we grapple with the possibility of rethinking education futures by arguing for the continued use of speculative education fiction in critical education studies, a method which has the potential for radical imagination. However, we note that, as a research method, such fictions need to rely less on what we identify as pessimistic visions of the future, which are visions exploring themes such as disconnection, lack of autonomy and sovereignty, and technological, corporate, state and/or authoritarian control, as these visions and themes are currently over-represented in recent publications using this method. We further demonstrate the limits of these thematic visions by tracing the relationship between the ways in which pessimistic storytelling, related as it is to apocalyptic storytelling, risks reinforcing inequality, especially with respect to settler colonial injustice. Alternatively, we propose using this method to help develop hopeful futures. These are futures shaped by themes, such as connection, agency and community and individual flourishment, and suggest a turn to the genres of hopepunk, solarpunk and visionary fiction as models of storytelling grounded in hope which imagines more liberatory education and learning futures.