Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction ed. by Ida Yoshinaga, Sean Guynes, and Gerry Canavan (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction ed. by Ida Yoshinaga, Sean Guynes, and Gerry Canavan Chris Pak Changing Our Dreams and Visions. Ida Yoshinaga, Sean Guynes, and Gerry Canavan, eds. Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction. MIT Press, 2022. 356+xv pp. $30.00 pbk. Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction assembles thirty-nine chapters that explore how sf can help us to identify and critique the structures that create and reinforce unevenness across multiple dimensions while developing approaches to community building to tackle their repercussions. The collection seeks to demonstrate how we might consider sf with due recognition of the diversity of approaches to the explication of strategies for community survival. As the editors ask in the introduction, “where has sf anticipated emergent futures and given us strategies to survive the present” (vii)? The chapters focus on a range of sf media with contributors who hail from several global and professional contexts, thus broadening the approaches to and uses of sf for reflecting on and helping to create the conditions for inclusive, sustainable futures. This ambitious project sketches key strategies that signal further extensions into speculating about emergent possibilities and place emphasis on the person as community member for actualizing these strategies. Uneven Futures experiments with foregrounding contributor positionalities to help us relate these fictions to the ongoing project of imagining and working toward new and diverse futures. The chapters’ styles reflect this aspect of the project: contributors offer a situated interpretation of a work of sf that speaks to our contemporary moment. While these readings connect sf to globally distributed locales, they converge on the project of connecting modes of community resilience and engagement and seek to address the collection’s core themes of the unevenness of our presents and futures and the collection of strategies to address this unevenness. The collection is organized into four sections with a brief “Interlude” comprising Ida Yoshinaga’s summary of the trajectory of sf studies in “Science Fiction Studies 3.0: Re-Networking Our Hive Mind.” Yoshinaga provides one way of situating each contribution within academic sf scholarship, but also considers the unevenness of sf scholarship and its future direction. Taking a cue from William Merrin’s Media Studies 2.0 (2014), Yoshinaga characterizes sf scholarship as progressing through three phases. First is the generation of “SF theory through professional creative and [End Page 506] academic practice” (168), which is keyed to the dual development of an industrial design for print sf aesthetics and thematics represented by the efforts of The Futurians, editors such as Damon Knight and Judith Merril, and the reading, writing, and editing communities of the 1950s–1960s; and an academic sf scholarship that develops from the 1970s following Darko Suvin’s theorization of cognitive estrangement. Second, SF Studies 2.0 is tracked to the diversification of sf and genre debates from the 1990s, which offered a convergence of experimental artistic feminist writing, and technocultural, intersectional, and global thinkers alongside a recovery of sf’s sociohistorical specificities. This period of diversification involved a decentering of literary print sf as the primary sf medium to encompass audio-visual, social, digital, and performative modes of sf. Third is a contemporary orientation for sf studies that privileges makers and practitioners as opposed to the decontextualized sf text. Yoshinaga’s championing of this emergent direction for sf studies sees those involved in the creation, distribution, and circulation of sf as “aimed at creating a sophisticated knowledge infrastructure to help diverse communities in the future withstand and survive the talons of capital and empire” (172). Yoshinaga’s call to forge a new phase of sf neatly encapsulates an essential goal of Uneven Futures: each chapter contributes to the work of creating a structure of knowledge, but the work itself, and the institutions and practices that make up the creative nodes of this sophisticated mode of knowledge generation, are the key organizing structures for SF Studies 3.0. Yoshinaga’s vision of the new orientation for sf connects the work of creators, scholars, and participants in sf cultures to activism but is not intended as an exclusive or prescriptive account of sf. Rather...