SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES最新文献

{"title":"Apophenic Inventions: Chance and the Dismantling of Anthropocentrism in Stanisław Lem’s Fiction","authors":"Simona Bartolotta","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910326","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910326","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: This paper examines how Stanisław Lem’s speculative writings configure the idea of chance as a challenge to anthropocentric thinking. Texts examined include tales from The Cyberiad , one of the faux reviews from A Perfect Vacuum , and Lem’s two detective novels The Investigation and The Chain of Chance —which, as the paper argues, in fact fully participate in the same cognitive tasks that in Lem’s literary-philosophical system are attributed to science fiction, concerning the expansion of possibilities of thought and the questioning, and possibly even the reinvention, of ingrained ideas and conceptions. By analysing the structural and theoretical role that chance plays in these texts, and chiefly drawing from scientific and philosophical application of probability theory, this paper demonstrates that Lem’s thought and oeuvre pivot on a complex web of connections between the idea of chance, the limits of anthropocentrism, and the question of tellability.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"370 7","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111307","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures ed. by Kevin M. Strait and Kinshasha Holman Conwill (review)","authors":"Joy Sanchez-Taylor","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910337","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures ed. by Kevin M. Strait and Kinshasha Holman Conwill Joy Sanchez-Taylor Buy It for the Pictures, Read It for the Knowledge. Kevin M. Strait and Kinshasha Holman Conwill, eds. Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures. Smithsonian, 2023. 216 pp. $29.95 hc. When I first learned about this project, a companion book for an exhibit of the same name currently on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, I was intrigued. Would this book be simply a record of the exhibit, a souvenir for the gift shop, or would it include additional information? Would it be useful for students? Once I saw the list of contributors, which includes Reynaldo Anderson, N.K. Jemisin, John Jennings, Alondra Nelson, Ytasha L.Womack, and Alisha B. Wormsley, among others, I knew I had to get a copy. In short, this book does not disappoint. Kevin M. Strait and Kinshasha Holman Conwill have curated a collection of essays from some of the leading creative and academic minds in the field of Afrofuturist studies. The essays are varied and accessibly written, and the accompanying color pictures make this book a must-have for students and anyone else interested in learning about Afrofuturism. Another benefit of museum collaboration is that this large hardcover text is affordably priced, which will be a huge benefit to educators who want to use the book in classes. The text is organized into four main sections: “Space is the Place,” “Speculative Worlds,” “Visualizing Afrofuturism,” and “Musical Futures.” Each section contains five or six mini-essays written by Afrofuturist scholars and creators with accompanying visuals. The format of the book is much like a textbook; although the essays do not include in-text citations, there is a [End Page 495] bibliography section at the end of the book with sources for each of the sections and recommended reading lists. The main theme of the book is Afrofuturism’s ability to bridge discussions of past, present, and future cultural histories to depict potential futures for African-American and Black diasporic peoples. Kevin M. Strait explains in the introduction that “As a conceptual framework, Afrofuturism enables authors, thinkers, artists, and activists to interpret the history of race and the nuances of Black cultural identity on their own terms. Reimagining the Black experience of the past provides new templates for reimagining Black futures to come—while also informing Black life in the present” (12). Most of the essays in the book address similar ideas, essentially teaching readers that Afrofuturist depictions of the future are intrinsically linked both to the ways that history has depicted Black peoples in the past and to the present-day social conditions of Black peoples. By pointing to an often under-recognized history of Black peoples creating alternate histories and futuristic narratives, as well as the history of contributions of Black peoples to speculative n","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"371 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice: A Critical Companion by David M. Higgins (review)","authors":"Veronica Hollinger","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910334","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice: A Critical Companion by David M. Higgins Veronica Hollinger Excellent Short-form Scholarship. David M. Higgins. Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice: A Critical Companion. Palgrave Macmillan, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, 2023. vii+92 pp. $44.99 hc, $34.99 ebk. [End Page 486] Palgrave’s “A New Canon” is one of a growing number of very good scholarly series devoted to short critical studies. Examples include University of Minnesota Press’s “Forerunners” (e.g., Steven Shaviro’s No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism [2015]), the Association for Asian Studies’ “Asia Shorts” (e.g., Jing Jiang’s Found in Translation: “New People” in Twentieth-Century Chinese Science Fiction [2021]), and MIT’s “Essential Knowledge” series (e.g., Sherryl Vint’s Science Fiction [2021]). Think of them as the novellas of critical scholarship. David Higgins’s “critical companion” to the first novel of Anne Leckie’s immensely popular Imperial Radch trilogy is the latest in Palgrave’s “New Canon” series. In the words of series editors Keren Omry and Sean Guynes, it “aims to offer ‘go-to’ books for thinking about, writing on, and teaching major works of SFF” (viii). In spite of its title, however, the diversity of offerings so far would seem to discourage conventional canon-building. It is difficult to cram (among others titles) Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956), Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996), Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), BioWare’s media franchise Mass Effect (2007–), Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood (1984), Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist album project Dirty Computer (2018), and Jeff Noon’s Vurt (1993) into a single “type” of sf/f worthy of canonization. On the other hand, it is difficult to ignore the series’ subtitle: if nothing else and in very different ways, each of these can lay claim to being a “major work.” As the only novel ever to win the trifecta of major sf awards—the Arthur C. Clarke, the Hugo, and the Nebula—Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013) is both very well known and well worth the extended focus of Higgins’s Companion. Equally, this Companion more than does justice to Leckie’s novel. The title of one section in Higgins’s introduction, “The Problem of Empire,” is at the core of this astute and entertaining reading; it also extends the post-colonial work of his award-winning Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood (2021). Each of the chapters following the introduction circles back to this “problem”: chapter 2 on “Gender and Coloniality,” chapter 3 on “Empire, Economics, and Addiction,” chapter 4 on “Race, Citizenship, and Imperial Personhood,” and chapter 5 on “Cynical Reason and Revolutionary Agency.” Higgins’s “central argument . . . is that Ancillary Justice offers a multitude of critical interventions that culminate in a devastating rebuke to the political, social, cultural, and economic injustices of American imperialism during the post-9","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"374 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Index For Volume 50 (2023)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910344","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910344","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"371 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Space between 1s and 0s: Intentional Patiency in Computational Creativity","authors":"Haerin Shin","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910330","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910330","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: Challenging humanity’s self-reified monopoly over the domain of hermeneutics, computational creativity destabilizes the foundations of its lexical reference, invoking Walter Benjamin’s musings on the age of technological reproducibility. How may we delineate the parameters of creativity outside the bounds of apperceptive intent, especially if the generative process is strictly reliant upon conditional expressions of correlational nature rather than the transcendental aura of instantaneous inspiration? Should procedurally derived computational outputs deserve the label of creativity? If so, then how do such developments affect and even reconfigure human language to challenge the metrics whereby we inscribe it with social value? By probing the interstitial space between algorithmic design and arbitrary semantics through readings of autonomously written fiction, this essay investigates how computational creativity remediates literary expressivity in text-generating models. Based on the concept of intentional patiency , which I propose as an alternative to the agency of the phenomenological sovereign subject in the valuation and appreciation of nonhuman creativity, the essay asks what it means to write, and what writing means in an age when not only artistic output, but also creative agency may be approaching the singularity event horizon.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"371 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction ed. by Ida Yoshinaga, Sean Guynes, and Gerry Canavan (review)","authors":"Chris Pak","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910340","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910340","url":null,"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 acade","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"370 8","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Navigating Waves of Capital and History: On Speculation and Submersion in Delany","authors":"Spencer Adams","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910325","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: This essay reads two texts by Samuel R. Delany— Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and “Atlantis: Model 1924”—that prominently thematize spontaneous queer encounter and the financialized production of urban space. It explores the writerly practices that open up the subjective space of sexual cultures threatened and eroded by the impersonal forces of capital, highlighting in particular the use of speculative play in “Atlantis,” to suggest it serves as a model for an sf relation to history. In making sense of the contingent conditions lending urgency to Delany’s generic intervention, the essay situates Delany’s writings within the US systemic cycle of capital accumulation, noting the distinct mechanisms of financialized real estate speculation and attendant gentrification that serve to enforce property relations and sexual norms in New York.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"372 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Er Shi Shi Ji Zhong Guo Ke Huan Xiao Shuo Shi / History of Chinese Science Fiction in the 20th Century by Wu Yan (review)","authors":"Shaoming Duan","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910339","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910339","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Er Shi Shi Ji Zhong Guo Ke Huan Xiao Shuo Shi / History of Chinese Science Fiction in the 20th Century by Wu Yan Shaoming Duan The Tortuous yet Extraordinary Development of Chinese SF in the Twentieth Century. Wu Yan, Er Shi Shi Ji Zhong Guo Ke Huan Xiao Shuo Shi [History of Chinese Science Fiction in the 20th Century]. Beijing UP, 2022. 235 pp. ¥68.00 pbk. To date, studies of Chinese sf have tended to maintain a local focus—that is, an author selects a short period of time and then summarizes and evaluates the science fiction of that period. Representative works include Jia Liyuan’s Modern and Unknown: A Study of Science Fiction in the Late Qing Dynasty (2021), Zhan Ling’s Research on the Transformation of Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction (2022), and Hua Li’s Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao [End Page 502] Cultural Thaw (2021). Unlike these earlier studies, Wu Yan, China’s foremost sf scholar, summarizes and analyzes the development of sf in China over the past 100 years from a macro perspective, so that readers can accurately and comprehensively understand its tortuous yet extraordinary development. Wu divides the history of Chinese sf in the twentieth century into five periods: its development in the late Qing Dynasty, sf during the Republic of China, sf in the early People’s Republic of China, sf after the Cultural Revolution, and sf in “the new era.” In his preface, “The Rise and Fall of Chinese SF,” Wu sums up these several periods of the development of sf in China with the words “prosperity, evolution, marginalization, transformation, and maturity.” There was no such category as sf in the ancient Chinese literary tradition; it first appeared in the late Qing. At the end of the ninteenth century, intellectuals in the late Qing introduced this type of Western literature into China with the mission of enlightenment and national salvation. In 1872, the Chinese translation of Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) was published in Shanghai Shen daily, opening up the exploration of sf in the Chinese literary field. After the New Culture Movement (1915–1919), realism became the dominant literary genre for the next seventy years. Realistic literature was praised and promoted by the majority of the population because it reflected their suffering and exposed social corruption. During the period of the Republic of China (1911–1949), sf was a marginalized genre. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Mao Zedong accused writers of being representatives of the bourgeoisie and their novels of being poisonous weeds poised against the Party and socialism. To the Chinese people, sf was a symbol of Western culture and for ten years the creation of science fiction was completely at a standstill. In the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping regarded sf as “spiritual pollution literature.” Once again sf was severely criticized. Wu’s first chapter is “The Development of SF in the Late Qing Dynasty (1900–1911).” In the late Qing, sf was a way","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"372 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111295","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Notes on Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910343","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"374 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Analyzing Humanity’s Fate Beyond the Anthropocene in the Works of Sheri S. Tepper","authors":"Weronika Łaszkiewicz","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910327","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910327","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: The aim of this article is to juxtapose two of Sheri S. Tepper’s works— Beauty (1991) and the Plague of Angels trilogy (1993–2014)—in order to demonstrate how her vision of humanity’s future beyond the Anthropocene evolves or devolves in the course of her literary career, from the promise of magical salvation into a disturbing scenario of scientific advancement involving passive genocide, genetic modification, and eugenics. My reading is grounded in Marek Oziewicz’s theory of planetary narratives, Donna Haraway’s concept of the Chthulucene, and Joan Gordon’s figure of the amborg, which allow one to critically evaluate the author’s perception both of interspecies relations and humanity’s position among other living creatures.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"372 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111296","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}