{"title":"Cannibal Nihilism: Meat and Meaninglessness in the Anthropocene Imaginary","authors":"T. Harper","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0027","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article examines the frequent appearance of cannibalism in works of environmentally oriented speculative fiction, including Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993), Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), Agustina Bazterrica's Tender is the Flesh (2020), and Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer (2013). Here, cannibalism is demonstrated to be more than a disturbing alimentary anxiety that lends aesthetic \"shock value\" to contemporary narratives of future ecological collapse and political catastrophe. Rather, the problem of people eating people serves as a proxy for a more difficult—and more conceptually nuanced—conversation about the very viability of political hope in a world defined by metastasizing environmental crises. Specifically, this article demonstrates that although works of Anthropocene fiction frequently use the specter of environmental disaster to leverage critiques of racialized capitalism, the political agenda of these novels and films is often tacitly undermined by depictions of cannibalism that frame anthropophagy as an irredeemable moral failing that cannot be explained away as the result of either neoliberal economics or the white supremacy that sustains such a system.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"304 - 321"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49253132","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":"Transhumanism and Posthumanism in Twenty-First Century Narrative ed. by Sonia Baelo-Allué and Mónica Calvo-Pascual (review)","authors":"J. Lindsay","doi":"10.4324/9781003129813","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003129813","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"373 - 376"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49304793","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":"Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fictions: Narrating the Future ed. by Tereza Dìdinová et al. (review)","authors":"Chris Pak","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0035","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"384 - 388"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45994946","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":"Cold-War Cabin Ecologies: Soviet-American Biospheric Thinking","authors":"Eliza Rose","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0025","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article draws a connection between closed-biosphere tropes in Kim Stanley Robinson's Icehenge (1984) and Soviet and American research on closed artificial ecologies. The article contends that during the 1980s, bioregenerative food systems—as research objects and literary tropes—expressed a perception of socialism and capitalism as imperfect yet eternal states. Two challenges are analogized: 1) conceiving political alternatives at the twentieth century's end, and 2) sustaining livable habitats using a closed ecology's limited available resources (for example, by deriving nutrients from waste). Both challenges inspire a mode of aggressive re-use here termed \"strategic recycling.\" To close, the article assesses the ambivalent politics attending biospheric thinking: closed biospheres clarify humans' metabolic enmeshment in their environments, inviting the radical reassessment of organism-environment relations as ratios of useful outputs over required inputs (what one emits over what one eats). The resulting perspective carries both utopian and eugenic implications that make biospheric thinking itself a \"recyclable\" material that can be conscripted with equal ease into emancipatory and reactionary projects.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"267 - 287"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43388205","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":"Plotting the Future in Caribbean SF: Alimentary Imperialism and Horti(counter)culture","authors":"M. Niblett","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0026","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article examines the connection between Caribbean foodways and the varieties of speculative fiction that have emerged from the region. My contention is that Caribbean sf not only draws attention to the baleful impact of capitalist imperialism on agro-ecologies and food cultures, but can also have a special role in catalyzing opposition to it. I examine some of the ways in which Caribbean writers have used sf and, more particularly, Afrofuturist forms to dramatize the bloody history of plantation agriculture, conflicts over land use, and popular resistance to imposed food cultures. Focusing on novels by Anthony Joseph, Erna Brodber, and Diana McCaulay, I explore how their aesthetics of estrangement sensitize readers to the stakes involved in the struggle between food dependency and food sovereignty. Against a backdrop of accelerating climate breakdown, new rounds of imperialist plunder, and the ongoing colonization of eating habits, all three authors draw on the legacy of the plot system to envision emancipatory food futures.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"288 - 303"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45563994","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":"Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead: The Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction by M. Elizabeth Ginway (review)","authors":"Andrea L. L. Bell","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0038","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"396 - 399"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41313549","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}