{"title":"Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror ed. by Stefan Rabitsch et al. (review)","authors":"J. Withers","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0063","url":null,"abstract":"of apocalypse, we are becoming more prepared to squarely face the looming disasters of our own time. Palmer closes the book with readings of Dead Astronauts and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Earth (2015) as two up-to-date alternatives to apocalypse: on the one hand, a story that imagines a ruined world in order to indict our own headlong rush to ruin the world we live in, and on the other a story that imagines our potential to change course and solve large-scale problems. These readings are convincing, and it would be nice to think that in our era of concatenating crises the escapism of apocalypse has been taken off the table of possible cultural responses and replaced by the clear-eyed engagement with historical challenges that Palmer finds in VanderMeer and Robinson. But this is not the case: the escape into apocalyptic obfuscation remains as potent a strategy today as it ever was. To suggest otherwise is to tell yet another story in which history moves through crisis to resolution, through tribulation to redemption: an apocalyptically optimistic account of the end of apocalyptic thinking.—Connor Pitetti, RuhrUniversität Bochum","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"582 - 585"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45784603","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":"Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood by David M. Higgins (review)","authors":"Suparno Banerjee","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0057","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"564 - 568"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45800823","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":"La Pandémie en science-fiction ed. by Christophe Becker and Clémentine Hogue (review)","authors":"Amy J. Ransom","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0053","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"552 - 555"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47089431","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":"Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction ed. by Meghan Gilbert-Hickey and Miranda A. Green-Barteet (review)","authors":"Brittany Tomin","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0037","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"392 - 396"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48804627","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}
N. Castle, R. Dini, Tiff Graham, K. Heffner, Fitzhugh Shaw (Chickasaw), Sarah Stang
{"title":"Roundtable: SF in the Kitchen","authors":"N. Castle, R. Dini, Tiff Graham, K. Heffner, Fitzhugh Shaw (Chickasaw), Sarah Stang","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0030","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:For this roundtable, we asked participants to respond critically to the topic of sf kitchens. How and why does the kitchen figure in sf? Why is it a significant site to think through the various concerns emanating around food futures? What can a focus on the kitchen as a key space in/of the future tell us about its historical organization of social and cultural relations? Might its future imagining afford the means to organize those differently?","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"359 - 372"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45591552","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":"Cross-Infections of Vegetal-Human Bodies in Science Fiction","authors":"Heather I. Sullivan","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0029","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:It is particularly disturbing when seemingly inert plants escape the category of nourishing food and instead become transmitters of vegetal diseases infecting our human bodies or transforming us into plant-human hybrids or even plant-infused zombies. This article analyzes the ecological and alimentary implications of three sf texts in which plants infect human bodies or use them as a kind of walking soil from which to sprout: Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Windup Girl (2009), Olivia Vieweg's German-language graphic novel, EndZeit [EndTime, 2018], and Nnedi Okorafor's graphic novel LaGuardia (2019). Presenting plant-human relations as either utopian and kinship-based or as horrific cross-species disease vectors creating human-plant zombies, these texts reveal aspects of the ecological fact that human bodies are always monstrously chimerical. All living things are, in fact, composed of multispecies entanglements with other beings such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi, as well as the species they consume, as described by Anna Tsing et al. in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017). Bacigalupi, Vieweg, and Okorafor transform our ecological entanglements with and dependence on plants into both disturbing and celebratory sf visions of bodily invasion.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"342 - 358"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66417419","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":"Manger demain: Food Futures in French Fiction","authors":"J. Dutton","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0024","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:France's national identity has long been inseparable from its culinary culture. From Taillevent's Le Viandier (c.1300) to Escoffier's Le Guide culinaire (1903), French treatises and texts led the way in establishing France's central role in codifying western food discourses. Against this backdrop of gastronomic glory, futuristic food fictions in French are few and far between, but they serve to reveal contemporary preoccupations and predictions related to culinary concerns. In this article, I track food futures in notable selected texts of French writing spanning four centuries—from Louis-Sébastien Mercier's L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais (1771) to Chantal Pelletier's Nos derniers festins (2019)—outlining briefly the gastronomic context from which they emanate and how these projections perform a parallel or meta-interpretation of food cultures in France. I will thereby demonstrate that the utopian and dystopian extremes emerging in these examples of food futures in French speculative narratives relate to and/or challenge the historical and literary contexts of culinary cultures in France.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"247 - 266"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46584312","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":"Food and Power: The Utopian City and Its Countryside","authors":"P. Parrinder","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0022","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:From More and Campanella to Gernsback's Ralph 124C 41+, utopian authors have imagined potential agricultural revolutions guaranteeing a secure and abundant supply of high-quality food. Since literary utopias are either based in or modeled on the institution of the city, their demand for food necessitates an increased exploitation of the countryside. Industrialized agriculture remains indispensable even in a future such as Gernsback's, where most foods are apparently synthetic. The \"garden city\" utopias from Cabet to Gilman equally rely on agricultural intensification, portraying an ideal of \"perfect cultivation\" that depends on systematic ecocide and environmental remodeling. Their utopian futures anticipate the historical development of global agriculture all too closely. Morris's News from Nowhere stands out for its opposition to industrial farming and to the subordination of the countryside to the rule of the city. Yet Morris's future London continues to import virtually all its food. Finally, consideration of Robinson's Pacific Edge suggests that the challenge of imagining a future for well-fed humanity no longer dependent on rural oppression and environmental destruction remains to be met.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"217 - 229"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42191465","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}