{"title":"Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism by Alex Zamalin (review)","authors":"J. Lindsay","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0070","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"605 - 609"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42596126","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":"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":"Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color by Joy Sanchez-Taylor (review)","authors":"J. Gordon","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0064","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"585 - 588"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45504013","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":"Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space by Fred Scharmen (review)","authors":"Rick Cousins","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0065","url":null,"abstract":"extensive that there seems nothing else to say and, therefore, nothing for students to explore in them. Second, in a connected story, I wished for an appendix, either after each chapter or at the end, of other fiction relevant to the themes explored. Both of these complaints indicate how valuable I think Diverse Futures would be in any sf classroom, undergraduate or graduate, and how helpful I found it in the reading.—Joan Gordon, SFS","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"588 - 591"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47113059","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":"J.G. Ballard and American Science Fiction","authors":"C. Mcguirk","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0048","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Offering something of a group portrait, this study focuses on Ballard's first decade as a published writer (1956-1966), seen in the context of US science fiction—its stories, writers, communal obsessions (including NASA's Mercury Program), and above all its shared writing practices. During the early Cold War years, science fiction regularly recast the genre's own earlier moments, a practice that tied even the pointed social critique of noir sf in the early 1950s—stories that first drew Ballard to the genre—to earlier pulp science fiction, including the space adventures of the 1930s and 1940s. An especially striking quality of this postwar generation is what seems an unusual degree of prescience; for Ballard's early sf—like that of the US writers who inspired him (sometimes to emulate, sometimes to critique)—regularly offer uncanny intimations of our own contentious historical moment today.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"476 - 501"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42890414","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":"Automobility Without Automobiles in Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140","authors":"J. Withers","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0045","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay argues that Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 understands something fundamental but far from obvious about automobility: it is an ideology that over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has grown so vast, complex, and multi-faceted that it encompasses much more than just materially existing cars. The novel provocatively (but menacingly) shows that automobility is so entangled with and bolstered by other ideologies such as capitalism and hegemonic masculinity that automobility can even survive the disappearance of cars due to catastrophic climate change. Further, this article addresses how some female characters in the novel use walking and airships to challenge the unpalatable capitalist and masculinist values that threaten to sponsor present and future modes of transportation.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"443 - 458"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43997665","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":"Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction: Living on the Edge of Burnout by Caroline Alphin (review)","authors":"David Shipko","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0052","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"550 - 552"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42428401","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}