{"title":"Speaking Crows and Alien Fish: Nonhuman Cosmopolitanisms in Satyajit Ray's Speculative Fiction","authors":"Paromita Patranobish","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2024.a931155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2024.a931155","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: I approach Satyajit Ray's sf stories as postcolonial interventions into Western Enlightenment discourses of scientific rationality. I trace the trajectory of these concerns as they are reflected in narratives centered around nonhuman animals, published in various Bengali juvenile magazines between 1961 and 1992. Ray's stories offer a critical site for interrogating, revising, and expanding the possibilities of a Kantian moral philosophy of cosmopolitanism for post-independence contexts of democratic governance, industrialization, and urbanization. Ray's sf enables readers to imagine a posthuman cosmopolitics (to use Isabelle Stengers's concept) as an alternative to colonial cartographies of personhood and the centrifugal impulse of postcolonial nation formation. My article addresses the significant but underexplored role played by Ray's ecological thinking and care for the nonhuman animal in his postcolonial politics. Ray's sf harnesses the possibilities of Bengali speculative fiction, including Kalpavigyan's model of a fluid science to posit a speculative vision of a future-oriented cosmopolitics where the possibility for non-reciprocal and untranslatable proximities becomes a conceptual foundation for thinking about alterity.","PeriodicalId":517674,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Studies","volume":"48 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141691293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science-Fiction Film, 1979-2017: The Aesthetics of Enclosure by Harry Warwick (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2024.a931165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2024.a931165","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":517674,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Studies","volume":"76 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141714623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Angry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World by Anne Stewart (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2024.a931163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2024.a931163","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":517674,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Studies","volume":"17 39","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141700058","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Olaf Stapledon's Thwarted Cosmopolitics in Last and First Men and Star Maker","authors":"Stephen Dougherty","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2024.a931152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2024.a931152","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: In this essay I argue that Olaf Stapledon's speculative writing in Last and First Men and Star Maker is deeply informed by a thwarted cosmopolitics. The dream visions of science fiction to come in these novels are born of the failure of a cosmopolitan idealism. In his profound devotion to the cause of attempted cosmopolitanism, as we might put it, and in his rich imagining of what happens right before it goes wrong, Stapledon is a very Kantian speculative writer. I flesh out a Kantian philosophical context for Stapledon in this essay, not only because of the quite practical value of considering Stapledon in a Kantian frame, but also because of Kant's uptake in recent years by critics deeply interested in the stealthy presence of a central science-fictional motif in Kant's writing: that of the extraterrestrial.","PeriodicalId":517674,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Studies","volume":"10 40","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141696262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shakespeare and Science Fiction by Sarah Annes Brown (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2024.a931159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2024.a931159","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":517674,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Studies","volume":"13 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141700656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction by Christina Lord (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2024.a931161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2024.a931161","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":517674,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Studies","volume":"13 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141704628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Jefferson Airplane to Starship: Science Fiction, Utopia, and Evolution","authors":"Nicola Allen, Gerry Carlin","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2024.a931150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2024.a931150","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: Paul Kantner's Blows Against the Empire (1970) is the only rock album to have been nominated for a Hugo Award. Kantner's lyrical excursions into SF, as a solo artist and as a member of Jefferson Airplane, are characterized by extensive borrowings of both themes and actual text from writers such as John Wyndham, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke, and others. Important intellectual fields addressed by sf and West Coast rock thematize unorthodox approaches to evolution. From Darwinian dissenters in the nineteenth century through philosophies of expanded consciousness and experimentation with psychoactive drugs in the 1960s, it seemed possible that the psychedelic youth movements of the period, and their utopian visions, were part of an evolutionary \"mutation\" in culture and consciousness. Science fiction seemed to have predicted this by popularizing \"precognitive myths\" of telepathy, gestalt consciousness, and ways of being that rock musicians thematized and to some extent sought to realize. Blows Against the Empire emerges as a compendium of sf and countercultural intertexts that celebrate such evolutionary ideals, and despite a lot of its ideas entering the mainstream, it remains a cult album and a unique record of late 1960s countercultural speculation.","PeriodicalId":517674,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Studies","volume":"25 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141845642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Green Apocalypse and Empathy for Vegetal Life","authors":"Jean E. Graham","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2024.a931153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2024.a931153","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: Speculative fiction can contribute toward overcoming \"plant awareness disparity\" and also can help create empathy for plants rather than fear of an apocalypse. The Saga of the Swamp Thing (1987) by Alan Moore, relies on Swamp Thing's anthropomorphism (undermining the vegetal nature of flora) to oppose the apocalypse and create an empathetic response. The non-anthropomorphic carnivorous plants of John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1954) never receive empathy from the human characters. In contrast, James Gunn's Transcendental (2013) depicts an invasive vegetal species which tells its own story, becoming empathetic without anthropomorphism.","PeriodicalId":517674,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141696194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}