#139 = Volume 46, Part 3 = November 2019
Jennifer Rhee
Finance Speculation, Indeterminacy, and Unforeclosed Futures in James Tiptree, Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”
Abstract. -- In this essay I argue that Tiptree’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” disputes finance capitalism’s considerable hold on the future through temporal and material indeterminacies that affirm the openness of the future. Pointing to speculative fiction’s and finance capitalism’s shared investment in speculation, this essay demonstrates that Tiptree’s story stages the future as a contested site between capitalism and the reader. Specifically, I argue that the story is replete with indeterminacies that insist on both the uncertainty of the future and the possibility of imagining futures that are not cannibalized by capitalism, markets, and financial tools that bank on speculation. In conversation with feminist materialist theory, which highlights materiality’s unruliness and uncontrollable capacities, I analyze the story’s emphasis on material bodies and corporeality as generating strange, unthinkable possibilities for the future, particularly those that imagine a future not foreclosed by capitalism. Attending to both the prevalence of fleshy bodies as well as the story’s time-travel conceit, I read these narrative elements as “tactical paradoxes” that destabilize the boundaries between the thinkable and the unthinkable, the possible and the impossible within a world structured by capitalism.
Elizabeth Stainforth and Jo Lindsay Walton
Computing Utopia: The Horizons of Computational Economies in History and Science Fiction
Abstract. This article connects the recent flourishing of economic science fiction with the increasing technicity of contemporary financial markets, to pose questions about computational economies, both historical and fictional, and their ambiguous utopian currents. It explores examples of computational economies and societies in which economic resources are largely defined and allocated by computational systems to challenge—if not entirely dispel—assumptions about the inextricability of computation and the dystopian specters of capitalism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. The article puts insights from the histories of cybernetics, computer science, and economics into dialogue with sf novels that experiment with different sociopolitical configurations of computational economies. The novels that are the primary focus of the discussion are The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) by Ursula K. Le Guin and If Then (2015) by Matthew De Abaitua. The article concludes with some thoughts about the use of history and fiction for expanding the imaginative horizons of the computable in economics.
Raino Isto
In the Valley of the Time Tombs: Monumentality, Temporality, and History in Science Fiction
Abstract. Modern and contemporary artists working in relation to monumentality have sometimes positioned their works in relation to sf, and at other times works of monumental sculpture have been labeled as science-fictional by audiences to whom these monumental forms appear alien or displaced in time. While art history has sometimes examined the influence of sf ideas on modern and contemporary artists, a more sustained consideration of the relationship between monumentality and sf is lacking. One necessary step in advancing this understanding is a consideration of how monuments themselves have been represented in sf literature. This article examines the representations and roles of monuments in a number of sf works, including H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936), Robert Charles Wilson’s The Chronoliths (2001), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge (1984). The ways in which monuments appear in these and other sf texts foreground a set of questions about the perception of inevitability, the shape of time, and the mutability of history. These works explore how the relationship between past and future can be reconfigured through encounters with monumental forms that create new bridges and chronologies across cosmic and historical scales of time.
Cara Healey
Madmen and Iron Houses: Lu Xun, Information Degradation, and Generic Hybridity in Contemporary Chinese SF
Abstract. Chinese sf can be characterized by its generic hybridity: how it combines, subverts, and reinterprets conventions of both earlier Chinese literary traditions and the Western sf canon. One example of this generic hybridity is the paradigm of information degradation, a common sf trope from H.G. Wells on that shares epistemological and ontological features with the work of early-twentieth-century Chinese realist writer Lu Xun. This essay uses the information degradation paradigm to present a science-fictional reading of Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” (1918), the first work of modern Chinese vernacular fiction and a foundational text in establishing Chinese national literature. Then, the article extrapolates how this reading of “Diary” is relevant to contemporary Chinese sf through close readings of Han Song’s “The Passengers and the Creator” (2006) and Zhang Ran’s “Ether” (2012). These stories adapt the information degradation paradigm in ways that evoke both Lu Xun and Wells and his followers, maintaining continuity with both traditions and illustrating a generic hybridity characteristic of contemporary Chinese sf that may account in part for its growing popularity.
Robert Looby
The Control of English Language Science Fiction in People’s Poland
Abstract. This article focuses on attempts to control and contain translations from English of science fiction in the People’s Republic of Poland (1944/45-1989). After a brief outline of the history of sf in twentieth-century Poland, I consider reasons for the weak representation of some foreign authors (e.g. Robert Heinlein) in post-war Polish sf publishing before turning to comparisons of English originals and their Polish translations in order to detect and discuss instances of censorship. Despite its mass appeal (one sf magazine had print runs of 100,000 a month in the 1980s), sf was not heavily censored. I offer some explanations for the comparative freedom from political interference English-language sf enjoyed in translation. For example, the concern of many writers with grand questions touching the entire human race protected their work from censors more concerned with immediate political exigencies.
Wenwen Guo
Semper Shame: Reading Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Fledgling
Abstract. This article reads the two standalone novels by Octavia Butler, Kindred and Fledgling, through the theoretical lens of shame. Through my close readings of the texts, I argue that the affect of shame, as it brings emotional and physical pain to the victims, is also indispensable to the survival of human community. Specifically, I propose three main claims about the representations of shame in Butler: that shame is largely a learned response closely associated with substances such as human blood, that to be shamed is to have always already been shamed, and that a permanent separation from shame poses life-threatening consequences. Of particular importance to my readings are earlier discussions about shame’s productive roles, including those formulated in Silvan Tomkins’s Affect Imagery Consciousness. Rather than recast shame in a completely positive light, I point to a capaciousness in Butler's understanding of shame.
Marc Acherman
Screening Prophetic Machines: Preemption, Minority Report, and the Problem of Multiple Endings
Abstract. “Screening Prophetic Machines” argues that director Steven Spielberg’s film Minority Report (2002) stages inconsistencies in the ideological fantasies of prophetic inevitability and preventive action that sustained the George W. Bush administration’s post 9/11 policy of preemption, otherwise known as the Bush Doctrine. It observes that the film hyperbolizes this policy through the science-fictional tropes of the “prophetic machine,” which fuse preemption’s speculative logics, traumatic affects, and excessive responses with contemporary media, screens, and surveillance to figure the American War on Terror and its ideological foreclosure of alternative futures. While acknow-ledging these parallels, however, this essay complicates criticism that proposes Minority Report inadequately critiques or even uncritically reproduces Bush-era ideology. Instead, it locates Minority Report’s politics in cinematic form, claiming that the film’s multiple possible endings suggest an array of possibilities for both narrative and prophetic closure that, when understood to be in tension, subvert assertions of preemptive certainty. Drawing from Fredric Jameson’s work on utopian fiction, this essay thus examines how preemptive discourse and cinematic form converse in the film, and ultimately contends that Minority Report, because of its resistance to narrative closure, redirects attention from metaphysical discourses of fate and inevitability to the potential dangers of misplaced trust in interpretive authority.
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