#141 = Volume 47, Part 2 = July 2020
Anna Louise Bedford and Donald Silberberg
A Woman of the Pulps: Leslie F. Stone
Abstract. -- Leslie F. Stone (1905-1991) was the second woman (after Clare Winger Harris) to publish science fiction in the early pulp magazines. She became a prolific and popular author of the Gernsback era. This essay offers readers a rare view into the life and experiences of a pioneering woman writer of the pulp era. It explores the origins and motivation behind her pseudonym, the reception Stone experienced as a woman writer in a male-dominated field, her innovative new plots, and her departure from publishing amid the wartime horrors of the 1940s.
Mark Taylor
Olaf Stapledon and Telepathy in Literature of Cosmic Exploration
Abstract. -- The literature of cosmic exploration has long had a close relationship with telepathy: in such fiction, apparent new discoveries in the human mind often accompany new discoveries in the cosmos. This article suggests that Olaf Stapledon is a key progenitor of this association. His Last and First Men, Last Men in London, and Star Maker each cover billions of years of human development, and each spans vast expanses of space. In these novels, telepathy allows characters to connect across great temporal and spatial distances. This article argues, however, that telepathy for Stapledon is not simply a thematic parallel to external discoveries. Instead, telepathy is central to his understanding of human potential. Inspired by advocates of telepathy, including J.B. Rhine and J.W. Dunne, Stapledon sees mind-to-mind connection as the natural consummation of a drive toward an ever-greater group feeling—a drive he finds truly universal. Following Stapledon, writers such as Stanisław Lem and Doris Lessing continue to explore what it means to imagine contact on a cosmic scale but suggest that the unintended projection of the human onto the alien is more likely than true connection.
Valentina Salvatierra
Science-fictional Multilingualism in Ursula K. Le Guin
Abstract. -- This paper develops a framework for reading fictional languages and neologisms in science fiction that complements prior critical approaches focused on linguistics or quantification. It argues that interpreting the inclusion of alien languages as a form of multilingual writing (albeit one where the source language does not exist) is a productive mode of analyzing science fiction. Bakhtin’s thought on heteroglossia as well as contemporary approaches to multilingual writing are employed to coin and refine the concept of fictive multilingualism. The mode of analysis is exemplified by applying it to Ursula K. Le Guin’s use of created languages, particularly in Always Coming Home (1985) and The Dispossessed (1974), in which fictive multilingualism serves both to construct plausible alien worlds and call attention to their textually constructed nature. The narratives of decipherment in Always Coming Home, manifested through untranslated or polyphonic terms, are explored in depth to support this point. In contrast to existing cultural criticism about created languages in sf, which tends towards analysis of neologisms in isolation, my approach is based on detailed readings of neologisms and other expressions of created languages as they function within a text and in relation to its main language.
Kelly McDevitt
Childhood Sexuality as Posthuman Subjectivity in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling
Abstract. -- This paper employs theories of childhood sexuality to frame an analysis of the posthuman politics in Octavia E.Butler’s vampire novel Fledgling (2005). Throughout the novel, Shori, the child protagonist, discovers her posthuman identity through political and social discourses of her juvenile sexuality. Designed as a genetic experiment to breed sun-resistant melanin into the population of her vampire species, Shori’s procreative potential forms one of the central conflicts of the novel. Childhood sexuality also serves a didactic role, helping both human and vampire characters create, accept, and learn about posthuman ways of being. I draw on Rosi Braidotti’s conception of an embodied critical posthumanism and bring it into conversations with scholars of childhood sexuality—including Katheryn Bond Stockton, James Kincaid, Steven Bruhm, and Natasha Hurley—to interrogate the posthuman potential of the sexual child. It follows that I examine how Shori’s juvenile sexuality marks a continuation of Butler’s longstanding interests in discourses of race, agency, and symbiosis. The complexity of childhood sexuality in the novel challenges popular narratives of childhood innocence and establishes the child as a productive site of posthuman possibility.
David W. Jackson
Landscape and Science-Fiction Film
Abstract. -- This article argues that 1950s American science-fiction films reproduce elements of landscape paintings to evoke the aesthetic experience of the sublime. For example, the arrangement of shots in which monsters dwarf humans is taken directly from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape painting, with monsters replacing vistas. I discuss the philosophical underpinnings in these images and tie them to the atomic bomb. This reading provides an aesthetic analysis of such films, whereas previous scholars have mostly been concerned with reading these images as metaphors.
Back to Home