#145 = Volume 48, Part 3 = November 2021
Michal Daliot-Bul
Voyage to Innumerable Star Worlds: A Nineteenth-Century Japanese SF Novel
Abstract. -- The origins of Japanese sf in the late nineteenth century have drawn little attention, yet they provide a revealing spree of cultural production. The historical setting of these beginnings is the post-Meiji imperial restoration (1868) that set Japan firmly on the path to Western-style modernization, including in Japanese literature. This article introduces one particular political novel with strong sf elements, Voyage to Innumerable Star Worlds (1882), written by Nukina Shunichi, a heretofore anonymous ex-samurai. Innovative as the novel’s sf imagination was, it nevertheless drew little attention and soon was forgotten. By focusing on the author, the novel’s radical techno-political sf vision, and its possible sources, this article offers a glimpse into the intellectual life of Japan’s elite during this period of rapid transformation and influx of Western ideas. The article concludes with some thoughts on why the novel was ignored without inspiring any similarly innovative sf in Japan.
Tyler Austin Harper
“The Pitiless Judgement of Time”: Human Extinction in the Evolutionary Tragedies of H.G. Wells
Abstract. -- Since the first wave of Wellsian scholarship emerged in the 1960s, The Time Machine has been interpreted in light of H.G. Wells’s various scientific obsessions, resulting in a wealth of interdisciplinary studies that have probed the relationship between the author’s early fiction and Victorian science. Yet despite the critical consensus that the author’s work incorporated insights culled from modern science in significant ways, scholars have not done enough to examine how Wells’s wide-ranging early engagements with the sciences were often underwritten by a single conceptual concern: the speculative possibility of human extinction. Reading key fictional and non-fictional documents from the author’s Victorian period, and culminating in an in-depth analysis that situates The Time Machine as a response to Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, this essay argues that scholars have not only failed to reckon with the centrality of human extinction to Wells’s work and thought but have also tended to ignore the tragic dimensions that undergird his early writing, often despite explicit evidence that Wells viewed his fiction as contributing to the tragic mode. Working against this tendency, this essay argues that Wells offers a revised, post-Darwinian form of tragedy that directly confronts the existential precarity of the human species.
Kara Kennedy
Spice and Ecology in Herbert’s Dune: Altering the Mind and the Planet
Abstract. -- The characterization of spice in Frank Herbert’s science-fiction novel Dune plays a significant role in world-building and focusing readers’ attention on natural enhancements to the human mind. Herbert uses historical and social contexts relevant to real-world spices to create layers of meaning by tapping into emerging trends in ecology, psychology, and politics. These include the historic spice trade, drugs in the countercultural movement, the disciplines of ecology and psychology, and foreign interference in the Middle East. Such linkages help position spice as a valuable commodity as well as a psychoactive substance that various characters must consume to accomplish extraordinary feats. In the world of Dune, everything is dependent on one substance, and although spice may give advantages, it also takes its toll. The consequences of spice consumption on an individual level then mirror the larger ecological disruptions in the novel in the realms of politics and the environment. In this way, spice represents a key feature of world-building that assists in tying the threads of the novel together and driving through to readers the ecological message about the interconnectedness of life.
Sara Hosey
“Keeping Women in the Dark”: Science Fiction, Fictional Science, and the Legacy of Maternal Misrepresentations
Abstract. -- In order to demonstrate the extent to which discussions of women’s bodies and reproductive lives are often untethered from biological realities or the imperative to engage meaningfully with women’s lived experiences, this article analyzes the depictions of abortion in the popular television series V: The Final Battle and in the pro-life “documentary” The Silent Scream, texts that debuted within months of each other in 1984. Placing them alongside each other reveals how these depictions and the mainstream rhetoric surrounding them are imbricated, how they are both heir to and purveyors of misinformation about reproductive technologies that promise access to the womb. While The Silent Scream presents visual technologies as providing authentic representations (at the same time as the filmmakers distort those representations), the characters in V are legitimately skeptical of these same technologies, articulating an awareness of their potential for manipulation. And yet the ideologies of these texts overlap in that both ultimately position fetuses as more intentional and agentic than their mothers.
Gregory Alan Phipps
Following Schrödinger’s Cat into Many Worlds: Quantum Physics and William Sleator’s The Last Universe
Abstract. -- This article examines connections between William Sleator’s The Last Universe and key concepts in quantum physics, including Schrödinger’s cat and the many-worlds interpretation. On the surface, The Last Universe introduces young adult readers to the basic ideas of Schrödinger’s cat and the many-worlds interpretation while also warning them of the dangers that can arise when they pursue single-minded objectives. Beneath its simplistic exploration of quantum physics and lucid moral messages, however, The Last Universe also unpacks the complex implications of Schrödinger’s cat and the many-worlds interpretation to tell a more subversive story about personal identity and the challenges of making genuine ethical decisions.
Toward a Chola Consciousness: Examining Nuclear Colonialism in Lunar Braceros, 2125-2148
Abstract. -- Adding to a growing body of scholarship on Chicanafuturism and borderlands science fiction, this essay interrogates the politics of labor in Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s novella Lunar Braceros 2125-2148. It examines the breakdown of the heteronormative nuclear family and its transformation into another version of the nuclear family, one that results from radioactive contamination and exposure. I argue the protagonist Lydia becomes a chola cyborg whose cyber-consciousness is created by nuclear alienation. I demonstrate how the environmental effects of the neoliberal economy, as portrayed in Lunar Braceros, are reflective of the sociopolitical conditions of Indigenous communities in the US.
Jenna Campbell
Ecofeminist Dialogic: Identity Continua in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora
Abstract. -- Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora (2015) contributes to an ecofeminist dialogic by complicating representation through linguistic systems. I examine the novel’s starship to look at the body’s role in identity formation within a confining linguistic system. Moving from a singular female “I,” to the plural genderless “We,” the starship resists the reductive tendencies of binary systems, shifting from a definitional role as a surrogate womb to posthuman selfhood as a collective. This essay enacts a psychoanalytic reading, employing a Lacanian framework extended by Judith Butler, who examines identity systems built by social, cultural, and historical contexts. From Butler, the essay moves on to ecofeminism, considering how identity continua complicate binary identity systems without rejecting them outright, thereby effectively creating continually traversable, overlapping channels among identity nodes. Achieving selfhood through identity continua allows the ship to access the posthuman, a step that promises the ethical, sustainable future called for by ecofeminists. Fulfilling its anthropocentric body burden highlights the social, cultural, and historical obstacles barring this potential future that considers, values, and protects the “we” implicit in all living and nonliving material actors.
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