#146 = Volume 49, Part 1 = March 2022
Stefania Forlini
Periodical Speculations: Early “Science-Fiction” and Popular Victorian Weeklies
Abstract. -- This article implicates early weekly periodicals in the history of British science fiction by examining the effects of periodicals as media defined by their specific rhythms of publication, diversity of content, and place in a larger media ecology. Specifically, it examines how prominent cheap weeklies Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (1832-1956) and Household Words (1850-1859) helped popularize science, promoted science-fictional habits of mind, and incubated science-fictional hybrid genres, including “reflective science,” “science in fable,” the fairy-tales of science, and what was first labeled “science-fiction” in 1851. Decades before H.G. Wells published his works in monthly periodicals, these accessible weeklies helped cultivate casual readers to whom his “miscellany of inventions” might appeal. Harnessing insights from the Gibson Collection of Speculative Fiction, this article varies its scale of analysis from individual periodical-based works to larger patterns that develop within and across periodicals and their associated book-length works, ultimately arguing for a genre evolution paradigm that explicitly attends to the material formats of publication, intermedial networks, and the practices of remediation, collection, recollection, and forgetting that necessarily shape critical assessments of sf.
Todd M. Thompson
“Religion, Violence, and Apocalypse in H.G. Wells
Abstract. -- H.G. Wells’s interest in cataclysmic violence that could save humanity from its biological heritage and propel it toward acceptance of the World State is a puzzling feature of his thought. This essay argues that Wells’s view of human nature and his belief that apocalyptic violence might be necessary to help humans transcend their nature reflects a synthesis between his Christian background and his commitment to science. Wells’s broader project throughout his career was to develop a scientific eschatology that could answer the questions raised by the Bible through appeal to the evidence furnished by science. His views on violence should be situated within the context of this larger apocalyptic vision of history. In light of this, Wells’s ideas bear comparison to those of René Girard, another thinker who brought Darwinian reflections on human extinction into dialogue with Christian views of the end times. This essay brings the ideas of Wells and Girard into conversation in order to reflect on the nature of science fiction as a genre that is especially well situated to address questions about the relationships among religion, violence, and technology. It argues that near the end of his life, Wells came to reject the idea that sacrificial violence might pave the way for human transformation after undergoing what René Girard has called a “novelistic conversion.”
Stefan Würrer
A Short History of Ambivalence Toward the Feminist Utopia in Japanese Science Fiction
Abstract. -- In the late 1970s, Japanese women writers started to question the androcentric conventions of sf and began transforming it through feminism-inspired works. One of the early stars of this new generation, Suzuki Izumi, was the first to publish an sf novel set in a single-gender world. In “Onna to onna no yononaka” [Women’s World, 1977], however, the all-female world is not so much the locus of utopian hope—as, for example, Whileaway in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975)—but rather the object of ambivalent disidentification. This is also true for the all-female worlds in Kurahashi Yumiko’s Amanon koku ōkanki [Records of a Voyage to Amanon, 1986] and Shōno Yoriko’s Suishōnai seido [The World Within the Crystal, 2003]. Situating these texts within the context of modern Japan, feminist/queer theory, and sf, I demonstrate in this essay that, while these texts are feminist negotiations of sexism and patriarchy, their ambivalence towards all-female worlds also bespeaks a systemic problem within the feminist discourses they reference. That is, it cannot just be read as an expression of doubt about the political potential of separatism or gender essentialism, but must also be understood as an effect of heteronormativity—the marginalization of lesbian voices within feminism in Japan. This is not a distinctly Japanese issue, however, as I will show at the end of my discussion.
Lorenzo Andolfatto
“Han Song’s “A Guide to Hunting Beautiful Women” and the Restricted Horizon of “Chinese SF”
Abstract. -- In this essay I discuss the work of Chinese sf author Han Song (1965–), focusing in particular on the novella “Meinü shoulie zhinan” [A Guide to Hunting Beautiful Women, 2014]. This novella is used as a starting point for approaching matters of language and form in contemporary Chinese-language science fiction, and exploring what these elements can tell us about the state of the genre to which they are ascribed. This essay develops on three levels: a self-reflective one, pertaining to my own experience as a translator; a formal one, in which I focus on the narrative configuration of “Meinü shoulie zhinan”; and a discursive one, in which I try to tackle the cultural phenomenon of “Chinese SF” from a wider perspective. These three levels are connected: I submit that my own experience in translating this novella, which was one of discomfort, was rooted in the code informing the text, and that the mobilization of this code therein reflects by way of metonymy the problematic mobilization of science fiction in China and the world today.
Lyu Guangzhao
Demise of the False Utopia: China’s Post-socialist Transition in Han Song’s Red Star Over America
Abstract. -- The eeriness in Han Song’s stories has made him a unique writer in the New Wave of Chinese science fiction. His “eerie” writings blend the imageries of utopia and dystopia, blurring the boundaries between “good” and “bad” places and creating a new form of utopianism that can account for the rapid social transition in China since the 1990s. This essay focuses on one of Han Song’s earlier novels, Red Star over America (2000), and interrogates the seemingly utopian China, governed by the omnipotent artificial intelligence Amanduo, through the lens of Moylan’s “critical utopia” and Bakhtin’s “adventure chronotope.” The collapse of Amanduo reflects the decline of “top-down” elitist discourse in China, developed during the New Enlightenment of the 1980s. Han’s protagonist’s hesitant journey in the post-Amanduo world in search of a new order represents China’s ideological transition during the post-socialist era.
Body Knowledge, Reproductive Anxiety, and “Paying the Rent” in Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild”
Abstract. -- In this article, we read Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild” as a “paying the rent” story in which reproduction functions as the source of payment made by the Terrans to the Tlic. We use Jenkins’s distinctions between “hierarchical body knowledge” and “intelligent body knowledge,” which derive from Butler’s conception of “body knowledge,” to argue that the Tlic’s reproduction anxiety results from a legacy of “hierarchical body knowledge” that persists in their approaches to and valuation of their Terran trade partners. The problem with hierarchical body knowledge, as Butler suggests in “Bloodchild,” is that it fosters social stratification at the expense of survival and could lead both groups to one-up themselves to death. To avoid such a fate, the story suggests that both groups need to develop a symbiotic love for each other, a love rooted in one of the foundational tenets of intelligent body knowledge—that a body’s survival value is more important than its social value.
Jo Alyson Parker
Ted Chiang’s Time-Travel Narratives: Predetermination, Predictability, and Free Will
Abstract. -- Ted Chiang’s sf narratives—“thought experiments,” in his words—are written in a variety of genres and cover a variety of ideas, including considerations of temporal issues such as time travel. Here I examine three of these time-travel thought experiments: “Story of Your Life” (1998), “What’s Expected of Us” (2005), and “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” (2007). As I argue, Chiang implicitly predicates each narrative on the block universe theory of the universe, whereby past, present, and future all coexist simultaneously; and he structures the narratives so as to reinforce this temporal fixedness. Concurrently, however, each narrative highlights key ideas relating to free will, such as knowledge, predictability, and agency, thus exploring what a meaningful definition of free will might be that is compatible with determinism.
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