#150 = Volume 50, Part 2 = July 2023
Chiara Mengozzi and Julien Wacquez
On the Uses of Science Fiction in Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences: Meaning and Reading Effects
Abstract. -- Traditionally neglected if not despised by researchers in the humanities and social sciences, science fiction is changing status, being invested with new qualities and functions and, above all, a real epistemic value by leading scholars in the field of environmental humanities. Some of them not only turn to sf as a conceptual resource but go so far as to write counterfactual texts, told in the future or from impossible points of view, deploying sf narrative strategies to breathe new life into their academic writing. This paper considers what qualities these researchers explicitly attribute to sf, focusing on an emblematic case study—an article of speculative anthropology by Anna Tsing—to show how concretely these unconventional writing experiments can weave science and fiction into their textual fabric. Finally, we address the reading effects that these hybrid texts may stimulate by positioning Tsing’s article in the field of contemporary sf, through the joint analysis of two fictions by Ted Chiang and Sylvie Lainé, which similarly ask how to account for a form of existence radically different from ours, relying on surprising comparisons between different sciences, living species, and instruments of knowledge. Our research approach contributes to grasping the current reconfiguration of knowledge and writing practices, allows us to formulate some hypotheses about today’s use and relevance of sf in the field of environmental humanities, and finally points to new and unexpected areas of application for comparative literature in a time of ecological collapse.
Stephen Schryer
Neoliberal World Reduction: Robert Heinlein and Milton Friedman’s Free-Market Utopias
Abstract. -- In the 1960s and 1970s, sf writer Robert Heinlein and Chicago economist Milton Friedman emerged as voices for the American libertarian right, promoting idealized visions of absolute, laissez-faire capitalism. These visions depended on the authors’ use of world reduction (Jameson). They stripped away many of the complexities of global capitalism, creating appealing pictures of a frictionless free market. This essay reads Robert Heinlein as an amateur economist, exploring his fascination with monetary theory from his early H.G. Wells-inspired socialist utopias to later libertarian fictions such as Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). Heinlein’s right-ward drift between these fictions hinged on his changing conception of risk, an idea that he at once celebrated and attenuated, rarely exposing the consequences of unfettered laissez-faire. Conversely, the essay reads Friedman as a science-fiction writer whose works for a popular audience (Capitalism and Freedom [1962], Free to Choose [1980]) extrapolate free-market futures that draw on nostalgic recreations of America’s frontier past. Heinlein’s and Friedman’s books made their respective versions of libertarianism compelling for a generation of (mostly) white male middle-class readers. Their world reductions helped usher in a specifically neoliberal vision of the individual’s place in society, one that celebrates economic freedoms while disavowing democratic liberties.
Lyu Guangzhao
Past the Point of No Return: Deterritorialization and Haecceities in M. John Harrison’s KEFAHUCHI TRACT Trilogy
Abstract. -- M. John Harrison is often considered one of the most commercially underestimated writers of science fiction and fantasy in the UK since the mid-1960s. This article aims to focus on Harrison’s under-recognized contributions to science fiction while focusing on his later work—the KEFAHUCHI TRACT trilogy (2002-2012). Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I will argue that Harrison’s trilogy provides a line of flight escaping the binary dichotomies between self and other, one and multiple, and subject and object, guiding us toward our eventual deterritorialization and liberating us from the competitive nature of capitalist realism. This process is certainly not just a celebration of deterritorialization for its own sake, but rather a refusal to allow the complexity of reality to be reduced to a mere reflection of the economic norms of capitalist realism
Sarah Leilani Parijs
THE BROKEN EARTH: Racialized Geosciences and Un-Person Magics to Darken Gaia
Abstract. --Speculative fiction often imagines the Earth as animate or elements of the natural world as having supernatural forms of agency. The idea of planetary animacy in American environmentalism is linked to Gaia theory that poses that Earth is an agential, feeling, and holistic planetary synecdoche. What is missing from the history of Gaia theory, however, is an account of racialization. This essay suggests that the vexed history of Gaia theory helps us think about how N.K. Jeminsin’s BROKEN EARTH trilogy (2015-2017) uses magic to estrange our imagination of Earth. It argues that Jemisin uses magic as a motif for planetary animacy but complicates ideas of ecological interconnection associated with seeing the planet as a synecdoche. By darkening Gaia, the trilogy exposes the raced violence of the human as an ontological category in Western thought. Ambiguous magic is a heuristic of planetary animacy, symptom of racialized dehumanization, and metonymic for the apocalyptic in black nihilist thought and indigenous science. This paper argues that Jemisin revises Gaia by enchanting its racialized history to theorize inhuman, intercultural planetary animacy in the Anthropocene.
Anna McFarlane
Reproductive Loss in the Anthropocene: Paul McAuley’s Austral
Abstract. -- The figure of the child is evocative of the deep time of human-as-species and has been read as a symbol of the future that forecloses political possibilities. Drawing on the work of Lee Edelman and Rebekah Sheldon, this paper argues that in the era of the climate crisis and the Anthropocene, the symbolism of reproductive loss is becoming increasingly significant, redolent as it is of futures cut short and time running out. This paper reads Paul McAuley’s Austral, a text centered around the miscarriage of its main character, a woman gene-edited to survive in Antarctic conditions. While the miscarriage represents a story brought to a premature end, it also anchors the novel’s narrative, which deals with the terraforming of Antarctica in conditions of global warming and the racialization of new forms of gene-edited life. The article considers the importance of reproductive loss as a metaphor for the climate crisis, while also engaging with the importance of representing and expressing experiences of reproductive loss that are often grieved in private.
M. Keith Booker and Isra Daraiseh
The Political Form of Postmodernism: Bakhtin, Jameson, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future
Abstract. --The Ministry for the Future (2020) is Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest and most complex in a series of science-fiction novels that engage with the issue of climate change. It adds to Robinson’s long engagement with the theoretical work of Fredric Jameson, though its polyphonic nature also rewards reading it through the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. The utopian dimension that is so important in Robinson’s work has often led Jameson to see Robinson precisely as an exception to the cultural hegemony of postmodernism. That utopian dimension is also strong in The Ministry for the Future. Many characteristics, however, of this long, complex, highly polyphonic novel make it more appropriate to characterize it as an example of the “political form of postmodernism” that Jameson has suggested might someday come to be, challenging the death grip of the “cultural logic of late capitalism” on contemporary cultural production. While The Ministry for the Future has many of the formal characteristics typically associated with postmodernism, it uses these characteristics not just to outline the problems posed by climate change and economic injustice but also to suggest ways in which ordinary people—working together on a global scale—can confront these problems and make a better world.
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