#151 = Volume 50, Part 3 = November 2023
Regina Y. Lee
A New Geological (R)age: Orogeny, Anger, and the Anthropocene in N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season
Abstract. -- In The Fifth Season (2015), N.K. Jemisin depicts speculative seismological and volcanic events to defamiliarize the outcomes of slavery from their American instantiations, making them starkly visible again and again. I argue that analyzing how The Fifth Season articulates this understanding requires a geological or, more precisely, a tectonic lens. In this paper I focus on The Fifth Season specifically for its tripartite narrative stratification, which reproduces the geological mechanisms of building and destroying mountains in the space of a human lifetime. Jemisin uses volcanos, tectonic plates, slip strikes, and especially earthquakes to parallel, echo, amplify, and foreshadow her characters’ responses and actions. This is a tectonic tactic, not only for negotiating the violent ruptures of the novel’s ironically named world of “The Stillness” but also for tracing slavery’s historical arc, requiring multifaceted transnational analyses across centuries to track its devastating trajectories.
Spencer Adams
Navigating Waves of Capital and History: On Speculation and Submersion in Delany
Abstract. --This essay reads two texts by Samuel R. Delany—Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and “Atlantis: Model 1924”—that prominently thematize spontaneous queer encounter and the financialized production of urban space. It explores the writerly practices that open up the subjective space of sexual cultures threatened and eroded by the impersonal forces of capital, highlighting in particular the use of speculative play in “Atlantis,” to suggest it serves as a model for an sf relation to history. In making sense of the contingent conditions lending urgency to Delany’s generic intervention, the essay situates Delany’s writings within the US systemic cycle of capital accumulation, noting the distinct mechanisms of financialized real estate speculation and attendant gentrification that serve to enforce property relations and sexual norms in New York.
Simona Bartolotta
Apophenic Inventions: Chance and the Dismantling of Anthropocentrism in Stanisław Lem’s Fiction
Abstract. -- This paper examines how Stanisław Lem’s speculative writings configure the idea of chance as a challenge to anthropocentric thinking. Texts examined include tales from The Cyberiad, one of the faux reviews from A Perfect Vacuum, and Lem’s two detective novels The Investigation and The Chain of Chance—which, as the paper argues, in fact fully participate in the same cognitive tasks that in Lem’s literary-philosophical system are attributed to science fiction, concerning the expansion of possibilities of thought and the questioning, and possibly even the reinvention, of ingrained ideas and conceptions. By analysing the structural and theoretical role that chance plays in these texts, and chiefly drawing from scientific and philosophical application of probability theory, this paper demonstrates that Lem’s thought and oeuvre pivot on a complex web of connections between the idea of chance, the limits of anthropocentrism, and the question of tellability.
Weronika Łaszkiewicz
Analyzing Humanity’s Fate Beyond the Anthropocene in the Works of Sheri S. Tepper
Abstract. --The aim of this article is to juxtapose two of Sheri S. Tepper’s works—Beauty (1991) and the PLAGUE OF ANGELS trilogy (1993-2014)—in order to demonstrate how her vision of humanity’s future beyond the Anthropocene evolves or devolves in the course of her literary career, from the promise of magical salvation into a disturbing scenario of scientific advancement involving passive genocide, genetic modification, and eugenics. My reading is grounded in Marek Oziewicz’s theory of planetary narratives, Donna Haraway’s concept of the Chthulucene, and Joan Gordon’s figure of the amborg, which allow one to critically evaluate the author’s perception both of interspecies relations and humanity’s position among other living creatures.
Tomás Vergara
Towards Postcapitalist Value in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future
Abstract. -- This paper establishes a dialogue between Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future and recent scholarship on the Capitalocene. By drawing on Jason W. Moore’s concepts of world-ecology and Cheap Natures, it argues that the novel attempts to reconceptualize economics with the aim of integrating biospheric sustainability into the composition of value. Through its emphasis on reformulating the value-form of capital, the text persuades readers that reformations can lead to a postcapitalist world-ecology.
Dihao Zhou
Contagion and Communication: Immunity, Information, and Reflexive Futurity in Ye Yonglie’s Outbreak Narratives
Abstract. -- This paper reads Ye Yonglie’s two stories about China’s encounter with future pandemics—“Performance is Not Postponed” (1979) and “Disease of Love” (1986)—as critical comments on post-Mao China’s reform and a vital sign of Chinese science fiction’s transformation in its understanding of the future. The paper first analyzes the representation of index patients and logistical infrastructures to reveal the tension between contagion and communication in Ye’s pandemic stories. While contagion triggers speculation about the nation’s biological and ideological immunity, it nonetheless foregrounds communication as necessary for China’s desired modernization. The paper then examines communication as the central theme of China’s reform by reading Ye’s two stories as narratives of information flow and control. Comparing them with Ye’s Little Smarty Travels to the Future (1978), the paper discusses how Ye’s pandemic stories disrupt and interrogate a utopian vision of communication that underlies post-Mao China’s political and technological reorientation. The paper finally associates the critical awareness of modernization in Ye’s outbreak narratives with a shifting understanding of the ontological condition of the future. Despite not being entirely freed from the Maoist-styled future as a destination of voluntarist and triumphalist progress, Ye’s outbreak narratives begin to conceive of the future as an uncertain and imposing horizon where crises generated by past development break out and demand our response.
Haerin Shin
The Space between 1s and 0s: Intentional Patiency in Computational Creativity
Abstract. -- Challenging humanity’s self-reified monopoly over the domain of hermeneutics, computational creativity destabilizes the foundations of its lexical reference, invoking Walter Benjamin’s musings on the age of technological reproducibility. How may we delineate the parameters of creativity outside the bounds of apperceptive intent, especially if the generative process is strictly reliant upon conditional expressions of correlational nature rather than the transcendental aura of instantaneous inspiration? Should procedurally derived computational outputs deserve the label of creativity? If so, then how do such developments affect and even reconfigure human language to challenge the metrics whereby we inscribe it with social value? By probing the interstitial space between algorithmic design and arbitrary semantics through readings of autonomously written fiction, this essay investigates how computational creativity remediates literary expressivity in text-generating models. Based on the concept of intentional patiency, which I propose as an alternative to the agency of the phenomenological sovereign subject in the valuation and appreciation of nonhuman creativity, the essay asks what it means to write, and what writing means in an age when not only artistic output, but also creative agency may be approaching the singularity event horizon.
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