#153 = Volume 51, Part 2 = July 2024
Nicola Allen and Gerry Carlin
From Jefferson Airplane to Starship: SF, Utopia, and Evolution
Abstract. -- Paul Kantner’s Blows Against the Empire (1970) is the only rock album to have been nominated for a Hugo Award. Kantner’s lyrical excursions into SF, as a solo artist and as a member of Jefferson Airplane, are characterized by extensive borrowings of both themes and actual text from writers such as John Wyndham, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke, and others. Important intellectual fields addressed by sf and West Coast rock thematize unorthodox approaches to evolution. From Darwinian dissenters in the nineteenth century through philosophies of expanded consciousness and experimentation with psychoactive drugs in the 1960s, it seemed possible that the psychedelic youth movements of the period, and their utopian visions, were part of an evolutionary “mutation” in culture and consciousness. Science fiction seemed to have predicted this by popularizing “precognitive myths” of telepathy, gestalt consciousness, and ways of being that rock musicians thematized and to some extent sought to realize. Blows Against the Empire emerges as a compendium of sf and countercultural intertexts that celebrate such evolutionary ideals, and despite a lot of its ideas entering the mainstream, it remains a cult album and a unique record of late 1960s countercultural speculation.
Anthony Camara
The Non-Euclidean Gothic: Weird Expeditions into Higher Dimensions and Hyper-Matter with H.P. Lovecraft
Abstract. --This article explores the significance of higher-dimensional and Non-Euclidean geometries in the weird horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, particularly in “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1933) and “From Beyond” (1934). Charting a new direction for studies of geometry in Lovecraft’s fiction, this article argues that said tales speculate on the role higher dimensions play in the qualities, capacities, and tendencies of physical matter, all the while emphasizing the need for topological investigations that examine the interrelations of time, space, and matter in Lovecraft’s weird cosmos. The first part of the paper reviews the suite of mathematical and scientific discoveries informing Lovecraft’s treatment of higher-dimensional and Non-Euclidean geometries in his mythos. Focusing on alien artifacts made of unknown chemical elements from higher dimensions, the second part of the paper underscores how matter is a site of onto-epistemological crisis for Lovecraft, owing to the way that it behaves with both lawful regularity and startling unpredictability. The final part of the paper uses the philosophies of Graham Harman and Reza Negarestani—two contemporary thinkers explicitly influenced by Lovecraft—to bring the weird writer’s own brand of speculative, higher-dimensional (hyper-)materialism into relief, in ways that not only expose the fundamental rifts in matter but also those tensions that characterize Lovecraft’s intellect itself.
Stephen Dougherty
Olaf Stapledon’s Thwarted Cosmopolitics in Last and First Men and Star Maker
Abstract. -- In this essay I argue that Olaf Stapledon’s speculative writing in Last and First Men and Star Maker is deeply informed by a thwarted cosmopolitics. The dream visions of science fiction to come in these novels are born of the failure of a cosmopolitan idealism. In his profound devotion to the cause of attempted cosmopolitanism, as we might put it, and in his rich imagining of what happens right before it goes wrong, Stapledon is a very Kantian speculative writer. I flesh out a Kantian philosophical context for Stapledon in this essay, not only because of the quite practical value of considering Stapledon in a Kantian frame, but also because of Kant’s uptake in recent years by critics deeply interested in the stealthy presence of a central science-fictional motif in Kant’s writing: that of the extraterrestrial.
Jean E. Graham
The Green Apocalypse and Empathy for Vegetal Life
Abstract. --Speculative fiction can contribute toward overcoming “plant awareness disparity” and also can help create empathy for plants rather than fear of an apocalypse. The Saga of the Swamp Thing (1987) by Alan Moore, relies on Swamp Thing’s anthropomorphism (undermining the vegetal nature of flora) to oppose the apocalypse and create an empathetic response. The non-anthropomorphic carnivorous plants of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1954) never receive empathy from the human characters. In contrast, James Gunn’s Transcendental (2013) depicts an invasive vegetal species which tells its own story, becoming empathetic without anthropomorphism.
Xiuqi Huang
Universe of Pluralism: Extraterrestrial Intelligence in Liu Cixin’s Short Stories
Abstract. -- This paper examines extraterrestrial intelligence in the short stories of Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin and their relation to the alien civilization in Liu’s immensely successful Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. I will discuss the topic from three aspects: extraterrestrial intelligence’s role as both metaphorical and literal mirrors in Liu’s short stories; various alien worldviews and existential states that derive their conflicting diversity from the scientific and humanistic divide in the literary tradition of Chinese science fiction; aliens that represent either the scientistic outlook or the pitfalls of scientific and technological progress. While the values and outlooks of alien civilizations in Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy are uniformly based on a reductive and unambiguous set of axioms, Liu’s short stories argue for the multiplicity and relativism of existential values and purposes of life in the universe not only by portraying diversity, but by juxtaposing opposites, abolishing binaries, and questioning absolute positions. I argue that Liu’s short stories concerning extraterrestrial intelligence convey a message about the plurality and relativism of worldviews and existential values through embracing the coexistence of the antithetical stances of humanism and science, disputing the absolute positions of anthropocentrism and scientism, and dissolving the binary of the human self and the nonhuman other.
Paromita Patranobish
Speaking Crows and Alien Fish: Nonhuman Cosmopolitanisms in Satyajit Ray’s Speculative Fiction
Abstract. -- I approach Satyajit Ray’s sf stories as postcolonial interventions into Western Enlightenment discourses of scientific rationality. I trace the trajectory of these concerns as they are reflected in narratives centered around nonhuman animals, published in various Bengali juvenile magazines between 1961 and 1992. Ray’s stories offer a critical site for interrogating, revising, and expanding the possibilities of a Kantian moral philosophy of cosmopolitanism for post-independence contexts of democratic governance, industrialization, and urbanization. Ray’s sf enables readers to imagine a posthuman cosmopolitics (to use Isabelle Stengers’s concept) as an alternative to colonial cartographies of personhood and the centrifugal impulse of postcolonial nation formation. My article addresses the significant but underexplored role played by Ray’s ecological thinking and care for the nonhuman animal in his postcolonial politics. Ray’s sf harnesses the possibilities of Bengali speculative fiction, including Kalpavigyan’s model of a fluid science to posit a speculative vision of a future-oriented cosmopolitics where the possibility for non-reciprocal and untranslatable proximities becomes a conceptual foundation for thinking about alterity.
Techno-Orientalism Goes to the Stars: The Space Asian/ American and Interstellar Company Rule in Simon Jimenez’s The Vanished Birds
Abstract. -- This article explores how Simon Jimenez’s The Vanished Birds participates in but also moves beyond the discourse of techno-Orientalism through its depiction of characters, companies, and interstellar travel. Readers encounter a seemingly quintessential techno-Orientalist construct when they meet the book’s protagonist, Fumiko. But their attention is soon redirected to a corporate entity whose predatory capitalist practices make it the new, menacing techno-Orientalist figure in the plot. The novel intervenes in discourses of techno-Orientalism by emphasizing how exploitative economic power dynamics are not limited to actors such as individuals or nation-states, as they are typically understood, but include corporate entities. This article thus contends that more precision is necessary when defining techno-Orientalist constructs and encourages readers to expand their perspectives as they immerse themselves in the Asian American science-fictional world.
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