Salt Fish Girl and “Hopeful Monsters”: Using Monstrous Reproduction to Disrupt Science Fiction’s Colonial Fantasies

Abstract

The revival of the Frankenstein origin myth has left science fiction’s relationship to colonialism undertheorized. More recent creative interventions have, however, challenged the genre’s colonialist legacy: two works that achieve this are Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Hiromi Goto’s short story “Hopeful Monsters” (2004). Using different forms of unruly reproduction—strange births, recurring histories, and eclectic intertextuality—these texts unravel the tangled histories of science fiction and colonialism. Using tropes of repetition and mutation, Lai and Goto trace not a myth of origins but the texture of interwoven histories of gendered and racialized oppression. Monstrous patchworks of texts, these works interrogate the boundaries between science fiction, myth, folklore, and fantasy, showing these generic distinctions to have been buttressed by colonialist discourses.