SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES最新文献

{"title":"Contagion and Communication: Immunity, Information, and Reflexive Futurity in Ye Yonglie’s Outbreak Narratives","authors":"Dihao Zhou","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910329","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910329","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"375 7","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Out of this World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium by Rachel S. Cordasco (review)","authors":"Regina Kanyu Wang","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910333","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910333","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Out of this World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium by Rachel S. Cordasco Regina Kanyu Wang Into a Real World. Rachel S. Cordasco. Out of this World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium. U of Illinois P, 2021. 277 pp. $60 hc, $19.95 ebk. As Rachel S. Cordasco writes in her introduction, “The early twenty-first century has witnessed an explosion of speculative fiction in English translation (SFT).” Out of this World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium comes at the right time to provide a panoramic overview and abundant details of this explosion. This study is well written and precise, and includes many examples and an organized and comprehensive framework, making it user-friendly for both academic and non-academic readers. It is divided into fourteen chapters focusing on SFT in fourteen different languages, with an introduction and a list of resources and an index at the end. Such an arrangement allows readers to navigate through the book easily and directs them to related resources for those who want to explore more. It is suitable for scholars who are interested in SFT as a global cultural phenomenon, researchers who are focusing on speculative fiction from a particular language, and readers who are looking to learn more about books in translation. Cordasco identifies the research objective of her study clearly in its title: speculative fiction in translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium. In her introduction, she sets boundaries on what she includes and excludes. She focuses only on works that have been translated into English from other languages and published in print (either novels, collections, or anthologies). She looks at adult-level speculative fiction, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and more. By clarifying her range, she limits the scale of the book in a practical manner and opens doors to future research with different emphases, such as short stories or young-adult books. She also provides a brief introduction to the larger historical context of SFT, acknowledging both earlier [End Page 484] attempts in the 1970s and recent efforts in the twenty-first century to enhance the communication among speculative fictions written in different languages all over the world and to promote SFT. She also points out two important facts in the genre’s history: its Anglophone domination and its gender imbalance. According to the data she provides, both are improving, or can be expected to improve with the publication of this book. Cardasco’s short yet informative introduction lays the foundation for a thorough analysis of SFT in each selected language in the chapters that follow. The fourteen chapters of the book examine SFT from Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish sf in alphabetical order. Cordasco chooses those","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"372 5-6","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Utopia and Its Discontents: Plato to Atwood by Sebastian Mitchell (review)","authors":"Rick Cousins","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910335","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910335","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Utopia and Its Discontents: Plato to Atwood by Sebastian Mitchell Rick Cousins Making the Best of All Possible Worlds. Sebastian Mitchell. Utopia and Its Discontents: Plato to Atwood. Bloomsbury, 2020. 215 pp. $156.95 hc. The attractions of living in a perfect world seem obvious, yet utopias are often invoked as cautionary tales of the “be careful what you wish for” variety. In Utopia and Its Discontents, Sebastian Mitchell tasks himself with discovering what all this wishing is about and what it leads to, through what he terms “a transhistorical study” spanning two and a half millennia (6). If “Utopianism often suggests a hopelessly impractical scheme or set of measures,” it may be because the very idea of utopia contains a central paradox (1). In a perfect world, there would be no need to imagine a perfect world; by extension, any perfect worlds we construct in response to the imperfections of the world we live in are bound to have imperfections of their own. As far as Mitchell is concerned, these imperfections are the inevitable by-product of reflections on society that have been distorted by less-than-perfect self-reflection: “utopian authors invariably constructed ideal states in their own image” (144). Utopias tend not to be “you-topias” but “me-topias”: casual travellers to any of these fabled lands would be well-advised to familiarize themselves with the author of the guide book and plan their trip by reading between the lines. This is precisely what Mitchell has done in Utopia and Its Discontents, by sidestepping the proselytizing and polemics in the fictionally perfect worlds he surveys. Instead, he continually sounds the refrain that any utopia is just as much a private aesthetic statement as it is a public political program. The degree to which the beautiful, the useful, and the good are equated in the eyes of the creator of a utopian scheme is the key to understanding whether its overall goals tend more towards making better citizens or merely making [End Page 489] better-controlled ones. Regardless of the form of governance chosen for an imagined earthly paradise, “the aesthetic is the central means of utopian expression” (5). Although Mitchell successfully reconciles divergent schools of thought concerning the role of aesthetics in utopias, in his view their creators have generally adopted Platonic ideals of form. Where they differ is in their acceptance of the restrictions Plato places on artistic expression, as put forth in the Republic (c.375 BCE) and the Symposium (c.385–370 BCE). As a student of fictional ideal states, Mitchell is honor-bound to conclude that Plato has little to offer any utopian writer who sees a place for art and artists in the grand scheme of things. “The shadow of Plato’s condemnation of aesthetic social function” has certainly spread far and wide across social theory, but it is also worth remembering that Plato’s own writings have a decidedly creative component (22). Constructed as extended d","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"375 8","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Educational Fabulations: Teaching and Learning for a World Yet to Come ed. by Diane Conrad and Sean Wiebe (review)","authors":"Brittany Tomin","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910332","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Educational Fabulations: Teaching and Learning for a World Yet to Come ed. by Diane Conrad and Sean Wiebe Brittany Tomin Pursuing Education Yet to Come. Diane Conrad and Sean Wiebe, eds. Educational Fabulations: Teaching and Learning for a World Yet to Come. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. xxi+399 pp. $169.99 hc, $129.99 ebk. Diane Conrad and Sean Wiebe’s edited volume Educational Fabulations: Teaching and Learning for a World Yet to Come (2022) is at once a collection of speculative pedagogical imaginings by scholar-educators as they envision educational possibility, and a methodological exploration of “speculative fiction as fiction-based research” (1). In their introduction, the editors frame this work within contemporary challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the ever-expanding capacities of artificial intelligence, and the increasingly “wired” nature of interpersonal relations. They situate these challenges and others against the backdrop of a pervasive anthropocentric orientation toward climate change and offer a contrasting turn towards humanity’s more-than-human relations and responsibilities. Central to this framing is the view that education alone is not, as jan jagodzinksi notes in the Forward, “up to the task that awaits” (xi). Viewing speculative fiction and the act of speculative storytelling as a means through which education can be imagined otherwise, the editors effectively situate speculative modes as valuable catalysts for posing the types of questions necessary to critique, interrogate, and disrupt present normative educational practices, and accordingly carve out a convincing path toward new educational theorizing within the imaginative possibility of the “not yet” (7; emphasis in original). Building on research at the intersections of education and sf, the editors do not seek to argue for space within education for speculative genres; rather they argue that education should be thought anew through the act of speculation, to “intervene in the business-as-usual perspectives that currently shape our systems of education” (10) by envisioning the futures we hope to shape. The stories that comprise this volume accordingly come from the kinds of questions that characterize educators’ experiences, since educators often wonder about how education might shift and evolve in practice. Resistant to making distinctions among speculative genres, the editors instead consider “speculative social fiction” (3) as an umbrella term conceptualizing stories that use the turns of speculation to imagine the “elsewhere” of education as a kind of theory. Bringing together thirty-eight storytellers across twenty-eight stories, the rest of this text is divided into six thematic and conceptual sections containing imaginaries that explore different elements of educational possibility. In Part I, “The Future of Technology in Education,” authors examine some of the wide-ranging implications of technological change for education, from android teach","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"373 8","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Science Fiction and Narrative Form by David Roberts, Andrew Milner, and Peter Murphy (review)","authors":"Rjurik Davidson","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910336","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910336","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Science Fiction and Narrative Form by David Roberts, Andrew Milner, and Peter Murphy Rjurik Davidson When Lukács Advocates for SF. David Roberts, Andrew Milner, and Peter Murphy. Science Fiction and Narrative Form. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 231 pp. $159.95 hc, $115.16 ebk. [End Page 492] For fifty years intellectuals and scholars have grappled with the question of science fiction as form (including its component parts of genre and definition). The earliest significant scholarly intervention was Darko Suvin’s 1972 definition of sf as a literature of “cognitive estrangement.” Since then, each critic of sf has had in some way to define the genre, if only implicitly to distinguish the boundaries of their subject. Following Suvin, significant reflections on sf’s formal components and definition have been offered by Samuel R. Delany, Robert Scholes, Brian Aldiss, Carl Freedman, Frederic Jameson, and many others. Science Fiction and Narrative Form enters this field as an original, idiosyncratic, and essential intervention. As David Roberts states in the Introduction, “The aim of this book is to situate science fiction among the great narrative forms” (1). Divided into three parts by the individual authors, the book makes an argument for situating sf in Georg Lukács’s typology of the “epic” and the “novel” (The Theory of the Novel [1920]. In this model, the epic is an organic and collective form in which meaning is immanent. In contrast, the modern novel, which chronologically follows the epic and is bound closely to the concerns of modernity, conventionally focuses on problematic individuals and their “alienation from society and nature” (Roberts 1); meaning is the very thing in question in the “godforsaken world” (3). Sf, the authors assert, is a companion form to the novel but transcends it by returning to the existential questions familiar to the epic, including those of humanity and history, technology and ontology, collectivity and destiny. This approach results in a more organic conception of the world, in “comprehensive world pictures” (1). Roberts’s Introduction and opening section establish many of the theoretical foundations of the book. As might be expected from an argument based in Lukács’s Hegelianism and specifically his The Theory of the Novel (1916), it is made in a literary-philosophical register that cleaves to the kind of German romanticist heritage that it is deploying. Roberts makes the compelling argument that sf has returned to the theological concerns of the epic, later abandoned by the novel for illusions of the free-floating individual. Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised (Les Particules élémentaires [1998]) is a pertinent example of the transcendence of individualism through the symbol of the clone and in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) through the usurpation of divine powers, most particularly that of creating life. In sf, technology provides the metaphors for the “perennial problems of h","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"371 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Notes and Correspondence","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910342","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910342","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"375 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Black Possibility: A Metaphysical Space of Power and Wild Imagination","authors":"Caroline Edwards","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910331","url":null,"abstract":"Black Possibility: A Metaphysical Space of Power and Wild Imagination Caroline Edwards (bio) Ekow Eshun, ed. In The Black Fantastic. MIT, 2022. 304 pp. $39.95 hc & pbk. Ekow Eshun’s In the Black Fantastic is a brilliant addition to the contemporary explosion of interest in Black sf/f. Written as the companion volume to his recently curated exhibition of the same title at London’s progressive Hayward Gallery (29 June–18 September 2022), this beautifully produced volume offers a visual history of the Black fantastic. The capaciousness of the Black fantastic is summed up by the poet Elizabeth Alexander, who invites readers to envisage “a metaphysical space beyond the black public everyday” informed by the “power and wild imagination that black people ourselves know we possess” (13). Eshun responds to Alexander’s call with a reverence for the breadth and diversity of African diasporic artworks whose polyphonic articulations of complex shared histories propel us into confident Black futures. Eshun’s show was the UK’s first exhibition dedicated to the work of Black artists who use fantastical elements in their work to address racial injustice. The Hayward Gallery has been the site of several significant exhibitions dealing with the work of Black artists over the past four decades. “The Other Story” in 1989 was the first group exhibition in a major public space in the UK that exhibited the work of artists of color and “Africa Remix” in 2005, which featured 84 artists from 25 different countries, was the largest ever exhibition of contemporary African art in Europe at the time. In the Black Fantastic introduces and contextualizes the artworks of the eleven contemporary artists featured in the exhibition: Nick Cave, Sedrick Chisom, Ellen Gallagher, Hew Locke, Wangechi Mutu, Rashaad Newsome, Chris Ofili, Tabita Rezaire, Cauleen Smith, Lina Iris Viktor, and Kara Walker. These artists incorporate elements of folklore, science fiction, and diasporic African spiritual traditions, and engage with the legacies of Afrofuturism. Their use of the speculative mode is not, as Eshun writes, “the escapism we might associate with fantasy. It is an indication, rather, that a world built on racial inequality is itself fractured” (55). Eshun insists on a conceptual distinction between Afrofuturism and the Black fantastic, citing art critics who lament the “hackneyed tropes” of Jive-talking aliens, martial arts prowess, and mandatory references to Sun Ra and Janelle Monáe, although Eshun himself cannot avoid such references, as his inclusion of Sun Ra and Janelle Monáe album art demonstrates (12). The Black fantastic, he suggests, “is less a genre or a movement than a way of seeing shared by artists who grapple with the [End Page 476] legacy of slavery and the inequities of racialized contemporary society by conjuring new narratives of Black possibility” (12; emphasis added). As Eshun described to me in a conversation hosted at Birkbeck, University of London, in February 20","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"374 6","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ecofeminist Science Fiction: International Perspectives on Gender and Ecology in Literature ed. by Douglas A. Vakoch (review)","authors":"Megan Stowe","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910338","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910338","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Ecofeminist Science Fiction: International Perspectives on Gender and Ecology in Literature ed. by Douglas A. Vakoch Megan Stowe International Voices on Ecofeminist SF. Douglas A. Vakoch, ed. Ecofeminist Science Fiction: International Perspectives on Gender and Ecology in Literature. Routledge, 2021. 232 pp. $128 hc, $39.16 ebk. In the first book-length approach to its subject, Ecofeminist Science Fiction: International Perspectives on Gender, Ecology, and Literature comprises fourteen chapters by voices in ecocriticism spanning five continents. The editor, Douglas A. Vakoch, outlines the project’s scope in his Preface as international scholars “scrutiniz[ing] science fiction for insights into the fundamental changes we need to make to survive and thrive as a species” at a time of ecological despair (20). The scope of this work is expansive, as scholars interrogate ecocriticism’s intersections with the Anthropocene in film, television, and both canonical and lesser known but equally important literatures that “trace the origins of human-caused environmental change in the twin oppressions of women and nature driven by patriarchal power and ideologies,” while also providing alternative ways of seeing and being in the world (19). Patrick D. Murphy offers the Introduction, creating a brief timeline of the historical interactions among women, science fiction, and the environment. Though the beginning of the introduction does not seem immediately clear as a framing mechanism for the anthology that follows, Murphy’s critique of the state of ecocritical anthologies up to this point is a salient one: “feminist and ecofeminist analyses of science fiction [by now should have] simply become part and parcel of any collection of essays on such literature [and] . . . any ecocritical anthology should have to include a substantial body of ecofeminist critique” (25). But it has been limited even among noted critics and authors in the field, which Murphy cites as justification for this anthology’s intervention. The book’s chapters are arranged in four parts. “Part 1: Female Bodies: Plants and Animals, Cyborgs and Robots” includes Melissa Etzler’s “Mothered by Arid Sand”: Hanns Heinz Ewers’s “Alraune with an Ecofeminist Twist,” followed by “The Runa and Female Otherness in Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow” by Leslie Kordecki. Etzler argues that the titular character Alraune can be read as a proto-ecofeminist femme fatale who redresses male manipulation and dominance in a novel where “the equation of [End Page 498] women, animals, and the earth and the argument for their subservience is so extreme it comes across as absurd” (47). Etzler takes care to trace the lineage of such pairing of the earth and woman from Plato to the novel and beyond, noting that the characters Baum and ten Brinken use language that suggests “woman equals earth” which “establishes the earth as desirous (wanton) of its own exploitation (wench), that [both] woman and earth equal a l","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"373 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Towards Postcapitalist Value in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future","authors":"Tomás Vergara","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910328","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910328","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"375 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A New Geological (R)age: Orogeny, Anger, and the Anthropocene in N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season","authors":"Regina Y. Lee","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.a910324","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.a910324","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"374 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}