{"title":"The Rise of the Cyberzines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1991–2020.Vol.5 of The History of the Science-Fiction Magazine by Mike Ashley (review)","authors":"P. Kincaid","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.0007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"50 1","pages":"116 - 119"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41595150","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 in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation ed. by Ian Campbell (review)","authors":"Lorenzo Andolfatto","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.0009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"50 1","pages":"121 - 124"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45819331","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}
ABSTRACT:Naomi Mitchison’s speculative fiction portrays learning as a process of unlearning. Travel Light (1952), Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), and Solution Three (1975) animate radical relational possibilities, favoring protagonists who let go of their prior knowledge to let in the unknown. In each text, the otherworldly illuminates inner worlds, inciting change. Mitchison posits an epistemics of contact, a way of knowing that hinges on adaptation. Her characters make a craft of forgetting the narratives that condition their perception and intentionally recondition themselves, re-membering their histories.
{"title":"The Ambivalence of Memory in Naomi Mitchison’s Speculative Fiction","authors":"L. Norris","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2023.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2023.0001","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Naomi Mitchison’s speculative fiction portrays learning as a process of unlearning. Travel Light (1952), Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), and Solution Three (1975) animate radical relational possibilities, favoring protagonists who let go of their prior knowledge to let in the unknown. In each text, the otherworldly illuminates inner worlds, inciting change. Mitchison posits an epistemics of contact, a way of knowing that hinges on adaptation. Her characters make a craft of forgetting the narratives that condition their perception and intentionally recondition themselves, re-membering their histories.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"50 1","pages":"19 - 33"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44485765","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}
“Creatures of the Light” (1930), for example, provides an intriguing example of early female-authored sf concerned with issues of the human. Thanks to his approach, which shows wide reading and deep understanding, Connolly provides a history of the human and its challenges in sf literature that is complementary, if not crucial, to contemporary engagements with sf from a critical posthumanist perspective. There is some ongoing debate about the role of posthumanism: is this a philosophical field concerned with the posthuman as a figure, a speculative idea for the subject that might come after the human? Or is the emphasis to be on posthumanism, a philosophical position critical of humanism, that can even be described as a practice of reading and interpretation? Connolly begins to move from one position to the other over the course of this monograph, finally arguing that “the ‘human’ ... comprises not a coherent figure in the history of SF, nor even a number of coherent figures, but rather a discursive site upon which may be projected any number of hopes and fears regarding the nature of human society ... and the future of embodied subjectivity in all its various guises” (200). This monograph gives a valuable starting point for considering the developments of human figures in science fiction before posthumanism had been articulated and it contributes productively to current conversations about reading such texts retroactively as engagements with the posthuman and posthumanism.—Anna McFarlane, University of Leeds
例如,1930年的《光之生物》(Creatures of the Light)就是早期女性创作的关于人类问题的科幻小说的一个有趣的例子。由于他的方法显示了广泛的阅读和深刻的理解,康诺利提供了人类的历史及其在科幻文学中的挑战,如果不是至关重要的话,从批判的后人文主义的角度来看,这是对当代科幻研究的补充。关于后人类主义的角色有一些持续的争论:这是一个关注后人类作为一个形象的哲学领域吗,是一个关于可能在人类之后出现的主体的思辨思想吗?还是强调后人文主义,一种批判人文主义的哲学立场,甚至可以被描述为一种阅读和解释的实践?在这本专著的过程中,康诺利开始从一种立场转向另一种立场,最后认为“‘人类’……在科幻史上没有一个连贯的人物,甚至没有几个连贯的人物,而是一个散漫的场所,可以投射出关于人类社会本质的任何数量的希望和恐惧……以及以各种形式体现的主体性的未来”(200)。这本专著提供了一个有价值的起点,考虑在后人类主义被阐明之前科幻小说中人物形象的发展,它对当前关于追溯阅读这些文本作为与后人类和后人类主义的接触的对话做出了富有成效的贡献。——安娜·麦克法兰,利兹大学
{"title":"Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy Through 1945: Immigrants in the Golden Age by Valerie Estelle Frankel (review)","authors":"C. Mcguirk","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0056","url":null,"abstract":"“Creatures of the Light” (1930), for example, provides an intriguing example of early female-authored sf concerned with issues of the human. Thanks to his approach, which shows wide reading and deep understanding, Connolly provides a history of the human and its challenges in sf literature that is complementary, if not crucial, to contemporary engagements with sf from a critical posthumanist perspective. There is some ongoing debate about the role of posthumanism: is this a philosophical field concerned with the posthuman as a figure, a speculative idea for the subject that might come after the human? Or is the emphasis to be on posthumanism, a philosophical position critical of humanism, that can even be described as a practice of reading and interpretation? Connolly begins to move from one position to the other over the course of this monograph, finally arguing that “the ‘human’ ... comprises not a coherent figure in the history of SF, nor even a number of coherent figures, but rather a discursive site upon which may be projected any number of hopes and fears regarding the nature of human society ... and the future of embodied subjectivity in all its various guises” (200). This monograph gives a valuable starting point for considering the developments of human figures in science fiction before posthumanism had been articulated and it contributes productively to current conversations about reading such texts retroactively as engagements with the posthuman and posthumanism.—Anna McFarlane, University of Leeds","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"562 - 564"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42664516","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}
ABSTRACT:One of the youngest of the major sf authors active in China today, Chen Qiufan is most often associated with cyberpunk, mainly because he is grounded in a critique of the near future and concerned with the ways in which biotechnology affects and alters our perception of the human body. This essay examines the "posthumanist" dimensions of three sf stories by Chen Qiufan (a.k.a. Stanley Chan): "Smog Society" (2010), "Year of the Rat" (2009), and "The Flower of Shazui" (2012), with the aim of establishing whether there are any substantial differences between posthumanism in the Chinese and Euro-American cases. I tentatively conclude that there are differences and that the main one is that the Chinese variant is more directly "post-humanist" (i.e., affiliated with philosophical humanism) insofar as it remains deeply concerned with the Marxisthumanist idea of alienated agency.
{"title":"Chinese Post-humanism and Chen Qiufan's Political Science Fiction","authors":"Ron S. Judy","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0049","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:One of the youngest of the major sf authors active in China today, Chen Qiufan is most often associated with cyberpunk, mainly because he is grounded in a critique of the near future and concerned with the ways in which biotechnology affects and alters our perception of the human body. This essay examines the \"posthumanist\" dimensions of three sf stories by Chen Qiufan (a.k.a. Stanley Chan): \"Smog Society\" (2010), \"Year of the Rat\" (2009), and \"The Flower of Shazui\" (2012), with the aim of establishing whether there are any substantial differences between posthumanism in the Chinese and Euro-American cases. I tentatively conclude that there are differences and that the main one is that the Chinese variant is more directly \"post-humanist\" (i.e., affiliated with philosophical humanism) insofar as it remains deeply concerned with the Marxisthumanist idea of alienated agency.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"502 - 519"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42027963","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}
overwhelmingly large assortment of cultural stuff. Bould posits that Villeneuve’s Arrival “exemplif[ies] contemporary cinema’s turn to misdirection, manipulation and mind-games, to narrative complexity, to uncertainty and instability” and is characteristic of contemporary digital culture, ruled by “the logic of databases and networks, of sampling, iteration, and gameplay. This generates “productive pathologies” including “paranoia (lateral thinking, making connections), schizophrenia (living with multiple modes of consciousness) and amnesia (running through protocols and procedures without personal or interpersonal engagement)” (116). The book does quite a bit of this as well, but in a very productive way, as Bould draws lines of connection between such seemingly disparate texts as Knausgard’s fiction and Sharknado. As a scholar of Asian Studies, I am struck by one assumption or aphasia in this book that is illustrative of the challenges of scale when trying to tackle the environmental humanities and global literature at the same time. That assumption regards the centrality of Europe to the history of art and civilization, and unfortunately to the history of the extractive industry as well. Bould’s definition of the “mundane novel” seems to be based on a history that excludes the very first novel in the world—Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji (c.1021 CE)—or any number of other novels. Drawing on Ghosh, Bould rightly notes that people at the global margins are already and will be the first to experience the impacts of global climate change, positing that the ideal author of climate fiction might be an Asian writer “of historical fiction, of contemporary-set fiction embedded in history, and of sf in which the future frames the past” (59). Bould does not unpack what he means here, and I generally enjoy that feature of this book. Left to unpack it myself, and ready as I am to take umbrage at the slightest hint of Asia as the Other, this strikes me as a techno-orientalist imagination of Asia as simultaneously peripheral to modernity and at the vanguard of modernity's horrific long-term consequences. This does not invalidate Bould’s thesis, and it would be impossible to do justice to every work of fiction in, say, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean. Suffice to say that Asia is not the periphery. Asia is not the exception. There is in fact a massive “dataset” out there that just proves Bould’s thesis to be all the more accurate. Overall, reading The Anthropocene Unconscious feels like the paperbound equivalent of watching someone who is really smart, really silly, has nothing to prove to any goddam tenure committee, and can write lyrically or throw some serious verbal jabs, get high and surf the internet through a screenshare. It is damn good fun. And it should be fun, because the serious stuff about the environmental humanities is so terrifying that I cannot really bear to read it. Save the children!—Nathaniel Isaacson, North Carolina State Unive
{"title":"After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin by Thomas Connolly (review)","authors":"Anna McFarlane","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0055","url":null,"abstract":"overwhelmingly large assortment of cultural stuff. Bould posits that Villeneuve’s Arrival “exemplif[ies] contemporary cinema’s turn to misdirection, manipulation and mind-games, to narrative complexity, to uncertainty and instability” and is characteristic of contemporary digital culture, ruled by “the logic of databases and networks, of sampling, iteration, and gameplay. This generates “productive pathologies” including “paranoia (lateral thinking, making connections), schizophrenia (living with multiple modes of consciousness) and amnesia (running through protocols and procedures without personal or interpersonal engagement)” (116). The book does quite a bit of this as well, but in a very productive way, as Bould draws lines of connection between such seemingly disparate texts as Knausgard’s fiction and Sharknado. As a scholar of Asian Studies, I am struck by one assumption or aphasia in this book that is illustrative of the challenges of scale when trying to tackle the environmental humanities and global literature at the same time. That assumption regards the centrality of Europe to the history of art and civilization, and unfortunately to the history of the extractive industry as well. Bould’s definition of the “mundane novel” seems to be based on a history that excludes the very first novel in the world—Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji (c.1021 CE)—or any number of other novels. Drawing on Ghosh, Bould rightly notes that people at the global margins are already and will be the first to experience the impacts of global climate change, positing that the ideal author of climate fiction might be an Asian writer “of historical fiction, of contemporary-set fiction embedded in history, and of sf in which the future frames the past” (59). Bould does not unpack what he means here, and I generally enjoy that feature of this book. Left to unpack it myself, and ready as I am to take umbrage at the slightest hint of Asia as the Other, this strikes me as a techno-orientalist imagination of Asia as simultaneously peripheral to modernity and at the vanguard of modernity's horrific long-term consequences. This does not invalidate Bould’s thesis, and it would be impossible to do justice to every work of fiction in, say, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean. Suffice to say that Asia is not the periphery. Asia is not the exception. There is in fact a massive “dataset” out there that just proves Bould’s thesis to be all the more accurate. Overall, reading The Anthropocene Unconscious feels like the paperbound equivalent of watching someone who is really smart, really silly, has nothing to prove to any goddam tenure committee, and can write lyrically or throw some serious verbal jabs, get high and surf the internet through a screenshare. It is damn good fun. And it should be fun, because the serious stuff about the environmental humanities is so terrifying that I cannot really bear to read it. Save the children!—Nathaniel Isaacson, North Carolina State Unive","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"558 - 562"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43492028","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}
Moylan returns us to Ruth Levitas, her formulation of utopian method, and how it rubs against Frederick Jameson’s skepticism that the future is imaginable. Jameson admits that we can see possibilities but draws the line at the efficacy of the fully formed programs constructed by classical utopianism. The utopian impulse, in his analysis, is something that always fails closure. Moylan points out that Levitas rises to Jameson’s challenge with a “radical positivity” that goes beyond the moment of utopian negation (which Nietzsche would reject as the pathway to nihilism) to exploiting the utopian remnant or surplus in any political program. The goal is to realize “a better way of living” that is at variance with the way the world is now (189). With Moylan at hand, perhaps we can imagine and achieve the future after all.—De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Indiana University
莫伊兰让我们回到了鲁思·莱维塔斯,她对乌托邦方法的阐述,以及它如何与弗雷德里克·詹姆森对未来是可以想象的怀疑相冲突。詹姆森承认,我们可以看到可能性,但对古典乌托邦主义构建的完整程序的效力划清界限。在他的分析中,乌托邦式的冲动总是无法结束。莫伊兰指出,莱维塔斯以一种“激进的积极性”迎接詹姆逊的挑战,这种积极性超越了乌托邦式否定的时刻(尼采会拒绝这种否定,认为这是通往虚无主义的道路),而在任何政治计划中都会利用乌托邦式的残余或盈余。目标是实现“一种与现在世界不同的更好的生活方式”(189)。莫依兰在身边,也许我们可以想象并实现未来--De Witt Douglas Kilgore,印第安纳大学
{"title":"Apocalypse in Crisis: Fiction from The War of the Worlds to Dead Astronauts by Christopher Palmer (review)","authors":"Connor M Pitetti","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0062","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0062","url":null,"abstract":"Moylan returns us to Ruth Levitas, her formulation of utopian method, and how it rubs against Frederick Jameson’s skepticism that the future is imaginable. Jameson admits that we can see possibilities but draws the line at the efficacy of the fully formed programs constructed by classical utopianism. The utopian impulse, in his analysis, is something that always fails closure. Moylan points out that Levitas rises to Jameson’s challenge with a “radical positivity” that goes beyond the moment of utopian negation (which Nietzsche would reject as the pathway to nihilism) to exploiting the utopian remnant or surplus in any political program. The goal is to realize “a better way of living” that is at variance with the way the world is now (189). With Moylan at hand, perhaps we can imagine and achieve the future after all.—De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Indiana University","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"580 - 582"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44183845","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":"Spain is Different?: Historical Memory and the \"Two Spains\" in Turn-of-the-millennium Spanish Apocalyptic Fictions by Dale Knickerbocker (review)","authors":"Sara Martín","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0060","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"574 - 576"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47019846","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}