ABSTRACT:This essay discusses Kim Stanley Robinson's early fiction: short stories and novellas, Icehenge (1984), and the trilogy set in Orange County (1984-1990). Robinson's early fiction is varied, exploratory, and experimental. Discussion begins by sketching his take on some common genres and topics in sf (for instance, settlement off-Earth), and then focuses on his varied treatment of memory and history. Memory is unreliable or missing; history is uncertain, faked, controverted. The short stories examine these issues from multiple angles. Icehenge depicts memory as haunted and the truth of the past as elusive, controverted, and arguably faked. The main characters are isolates and anomie prevails in the novel's world. With the Orange County trilogy, Robinson realigns his fiction. The setting is now local and restricted; the central characters are young and have scope for both follies and development. Each embarks on a narrative which has an oblique relation to the past. History is both a burden and a blank in The Wild Shore; crowded contemporary society entraps and overwhelms the protagonists in The Gold Coast, but a history reaching back into deep time is achieved; a community in which free life in the present can be enjoyed is achieved by the time of Pacific Edge, but it is bounded by death and unhappiness.
{"title":"Early Robinson: Memory, History, and the Local","authors":"Christopher Palmer","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0044","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay discusses Kim Stanley Robinson's early fiction: short stories and novellas, Icehenge (1984), and the trilogy set in Orange County (1984-1990). Robinson's early fiction is varied, exploratory, and experimental. Discussion begins by sketching his take on some common genres and topics in sf (for instance, settlement off-Earth), and then focuses on his varied treatment of memory and history. Memory is unreliable or missing; history is uncertain, faked, controverted. The short stories examine these issues from multiple angles. Icehenge depicts memory as haunted and the truth of the past as elusive, controverted, and arguably faked. The main characters are isolates and anomie prevails in the novel's world. With the Orange County trilogy, Robinson realigns his fiction. The setting is now local and restricted; the central characters are young and have scope for both follies and development. Each embarks on a narrative which has an oblique relation to the past. History is both a burden and a blank in The Wild Shore; crowded contemporary society entraps and overwhelms the protagonists in The Gold Coast, but a history reaching back into deep time is achieved; a community in which free life in the present can be enjoyed is achieved by the time of Pacific Edge, but it is bounded by death and unhappiness.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"417 - 442"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47665839","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":"Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation by Tom Moylan (review)","authors":"De Witt Douglas Kilgore","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0061","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"576 - 580"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41946817","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":"Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction by Sami Ahmad Khan (review)","authors":"A. Gupta","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0059","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"571 - 574"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44082549","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 Film: Predicting the Impossible in the Age of Neoliberalism by Eli Park Sorensen (review)","authors":"T. Bordun","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0066","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"591 - 595"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49354960","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:Literary, theoretical, and zoological discussions of the nonhuman animal often default to ethological observation; that is, how humans observe and make sense of nonhuman behavior. This essay reworks that paradigm to highlight how nonhuman animal mutants participate in their own form of ethological observation with particular attention to Annihilation—both Jeff Vandermeer's novel and the film adaptation by Alex Garland. It theorizes a notion of zoo-optics from the seemingly panoptic presence of mutated creatures in Annihilation to offer a new method of seeing and experiencing in the Anthropocene. Zoo-optics makes visible theentanglement of environmental, social, and planetary realities that we must navigate in our era of climate change.
{"title":"Zoo-Optics: Mutant Ethology and Nonhuman Visualities in VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy","authors":"J.Y.F. Chow","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0051","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Literary, theoretical, and zoological discussions of the nonhuman animal often default to ethological observation; that is, how humans observe and make sense of nonhuman behavior. This essay reworks that paradigm to highlight how nonhuman animal mutants participate in their own form of ethological observation with particular attention to Annihilation—both Jeff Vandermeer's novel and the film adaptation by Alex Garland. It theorizes a notion of zoo-optics from the seemingly panoptic presence of mutated creatures in Annihilation to offer a new method of seeing and experiencing in the Anthropocene. Zoo-optics makes visible theentanglement of environmental, social, and planetary realities that we must navigate in our era of climate change.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"532 - 549"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46082676","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":"Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia: Abandoning Babylon by Nathaniel Robert Walker (review)","authors":"James A. Hamby","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0069","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"602 - 605"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41976234","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:Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 (2012) has been mainly approached from an ecocritical perspective. I focus here, however, on the love story between its protagonists, Swan Er Hong and Fitz Wahram. Robinson considers posthuman sexuality and gender, and the meaning of marriage in the posthuman future of our species. Swan and Wahram disrupt intersexuality, heterosexuality, femininity, and masculinity from a progressive perspective, but Robinson's main challenge to his readers is his focus on love. Relying mainly on Alain Badiou's In Praise of Love, I argue that, beyond the freedom which humans enjoy regarding sex and gender in Robinson's twenty-fourth-century solar system, in 2312 he is specifically celebrating mature love beyond superficial passion. Robinson considers, besides, how posthumans aspiring to extreme longevity may see marriage from an angle that defies Zygmunt Bauman's views about the ephemerality of romantic relationships and the current questioning of marriage itself.
{"title":"A Celebration of Mature Love: Posthuman Sexuality, Gender, and Romance in Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312","authors":"Sara Martín","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0047","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 (2012) has been mainly approached from an ecocritical perspective. I focus here, however, on the love story between its protagonists, Swan Er Hong and Fitz Wahram. Robinson considers posthuman sexuality and gender, and the meaning of marriage in the posthuman future of our species. Swan and Wahram disrupt intersexuality, heterosexuality, femininity, and masculinity from a progressive perspective, but Robinson's main challenge to his readers is his focus on love. Relying mainly on Alain Badiou's In Praise of Love, I argue that, beyond the freedom which humans enjoy regarding sex and gender in Robinson's twenty-fourth-century solar system, in 2312 he is specifically celebrating mature love beyond superficial passion. Robinson considers, besides, how posthumans aspiring to extreme longevity may see marriage from an angle that defies Zygmunt Bauman's views about the ephemerality of romantic relationships and the current questioning of marriage itself.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"459 - 475"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48127239","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:I explore the relation between Neill Blomkamp's science fictional District 9 and Derrida's philosophy in the light of South African history. My aim is to show that this film tells the story of the twenty-first century migrant crisis in Johannesburg, exploring past, actual, or future xenophobic/racist experiences and events, especially those of apartheid and of possible future systems of segregation anticipated in the movie. While Blomkamp was filming District 9 in Johannesburg in 2008, the logic of apartheid was reactivated during a migrant crisis, proving that the ghosts of the past continue to haunt the country. Many South-African natives were hostile to newcomers from Zimbabwe in search of job opportunities and arriving by the thousands every month. I use Derrida's notion of spectrality to shed a new light on the dialectical construction of historical temporality in Blomkamp's aesthetics. On the same subject of history, I unveil the allegorical dimension of the two main characters in District 9, Christopher Johnson and Wikus van der Merwe, to show how their destiny echoes those of the South African freedom fighters, thus telling implicitly the story of this country. They propose a solution to a "3.0 version" of apartheid possibly in the making. I finally show that xenophobia transcends eras, borders, and races in District 9, as an ultimate lesson from Blomkamp to avoid errors of the past.
{"title":"District 9 by Neill Blomkamp: Derrida's Spectrality and the Alien Migrant Crisis","authors":"D. Boucher","doi":"10.1353/sfs.2022.0050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2022.0050","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:I explore the relation between Neill Blomkamp's science fictional District 9 and Derrida's philosophy in the light of South African history. My aim is to show that this film tells the story of the twenty-first century migrant crisis in Johannesburg, exploring past, actual, or future xenophobic/racist experiences and events, especially those of apartheid and of possible future systems of segregation anticipated in the movie. While Blomkamp was filming District 9 in Johannesburg in 2008, the logic of apartheid was reactivated during a migrant crisis, proving that the ghosts of the past continue to haunt the country. Many South-African natives were hostile to newcomers from Zimbabwe in search of job opportunities and arriving by the thousands every month. I use Derrida's notion of spectrality to shed a new light on the dialectical construction of historical temporality in Blomkamp's aesthetics. On the same subject of history, I unveil the allegorical dimension of the two main characters in District 9, Christopher Johnson and Wikus van der Merwe, to show how their destiny echoes those of the South African freedom fighters, thus telling implicitly the story of this country. They propose a solution to a \"3.0 version\" of apartheid possibly in the making. I finally show that xenophobia transcends eras, borders, and races in District 9, as an ultimate lesson from Blomkamp to avoid errors of the past.","PeriodicalId":45553,"journal":{"name":"SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES","volume":"49 1","pages":"520 - 531"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45658910","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}
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