Beauty as a trait has always had problematic influences on the representation of female characters in popular culture. Terry Pratchett, who recognizes the strong presence of stereotypes and patriarchal narratives in what he calls the consensus fantasy universe, subverts such detrimental narratives of beauty within his Witches novels. This essay analyses Terry Pratchett's nuanced approach to the representation of beauty within the context of Discworld tropes such as Narrative Causality and Headology, which foreground metafictional discussions of narratives of beauty in his Witches novels.
It is difficult to give thought to the stars when the ground is swallowing you up. (Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate)This paper analyzes the science fiction subgenre hopepunk and its academic potential, specifically when considered as a form of low theory in the sense that Jack Halberstam describes in The Queer Art of Failure. I argue that considering hopepunk as low theory represents a discursive way out of the theoretical dispute between queer futurity and the queer death drive. After establishing hopepunk as a low theory of queer temporality, I examine the way that affect functions in the subgenre as a sort of 'empathy trojan horse.' Throughout this essay I refer to To Be Taught, If Fortunate and The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, whose work is considered the epitome of hopepunk. In referencing Chambers I hope to demonstrate that this work is in fact theory (even if it must be considered the low sort), despite its intention for a non-academic audience.
In Leni Zumas's Red Clocks (2018) and Sophie Mackintosh's Blue Ticket (2020), the featured state either designates women as un/worthy of motherhood or forces motherhood upon women, which seeds resentment and division. Division among women diminishes the possibility of resistance through community building. In the wake of such state-sanctioned cruelty targeting women's freedom and bodily autonomy, anger and anxiety can be harnessed to form communities of fate, or communities formed through duress. As critical dystopias, Red Clocks and Blue Ticket show the power of centering resistance, activism, and justice, thus demonstrating the productive capacities of community formation.
Philip K. Dick's Ubik (1969) has often been interpreted through a theological or ontological lens, with scholars reading the titular substance as a benevolent force akin to the Gnostic god-a stabilizing presence amid entropic decay. However, from the perspective of Bill Brown's "material unconscious," Ubik does not function as a redemptive agent but rather as an extension of decay itself, an instrument of planned obsolescence. This essay repositions Ubik within the logic of material accumulation, arguing that discarded and obsolete objects do not simply vanish but instead form an assemblage that exceeds human perception. In this way, Ubik emerges not as a salvific force but as a capitalist mechanism sustaining the cycle of production, consumption, and waste, ensuring that obsolescence remains structurally necessary. As these discarded objects persist, they exert agency, resisting disappearance and reconfiguring the material landscape in ways that challenge traditional subject-object hierarchies.
This article aims to challenge the dominant readings of Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) that are reliant on Le Guin's interests in their approach. Focusing on Jungian readings, it uses queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's framework of paranoid and reparative reading to diagnose both the dominant critical approaches and to read the novel itself. Consequently, it will read A Wizard of Earthsea as a text oriented around the escape of a dominant episteme, establishing a position where an individual can repair their relationship not only to themselves but also to the surrounding culture. This analysis will ultimately provide insight into fantasy's potential as a reparative mode.
This essay reads The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) in the context of anthropology and anarchist traditions. Like many science fiction writers of the 1960s and 1970s, Ursula K. Le Guin relies on formal techniques derived from ethnography, namely “thick description.” In using what I term “thick narration” to describe the world of Gethen and its two primary social groups, the novel slowly builds a mutually exclusive choice between war and civilization. Genly’s journey, as well as his dialogues with Estraven, construct a narrative in which a people who have never known the eradicating force of war consciously choose civilization instead.
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the mass extinction of "authentic" animals makes ownership and care for them a valuable commodity-and a penitence. Dick's characters are reckoning with a world after failure, contending with regret. The development and implementation of artificial creatures across all aspects of human experience is symptomatic of the mass disruption of our own ecosphere and of our troubled preexisting relationship with the nonhuman. As our planet empties and our spaces fill with artificial simulacra, the value of "authentic" beings will shift, and we will have to face down our prior marginalizations of creaturely experience.
The vast scholarship on Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) underestimates the film's relationship with Reaganism. This article links the two through a reading of the racialized status of its replicants and by applying a Reaganite prism to the film's frequently cited nostalgic hue. This complicates our understanding of the political meaning of the replicants, moving beyond the simplistic observation that the white-skinned replicants are, politically speaking, Black. As such, the article suggests that, while the film's presentation of corporate power and ecological devastation critique Reaganism, it portrays replicants as both victims and unwitting exemplars of Reaganism; in the process, the film becomes an example of Reaganism itself.
This article examines aesthetic appeals in slice-of-life isekai stories. It first discusses the gamic world-building in the genre, addressing how this transmedia element literalizes the neoliberal gamification of life and reveals the genre's attachment to neoliberal aspirations. The discussion then elaborates on the notion of ordinariness celebrated in the three slice-of-life/isekai texts as a means to counter neoliberal ideology. However, a close examination of these texts demonstrates that traces of attachment to neoliberalism remain, despite their emphasis on the joy that ordinary life can yield.
Indian science fiction (sf)-especially its variants written by Jayant Vishnu Narlikar (JVN), a prominent scientist and an eminent Marathi sf author-popularizes science in India and comments on a developing, heterogenous society within which science and fiction operate. This article identifies how two stories by JVN-"The Adventure" and "The Comet," both of which are/were prescribed in India's school syllabus-engage with genre sf, communicate complex scientific theories to a general audience, and foreground the divergent anticolonial praxis of Indian sf. It proceeds along three nodes: JVN as a scientist-author vis-a-vis Indian sf; scientific concepts in the selected texts and the overall positioning of science in India; and the entanglements between mythology, ideology, and technology within Indian sf-which constitutes the focal point for the readings.
This paper uses affordance theory to understand setting as a technology that performs narrative work. We focus on the changing role of island settings in the history of science fiction (sf) literature and film (including sf horror). Island settings have been used for their affordance of confinement, which can produce feelings of fear and produce the monstrous, both within the narrative and for readers/viewers. As changing sociotechnical contexts have reduced the island setting's ability to provide this affordance, users have increasingly turned to other settings that better afford spatial confinement, including sailing ships, alien planets, spaceships, and haunted houses.
This article examines aesthetic appeals in slice-of-life isekai stories. It first discusses the gamic world-building in the genre, addressing how this transmedia element literalizes the neoliberal gamification of life and reveals the genre’s attachment to neoliberal aspirations. The discussion then elaborates on the notion of ordinariness celebrated in the three slice-of-life/isekai texts as a means to counter neoliberal ideology. However, a close examination of these texts demonstrates that traces of attachment to neoliberalism remain, despite their emphasis on the joy that ordinary life can yield.
Indian science fiction (sf)—especially its variants written by Jayant Vishnu Narlikar (JVN), a prominent scientist and an eminent Marathi sf author—popularizes science in India and comments on a developing, heterogenous society within which science and fiction operate. This article identifies how two stories by JVN—“The Adventure” and “The Comet,” both of which are/were prescribed in India’s school syllabus—engage with genre sf, communicate complex scientific theories to a general audience, and foreground the divergent anticolonial praxis of Indian sf. It proceeds along three nodes: JVN as a scientist-author vis-à-vis Indian sf; scientific concepts in the selected texts and the overall positioning of science in India; and the entanglements between mythology, ideology, and technology within Indian sf—which constitutes the focal point for the readings.
Kay O’Neill’s trilogy of tea dragon books, The Tea Dragon Society (2017), The Tea Dragon Festival (2019), and The Tea Dragon Tapestry (2020), demonstrate how the relatively new cozy fantasy trend is particularly well suited to the goals of queer ecofeminism and queer ecology, especially in children’s books. O’Neill takes advantage of how cozy fantasy queers the standard fantasy story in order to also queer the traditional cultural binaries that label disabled, queer, and BIPOC people as inherently “unnatural” and unfit for natural spaces.
This paper uses affordance theory to understand setting as a technology that performs narrative work. We focus on the changing role of island settings in the history of science fiction (sf) literature and film (including sf horror). Island settings have been used for their affordance of confinement, which can produce feelings of fear and produce the monstrous, both within the narrative and for readers/viewers. As changing sociotechnical contexts have reduced the island setting’s ability to provide this affordance, users have increasingly turned to other settings that better afford spatial confinement, including sailing ships, alien planets, spaceships, and haunted houses.
In 1953, queer polymath Gerald Heard recognized that breakthroughs in endocrinology were beginning to dissolve destructive and archaic binaries of sex and gender. Fearing society’s response, he called on sf writers to create stories that would help us imagine—and welcome—new ways of being human that could be accessed through endocrine therapy. Following Heard’s lead, in this article I read the science and sf of the early twentieth century together, showing that the sf of the time was meaningfully engaged with both the science and the politics we now think of as trans.
This article explores two short stories by Métis writer Chelsea Vowel, “Buffalo Bird” and “Maggie Sue,” from her collection Buffalo Is the New Buffalo (2022), focusing on principles of kinship relations present in various Indigenous cosmologies. These involve relations with nonhuman animals, the land, and natural forces, and I argue that such notion of kinship can be crucial for decolonial manifestations of solidarity. Where Euro-Western conceptualizations of solidarity seldom extend beyond human relations, decolonial solidarity guided by kinship principles will most effectively uncover histories, past and present, of colonial oppression and violence against Indigenous peoples and land. This will also contribute to the creation of worlds otherwise, like those (re)imagined in Vowel’s stories, where Indigenous lives may thrive.
This article argues that sf’s discursive cultures have a particular concern with the quality of seriousness: of its texts, authors, readers, fans, and the wider genre itself. First distinguishing this perceived quality of seriousness, I argue that it is a metaconcern of sf—a problematic—visible in arguments around the genre’s functions as, for example, estranging, inuring or oracular, or through its connection to science. I posit that the quality of seriousness sprang up as an alternative to literariness—long denied to the genre—and that this seriousness/literariness dialectic still defines the discursive object we call sf.
This article explores Joseph D’Lacey’s MEAT (2008) and Vincent Message’s Défaite des maîtres et possesseurs (2016) through the prism of biopolitics and language. In the worlds of both novels, humans take the positions of nonhuman animals in industrial animal agriculture—a speculative technique that has been praised by the critical literature. Drawing on Cary Wolfe (2013) and Eva Meijer (2019), this article brings nuance to these discussions: while the novels call into question anthropocentric definitions of language and the human/nonhuman binary, the familiarity of the (human) animals means that the novels fail to reimagine anthropocentric conceptions of animality.
In the present article, I examine the importance of the hybrid zoologies of Juan Miguel Aguilera and Javier Redal’s Spanish sf Mundos en el abismo [Worlds in the Abyss] (1988). I argue that the novel’s space-operatic, terrestrial, and extraterrestrial animals may be read as fictive fusions of vertebrate, invertebrate, plant, and machine, beings instrumental to the novel’s examination of bioengineering and colonial power. In my analysis of the socioeconomic significance of Mundos en el abismo’s biological extrapolations, I make use of the animal question and its subqueries as presented by Joan Gordon in “Animal Studies” (2009).
