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An issue devoted to the use of science fiction in the French language classroom discusses such topics as the development of the genre, literary techniques, themes, imagery, sociolinguistic elements, and potential classroom activities. (MSE)

This paper aims at analyzing utopias and dystopias in Last and First Men (1930) by William Olaf Stapledon. Taking into consideration that this narrative was already defined as a scientific romance and an anatomy with allegorical status, as well as McCarthy's observation that Stapledon’s writing resists simple categorization and that its classification as science fiction or utopian literature is inadequate, this paper suggests several definitions for Stapledon’s work. The author also takes into account the ongoing dispute between utopian studies and science fiction scholars about the strong interaction between utopia and science fiction in the twentieth century. The possibilities of applying the conceptual integration theory to such a complex work of fiction as Last and First Men is explored.

In the wake of the Occupy movement, a group of dystopian films were released that, despite many differences, share a unique series of characteristics. In the Hunger Games trilogy, Elysium and Snowpiercer, class war emerges as the main theme. The 99% are physically shut out from the world of the 1% by impressive barriers which must be destroyed through bloody struggle. The paper uses a critical approach, mainly Jamesonian, to examine historical, political, psychological and interpretative issues in this constellation of occupy-era films, and how they testify to the huge impact on the American psyche of the 2007 financial crisis and ensuing long depression, and the feeling of frustration that fostered Occupy. Of particular interest is the way in which these critical dystopias deal with the ideologeme of “ressentiment” while depicting the breaching of the residences of the elite by the pleb.

This paper strives to illuminate the forebodings of AI and automatization’s impact on society in two neglected Czech treasures unavailable in English, Čestmír Vejdělek’s Návrat z ráje [Return from Paradise] (1961) and Jiří Marek’s Blažený Věk [The Blessed Age] (1967). The study aims to illustrate science fiction’s prescience and part of Czech SF’s path after Čapek, while challenging the notion that “the utopian society is a subject, perhaps even the only subject that is inaccessible to literature” (Hans Magnus Enzensberger). For these dystopian texts engage readers to imagine the positive alternative to the portrayed societies, rather than explicitly evoking eutopia.

An interview with Mumbai-based contemporary artist Sahej Rahal discusses the potential of artificial intelligence-driven simulations and images to engage issues of temporality. The interview considers the AI simulation Anhad (2023), in which a tripedal figure is both driven by noises in the gallery and creates a haunting song with each step. It examines the implications of the work’s juxtaposition of various modes of temporality within and beyond an Indian political landscape dominated by a Hindu nationalist, authoritarian regime. Moving to a suite of AI-generated still images called Black Origin (2022), the conversation assesses the challenge artificial intelligence makes to photography. It contextualizes those images as they were presented in an exhibition that both reflected on the seventy-fifth anniversary of India’s independence and speculated about the country’s future.

An editorial is presented that delves into the ethical considerations surrounding the development and application of artificial intelligence in healthcare, drawing parallels to science fiction narratives like Isaac Asimov's works. It highlights the rapid advancement of AI technologies in medical diagnostics and conversational AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard, emphasizing the need for robust ethical frameworks to guide their use.

The television miniseries Watchmen (HBO, 2019) is a particularly complex narrative product. The miniseries is inspired by the graphic novel of the same title by Alan Moore and David Gibbons and was created by writer, producer, and cartoonist David Lindelof - known as co-writer and lead writer of the tv series Lost. It looks like a sequel to the Moore and Gibbons comics, and it is, as for the comics, a sci-fi uchronia. The interesting thing is that the focus of the narrative of the miniseries is based on a historical event, which really happened even if for a long time hidden, called The Tulsa Massacre (May 31- June 1, 1921). This television product, apparently attributable to the science fiction and comics genre of superheroes, actually proposes a reflection that tries to connect the past, a real historical event, to the present, to the racial problems that cross the United States. The analysis will focus on some theoretical concepts, such as narrative camouflage and genre mix, through which an attempt will be made to explain the particular narrative construction of the text and its distinctiveness.

Abstract Ethnography-based Anthropology and Science Fiction can engage in a productive dialogue since both address what is proposed as “altertopias”. Utopias, dystopias, and cultural alterity share the possibility of imagining social and cultural organizations different from both those of the authors and those of the readers. These imaginations are intrinsically creative/artistic and political at the same time, and they critique power structures, especially when approached through a feminist stance. Inspired by the literary work of Ursula Le Guin, the article takes this further by experimenting with the inclusion of a fictional piece of “Social science fiction” that itself plays on Le Guin’s themes.

In this article, I will attempt to show how Han Song, one of the leading authors of contemporary Chinese science fiction, manages, through science fiction, to make reference the unspeakable trauma of the Tiananmen massacre. To this end, I will focus on the short story “The Dark Chamber” (Anshi 暗室), in particular on the many parallels between the “fable”, in Aristotle’s sense, of the short story and the events of Tiananmen, as well as on the use of allegory as a way of bearing witness to this traumatic event while circumventing censorship.

An interview with J.D. Kurtness, Canadian writer, is presented. Topics discussed include impact on novel due to the pandemic of Covid-19; emphasis on the pandemic in the discourse around Aquariums when in reality it is far from being the central plot of the novel and invest in anticipation or science fiction, a genre still not present in French-speaking native literature.

Imaginary genres have always played with language and lexicon in order to build their worlds. The sci-ence fiction genre, in particular, creates a lexicon on the borderline between literary creation and scientific and technical terminology so the stories can be framed elsewhere or in the future. The translation of these invented words can be a real challenge for translators because of their very nature as hybrids, but also because of the science fictional megatext. The translation treatment from English into French of these neologisms, known as “fiction terms”, shows different strategies of lexical (re)creation. Following a terminological approach, this paper presents a contrastive analysis of lexical creation strategies and morpho-syntactic structures between the two languages on a list of science fictional terms from the audiovisual field and extracted from a corpus of science fiction novels.

The article is devoted to theoretical exploration of modern hybrid speculative fiction. This term comprises a huge body of creative works which are written at the intersection of genres related to speculative prose. On the one hand, hybrid speculative fiction is rooted in post-modern epoch, on the other hand, it returns to the principles of hybrid genre genesis, which flourished at the beginning of the 20th century. The tendency to genre eclecticism is a common feature of a great number of modern creative works and seems to be an efficient way out of conceptual crisis emerged in speculative fiction at the close of the 20th century, that is why the future development of speculative fiction is expected to be closely connected with the expansion of hybrid genre forms. The overall goal of the article is to scientifically comprehend hybrid genres in modern speculative fiction of the United States and Russia. The investigation of hybrid speculative fiction as a genre and cultural phenomenon leads to setting three goals. Firstly, it is necessary to determine genre taxonomy of such genres of traditional speculative fiction as science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Secondly, it is necessary to investigate genre-forming models, which underlie modern hybrid works. Thirdly, it is important to understand common features of the works of hybrid speculative fiction. The study of the genre interaction in modern speculative fiction is based on the descriptive and functional methods. The comparison of Russian and American works involves the use of comparative, typological and cultural-historical methods. Using the genre blocks common for both literary criticism, readers’ expectations and publishing practice, it is possible to identify such genre-forming models of hybrid speculative fiction, as: science fiction+fantasy; science fiction+horror; fantasy+historical novel; fantasy+post- modernist novel. It is also possible to sum up such common features of the works of hybrid speculative fiction, as: irrational world outlook; distortion of the very structural basis of traditional science fiction; shift of sociocultural model of world outlook; polyphonic principle of narration and potentially an endless unravelling of the plot without a pronounced climax; postclassical narrative model; the complexity of storyline. To conclude, modern hybrid speculative fiction can be treated as a separate literary and sociocultural phenomenon in the literature of the U.S. and Russia. It destroys inner canons of traditional science fiction, it is deeply influenced by post-modern cultural paradigm, and could be described as a significant cultural movement, which is aligned with demands and values of modern society.

The article investigates works by Octavia E. Butler (1947 –2006), an African-American writer who had a significant impact on the development of science fiction in the USA and the world. The paper provides an overview of Butler’s works and reveals the relationship between the problems and language / style of her prose, the latter being determined by the former. The first part of the paper examines the main topics of Butler’s works and focuses on the problem of survival. Being a disappearing minority, Butler’s heroines are usually isolated from others and, consequently, in order to survive they have to adapt to the circumstances, since resistance is impossible. However, for Butler the survival of an individual is less important than the preservation of the humankind. For Butler’s heroines it is the reproduction of the genetic and/or cultural memory of mankind that make the future possible and guarantee the survival. In the second part of the paper Butler’s works are analyzed in the context of Afrofuturism and it is pointed out that although Butler has much in common with other representatives of this movement, she deals with the projects for building an ideal society in a different way: Butler is skeptical about utopia as a project of a conflict-free society. The final part of the paper examines Butler’s language and style, noting that for her language serves as an impersonal, objective tool of analysis of human behavior. A special attention is paid to Butler’s latest novel Fledgling (2005), in which language serves both as a tool for expression and a topical issue.

The first season of the TV series Äkta Människor (Real Humans, 100 % humain) presents various types of emotional and sexual links between human beings and robots, raising both anthropological and social questions as to the definition of man as a relational and embodied entity. The series announces possible relationships between human beings and robots endowed with intelligence and feelings. It thus stands in opposition to the idea of the necessary sexual and emotional instrumentalization of robots because of their mechanical nature. By contrast, it describes the emergence of a community including both human beings and robots, despite the biological differences between these two distinct species. Attachment between them is thus both the result and the condition of a new definition of what is human, so that robots can be recognized as subjects of rights and of desire.

Whether we speak of a « posthuman novel » (Amaury Dehoux) or of « posthumanist fiction » (Mara Magda Maftei), the proposed generic neologism once again compromises the already porous boundaries that distinguish the literary and scientific domains. Through this contribution, it is essentially a question of questioning the updating of science fiction by transhumanist authors.

Pierre Alferi (1963), a poet and novelist who is known for the innovative nature of his texts, presents in Hors sol (2018) a post-apocalyptic world where only a tiny part of humanity has survived, in gondolas suspended in the stratosphere, while the rest has disappeared as a result of the many catastrophes caused by climate change. In contrast to traditional cli-fi, which is linked to popular genres such as thriller, this novel is strongly characterised by its concern for form: it presents a compilation of very heterogeneous texts, which are available online at a specific date in the early 22nd century. This amalgam of documents gives a fairly complete picture, not only of this post-apocalyptic world, but also of the causes of the exile in the sky. In this article, the study of dialogism (Bakhtin)—particularly the subversion of official discourses—and the polyphonic nature of the novel—its fragmentation and the way in which different texts are presented—will be proposed in order to demonstrate that Pierre Alferi uses juxtaposed fragments to create a nuanced image of the fictional universe, combining elements of science fiction with a commitment to addressing climate change.

The article focuses on the evolution of cyberspace from a myth-critical perspective: the presence of irrational and fantasy elements in seemingly rational and scientific cyberpunk as a subgenre of hard science fiction. Our research primarily focuses on two significant works: William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy (1984-1988), an icon of early cyberpunk, and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), a switch to postcyberpunk. Moreover, we consider the other works of a broad genre of cyberpunk including The Matrix movies and conclude that the cyberpunk of the 1980s and 1990s presented cyberspace as an enchanted Terra incognita and blurred the line between rationality and irrationality, technology and magic. Emerging as a way of escaping the real world, as hope for immortality, transcendence or transgression (Foucault), the cyberpunk ‘matrix’ followed in the footsteps of fantasy, myth, religion, and utopia. In our view, the postcyberpunk ‘Metaverse’ of the 1990s is more ironical and ‘realistic’ as it appears, and the more familiar and routine the cyberspace became to people, the less romantic and mysterious it turned out to be. Nevertheless, the nostalgic attempts to return to the old, fantasy model of cyberspace were made in postcyberpunk almost immediately after its emergence.

This article examines the literary representations of the beekeeper, and more generally of beekeeping, in three science fiction stories from the second half of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first: Frank Herbert’s Hellstrom’s Hive, Wang Jinkang’s The Beekeeper (Yangfengren) and Maja Lunde’s A History of Bees (Bienes Historie). It shows that the figure of the beekeeper – or of the woman beekeeper – and the whole beekeeping environment are both literary and discursive matrixes, allowing for original narrative developments and interpretative readings, notably political and philosophical. Finally, it considers the evolution of these representations under the influence of the awareness of the environmental crisis and new ecological concerns.

Imaginary genres have always played with language and lexicon in order to build their worlds. The science fiction genre, in particular, creates a lexicon on the borderline between literary creation and scientific and technical terminology so the stories can be framed elsewhere or in the future. The translation of these invented words can be a real challenge for translators because of their very nature as hybrids, but also because of the science fictional megatext. The translation treatment from English into French of these neologisms, known as "fiction terms", shows different strategies of lexical (re)creation. Following a terminological approach, this paper presents a contrastive analysis of lexical creation strategies and morphosyntactic structures between the two languages on a list of science fictional terms from the audiovisual field and extracted from a corpus of science fiction novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses two stories by women writers (The Heads of Cerberus by Francis Stevens (1952) and The Breakthrough by Daphne du Maurier (1964)), which could both be considered as belonging to the genre of science fiction. These stories do not follow the ‘canonical’ or more popular type of underworld narrative, especially the idea of the katabasis or descent to the underworld and the encounter with the dead, a motif which has often been present in Western culture since classical antiquity and has generated numerous narratives. Rather, they evoke the classical myth of the underworld through the use of certain names (such as Charon and Cerberus) as well as exploring other concepts which coincide with ancient Greek accounts of the topography and inhabitants of the world of the dead, the realm ruled over by Hades.

Since 1959, when C.P. Snow delivered his seminal lecture The Two Cultures on the lack of understanding between scholars working in the humanities and their colleagues from science departments, the gap between the two groups has been one of the most notorious clichés of contemporary Western culture. The aim of this article is to show that this seemingly insurmountable abyss between sciences and the humanities that was brought to the forefront during the mid-20th century is slowly receding into history. Literature studies today is heavily indebted to modern science. Biology (especially evolutionary biology), physics (especially quantum physics), and ecology (especially the Anthropocene studies) are among the most important subjects scholars of literature have to take into account. In order to prove this point I shortly describe literary genres which introduce modern science to the readers: science fiction, cyberpunk, solarpunk, lablit, quantum fiction, and cli-fi. I also refer to the newly-emerged schools of criticism-science fiction studies, ecocriticism and evocriticism-to show how scholars discuss these texts within the framework of the humanities. Additionally, I give a sample discussion of one of the cli-fi’s classics, J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World and also shortly discuss two science fiction novels concerned with the civilisational conflict between science and humanities: Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.

Metaphors are ubiquitous in natural language; in fact, no language without metaphors is known. But can we construct a language without metaphors? An issue that is particularly relevant to this question is the relation between metaphor and simile. Some argue that metaphors are a type of (elided) simile, whereas others claim that the two phenomena differ in kind. Ideally, a way to settle the dispute would be to find a language that contains similes but not metaphors. There is no such actual language. But two science fiction authors have attempted to conceive of and describe just such a language. David Brin, in The Uplift War, creates birdlike aliens, whose language is claimed to have similes but not metaphors. However, Brin reproduces utterances of these aliens, in which he reflects their avian nature; and he often does so by metaphor. China Miéville, in Embassytown, also creates aliens whose language is claimed to have similes but not metaphors. However, these similes are frozen, and are actually idioms: they have a fixed, conventional meaning. Later on, the aliens acquire metaphors, and only then do they begin to have, in addition, novel similes. Hence, both Brin and Miéville fail: the former constructs a language that has both similes and metaphors, whereas the other constructs a language that initially has neither, and later acquires both simultaneously. Science fiction authors are, after all, humans, and are bound by the constraints of human languages. Hence, their failure to construct a language that contains similes but not metaphors tells us that the two phenomena are fundamentally very close. To the extent that it is possible to construct a language without metaphors, it appears that it would have to do without similes too.

A partire dall'opposizione postulata da Deleuze tra la copia-icona e il simulacro, l'intervento esamina alcune opere contemporanee che ci presentano delle figure ibride di esseri artificiali, intesi come copie o "continuazioni" di esseri umani: l'episodio Be Right Back della serie Black Mirror, e i romanzi Permutation City di Greg Evan e Klara and the Sun di Kazuo Ishiguro. La questione che si cercherà di chiarire è se l'instabilità o labilità recente della distinzione tra Copia e Simulacro sia la spia di un cambiamento in corso nella nozione di identità: in altre parole, se nell'era della mediazione digitale totale abbia ancora senso distinguere tra autentico e simulato, naturale e artificiale.

The paper deals with the Gothic elements in the representation of a pandemic based on the 1983 novel Besnilo (‘Rabies’) by Serbian author Borislav Pekic. The authors start from the premise that the elements ‘borrowed’ from the Gothic genre play a key role in creating the main plot of the novel: a catastrophe caused by an extremely contagious and deadly man-manipulated version of the rabies virus. The theoretical framework is based on Fred Botting’s (1995) and Jerrold E. Hogle’s (2002) views of Gothic writing as a diffused mode that exceeds genres and categories and contributes its various elements to various literary forms. Furthermore, Gothic elements characteristic of Gothic science fiction, such as madness, monstrosity, the Mad Scientist, people meddling with nature with catastrophic consequences, the apocalyptic vision of human future and “the removal of man from his natural, living state and entry instead into a state of being neither completely human or monster, and neither fully alive or completely dead” (MacArthur 2015: 79) are traced in the novel and analysed in the context of literary representations of a pandemic. As Pekic’s novel is a mixture of various genres and is often defined and described as a horror thriller novel, an attempt is made to offer a new reading that would consider its constituent Gothic elements against a backdrop of the deeply and inherently human drama of the everlasting struggle between good and evil. Thus, pandemics are represented as a kind of catalyst that exposes both deeply human and rational, and deeply inhuman and irrational, impulses, leaving the final outcome of that struggle uncertain.

Dans cet entretien1, Cédric Denis-Rémis, enseignant-chercheur à l'université PSL et Jean-Baptiste Colas, qui co-dirige le laboratoire de l'Agence de l'innovation de défense (AID) du ministère des Armées, nous présentent le projet Red Team. Le principe de ce projet piloté par l'université PSL est pour l'armée de faire appel à des écrivains et écrivaines de science-fiction pour imaginer les menaces possibles, afin que celle-ci puisse réfléchir aux manières de les contrer. La démarche illustre les potentialités de la fiction comme stratégie organisationnelle et complète les autres articles de ce dossier. L'entretien donne des détails sur le fonctionnement organisationnel de ce projet exemplaire, qui constitue une source d'inspiration pour les entreprises qui souhaiteraient appliquer une démarche similaire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author investigates connections between historical variability of literary genres and readers’ ability to recognize them. Following J.-M. Schaeffer, the author understands genre as a semiotic sign constituted of a “generic name” and “generic notion.” The author interprets Schaeffer’s theory from the perspective of cognitive poetics and treats genres as “prototypes.” Their nature is both individual and collective—it derives from a person’s individual experience and skills of aesthetic reception, but also from social imaginary and stereotypes. The author focuses on a noncanonical genre of popular literature—science fiction—and argues that social and receptive aspects of the genre are interconnected. In the final part, the author analyses the image of “generation starship” in science fiction and concludes that changes of poetic techniques used to create fictional space of science-fictional starships—which has no correlation with readers’ empirical surroundings—formed a new “reading paradigm”, i.e., addressed mechanisms of reception that were not relevant previously in the history of the genre.

Tematem artykułu jest obraz Chin i chińskiego komunizmu w polskiej literaturze fantastycznej dwudziestolecia międzywojennego oraz Polskiej Rzeczpospolitej Ludowej. Analizy obejmują zarówno powieści katastroficzne poświęcone problematyce „żółtego zagrożenia” (Witkiewicz, Nienasycenie; Barszczewski, Czandu), jak i socrealistyczne powieści fantastycznonaukowe (Lem, Astronauci; Obłok Magellana), w których tematyzacji lub problematyzacji poddane zostały: chiński komunizm, ekspansja cywilizacyjna oraz polityczna i militarna Chin czy wreszcie internacjonalistyczna, multikulturowa utopia komunistyczna z udziałem Chin/Chińczyków. Osią problemową szkicu jest analiza diagnoz społecznych oraz technologicznych i cywilizacyjnych prognoz wpisanych w literaturę fantastycznonaukową, a także próba dekonstrukcji stereotypu chińskiego/azjatyckiego komunisty jako figury politycznego dyskursu wpisanego w spór między kolonialnym resentymentem Europejczyków a modernizacyjnym potencjałem komunizmu w XX wieku.

This article proposes a reconceptualization of Darko Suvin’s notion of cognitive estrangement through affordance theory. Specifically, science-fictional estrangement is redescribed as the creation of fictional world-affordances imbued with cognitive potential. This perspective, drawing from traditional SF criticism, cognitive literary studies, and postcritical literary theory, allows to take the study of SF beyond the coordinates of critique and critical theory, which, also due to the profound influence of theorists such as Darko Suvin and Carl Freedman, have so far been the primary rhetorical and critical modes of this branch of genre criticism.

Copyright of Synergies Portugal is the property of GERFLINT (Groupe d'Etudes et de Recherches pour le Francais Langue Internationale) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Savant certainly represents one of the most popular figures in French literature at the end of the nineteenth century. A specialist of the various branches of knowledge, this emblematic figure seems to reflect the great passion for science that characterizes this particular historical era, in which progress and technological discoveries play an important role in everyday life. Savants of all kinds invade the literary fiction of these years, crossing the great multitude of literary genres that enriches the cultural panorama of the fin-de-siècle. Doctors, scientists, professors, inventors become the recurrent protagonists of literary productions, conquering the main literary scene, from Naturalism to Science fiction and from Symbolism the Decadent movement. In addition to these scientific figures, other types of Savants permeate fin-de-siècle fiction. Occultists, magicians and sorcerers indeed play an important role in the literary genres, thus embodying other forms of erudition: “occult sciences”. This article investigates the multifarious aspects of the figure of the Savant, using critical tools to analyze three emblematic novels of the fin-de-siècle literature: Le Docteur Pascal (1893) by Émile Zola, Le Vice suprême (1884) by Joséphin Péladan and L’Ève future (1886) by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. This study aims to identify the differences between scientific and occult Savants, but also their numerous analogies, which reflect the cohesion that exists between various literary genres during these years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Mélanges francophones is the property of Galati University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In Among Others, Jo Walton’s fairy story about a science-fiction fan, science fiction as a genre and archive serves as an adoptive parent for Morwenna Markova as much as the extended family who provide the more conventional parenting in the absence of the father who deserted her as an infant and the presence of the mother whose unacknowledged psychiatric condition prevented appropriate caregiving. Laden with allusions to science fictional texts of the nineteen-seventies and earlier, this epistolary novel defines and redefines both family and community, challenging the groups in which we live through the fairies who taught Mor about magic and the texts which offer speculations on alternative mores. This article argues that Mor’s approach to the magical world she inhabits is productively informed and futuristically oriented by her reading in science fiction. Among Others demonstrates a restorative power of agency in the formation of all social and familial groupings, engaging in what Donna J. Haraway has described as a transformation into a Chthulucene period which supports the continuation of kin-communities through a transformation of the outcast. In Among Others, the free play between fantasy and science fiction makes kin-formation an ordinary process thereby radically transforming the social possibilities for orphans and others.

Desde sus orígenes la ciencia ficción se relaciona estrechamente a la utopía y muestra planetas lejanos, seres extraños y tecnologías desconocidas para instigar reflexiones sobre una realidad muy cercana y conocida, nuestra vida en la Tierra y sus perspectivas. Por esta razón, ciudades, que son elementos claves de nuestra vida y de toda visión utópica a la vez, juegan un papel tan importante en las obras de la ciencia ficción. Esto se comprueba de una manera contundente en el largometraje Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (Valerian y la ciudad de los mil planetas, 2017), una de la producciones más ambiciosas y mas caras de los últimos años. Nuestra contribución se propone analizar cómo las diferentes ciudades de este film de Luc Besson (las aldeas idílicas de los Pearls cerca del mar, la invisible ciudad ultra capitalista en el desierto y sobre todo la gigantesca metrópolis interplanetaria Alpha) se utilizan para hacer reflexionar sobre la vida humana en la Tierra, cada vez más urbanizada. Las ciudades fílmicas de Besson ilustran de cierto modo algunas opiniones de historiadores y sociólogos influyentes de nuestro tiempo (Marc Augé, Achille Mbembe y Yuval Noah Harari) que nos sirven para hacer resaltar el mensaje que el director francés quiere transmitir con su adaptación de los cómics de Jean-Claude Mézières y Pierre Christin. Para este mensaje es altamente importante la presencia llamativa de lo grotesco en el largometraje: en Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets lo grotesco no sólo sirve para (re-)definir lo humano, meta que explica la interacción tan frecuente de lo grotesco y la ciencia ficción en el cine y la literatura, sino también respalda la propagación de una tolerancia universal. Tal tolerancia caracteriza la primera secuencia de la película que nos muestra la fundación de Alpha después de encuentros entusiastas entre diferentes especies del universo. Sin embargo, el egoísmo de los humanos amenaza la vida pacífica en Alpha (y causa a la vez la destrucción del planeta de los Pearls, un ejemplo importante de la Edad de Oro), y la paz solo vuelve a establecerse gracias a la ayuda de Bubble, un ser polimorfo, quien puede considerarse el punto culminante de lo grotesco en el film. De hecho, en el personaje de Bubble, quien parece una personificación de una célebre definición del cuerpo grotesco par Bajtín, se observa de una manera ejemplar la transgresión de todas las fronteras, que es una de las características determinantes de lo grotesco. Además, encarnada por Rihanna, Bubble nos lleva a la dimensión transnacional de este largometraje, otra vez estrechamente unida a lo grotesco y de una importancia capital para el mensaje de la obra. Esta dimensión transnacional marcada (la adaptación en inglés de un cómic francés por un director francés con actores anglo-americanos) se trata en el penúltimo apartado de nuestra contribución. Esta se termina con algunas reflexiones sobre la serie de Mézières et Christin, el modelo del film de Besson, y los cómics en general en los cuales ciudades y arquitectura suelen tener un papel primordial como lo comprueban en la cultura francófona, al lado de la serie centrada en Valerian y Laureline, Les Cités obscures (Las ciudades oscuras) de François Schuiten y Benoît Peeters.

This paper aims to examine the main novum of Philippine author F. H. Batacan’s science fiction short story “Keeping Time” in the light of apocalypse and how, as a mirror to the real world, it showcases the use of lifestyle as a way of managing populations. The article uses Frank Kermode’s ideas of apocalypse, and Christopher Mayes’ idea of lifestyle as a biopolitical dispositif, a lens through which the story is discussed. While the story depicts an apocalyptic future, the reasons and concerns that lead up to it are already seen in current society, particularly when discussing a lifestyle/health issue like obesity. In the end, the story remains true to Darko Suvin’s stand, that a science fiction story comments on the context of the author, and thus, is a story about present times, rather than it being an escape from it.

The novel World War Z describes an epidemic of zombies whose origin is in China and which decimates humanity in a few years. The zombic imagination allows us to wonder about the destabilization of human organizations in the face of a global pandemic. Collapsological theories envisage the end of technostructure by phenomena like epidemics. It is a form of neoapocalyptic thought reflecting the doubts of American and Western civilization following attacks such as 9/11. The reintoduction of zombies by the entertainment industry makes it possible to reactivate ancestral fears and crystallize the most violent anxieties and aspirations of society. The mythology of zombies serves as a sectorial myth for medicine, and more particularly for actors responsible for the regulation of epidemics that can potentially decimate humanity.

The purpose of this study is to identify the relevance of Michèle Laframboise’s short story, “Monarque des glaces” [“Ice Monarch”], in a (sub)generic framework, as well as to demonstrate its applicability to plausible scenarios of environmental crisis, indeed, to “dynamics of collapse.” My research is informed by the work of Brent Ryan Bellamy, Roger Bozzetto, Gerry Canavan, Rebecca Evans, Andrew Milner and J. R. Burgman, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Darko Suvin. Among the objects of study to be analyzed are the stakes of the climate crisis, as represented in Laframboise’s narrative, and the characters’ means of survival and intervention, for better or for worse. The passages that I have chosen for consideration are on the physical and ideological conditions of the story world, on the modified body as an adaptation for the characters, as well as on their agency, and on the continuing social fallout of catastrophe, which aligns with anthropogenic causes of and anti-capitalist solutions to climate change.

Résumé : Le but de ce travail est de mettre à profit le rapport – à la fois déclaré et manifeste – de Roberto Bolaño à ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler la « pop culture », pour proposer un agencement ou une articulation de plusieurs questionnements traditionnellement associés à son œuvre : la thématique du Lumpen, l’imbrication vitale de l’art et de son extériorité, et enfin la problématique du Mal que nos travaux antérieurs sur l’auteur n’ont jamais dissociée de celle du « devenir technique » heideggérien. Notre thèse centrale, à laquelle l’analyse du motif de la science-fiction dans son œuvre nous conduit, est ainsi celle d’un dépassement par l’auteur de la réflexivité postmoderne : un dépassement dans lequel, à notre sens, réside une bonne part de son pouvoir de fascination. Abstract: The aim of this work is to emphasize Roberto Bolaño’s relationship – at the same time declared and manifest – with what is known as «pop culture», to propose an arrangement or articulation of several questions traditionally associated with his work: the theme of Lumpen, the vital interweaving of art and its exteriority, and finally the problematic of Evil that our previous works on the author have never dissociated from that of Heidegger’s «technical evolution». Our central thesis, to which leads us the analysis of the motive of science-fiction in his work, is the overrun by the author of postmodern reflexivity: it is on this overrun that hinges on, in our view, a good part of his power of fascination. Resumen: El propósito de este trabajo es aprovechar el vínculo –a la vez reivindicado y manifiesto– de Roberto Bolaño con lo que acostumbramos llamar la «cultura pop» para proponer una articulación de varias problemáticas tradicionalmente asociadas a su obra: la temática de lo Lumpen, el entrelazado vital del arte con su exterioridad, así como la cuestión del Mal, que nuestros trabajos anteriores sobre el autor nunca disociaron de los aportes del pensamiento heideggeriano sobre la técnica. Nuestra tesis central, a la que nos lleva el análisis del motivo de la ciencia ficción en su trabajo, es la de un repudio por parte del autor de la reflexividad posmoderna: un repudio en el que radica, a nuestro parecer, buena parte de su poder de fascinación.

This paper investigates scientists’ conceptual borrowings from science fiction through the case of Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report. In this short story, K. Dick depicts New York City as a crime-free society, thanks to the work of a police division, Precrime, whose function is to arrest criminals-to-be before they actually commit any crime. This writing has spurred academics’ attention, including criminologists and neuroscientists. While some of them propose a utopian reading of K. Dick’s ideas, other accentuate its dystopian dimension, depending on whether they are proponents or critics of the use of predictive methods in the criminal justice system. Moreover, we show that while critics tend to inscribe The Minority Report into a regime of truth that tells something about the current state of our societies, proponents tend to elaborate futuristic visions that come to complement and extend Philip K. Dick’s.

In public discussions or in private conversations, one frequently hears the idea expressed that “God is beyond dogmas and religion.” Those who say this imagine that a “God beyond language” would promote inter-religious dialogue, because going beyond statements of beliefs would enable differences to be overcome and religious conflicts to be eliminated by a process of spiritual convergence around a link shared by all religions. Now this is not the case. We observe that the potential for violence inherent to expressions of religion has not been neutralised by the idea of a God beyond language and the dialogue between religions seems to be awaiting a lasting settlement. There must therefore be something wrong with the idea that God is beyond language. This article proposes to investigate this inaccuracy by making a detour via Ian Watson’s science fiction novel, The Embedding, which we use here as a support for an epistemological reflection to reveal the impasse of the shared link and the scepticism to which it leads. Finally, to the question of knowing what to think of the idea of a God beyond language, we could reply, in the wake of The Embedding: this is an idea from science fiction.

Most work on the relationship between science and science fiction focuses on how science fiction can advance science by speculatively elaborating scientific theories. This text, to the contrary, argues that we should understand some science fiction texts as contributing to the making of science as a social practice rather differently: namely by seeing them as a form of didactic literature which offers moral exempla to scientists or potential scientist readers. In order to illustrate this point, this article considers the representation of scientist-heroes in Gregory Benford’s Cosm and Ursula K. Le Guin The Dispossessed. It illustrates the ways which these authors depict model scientists that can help readers to imagine what it might mean to be a scientist, and to engage in science as a profession. It brings out the ways in which their drive to create such didactic examples may have emerged out of a crisis within the ideology of science itself, namely the crisis of legitimacy and authority of science today known as the Science Wars.

The “colonization” of the planet Mars is a theme that haunts those who are passionate about space. It finds its relevance in science fiction and futurology narratives, which function as signs of reference and appartenance within the space community. This article explores how and why these narratives are mobilised, as well as the imaginations and conceptions of the sciences and technologies they help to communicate. In addition to this analysis based on a corpus of writings, we will illustrate this cultivation of the idea of the colonization of Mars using the history of the Mars Society as a starting point. The collective belief in the relocation of the human life on Mars is reinforced among “enthusiasts” by the fact that it is constantly being deceived by the delays in the launching of the missions that are supposed to accomplish this project.

After presenting the mainstream perspectives of sociologists of literature towards science fiction, the article aims at developing an original approach that could account for the specificity of science fiction, i.e. seeing it as being positioned at the very boundaries of science and literature, reality and fiction, and technique and culture. Rather than confining science fiction into either poles of those dichotomies, this approach wants to invite sociology to fully embrace the « space between » that characterizes it. It also entails that science fiction may become one of the privileged loci from where the scholars can observe how the split between the categories mentioned above is being constituted, displaced, renewed or, conversely, consolidated and reinforced.

Beginning with the famous scene in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869–71) in which a giant squid appears facing the large window of the Nautilus, just as the heroes were discussing its possible existence, this article is an attempt to question a contradiction in the discourse on the images in science. The popular novel and the scientific vulgarisation are constantly constructing images of scientists who are looking directly at reality, like the heroes in Jules Verne, images which illustrate a two-fold discourse on the sciences and on popular culture. Whereas the scientists are looking directly at nature precisely because they are capable of going beyond the ‘shadows in the cave’ and the influence of images, those who are not scientists would take a great risk if they were to do the same precisely because they may well be influenced by these popular novel images and might imagine all sorts of things which do not exist. This article attempts to demonstrate that these images gain by being analysed in other terms while at the same time bearing in mind that it is precisely a question of images and by constructing a symmetrical analysis which deals with the scientific images and these “popular” images in the same terms. This enables us to move away from the opposition between scientific thought and popular beliefs to describe how the images display both scientific knowledge and public discourse on the sciences.