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Copyright of Esferas is the property of Esferas 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 subject of this article is the relationship between urban spaces and a fictional present time in an apocalyptic or dystopian key. The city is no longer the place where progress takes place, but where social relations are defined by the destruction and the end of Latin American aspirations for a better future. Taking into account four contemporary Argentine graphic novels, I propose to review the role of the city as a space for action in Argentine comics. The objective is to verify what political and aesthetic readings of the Argentine and Latin American reality can be found in line with the context of the last decade, but also with the tradition in the use of science fiction as a privileged genre for social criticism.

The problem-situation addressed in this article stems from the recognition of the increase in literary and audiovisual works that make use of Afrofuturist aesthetics. Our hypothesis focuses on the understanding that Afrofuturism allows addressing social, political and economic issues; therefore, themes such as African culture, history and diaspora, as well as resistance and identity, are highlighted. Having demarcated these points, we point out that the objectives of the argumentation presented consist of (1) describing the aesthetic characteristics of this phenomenon to understand the aspects that compose it; (2) address the science fiction literary genre; (3) to take up aspects of traditional African and historical cultures. The reflections of Ytasha L. Womack in Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture and Mark Dery in the essay “Black to the Future”, as well as Adam Roberts in The True History of Science Fiction, lay the theoretical ground. We adopted as a method the bibliographic, qualitative and descriptive research, thus offering (1) a descriptive approach to the phenomenon, (2) deepening the perceptions and meanings present in the selected corpus, thus offering (3) interpretation and reflexive analysis; and (4) contextualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary science fiction, two types of narratives on the human can be distinguished: some narratives, surreptitiously conservative, consolidate the "capital reality", while others are bearers of a non-conformist marginality. I propose to associate the idea of an 'eye-centric' science fiction with the first type on narrative, which enthroned the eye, and the idea of a “somato-centric” production with the latter, as it claims the body as a place of abject and “committed” enunciation. The poetics of Castagnet, Barragán and Paz Soldán point to this Latin American continental tendency towards a science fiction that is both post-human and post-colonial.

Copyright of Culturas Midiáticas is the property of Programa de Pos-Graduacao em Comunicacao 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.)

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.

This paper explores the tenuous boundaries between circumstantial reality and oneiric fantasy in the cinematic typology of science fiction. Starting from a brief analysis of the relationship between psychoanalysis and cinema, several parallels are drawn between psychoanalysis (as the "science of dreams") and science fiction (as a "dream of science"), and the structural conventions of this specific cinematographic genre are identified and analyzed. Often, the filmic structure of science fiction works includes parallel narrative plots that either synchronic or diachronically combine individual, prosaic and familial dramas, with grandiose, fantastic and alien events. The latter seem to provide an oneiric representation of the fantasies underlying the former, "paradoxically" making the science fiction film more realistic from a psychic standpoint, for including both the characters' observable behavior and the way they can experience, or represent, internally/fantastically the dilemmas of existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the Anthropocene has traditionally been associated with apocalyptic images, the notion of the good Anthropocene, widely criticized since its origin, has emerged as its utopian counterpart. In his novel The Ministry for the Future (2020), Kim Stanley Robinson explicitly uses the name “good Anthropocene” to refer to the state of the world at the end of the story, more sustainable and equitable. This article examines the utopian and dystopian connotations of the (good) Anthropocene and analyzes how Robinson utilizes the term in his narrative; in particular, it focuses on his employment of narrative structure to convey the multiplicity of the Anthropocene, his preoccupation with discerning the socio-cultural origins of the epoch and his intention of conveying the positive future of the story as achievable through active hope and collaboration.

Copyright of Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English & Cultural Studies is the property of Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, CCE Departamento de Pos-Graduacao em Lingua Englesa 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.)

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.

This paper presents and analyzes the methodology for teaching the concept of entropy supported by a science fiction text. In previous publications, we have presented ways of articulating Ausubel's Meaningful Learning and Matthew Lipman's Education theories, the object of his Philosophy Program. We show how this articulation considers the prerogatives of meaningful learning, linking it to higher-order thinking established by research communities and suggesting aggregating methods. As a theoretical-methodological expansion of these references, we transferred the notion of didactic transposition, via science fiction texts, to reinforce these postulates about teaching and cognition. The translational research involved researchers from the field of Physics teaching and 58 second-year high school students from a public institution. In the pedagogical mediation, as a basis for the discussion of the concept of entropy in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, we use one of the most acclaimed short stories by the popular Russian-American author, Isaac Asimov, entitled "The Last Question". For data analysis, we resorted to techniques of semantic frequency and medium order of evocation as constructs of a taxonomy for the investigation of social representations arising from the implemented proposition. The results indicated consistency with the perspective of meaningful learning, consolidating reflections for similar interventions and contiguous research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Letras de Hoje is the property of EDIPUCRS - Editora Universitaria da PUCRS 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.)

Copyright of Arcos: Design, Cultura e Visualidade is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) 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.)

Copyright of Cognitio - Revista de Filosofia is the property of Cognitio - Revista de Filosofia 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 this interview, Walidah Imarisha discusses the potential of visionary fiction for social transformation. She highlights the importance of science fiction as a space for imagination and mentions her collaboration with adrienne maree brown in the anthology "Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements". The author argues that visionary fiction should be anticapitalist and without hierarchy, and that action is necessary to create emancipated futures. The anthology has had a significant impact on the social justice movement in the United States. Imarisha also emphasizes the importance of listening to and valuing the leadership of the most vulnerable people during the pandemic, and emphasizes the need to imagine and work towards creating fairer futures. She discusses the importance of visionary fiction as a tool for reimagining the past and shaping the present and future, and highlights the need to recognize and connect with the experiences of non-white people, especially black people. Imarisha also emphasizes the importance of creating independent spaces of information and knowledge, where communities can write their own stories. [Extracted from the article]

This article aims to analyze the translation process in poetry considering the works of Angela Carter as a translator. Carter was a noted British author, best known for her novels and rewrites of fairy tales, and for her works related to science fiction. For this article, by using the book Unicorn: the poetry of Angela Carter (2015) and based on Lefevere's theories of translation (1975, 1992, 2003) we propose a translation exercise from English into Brazilian Portuguese of an excerpt from her poem - namesake - titled "Unicorn". In this sense, we seek to understand how literary creation and literary translation are presented in Carter's work as a wordsmith - an artist of the word. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches Sirius (1944), by Olaf Stapledon, from a perspective that brings together literary animal studies and ecocriticism. The eponymous main character of this science fiction novel is a genetically-modified dog who struggles between the human and the animal realms, being unable to belong to either urban or natural spaces. I argue this work of fiction carries out an exercise of blurring boundaries, thus proposing alternatives for harmful binaries such as human-animal, city-nature, or divine-mundane. Each of these binaries is explored in three trips of the many this character experiences throughout the novel. This allows the main character to reflect on his peculiar, unique species as the singularity he is. Sirius claims it is only empathy that can help in such a task; both human and nonhuman animals are then able to rejoice in biological, cultural, and spiritual differences. Sirius’s trips are analyzed in order to look closely at (1) the dog’s reflections on humankind while being in London, (2) his becoming a wolf, dog, and human at the same time in the woods, and (3) music as the ideal tool to articulate one’s spirituality based on a reconnection with an almost lost biodiversity.

Copyright of Esferas is the property of Esferas 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.)

Copyright of Esferas is the property of Esferas 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.)

Copyright of Revista Psicologia Clínica is the property of Faculdades Catolicas - Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro 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 present article discusses how speculative design relates to technoscientific extrapolation, an important science fiction feature, to plan for potential scenarios and prototype viable models of futurity. Through it, the paper outlines some important nuances between different approaches concerning speculative design’s role, considering their particular epistemological assumptions. A specific case is presented and discussed: Daleko (2020), a project developed for the Strelka Institute’s Terraforming program. This project consists of nine science fiction pieces that entangle issues of waste management, technical infrastructure, and climate politics, discussing the problematic conception of waste as a form of externality and imagining future scenarios for managing it through a more holistic perspective. By analysing Daleko’s approach to speculative design, in its final section the article suggests further developing speculative projects in contexts of design education. This would serve towards stimulating designers to ponder how their craft relates to anthropogenic impact and how it can play a decisive role in prospecting more viable future scenarios.

This essay analyses how water elementals in fantasy and science fiction animations created in the last decade suggest an aquatic materiality that raises alternative ways of thinking about a History of Waters. The analysis is conducted based on three characters from award-winning animations that embody, respectively, water in liquid, solid, and gaseous states: Lapis Lazuli (Steven Universe, 2013–2020), Elsa of Arendelle (Frozen 1, 2013 and Frozen 2, 2020), and Masami Yoshida (The Amazing World of Gumball, 2011–2019). The initial assumption is that animations in the fantasy and science fiction genres, in addition to being based on the historical circumstances of their time and even incorporating theories of history, allow the production of new possibilities of thinking historically. The three characters enable us to explore alternatives for a history that incorporates the contingent identity of waters that challenge certainties, permanence, and the traditional notion of historical agency while highlighting the evental and ambivalent nature of time.

The stereotypical representation of the Black world in Western cultural repositories has often been of great concern to scholars in African studies. This prejudicial delineation fosters dystopian sensibility on the unconscious mind of the Blackman who involuntarily internalises the myths of his sub-humanity. Stephen Hopkins’ 'The Ghost and the Darkness' (1996), Antoine Fuqua’s 'Tears of the Sun' (2003), Terry George’s 'Hotel Rwanda' (2004), Fernando Meirelles’ 'The Constant Gardener' (2005), Kevin Macdonald’s 'The Last King of Scotland' (2006), Cary Fukunaga’s 'Beasts of No Nation' (2015), and Mira Nair’s 'Queen of Katwe' (2016), for instance, project the Black world as a locus horridus. Though this stereotype has been invalidated in many scholarly writings, the Hollywood superhero movie, 'Black Panther' (2018), further intensifies the repudiation, affirming the Blackman’s contributions to humanity, albeit with a touch of narcissism. Using sci-fi genre, the movie provides a fictional truth, abstracted reality averring the cargo cult thinking of the Blackman. This is because the movie envisions Black hegemony and a world that pays homage to the wealth and imagined techno-scientific prowess of the Blackman. In this article, I examine the underlying subtexts in the movie, interrogating its Afrofuturist or Africanfuturist agenda. I argue that the agenda is steeped in illusionism, fringe science, esoteric spirituality, and cargo cult mentation. I contend that the failure of the Black world to catch up with the rest of the world may have necessitated its love for esoteric and infantile desires, rather than exploring the material, empirical realities around it to effectuate tangible development.

As "writers of a larger reality", Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941) and Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 - 2018) were, each in their own time, novelists and essayists who were not limited to seeing words and their meanings as closed correspondences, watertight. Understanding the art of writing through the lens of the collective and of multiplicity, both wrote fiction as if to expand the reach of words and amplify the metaphors that could arise from them. This essay intends to investigate some of the points of contact between Woolf and Le Guin, thinking in particular the dialogue between the non-fiction writings, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1924), written by Woolf, and Le Guin's posthumous response in the text "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown" (1986). The second part of the essay develops on Woolf and Le Guin's criticisms of the concept of heroism, as well as proposals for reformulating the "primordial" narrative of the hero in terms of a fundamental interdependence for life in society, for the valuing of difference (BUTLER, 2020; BRAIDOTTI, 2011). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of MATRIZes is the property of Universidade de Sao Paulo, Programa de Pos Graduacao em Ciencias da Comunicacao 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.)

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.

The thirty years between the 1972 publication of Rosario Ferré’s short story “La muñeca menor” and Pedro Cabiya’s 2003 novella “Relato del piloto que dijo adiós con la mano” span the cultural, political, and economic “shift” from a “regulatory state” to a neoliberal global order that, per Rebekah Sheldon’s analysis, has articulated and contextualized similar contrasting takes on biological and material reproduction. Focusing on their transformed imaginary of “monstrous” reproduction, I explore in this paper how the texts’ Gothic and SF modalizations refract local conditions as well as critical elements of that shift, full of increasingly urgent and extreme consequences in Puerto Rico, and even farther afield.

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.

I wrote this essay on the film eXistenZ (Canada/UK/France, 1999) in 2007, at the request of my undergraduate students, who were committed to editing a special issue of Portfolio Magazine on the theme of impact of new technologies in everyday life. The film had been made by David Cronenberg eight years earlier, at the end of a decade in which video games and online entertainment platforms had seen an exponential development. In my case, I was mainly interested in cinema issues – Cronenberg was always one of my favourite contemporary filmmakers - and the way in which its forms allow us to “access” to more-than-human dimensions. In its own way, cinema has always been a screen of “virtual reality”, another space, perhaps Foucaultian, a “possible world”, which - like the inspiring science fiction of Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), writer and scientist, biochemist, whose stories fascinated me in my childhood and adolescence – helped to install my passion for this limbo of (un)knowledge that forms when art and science intersect. It was this persistent fascination with the abyss of Cronenberg's images that led me to the film again, in 2015, now to extract from it, at the limit, a concept of game, to be presented in the context of a workshop. But, thirteen years after the first writing exercise on eXistenZ – which I present you here with minimal changes – I reread these lines and discover in them an extraordinary possible mirror of the present. One says that cinema is not life, and that life is not a game. But, in defence of cinema, which Aristotle did not know, I invoke his Poetics, to say: cinema as poetry - unlike history - never speaks of what life was but what it could be ...

As the genre of fantasy literature continues to grow, new authors strive to innovate and stray from the traditional principles that ruled it for many decades when epic fantasy was more prominent. Though epic features still remain a great part of the genre, the characteristics that rule fantasy worlds, stories, and characters have changed over time, bringing new aspects into the fold and introducing new voices. As academics attempt to categorize a genre as diverse as fantasy to better understand it and define it, authors continue to expand and mingle fantasy elements with components from other genres, especially science-fiction. The aim of this article is to identify how a taxonomy of fantasy can be used to understand the relation between the fantastic and the narrative. By analyzing N. K. Jemisin's novels in the Broken Earth trilogy through Farah Mendlesohn's categorization of fantasy proposed in Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008), the goal is to discover the aspects in which Jemisin brings innovation into the fantasy genre by applying elements from various categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tradução em Revista is the property of Faculdades Catolicas - Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro 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.)

This work aims to analyze how the notion of the future that Deleuze outlines in his philosophy of time can be related to decolonial thinking, especially when it refers to the possibility of imagining other futures not yet captured by the promises of modern utopias or by post-apocalyptic scenarios of technological dystopias. As a legacy of scientific and modern thought, the future has been hijacked by the most diverse techniques of prediction and anticipation. In the fictional territory, the imaginary futures of classic science fiction narratives were also colonized, as certain notions that are closely linked to a Eurocentric point of view have been predominant in this type of fiction, such as the notion of civilization, of "developed societies" or even humanity. For this reason, we emphasize the need to dissociate the future from finalist perspectives that fix it at a certain time to come. For this, we resorted to the concepts of "third synthesis of time" and "geophilosophy" elaborated by Deleuze (the second in partnership with Guattari), in an attempt to free the category of the future from the linear and chronological perspectives of time, emphasizing, on the other hand, its opening and multiplicity. From an approximation between this future approach and decolonial studies, we finally bet on a speculative perspective that includes uncertainty, to give birth to other versions of the future, not those already probable, but futures not yet thought of, other worlds that are, right now, also claiming for a call to existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work, the result of a discussion carried out in a PhD thesis, analyzes how the possible, a temporal category that belongs to the future, has been increasingly captured by mechanisms of power characteristic of the so-called societies of control. The field of possibilities is being circumscribed today not only by homogenizing visions of the future that predominate in the imaginary (such as the technological future of science fiction), but also by increasingly refined mechanisms of control that predict and induce our next steps, diminishing our ability to choose, our imagination and our subjectivities. This essay analyzes these different forms of hijacking the possible, going through the machinery of modern sciences and financial speculation, until getting to the information currently stored as big data, the data flow fed by the algorithms that control and predict our next choices. The paper questions, at the end, what other types of speculation could, instead of closing the field of possibilities, expand and intensify it, remaining open to difference, uncertainty and contingencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La ciencia ficción no es uno de los géneros más practicados en el teatro español del siglo XX. Ello no obsta para que exista algún que otro título merecedor de atención y estudio. El presente artículo se centra en Sodomáquina, del italiano afincado en España Carlo Frabetti (Bolonia, 1945). Publicada en 1970 en las revistas especializadas –en ciencia ficción y en teatro, respectivamente– Nueva Dimensión y Yorick, constituye uno de los más dignos intentos de aclimatar el género en las tablas, con todo su potencial imaginativo y discursivo. En nuestro análisis, valoramos su condición de distopía crítica, así como el alcance de su ataque a los sistemas opresores y deshumanizados. Inevitablemente, es el franquismo el primero de estos sistemas que viene a la memoria. Como demostraremos, no obstante, el cuestionamiento es extrapolable a muchos otros contextos, de la misma manera que ocurre con la apuesta por un humanismo renovado y una utopía para el futuro, confiada al ser humano antes que a poderes trascendentales.

Reseña de Historia de la ciencia ficción en la cultura española, editada por Teresa López-Pellisa. Madrid: Iberoamericana, Vervuert, La Casa de la Riqueza, Estudios de la Cultura de España 44, 2018. 523p; la cual aborda la historia de la literatura, el teatro, el cine, la televisión, la poesía y la narrativa gráfica en España

Using immune discourse to examine zombies in González’s “Luna de sangre,” I argue that his zombies function as embodied manifestations of physical, spiritual, and cultural contagion. The ideas of Roberto Esposito, Priscilla Wald, Mabel Moraña, Sarah J. Lauro and Karen Embry, put into conversation with González’s tale, help illuminate how the author uses monstrosity to demarcate the Other and define it as those who exist outside of the human, the normative, and more generally outside of the Western social order. The historical and contemporary context of “Luna de sangre” is one of nationalism, bigotry, walls, and anti-Islamic and anti-Semitic sentiment. González says that “el marco histórico lo escogió Cervantes mismo, no yo.” Within the narrative, the distinction between race and religion blurs, as the characters treat Turkish Muslims, Spanish Jews and “unconverted” Africans alike with similar disdain. González’s work necessarily draws upon the baroque quality of Cervantes’s original Quixote narrative, and his parody also reflects the similarly complex twenty-first century relationships and tensions between varying groups of “us” and “them,” where those categories of community and belonging shift depending on the position of the speaker.

The objective of this article is to discuss, from the Hollywood cinema, the dystopian visions about the future, taking as a base the imaginary about the end of the world from the perspective of environmental crisis originating in the second half of the 20th century. The environmental crisis demonstrates that the effects of human action, under the aegis of the capitalist system, will not only promote the depletion of natural resources, but also the radical transformation of the climate, especially global warming, making the planet uninhabitable for all species. Several films of the science fiction genre brought directly or indirectly in their plots the discussion of environmental degradation and its consequences for humanity. Our discussion will take place from three films: 2012 (2009), Elysium (2013) and Interstellar (2014), cinematographic works representative of the defended argument, that is, the relationship between science fiction, cinema and the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses, from the critique of a fictional work, the discursive dimensions of irony in the dystopian narrative of the future, in which the inexorable advance of consumerism, capitalist progress and its impacts on the global climate crisis threatens human life and the very survival of the planet. Methodologically, the text explores the Bakhtinian concepts of the language of laughter in shaping the social senses, seeking to identify its potential as an argumentative strategy. The analysis points to the discursive efficacy of irony to address irremovable human behavior in the face of the pleasures of the inexhaustible pleasures of permanent leisure and consumerism and the failure of the Guattarian autopoietic machine in the production of new subjectivities and collective agency for the production of new realities, both phenomena necessary to face the imminent environmental collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that the language someone speaks shapes their thoughts. Although this view may have fallen into disrepute in the field of linguistics, its influence, the Whorfianism, has been the number one showcase in science fiction works that somehow approach language, and more specifically, invented languages. This paper uses Ted Chiang’s award-winning novella Story of your life (1998) and its filmic adaptation Arrival (2016) directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Eric Heisserer as a case study to investigate this literary phenomenon. The considerations of Guy Deutscher (2010), Stockwell (2006) and Ria Cheyne (2008), as well as the authors’ own viewpoints, are vitally important for that. The result is a speculative and comparative analysis that contributes to a better understanding of the frequent connexion of science fiction, glossopoesis and Whorfianism.