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Science fiction claims Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a progenitor on the basis of its extrapolation from speculations by Erasmus Darwin and others about the nature and origins of life. An equally strong narrative thread in the novel about extraordinary states of mind is usually taken as evidence of its grounding in supernatural and gothic fiction. The novel applies the same materialist assumptions and reasoned approach to dreaming, however, that it uses to explore biological science. Reading it in the context, first, of David Hartley's eighteenth-century Observations on Man and, second, of contemporary studies of the dreaming brain, we can see that Frankenstein is also science fiction of a different sort than usually supposed, a thought experiment about states of consciousness and unconsciousness and the strange experiences that arise from disrupting the boundary between sleep and waking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the winner of the 2022 Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science Book Award, Nicole Starosielski's "Media Hot and Cold," which offers a groundbreaking examination of the intersections between popular culture, technology, and postwar U.S. society. Topics discussed include the exploration of motherhood in science fiction, the need for critical analysis of science fiction and fantasy comics, and the upcoming conference on graphic/visual science fiction.

In Priya Sarukkai Chabria's science-fiction novel Clone (2019), the central character Clone 14/54/G is a cyborg replica of her Original, named Aa-Aa, an incarcerated dissident writer who met a violent death just before delivering a potentially incendiary public address. Against her programming, the mutant Clone experiences flashbacks (or "visitations") of her Original's past life and fictional oeuvre, which makes it possible for her to revisit disparate temporalities of Indian history. While many existing interventions attempt to extend or apply the familiar conventions of postcolonial analysis to works of postcolonial science fiction, this essay sets out to ask rather how the emergence of the latter serves to both reconfigure and reclaim the affective stakes of an anti-imperialist politics that avoids a straightforward historical determinism. By reading Chabria's sf novel through affective articulations of spectrality and queer temporality, I present the novel as a form of narrative crypt that provides a phantasmal space for the spectral return of those who have been silenced or erased from history, not only as a consequence of their gender, race, and class, but also because of their inability or refusal to comply with the normative temporal rhythms of the society in which they live. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren (1975) moves through different genres and styles of literature in much the same way that Walter Benjamin's flaneur moves through the spaces of the city. Delany as a writer makes contact with any number of other traditions outside of science fiction, but he expresses no radical desire to revolutionize sf or move it into mainstream literature. Delany does not assimilate or synthesize outside influences into his work so much as he encounters them. In Starboard Wine (1984), his book of sf criticism, Delany defines "encounter" in literature as the interpretation of a text associated with one genre through the reading protocols associated with another. I argue that "encounter" is analogous to "contact," a concept from Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) that relates to the real, physical interaction of individuals in an urban environment. Nowhere is this convergence of literary encounter and urban contact clearer than in his novel, Dhalgren. Dhalgren uses the city as a conceptual framework for encounters among a diverse array of influences including myth, poetry, autobiography, and literary modernism. These types of encounters are also plentiful in Delany's earlier work, but Dhalgren pushes them to a point where even sf itself is decentered and becomes just one more thing to be met in the space of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders Samuel R. Delany's theory of science fiction as a form of language in order to develop the notion that science fiction is a method of making meaning and reading texts. Three stories by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, "The Aleph," "The Library of Babel," and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," are read as science fiction to demonstrate how the method functions. Borges's ambiguous relationship with science fiction during his lifetime is well-documented, but no previous study of Borges as a science-fiction writer exists in English. The notion of science fiction as a way of reading enables a reading that treats the elements of textual playfulness that make Borges's texts so beloved throughout literary studies as science fictional, because they encourage the reader to reconstruct an alternate world around the text and create a comprehensive theory of how that world works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

M. John Harrison is often considered one of the most commercially underestimated writers of science fiction and fantasy in the UK since the mid-1960s. This article aims to focus on Harrison's under-recognized contributions to science fiction while focusing on his later work--the KEFAHUCHI TRACT trilogy (2002-2012). Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I will argue that Harrison's trilogy provides a line of flight escaping the binary dichotomies between self and other, one and multiple, and subject and object, guiding us toward our eventual deterritorialization and liberating us from the competitive nature of capitalist realism. This process is certainly not just a celebration of deterritorialization for its own sake, but rather a refusal to allow the complexity of reality to be reduced to a mere reflection of the economic norms of capitalist realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally neglected if not despised by researchers in the humanities and social sciences, science fiction is changing status, being invested with new qualities and functions and, above all, a real epistemic value by leading scholars in the field of environmental humanities. Some of them not only turn to sf as a conceptual resource but go so far as to write counterfactual texts, told in the future or from impossible points of view, deploying sf narrative strategies to breathe new life into their academic writing. This paper considers what qualities these researchers explicitly attribute to sf, focusing on an emblematic case study--an article of speculative anthropology by Anna Tsing--to show how concretely these unconventional writing experiments can weave science and fiction into their textual fabric. Finally, we address the reading effects that these hybrid texts may stimulate by positioning Tsing's article in the field of contemporary sf, through the joint analysis of two fictions by Ted Chiang and Sylvie Lainé, which similarly ask how to account for a form of existence radically different from ours, relying on surprising comparisons between different sciences, living species, and instruments of knowledge. Our research approach contributes to grasping the current reconfiguration of knowledge and writing practices, allows us to formulate some hypotheses about today's use and relevance of sf in the field of environmental humanities, and finally points to new and unexpected areas of application for comparative literature in a time of ecological collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I explore the relation between Neill Blomkamp’s science fictional District 9 and Derrida’s philosophy in the light of South African history. My aim is to show that this film tells the story of the twenty-first century migrant crisis in Johannesburg, exploring past, actual, or future xenophobic/racist experiences and events, especially those of apartheid and of possible future systems of segregation anticipated in the movie. While Blomkamp was filming District 9 in Johannesburg in 2008, the logic of apartheid was reactivated during a migrant crisis, proving that the ghosts of the past continue to haunt the country. Many South-African natives were hostile to newcomers from Zimbabwe in search of job opportunities and arriving by the thousands every month. I use Derrida’s notion of spectrality to shed a new light on the dialectical construction of historical temporality in Blomkamp’s aesthetics. On the same subject of history, I unveil the allegorical dimension of the two main characters in District 9, Christopher Johnson and Wikus van der Merwe, to show how their destiny echoes those of the South African freedom fighters, thus telling implicitly the story of this country. They propose a solution to a “3.0 version” of apartheid possibly in the making. I finally show that xenophobia transcends eras, borders, and races in District 9, as an ultimate lesson from Blomkamp to avoid errors of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offering something of a group portrait, this study focuses on Ballard’s first decade as a published writer (1956-1966), seen in the context of US science fiction—its stories, writers, communal obsessions (including NASA’s Mercury Program), and above all its shared writing practices. During the early Cold War years, science fiction regularly recast the genre’s own earlier moments, a practice that tied even the pointed social critique of noir sf in the early 1950s—stories that first drew Ballard to the genre—to earlier pulp science fiction, including the space adventures of the 1930s and 1940s. An especially striking quality of this postwar generation is what seems an unusual degree of prescience; for Ballard’s early sf—like that of the US writers who inspired him (sometimes to emulate, sometimes to critique)—regularly offer uncanny intimations of our own contentious historical moment today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a roundtable discussion wherein participants are asked to critically respond to the topic of science fiction (sf) kitchens. Topics include a description of the kitchens of tomorrow or futuristic kitchens as depicted in General Motors' Populuxe industrial short film "Design for Dreaming," a discussion of kitchen appliances and food futures in sf and alternative food options in Rachel K. Jones' "The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant" from an sf perspective.

It is particularly disturbing when seemingly inert plants escape the category of nourishing food and instead become transmitters of vegetal diseases infecting our human bodies or transforming us into plant-human hybrids or even plant-infused zombies. This article analyzes the ecological and alimentary implications of three sf texts in which plants infect human bodies or use them as a kind of walking soil from which to sprout: Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Windup Girl (2009), Olivia Vieweg's German-language graphic novel, EndZeit [EndTime, 2018], and Nnedi Okorafor's graphic novel LaGuardia (2019). Presenting plant-human relations as either utopian and kinship-based or as horrific cross-species disease vectors creating human-plant zombies, these texts reveal aspects of the ecological fact that human bodies are always monstrously chimerical. All living things are, in fact, composed of multispecies entanglements with other beings such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi, as well as the species they consume, as described by Anna Tsing et al. in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017). Bacigalupi, Vieweg, and Okorafor transform our ecological entanglements with and dependence on plants into both disturbing and celebratory sf visions of bodily invasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws a connection between closed-biosphere tropes in Kim Stanley Robinson's Icehenge (1984) and Soviet and American research on closed artificial ecologies. The article contends that during the 1980s, bioregenerative food systems--as research objects and literary tropes--expressed a perception of socialism and capitalism as imperfect yet eternal states. Two challenges are analogized: 1) conceiving political alternatives at the twentieth century's end, and 2) sustaining livable habitats using a closed ecology's limited available resources (for example, by deriving nutrients from waste). Both challenges inspire a mode of aggressive re-use here termed "strategic recycling." To close, the article assesses the ambivalent politics attending biospheric thinking: closed biospheres clarify humans' metabolic enmeshment in their environments, inviting the radical reassessment of organism-environment relations as ratios of useful outputs over required inputs (what one emits over what one eats). The resulting perspective carries both utopian and eugenic implications that make biospheric thinking itself a "recyclable" material that can be conscripted with equal ease into emancipatory and reactionary projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article works to situate H.G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon (1901) within the context of discourses and debates concerning the increasingly globalized meat markets of the British fin de siècle, considering how Wells's depiction of pastoral industry and fantasies of consuming alien flesh worked to interrogate prevailing modes of food production, as well as the ideologies of imperial capitalist expansion to which they were bound. Subsequently, it reads Wells's text against four lesser-known early British sf novels, in which alien food cultures are used to critique the carnivorous status quo and to explore more sustainable food systems. John Munro's A Trip to Venus (1897) and Mark Wicks's To Mars via the Moon (1911) incorporate discourses drawn from movement vegetarianism to imagine alternative food futures in which unsustainable carnivorous diets are superseded by plant-based ones. Meanwhile, Hugh MacColl's Mr Stranger's Sealed Packet (1889) and W.S. Lach-Szyrma's Under Other Conditions (1892) build on contemporary advances in science to explore the possibilities of chemically synthesized foods. By reading Wells against these novels, previously overlooked by scholarship, this article considers how food cultures were being used not only to energize but to complicate and challenge dominant nutritional and political ideologies during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From More and Campanella to Gernsback's Ralph 124C 41+, utopian authors have imagined potential agricultural revolutions guaranteeing a secure and abundant supply of high-quality food. Since literary utopias are either based in or modeled on the institution of the city, their demand for food necessitates an increased exploitation of the countryside. Industrialized agriculture remains indispensable even in a future such as Gernsback's, where most foods are apparently synthetic. The "garden city" utopias from Cabet to Gilman equally rely on agricultural intensification, portraying an ideal of "perfect cultivation" that depends on systematic ecocide and environmental remodeling. Their utopian futures anticipate the historical development of global agriculture all too closely. Morris's News from Nowhere stands out for its opposition to industrial farming and to the subordination of the countryside to the rule of the city. Yet Morris's future London continues to import virtually all its food. Finally, consideration of Robinson's Pacific Edge suggests that the challenge of imagining a future for well-fed humanity no longer dependent on rural oppression and environmental destruction remains to be met. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented wherein the authors discuss various reports within the issue about food futures in the history of science fiction and its subgenres.

The eeriness in Han Song's stories has made him a unique writer in the New Wave of Chinese science fiction. His "eerie" writings blend the imageries of utopia and dystopia, blurring the boundaries between "good" and "bad" places and creating a new form of utopianism that can account for the rapid social transition in China since the 1990s. This essay focuses on one of Han Song's earlier novels, Red Star over America (2000), and interrogates the seemingly utopian China, governed by the omnipotent artificial intelligence Amanduo, through the lens of Moylan's "critical utopia" and Bakhtin's "adventure chronotope." The collapse of Amanduo reflects the decline of "top-down" elitist discourse in China, developed during the New Enlightenment of the 1980s. Han's protagonist's hesitant journey in the post-Amanduo world in search of a new order represents China's ideological transition during the post-socialist era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I discuss the work of Chinese sf author Han Song (1965-), focusing in particular on the novella "Meinü shoulie zhinan" [A Guide to Hunting Beautiful Women, 2014]. This novella is used as a starting point for approaching matters of language and form in contemporary Chinese-language science fiction, and exploring what these elements can tell us about the state of the genre to which they are ascribed. This essay develops on three levels: a self-reflective one, pertaining to my own experience as a translator; a formal one, in which I focus on the narrative configuration of "Meinü shoulie zhinan"; and a discursive one, in which I try to tackle the cultural phenomenon of "Chinese SF" from a wider perspective. These three levels are connected: I submit that my own experience in translating this novella, which was one of discomfort, was rooted in the code informing the text, and that the mobilization of this code therein reflects by way of metonymy the problematic mobilization of science fiction in China and the world today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

H.G. Wells's interest in cataclysmic violence that could save humanity from its biological heritage and propel it toward acceptance of the World State is a puzzling feature of his thought. This essay argues that Wells's view of human nature and his belief that apocalyptic violence might be necessary to help humans transcend their nature reflects a synthesis between his Christian background and his commitment to science. Wells's broader project throughout his career was to develop a scientific eschatology that could answer the questions raised by the Bible through appeal to the evidence furnished by science. His views on violence should be situated within the context of this larger apocalyptic vision of history. In light of this, Wells's ideas bear comparison to those of René Girard, another thinker who brought Darwinian reflections on human extinction into dialogue with Christian views of the end times. This essay brings the ideas of Wells and Girard into conversation in order to reflect on the nature of science fiction as a genre that is especially well situated to address questions about the relationships among religion, violence, and technology. It argues that near the end of his life, Wells came to reject the idea that sacrificial violence might pave the way for human transformation after undergoing what René Girard has called a "novelistic conversion.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article implicates early weekly periodicals in the history of British science fiction by examining the effects of periodicals as media defined by their specific rhythms of publication, diversity of content, and place in a larger media ecology. Specifically, it examines how prominent cheap weeklies Chambers's Edinburgh Journal (1832-1956) and Household Words (1850-1859) helped popularize science, promoted science-fictional habits of mind, and incubated science-fictional hybrid genres, including "reflective science," "science in fable," the fairy-tales of science, and what was first labeled "science-fiction" in 1851. Decades before H.G. Wells published his works in monthly periodicals, these accessible weeklies helped cultivate casual readers to whom his "miscellany of inventions" might appeal. Harnessing insights from the Gibson Collection of Speculative Fiction, this article varies its scale of analysis from individual periodical-based works to larger patterns that develop within and across periodicals and their associated book-length works, ultimately arguing for a genre evolution paradigm that explicitly attends to the material formats of publication, intermedial networks, and the practices of remediation, collection, recollection, and forgetting that necessarily shape critical assessments of sf. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adding to a growing body of scholarship on Chicanafuturism and borderlands science fiction, this essay interrogates the politics of labor in Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita's novella Lunar Braceros 2125-2148. It examines the breakdown of the heteronormative nuclear family and its transformation into another version of the nuclear family, one that results from radioactive contamination and exposure. I argue the protagonist Lydia becomes a chola cyborg whose cyber-consciousness is created by nuclear alienation. I demonstrate how the environmental effects of the neoliberal economy, as portrayed in Lunar Braceros, are reflective of the sociopolitical conditions of Indigenous communities in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora (2015) contributes to an ecofeminist dialogic by complicating representation through linguistic systems. I examine the novel's starship to look at the body's role in identity formation within a confining linguistic system. Moving from a singular female "I," to the plural genderless "We," the starship resists the reductive tendencies of binary systems, shifting from a definitional role as a surrogate womb to posthuman selfhood as a collective. This essay enacts a psychoanalytic reading, employing a Lacanian framework extended by Judith Butler, who examines identity systems built by social, cultural, and historical contexts. From Butler, the essay moves on to ecofeminism, considering how identity continua complicate binary identity systems without rejecting them outright, thereby effectively creating continually traversable, overlapping channels among identity nodes. Achieving selfhood through identity continua allows the ship to access the posthuman, a step that promises the ethical, sustainable future called for by ecofeminists. Fulfilling its anthropocentric body burden highlights the social, cultural, and historical obstacles barring this potential future that considers, values, and protects the "we" implicit in all living and nonliving material actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The characterization of spice in Frank Herbert's science-fiction novel Dune plays a significant role in world-building and focusing readers' attention on natural enhancements to the human mind. Herbert uses historical and social contexts relevant to real-world spices to create layers of meaning by tapping into emerging trends in ecology, psychology, and politics. These include the historic spice trade, drugs in the countercultural movement, the disciplines of ecology and psychology, and foreign interference in the Middle East. Such linkages help position spice as a valuable commodity as well as a psychoactive substance that various characters must consume to accomplish extraordinary feats. In the world of Dune, everything is dependent on one substance, and although spice may give advantages, it also takes its toll. The consequences of spice consumption on an individual level then mirror the larger ecological disruptions in the novel in the realms of politics and the environment. In this way, spice represents a key feature of world-building that assists in tying the threads of the novel together and driving through to readers the ecological message about the interconnectedness of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origins of Japanese sf in the late nineteenth century have drawn little attention, yet they provide a revealing spree of cultural production. The historical setting of these beginnings is the post-Meiji imperial restoration (1868) that set Japan firmly on the path to Western-style modernization, including in Japanese literature. This article introduces one particular political novel with strong sf elements, Voyage to Innumerable Star Worlds (1882), written by Nukina Shunichi, a heretofore anonymous ex-samurai. Innovative as the novel's sf imagination was, it nevertheless drew little attention and soon was forgotten. By focusing on the author, the novel's radical techno-political sf vision, and its possible sources, this article offers a glimpse into the intellectual life of Japan's elite during this period of rapid transformation and influx of Western ideas. The article concludes with some thoughts on why the novel was ignored without inspiring any similarly innovative sf in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

H.G. Wells is sometimes credited with a stylistic rupture that separated science fiction from other fantastic genres, eschewing magical elements in favor of empiricist and rationalist knowledge. While there is merit to this narrative, this article argues for a more complex genre heritage by evaluating the fiction of Edward Bulwer-Lytton as an indicative example of a competing nineteenth-century strand of occult science fiction. This form, quite popular in the period, drew on methods of scientific legitimation used by esoteric traditions such as Theosophy and Spiritualism, as well as theories of the mind such as clairvoyance and telepathy, producing fiction that was in dialogue with scientific currents of the day but that did not reject magic. Indeed, noting that Wells consciously exploited the narrative value of esoteric science in a number of his early short stories, the article argues that the fiction of authors such as Bulwer-Lytton is distinguished from the form championed by Wells not by an exorcism of magic but by a productive occlusion of it. The article concludes by outlining the methods and continuing influence of this occlusion, arguing that esoteric sciences have continued to influence and generate the tropes, novums, and stylistics of science fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many respects, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and His Master’s Voice (1968) could not be more different. Kubrick/Clarke’s mystical and affirmational visions of space exploration and humankind’s technological evolution are decisively countered by Lem’s downbeat tale about failed communication with the aliens. Rather than conventional first-contact stories, these texts are more specifically about the impact of messages received from outer space, which sf fans either reading or going to the movie theatres were surely encouraged to evaluate within the context of “space-age” technology and lifestyle. What did it mean to be space-faring humans, leaving the Earth behind? What were the political and social consequences of technocracy and the space race? How was “big science” changing politics and society, both in the East and West? How was it changing the ways that humans might take the measure of themselves? These are big questions, and I have chosen the Kubrick/Clarke and Lem works, created on either side of the Iron Curtain, because I believe that their juxtaposition helps us to appreciate the central role of the Cold War struggle in shaping the sf genre’s responsiveness to the times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reexamines and reframes Philip K. Dick’s sprawling philosophical text, known as the Exegesis, in relation to his widely celebrated fiction, philosophies of mysticism, posthumanism, and transhumanism, and more generally, the difficult task of discovering means of transforming our personal and cultural values to be more adequately attuned to our changing environment. I consider how the ontological uncertainty produced in sf relates to an inevitable ontological disorientation produced by science and technology, and show how this leads to a particular (and particularly mystical, for reasons explained) task: the need to estrange ourselves from our traditional human concepts, values, beliefs, and cultures. Using passages from the Exegesis, I lay out how Dick sets up the task of the Exegesis as a kind of simulation of moksha (liberation, in a profound sense), reading the Exegesis as the venue for Dick to run philosophical and personal counterparts to the simulations of his fiction. Dick’s remixing of mystical and transhuman rhetoric also clarifies mysticism’s relationship to science fiction. Along the way, I reread Martian Time-Slip, Ubik, Valis, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch through the frame and task set up in the Exegesis, resulting in a new reading of Dick’s work that integrates with his post-1974 experiences and writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Very broadly speaking, beginning with the development of a social science-fictional mode, a number of postwar authors began exploring how forms of exceptionally accurate foresight might effect the development of a society. The social effects of the mobilization of extraordinary forms of prognostication were explored by numerous authors in the 1940s and 1950s, including Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, A.E. van Vogt, and Isaac Asimov. This became a significant, but theoretically and critically understudied, motif in sf during the 1960s and 1970s. Relative to the study of prognostication in history, this body of sf literature provides a unique perspective on the relationship between predictive methods and governance, offering a corpus of theoretical reflections on how the implementation of hypothetical, infallible (or nearly infallible) prognostic systems could affect different types of social order. In this essay, I will briefly explore the development of prognostication and precognition as sociallyembedded novums and investigate what these sources tell us about prognostication in history when viewed through the lens of Western metaphysics and the Western literary imagination. In doing so, I propose a binary taxonomy as a heuristic, organizing texts with prognostication or precognition as their central novum into two general modes: (1) positivist/techno-optimist and (2) romantic/techno-pessimist. The intellectual history of these tendencies in the literature is explored and compared through several exemplary texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the connection between R.L. Stevenson and H.G. Wells, with a particular focus on their shared interest in the ethical implications of expansionism at the close of the nineteenth century. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, Wells surprisingly appears to have extensively borrowed from and reworked Stevenson’s Pacific tale The Ebb-Tide. On these grounds, it is possible to trace an implied conversation between Wells and Stevenson, which takes its cue from Robert M. Philmus’s pioneering works on the “Strange Case of Moreau.” Moreau, as Philmus and other critics have noted, is in fact rich with intertextual connections, which complicate its meaning and make it highly ambivalent. The Ebb-Tide, a major and leading source text seemingly as relevant as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, has been largely neglected by contemporary criticism. Bringing more evidence to the case, this essay also connects Wells and Stevenson to a shared ideological awareness, while shedding more light on the sociopolitical horizons of Wells’s early sf. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including COVID-19 pandemic; politics of nostalgia science fiction; and polyvalent character of nostalgia.

A personal narrative is presented which discusses author's experience of getting attracted to science fiction and growing up in household defined by patriarch.

This paper develops a framework for reading fictional languages and neologisms in science fiction that complements prior critical approaches focused on linguistics or quantification. It argues that interpreting the inclusion of alien languages as a form of multilingual writing (albeit one where the source language does not exist) is a productive mode of analyzing science fiction. Bakhtin's thought on heteroglossia as well as contemporary approaches to multilingual writing are employed to coin and refine the concept of fictive multilingualism. The mode of analysis is exemplified by applying it to Ursula K. Le Guin's use of created languages, particularly in Always Coming Home (1985) and The Dispossessed (1974), in which fictive multilingualism serves both to construct plausible alien worlds and call attention to their textually constructed nature. The narratives of decipherment in Always Coming Home, manifested through untranslated or polyphonic terms, are explored in depth to support this point. In contrast to existing cultural criticism about created languages in sf, which tends towards analysis of neologisms in isolation, my approach is based on detailed readings of neologisms and other expressions of created languages as they function within a text and in relation to its main language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leslie F. Stone (1905-1991) was the second woman (after Clare Winger Harris) to publish science fiction in the early pulp magazines. She became a prolific and popular author of the Gernsback era. This essay offers readers a rare view into the life and experiences of a pioneering woman writer of the pulp era. It explores the origins and motivation behind her pseudonym, the reception Stone experienced as a woman writer in a male-dominated field, her innovative new plots, and her departure from publishing amid the wartime horrors of the 1940s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reconsiders what genre historian Bradley Schauer terms the "pulp paradox," that is, the film industry's supposed reluctance to produce sf films because of a fear that doing so would associate the movies with "the less reputable variations of the genre" often associated with pulp literature. It examines this notion by considering a partnership in the 1950s between producer George Pal, major film studio Paramount Pictures, and the most respected of the sf pulps, Astounding Science Fiction. In this period Astounding published a series of articles sponsored by Pal and Paramount designed to help market a group of films: Destination Moon (1950), When Worlds Collide (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), and Conquest of Space (1955).The articles, however, would reveal a level of irony in this industry strategy, for while they initially sought to stress the scientific and technological accuracy to be found these films, they--in concert with the films themselves and other marketing strategies--would also increasingly suggest a kind of pulpiness in the films. During the course of this decade the film industry, with its emphasis on special effects, what Susan Sontag refers to as an "imagination of disaster," and a sensationalistic and at times lurid imagery, became the real purveyor of a pulp vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern and contemporary artists working in relation to monumentality have sometimes positioned their works in relation to sf, and at other times works of monumental sculpture have been labeled as science-fictional by audiences to whom these monumental forms appear alien or displaced in time. While art history has sometimes examined the influence of sf ideas on modern and contemporary artists, a more sustained consideration of the relationship between monumentality and sf is lacking. One necessary step in advancing this understanding is a consideration of how monuments themselves have been represented in sf literature. This article examines the representations and roles of monuments in a number of sf works, including H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (1936), Robert Charles Wilson's The Chronoliths (2001), and Kim Stanley Robinson's Icehenge (1984). The ways in which monuments appear in these and other sf texts foreground a set of questions about the perception of inevitability, the shape of time, and the mutability of history. These works explore how the relationship between past and future can be reconfigured through encounters with monumental forms that create new bridges and chronologies across cosmic and historical scales of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]