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Focussing on a number of literary works in English(es), this article intends to show how contemporary women writers have been enacting the disruption of the polarity not only between the fantastic and the real but also between apocalyptic scenarios and the utopistic urge of subgenres like solarpunk. By embracing the concept of mixtopia, as proposed by Giuliana Misserville, I will thus attempt to prove how, in a world ravaged by climate change and shaped by A.I., several women writers bring to the fore the relevance of a technocritical approach in form and content, queering the material-semiotic nature of sci-fi itself, originally a male-dominated genre, and now a wild land of uncharted territories, full of eco-aware possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the Possible Worlds Theory and its application to contemporary fictional universes, specifically focusing on eutopias and dystopias. I trace the historical development of the Theory from the 1970s. The Theory, emerging from formal logic and analytic philosophy, presents an alternative to binary thinking by considering all as fiction. I critique David Lewis's approach, which eliminates hierarchies between real and fictional worlds, and instead propose to analyze alternative fictions, particularly counterfactuals, fantasy, and science fiction, from their relation to the real world and their moral dimensions. The study contrasts utopias and dystopias, suggesting the use of "eutopia" and "cacotopia" for better and worse states than the current world. I explore whether these alternative fictions challenge or reinforce the boundary between reality and fiction. Through the analysis of works like Laurent Binet's Civilizations and Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem, I investigate the role of play in these narratives and their implications for understanding contemporary culture's obsession with alternative worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is an important attempt of the contemporary Chinese science fiction to creatively transform traditional writing resources by using science fiction to creatively adapt and reconstruct mythological history. This creative adaptation and reconstruction of Chinese science fiction originates from the narrative tradition of "rewriting old stories". Science fiction writers have made active exploration in terms of content sourcing, narrative construction, adaptation techniques, and the combination of mythological history and science fiction. Currently, there are still issues in the creative adaptation and reconstruction of Chinese science fiction, such as the lack of a scientific fiction core, stereotyped plot formulas, and ambiguous science fiction attributes. On this basis, contemporary Chinese science fiction novels can effectively transform traditional writing resources through setting up reasonable scientific cores, skillfully connecting with suitable points, activating Chinese excellent traditional culture, and integrating local genre novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the stories "Abel" (2013), "La incompleta" (2015) and "La esperada" (2019), by the Costa Rican writer Anacristina Rossi, this article explores the ways in which this narrative trilogy draws from science fiction to reconfigure the notions of identity, nature, and what it means to be human. Drawing on the theories of ecocriticism, postcolonial ecocriticism, and ecofeminism, Rossi's discursive strategies to interconnect anthropocenic concerns about the sustainability of civilization with the idea of the end of the world and a new genesis are analyzed to unravel her critique against all systems of domination that prevail today: patriarchal, economic, colonial, racial, and gendered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Atomik Aztex by Sesshu Foster is widely regarded as a paradigm of postcolonial intervention in the genre of the science fiction novel and alternative histories. This article marks a departure from such readings by positing the novel as a study of psychosis in the postcolonial subaltern. Through the employment of psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan with reference to Angelo Bravi's concept of the "psychosis of civilisation," this article contends that the novel's narrator-protagonist Zenzon experiences symptoms of psychosis that result in hallucinations of alternate realities. Through the ideations of Dipesh Chakraborty, Ashis Nandy and Walter Mignolo, the article posits Zenzon as a postcolonial subaltern through his failed attempts to trace a postcolonial history beyond the colonizer's epistemologies. Finally, the article traces the emergence of a subjectless subject from the position of the postcolonial subaltern, who, overwhelmed by his psychotic condition, revels in his subalternity through an avowal of his psychosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Basma Abdel Aziz's The Queue ("al-Tábúr" 2013; translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette in 2016) with special emphasis on estrangement and diglossia. Abdel Aziz portrays the sheer brutality of political power represented in "The Gate" in an artistic yet allegoric manner to elucidate the frustration in outcomes of recent events while simultaneously igniting hope for the future. She is cognizant of the linguistic choices to address local readers to raise awareness about their ongoing issues while using figurative expressions to avoid political complications. By colligating written and spoken linguistic registers of Arabic, she goes beyond the language convention of Arabic Science Fiction (ASF) to address local people on their terms, especially in dialogues. Hence, I argue that through the orchestration of diglossia and the encapsulation of allegorical language, Abdel Aziz revolutionizes ASF while invoking a poetic style to meet local concerns. By relying on the tropes of ASF, she estranges her society by constructing a dictionary of coded lexicons that captures the Arab Spring while concomitantly rendering political critique implicitly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay proposes the term planetary utopianism to name the imagination of a radically changed planet Earth in the future. Such utopianism is ecological at its core, for it implies the reconstitution of nature, as well as society. It's also inextricable from a critique of capitalism insofar as the latter has become, in Jason W. Moore's expression, a world-ecology. The essay focuses on geoengineering and on the representation of geoengineering in speculative fiction, especially Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (2020). Such fiction speculates on the social and ecological possibilities opened up by reengineering aspects of the Earth system; it emphasises technological intervention, though in a manner that acknowledges ecological limits. Planetary utopianism responds to the climate crisis by turning the challenge of survival into an opportunity to reinvent human civilisation. The essay also engages with Holly Buck's After Geoengineering (2019) and N.K. Jemisin's 'The Broken Earth' trilogy (2015–2017) as examples of planetary utopianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utopian literature has a vexed relationship with disability. Literary utopias have frequently been informed by eugenic models of perfection in which 'utopia' is defined as the absence of disability. This eugenic utopian tradition uses the figure of the implicitly able, 'perfect' child to represent the future, while simultaneously prohibiting the reproduction of disabled and otherwise 'imperfect' children, figured as waste. In this article, I critique the influence of eugenics, and specifically of this dual conceptualisation of childhood, on utopianism. To this end, I engage with disability justice activist Mia Mingus' short story 'Hollow' (2015). In 'Hollow' a group of disabled activists known as the UnPerfects have been shipped off-world to an uninhabited planet turned prison camp. By imagining her characters revolting against their guards and attempting to build a utopian society, Mingus succeeds in critiquing eugenic utopianism while maintaining a commitment to radical transformation. I argue that this radical transformation can be usefully connected, not only to disability justice, but to the interlinked projects of children's liberation and critical utopianism. 'Hollow' offers an example of a text which refuses to position either childhood or utopia in an ever-receding future, instead making an UnPerfect, disabled, child-centric utopia of the present thinkable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay evaluates and compares a series of Italian translations of Soviet and pre-Soviet science fiction novels, published from 1991 to 2022, with particular attention to the most emblematic editorial case of the last 15 years: the new translations of the dystopian novel We by E. Zamjatin. In addition, this essay discusses the Italian translations of the most prolific and representative authors of the science-fiction genre: the Strugackij brothers, I. Efremov, A. Belaev, A. Tolstoj, and A. Bogdanov. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This essay rereads Kazuo Ishiguro's depiction of the relationship between health, care and socio-economic inequality against the backdrop of our present time of crisis in which the COVID-19 pandemic features centrally. The pandemic has directly and indirectly laid bare and exacerbated various international crises and injustices that are shaping the structure of feeling of our times. Although Ishiguro's work does not (yet) address or represent the pandemic directly, the oeuvre is interesting for the ways it frames and responds to the many societal crises that characterise the early twenty-first century – and which the pandemic revealed and intensified. This essay explores specifically the ways in which Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) thinks about health, well-being and care in contemporary society, and how it depicts our own troubled empathetic relationship to institutions like the NHS and its workers. It will proceed to explore how Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021) considers a new kind of crisis, namely, the interrelation of digital inequality and digital well-being, a problem the COVID-19 crisis intensified and accelerated. It concludes with an analysis of Ishiguro's call for a new social contract that is rooted in a new attitude towards others and the world that is open and dialogic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cormac McCarthy's The Road depicts the journey of an unnamed man and his young son across a devastated American wasteland in a post-apocalyptic world. The spaceship, Mars, other planets and aliens are referred to in this novel. Moreover, it also explicitly refers to the residues of modernisation the father and son come upon on their journey to the south. However, the significance and implications of these references have not been given due attention by extant criticism. Accordingly, this paper argues that the references have many significant implications for us to understand this novel's denial of the plausibility of fantasies of extraterrestrial colonisation, critique of techno-futurism and anthropocentrism, and call for responsible earth stewardship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there are major works tracing the themes of belonging and longing for home in contemporary fiction, there is no current study adequately addressing the connection between dystopian novel and nostalgia. This paper aims to illustrate how the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood uses nostalgia as a framework to level a critique against technological utopianism in her dystopian novel Oryx and Crake (2003). The first novel in Atwood's "MaddAddam Trilogy" problematizes utopian thought by focusing on the tension between two utopian projects: the elimination of all suffering and the perfection of human beings by discarding their weaknesses. Despite the claims of scientific objectivity and environmentalism, the novel exposes the religious and human-centered origins of Crake's technological utopian project. Atwood's Oryx and Crake is an ambiguous work of science fiction that combines utopian and dystopian elements into its narrative to criticize utopian thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes up science-fictional visions of the future against the "deep time" of the Anthropocene in order to explore the possibilities for utopia that remain in an era that only seems capable of producing necrofuturological dread. The piece surveys a wide range of contemporary literature and film; the key prose authors discussed are Octavia E. Butler, Margaret Atwood, Ernest Callenbach, and Kim Stanley Robinson. These texts are used to identify patterns of thought that have become habitual in the cultural moment of the Anthropocene, and they are explored as critiques of, alternatives to, and lines of flight away from its more pessimistic ideological formations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]