No Other Planet

Since its founding in 1994 as an online bookstore, Amazon has “revolutionised” not only the market for literature but also expanded aggressively and transformatively in sectors including consumer retail, film and television, groceries, logistics, robotics, surveillance, AI, and web services. This growth and expansion is grounded in the firm’s internal and outward-facing rhetoric about its leading contribution to a brighter future, a narrative deeply inspired by the genre of science or speculative fiction (SF). But Amazon’s utopian vision is largely experienced as a dystopia by most of its rank-and-file workers, who labour under exploitative conditions of surveillance, robotization, and relentless managerial control. Hence our team inaugurated the Worker as Futurist project to support rank-and-file Amazon workers to read/watch SF stories to collectively understand their employer and its world, and also to write short, SF stories about “the world after Amazon.” In this preliminary report on the project, we explain the inspirations for the project and reflect on some of what we have learned from the participants, as well as some implications for the futures of platform workers generally.

Utopian narratives express a universal yearning for a better human society in response to each author’s perception of malfunction and malfeasance in his or her own society. The earliest one of which I am aware (other than the legendary folk tale of the Garden of Eden) is Plato’s Republic. I review and comment on selected utopian literature from Plato to the modern American dream and a humanist vision for a global social order. To its authors, utopian visions are not mere wishful thinking, but societal policy declarations that at least in principle can be implemented, if only in part.

The term “speculative fiction” has three historically located meanings: a subgenre of science fiction that deals with human rather than technological problems, a genre distinct from and opposite to science fiction in its exclusive focus on possible futures, and a super category for all genres that deliberately depart from imitating “consensus reality” of everyday experience. In this latter sense, speculative fiction includes fantasy, science fiction, and horror, but also their derivatives, hybrids, and cognate genres like the gothic, dystopia, weird fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, ghost stories, superhero tales, alternate history, steampunk, slipstream, magic realism, fractured fairy tales, and more. Rather than seeking a rigorous definition, a better approach is to theorize “speculative fiction” as a term whose semantic register has continued to expand. While “speculative fiction” was initially proposed as a name of a subgenre of science fiction, the term has recently been used in reference to a meta-generic fuzzy set supercategory—one defined not by clear boundaries but by resemblance to prototypical examples—and a field of cultural production. Like other cultural fields, speculative fiction is a domain of activity that exists not merely through texts but through their production and reception in multiple contexts. The field of speculative fiction groups together extremely diverse forms of non-mimetic fiction operating across different media for the purpose of reflecting on their cultural role, especially as opposed to the work performed by mimetic, or realist narratives. The fuzzy set field understanding of speculative fiction arose in response to the need for a blanket term for a broad range of narrative forms that subvert the post-Enlightenment mindset: one that had long excluded from “Literature” stories that departed from consensus reality or embraced a different version of reality than the empirical-materialist one. Situated against the claims of this paradigm, speculative fiction emerges as a tool to dismantle the traditional Western cultural bias in favor of literature imitating reality, and as a quest for the recovery of the sense of awe and wonder. Some of the forces that contributed to the rise of speculative fiction include accelerating genre hybridization that balkanized the field previously mapped with a few large generic categories; the expansion of the global literary landscape brought about by mainstream culture’s increasing acceptance of non-mimetic genres; the proliferation of indigenous, minority, and postcolonial narrative forms that subvert dominant Western notions of the real; and the need for new conceptual categories to accommodate diverse and hybridic types of storytelling that oppose a stifling vision of reality imposed by exploitative global capitalism. An inherently plural category, speculative fiction is a mode of thought-experimenting that includes narratives addressed to young people and adults and operates in a variety of formats. The term accommodates the non-mimetic genres of Western but also non-Western and indigenous literatures—especially stories narrated from the minority or alternative perspective. In all these ways, speculative fiction represents a global reaction of human creative imagination struggling to envision a possible future at the time of a major transition from local to global humanity.

Speculative fiction, like queer, can be an umbrella term; it can cover any writing in which reality is not mimetically represented. In other words, speculative fiction is a fuzzy set whose boundaries are permeable, capacious, and capable of definition and redefinition by readers and writers alike. The set includes science fiction, fantasy, horror, the Gothic, and most or all magic realist writing. Because of its focus on spaces and times that have not (yet) happened, may never happen, and may, indeed, be impossible, speculative fiction as a supergeneric category leaves open a great deal of room for queerness in all its forms. Queer theory illuminates depictions of sexuality, gender, and their intersectionalities as they are represented in speculative fictions of all kinds. In doing so, it traces several specific queer theoretical interventions, including: questions of queer representation; histories in which queer representation has been suppressed; queer dismantling of all types of normativity; queer theorizing about intimacy, kinship, reproduction, and family; questions of posthumanism and the queering of embodiment and/through technology; and issues of queer time versus the power of chrononormativity to reinforce assumptions about linear time and “normal” life. Speculative fiction is a powerful medium for both queer readers and queer writers because it empowers narratives, characters, and/or settings that disrupt the many ways in which dominant assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality are produced by, and in turn reinforce, colonial aspirations and expectations. Some speculative fiction may be dystopian, but some speculative fiction may also read the past reparatively in order to imagine more hopeful worlds.

From the Technique for Creating Humans to the Art of Reprogramming HeartsScientists, Writers, and the Genesis of China’s Modern Literary Vision Jing Jiang (bio) In an essay published in 1972, Susan Sontag described China as “the country of science fiction, where everyone speaks with the same voice. Maotsetungized” (270). By the use of this term, she was referring to the way Mao Tse-tung had held captive the minds of so many Chinese people with his political vision, inciting them into a unified uproar. At the time, China was in the middle of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), a movement that seems to be forever frozen in an image of revolutionary fervor, mass subjectivity, and the cult of Mao: a green sea of Red Guards, all wearing military-style uniforms, and all waving their pocketsize “red book” and collectively shouting out political slogans. In the eyes of an American writer watching from outside in, this was not an image of freedom, but, rather, this new form of mass subjectivity had an eerily mechanized feel to it. Hence the naming of China as the country of science fiction, a genre where the mechanized and human often merge. While Sontag uses science fiction only as a metaphor for Maoist China, in this essay I will turn literally to early Chinese science fiction. The body of science-fiction texts constitutes an important, though understudied, discursive site where notions of “Chineseness,” modernity, and human nature were first articulated, expanded, and subsequently consolidated into a vision of modern China. This vision is at once literary and sociopolitical, sentimental and scientistic, universal and national. Despite the exclusion of science fiction from the canon of modern Chinese literature and the sporadic scholarly attention it has received, science fiction enjoyed a privileged role in the project of mass [End Page 131] enlightenment at the behest of modern Chinese intellectuals in the late Qing and early Republican years. The translation into Chinese of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days in 1900 introduced science fiction to China on a large scale, catapulting the reading, translating, and writing of science fiction stories and novels. The cultural luminaries who earnestly promoted or practiced the genre include Liang Qichao (1873–1929), the foremost intellectual leader of China in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and Lu Xun (1881–1936), the most celebrated writer of the modern period.1 Following his predecessors’ footsteps, Lu Xun in 1903 translated two more of Verne’s works, From the Earth to the Moon and A Journey to the Center of the Earth, from the Japanese translations. In the preface to the first work, Lu Xun gives what would in retrospect amount to a Chinese science-fiction manifesto, in which he attributes the ignorance of the masses to the paucity of science fiction in the Chinese literary tradition. He claims that the development of science fiction will guide the Chinese people out of their dark ignorance, and even goes so far as to link the rise of science fiction directly with the renaissance of the yellow race in the near future (Lu 1981, 151–52). In this preface, Lu Xun uses the term kexue xiaoshuo (science fiction) to name the new literary genre now imagined to be a potent tool for mass enlightenment, national strengthening, and racial rejuvenation. It is important to distinguish between this term and a later term, kexue huanxiang xiaoshuo (science-fantasy fiction), commonly abbreviated as kehuan xiaoshuo, which is the standard Chinese translation today for “sciencefiction.”2 This term did not appear until the 1950s, when science fiction texts from the Soviet Union were translated and introduced to Chinese readers on a massive scale, and it did not become widely used until after the end of the Cultural Revolution (Xiao, 20). For the first half of the twentieth century at least, the default Chinese term for “science fiction” had been kexue xiaoshuo, though kexue huanxiang xiaoshuo was also used sporadically. Aside from the occasional use of these other terms, between the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the understanding of the mission and function...

This paper is based on an action research done in an undergraduate class on science fiction. The course, SKBS 2193 Science as Narrative, is part of the BA Literature in English programme at the National University of Malaysia. The objectives of the course are to develop students’ communication and critical thinking skills through discussions of different themes within science fiction and to train students to be critical and perceptive to the connection between science fiction and real life issues. This paper demonstrates how studying science fiction helps students become creative and critical thinkers. This is achieved by probing the texts and connecting them to current themes and issues especially those relating to the future of mankind. We also show how the course helps students carry out group projects with outputs in the form of multimedia productions that relate science fiction themes to contemporary issues.

This chapter provides a broad overview of the ways in which future cities have been imagined in literature, with a focus on science fiction, broadly conceived. It is structured around five recurrent themes in this vast corpus of literature: the imagination of endings; of nature reclaiming human artifice; of the dangers of artifice itself (technology in the main); of social division; and of progress through integration and salvage. Science fiction often plays hard and loose with critical ideas of what counts as literature, preoccupied as many literary critics so often are with works that are either formally challenging (modernist) or overtly realist. The chapter argues that the heady disorientation of many science fiction texts is actually closer to the “reality” of our fast-changing world. In this understanding, science fiction that imagines future cities might be the most appropriate mode for coming to terms with a real future that is likely to be anything but “realist” in the sense of what we already know and believe will carry on as before.

The Alien Worlds project teaches ethnographic skills using the societies of dystopian, postapocalyptic, and science fiction texts as imagined field sites and targets for analysis. These exercises and assignments, which illustrate principles of qualitative fieldwork, were developed when COVID-19 precautions made it impossible to assign tasks that involved in-person social interaction. Preliminary findings from use in 2020–2021 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (n = 140) and Science Fiction and Society (n = 10) classes suggest that science fiction may have an ongoing place in beginning and intermediate social science courses, as it provides an entertaining, low-stakes way for students to practice observation and analysis. The original project is designed to span at least six weeks or the course of a semester, but variations for shorter and stand-alone assignments are provided in addition to ways that it can be adapted to suit the needs of different audiences. Though it will not replace all in-person field experience for advanced sociology and anthropology students, it provides a bridge between classroom content and hands-on interaction that encourages a growth mindset in learning.

This is no longer the earth on which man lives. Heidegger 1993: 106 There is no doubt that Jorge Luis Borges is a major literary precursor of contemporary interactive and multimedia works. It is almost commonplace to see tales such as ‘Funes el memorioso’ [Funes the Memorious], ‘La biblioteca de Babel’ [The Library of Babel], or ‘El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan’ [The Garden of the Forking Paths] as prefigurations of cyberliterature. Borges' web presence is vast – from sites dedicated to ‘Webmaster Borges’, which claim that ‘the greatest influence on the Argentine writer was a phenomenon invented after his death [namely: the Internet]’ (Wolk 1999), to the all-encompassing site of the ‘Jorge Luis Borges Center for Studies and Documentation’ hosted by the University of Iowa. This chapter aims to demonstrate the depth and importance of Borges' legacy not only to cyberliterature but to discussions of the entire contemporary ‘posthuman’ paradigm. Even though Borges rarely speaks in any direct way of technology and of the cybercultural futures which it makes possible, his speculative fictions and other prose writings provide glimpses of posthuman conditions that are more fully portrayed by writers such as William Gibson and Philip K. Dick or in films such as The Matrix (Wachowski 1999) and Minority Report (Spielberg 2002). His work thereby can stake a claim to a foundational presence within contemporary debates on the future of the archive, memory and consciousness, on the machinic and the digital prosthetisation of the human, and on the pervasiveness of communications systems and their reshaping of the very notion of the literary.

Reviewed by: The Bloomsbury Introduction to Children's and Young Adult Literature by Karen Coats Lara Saguisag (bio) Karen Coats. The Bloomsbury Introduction to Children's and Young Adult Literature. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Students, educators, and scholars who are seeking comprehensive and accessible critical introductions to the study of children's and young adult literature have a few notable titles to choose from. Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer's The Pleasures of Children's Literature, originally published in 1991 with a third edition released in 2003, remains an essential introductory handbook on children's literature studies. In the more recent Reading Children's Literature: A Critical Introduction (2013), Carrie Hintz and Eric Tribunella cover a wide variety of forms, genres, and themes and skillfully guide readers in using the lens of age, race, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and ability to arrive at nuanced readings of texts for young people. It seems fair to expect that a new critical introduction to children's literature studies not only match the scope and accessibility of existing titles but also offer new perspectives and content. The Bloomsbury Introduction to Children's and Young Adult Literature by Karen Coats undoubtedly meets these expectations. This thoughtfully organized, wide-ranging, and innovative book draws from cultural studies, literary studies, and child development studies in its consideration of diverse forms and genres. Chapter 1 deftly illustrates how knowledge of the histories of ideologies of childhood is fundamental to understanding the histories of literature for young people. Chapter 3 works to demystify literary theory, assuring readers that "we are always already theorists" (84); framed by an anecdote in which a teenaged girl and her friends dissect her conversation with her crush, the chapter covers a variety of theoretical paradigms including formalism, deconstructionism, New Historicism, and reader response criticism. Other chapters provide substantial discussions of poetry, picture books, films, folk narratives, nonfiction, realistic fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction. Each chapter is supplemented by case studies, prompts for writing and discussion, and suggestions for further reading, including Internet sources. These supplements will likely be effective in generating vibrant classroom discussions, increasing student engagement, and helping emerging scholars become confident, independent researchers. The volume is primarily addressed to undergraduate and graduate students, but it will also appeal to educators who are looking for creative approaches to structuring and enlivening their courses as well as experienced scholars who are committed to keeping pace with contemporary debates that are animating children's and young adult literature studies. I do wish that chapter 6, which discusses images in children's literature, did more to clarify the differences between various visual-verbal narrative forms. The chapter certainly enables readers to develop a vocabulary to discuss [End Page 147] pictures in texts for young people. It historicizes the functions of illustrations in children's books and shows how attention to visual elements as well as issues of production and audience can yield varied and rich interpretations of visual-verbal narratives. But some discussion of, say, the different ideological frameworks and histories of picture books and comics may be necessary to illustrate the complex ways pictures in visual-verbal narratives for young people are apprehended by readers across time and culture. As the whole, the book instructs readers to be responsible, inquisitive scholars. And it does so in such an openhearted manner. In her introduction to the volume, the author provides a short biography and invites readers to "call her Karen" (5). As such, Karen not only models the practice of acknowledging one's cultural position; she also deliberately establishes a tone of affability, demonstrating that an intimate, personal approach is not necessarily incompatible with meaningful scholarship. In the final chapter, Karen invites new scholars to "[enter] the professional conversation," providing comprehensive lists of journals and professional associations as well as advice on research, writing, and disseminating one's work. Throughout the book, Karen cracks jokes, shares personal anecdotes, acknowledges questions she continues to wrestle with, and urges readers to disagree with and complicate the points that she makes. In short, she displays how pleasure, uncertainty, and exchange of knowledge are part and parcel of the practice of scholarship. Bloomsbury Introduction pays attention to recent trends in children's...

This special half-issue is inspired by a passage by Indian writer, educator, and utopian experimenter Rabindranath Tagore in his The Religion of Man (1931), which Tagore first delivered in 1930 as the Hibbert Lectures at the University of Oxford:The set of four articles in this issue is particularly focused on transcultural utopian imagination with nodal point in South Asia, with the transnational space of Bengal (spanning the present-day sovereign nations of India and Bangladesh) as a further major focus, irradiating out to the past and future, and to many utopian places, both rural and urban, extending, notably, to the United Kingdom, South Africa, Indonesia, and the United States.Recent scholarship has made substantive analysis of modern South Asian utopian and dystopian imagination, alerting us, notably, to the importance of analyzing women’s utopian writing and practice from South Asia (Bagchi 2016, 2020), to the insights afforded by including bhasha or vernacular Indian literature and film in our canon of utopia and dystopia (Bagchi 2019, 2020; Banerjee 2019; Chatterjee 2019; Chaudhuri 2019; Mohan 2012), to the importance of religion in utopianism (Bagchi 2016), and to the recurring imagination of the rural and the urban as sites of social dreaming and nightmare (Mohan 2012; Banerjee 2019). This collection expands the current scholarly debates on these subjects.The present collection continues the line of argument begun by Bagchi (2016) in the context of South Asian and transcultural utopian imagination: religion plays a far more important role than is usually recognized in utopian writing and practice. The articles in this collection further explore the fruitful paradox expressed in the phrase “prospective memories of the future” as a means of crystallizing the social dreaming upon which utopia depends. How can memory be prospective, or anticipatory? How does one view such a paradoxical vision of temporality? A prospect is both a mental picture and an anticipated event. From what place, imagined how, does the social dreaming occur? How is the memory of the past deployed in utopian imagination? What processes of transcultural innovation occur in such imaginings?Bagchi examines transcultural utopian imagination of social futures in early twentieth-century India and Britain, with Rabindranath Tagore and his friend M. K. Gandhi at the center. The article looks at Tagore’s and Gandhi’s stays at and fellowship with Woodbrooke, a Quaker residential educational institution in England. Woodbrooke was also dear to Tagore and Gandhi’s British friend, the Christian anticolonial and social activist C. F. Andrews, a key influence on Gandhi’s 1931 visit to Lancashire, a visit that the article also examines. The article argues that Tagore’s and Gandhi’s visits to England (specifically the Midlands and/ or the north of that country) in 1930 and 1931 illuminate Indo-British entanglements in utopianism, manifesting ideals of social futures in which values were shared with Christian, mainly Quaker utopians. One of the early British influences on Indian utopians was John Ruskin (1819–1900), whose thought valorizing social fellowship and religion and speaking against wage capitalism influenced Gandhi; Ruskin also influenced the settlement movement contributing to the foundation of the Quaker institution at Woodbrooke.Zooming in on Gandhi’s 1931 visit to Lancashire in northern England, the article argues that British and Indian utopians cooperated with and mutually influenced each other under difficult political conditions. The article excavates, with regard to Gandhi’s Lancashire visit, the work of the Quaker social dreamer Corder Catchpool (1883–1952) and his utopian experiments in Spring Vale Garden Village, where Gandhi stayed in 1931. The Indian and British utopian figures active in the 1930s examined here envisaged the future in ways that were often animated by aspects of the past, usually a renovated and reimagined past, in which religion is important.Sangeeta Datta explores Tagore’s vision of the future, in relation to Datta’s own creative practice, especially as theatre and film director, a practice that engages with the resonances of Tagorean utopia and his future-making that continuously reinvent the past. Written at a time of pandemic crises exposing humankind’s vulnerability, Datta’s piece examines Tagore’s utopian vision that, when revalued and renewed, remains enormously fruitful for furthering social justice and creativity today.Datta examines the afterlives of Tagore’s utopia through three case studies. First, she examines the Dartington project where Tagore’s friend and associate Leonard Elmhirst was inspired to create an English utopian experiment on the model of Tagore’s utopian community in Santiniketan and Sriniketan. Second, she analyzes Tagore’s musical Tasher Desh (Land of Cards) in its original context and Datta’s recent stage production presented by the arts company Baithak UK in London in 2019. Finally, Datta examines the feature film Life Goes On, which she directed, analyzing it as a familial dystopia and a Tagorean vision revisited through lenses of family, race and gender.Samadrita Kuiti examines Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s ‘Sultana’s Dream’ (1905), a short work originally written in English, offering a dream vision of a futuristic utopian society, with elements of science fiction, and Padmarag (1924), a short novel originally written in Bengali, which can be seen as complementary parts of a feminist utopian vision. These works show a desire for an egalitarian, decolonized nation, cutting through barriers of religion, gender, race, and class. Kuiti’s article shows how both fictions offer a vision of interreligious sisterhood, particularly by proposing Hindu-Muslim communal unity, against a backdrop of growing tensions between the Hindu and Muslim communities in fin-de-siècle British India. The article also shows how the Indigo Rebellion of 1859 in colonial Bengal is represented in Padmarag to create critiques of predatory colonial masculinity. Hossain’s utopian narratives play a major role in decolonizing utopian studies, the article argues overall.Banerjee examines the utopianism of the film Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969), directed by Satyajit Ray. The article interrogates the various ways in which Ray’s film signals the utopian, through an examination of the trope of wish-fulfillment, through an analysis of the way utopianism is articulated through irrealist aesthetics, particularly its figuration of ghosts, and through its violation of the narrative structure of the real. With the film in its utopianism making acute critiques of issues around class, caste, abusive power, and war, Banerjee sees some intransigent social contradictions playing out in the film, signaling the limits of textual utopianism. The three faces of utopianism that Sargent so foundationally explicated—literary utopia, utopian practice, and utopian social theory (Sargent 2010, 5–9)—play out in the analysis offered in the articles in this special issue, showing how utopian literature and practice fruitfully dialogued, and offering major insights into cultural and social crossings and hybridities in utopianism from cultures extending beyond Europe, extending the lines of enquiry that Dutton and Sargent (2013) so boldly articulated.

An analysis of US science fiction, through the lens of critical race theory, that illuminates how the genre offers new directions for serious appraisals of race and racism between yesterday, today, and tomorrow In Race, Law, and Speculative Fiction , Isiah Lavender III takes seriously the theoretical, stylistic, and rhetorical possibilities inherent in the genre of science fiction toward challenging perceptions of race, ethnicity, whiteness, and Blackness in US culture. To do so, he examines works by a wide variety of science fiction writers exploring racial themes—Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Edgar Allan Poe, Mat Johnson (whose Pym [2011] is a direct challenge to Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket [1838]), Derrick Bell, and others. Locating racial contexts, social categorizations, and cultural patterns in US speculative fiction, Lavender employs the tenets of critical race theory to sight the unanticipated things the genre might have to say about race at the intersection between imaginary laws and how we, as readers, partake in this imagining. Recognizable science fiction tropes—such as alien contact, time travel, contagion, generation starships, the near future, alternate history, climate change, among others—constitute science fictional novum. The novum is the new thing, invention, or novelty introduced into the fictional world that deliberately functions as the catalyst for the change made in the fictional world, differing from the reader’s world. Lavender coined the term noirum to represent the legislative innovations prompted within the fictional world to cope with, if not to control, the impact of the novum. Whether it is a make-believe amendment, imaginary federal court ruling, fictitious executive order, or something else entirely, the noirum identifies the ways in which these powerful science fiction motifs are organized around question of race. Race, Law, and Speculative Fiction analyzes the ways in which science fiction has engaged with institutions and the law, offering narratives or concepts, or both, that uphold the racial status quo or fictional alternatives to existing legal structures. Bringing critical race theory and science fiction together, Lavender highlights stories that not only counter the dominant narrative of white supremacy but also envision a future in which people are united in full colored racial consciousness against dehumanization of any kind.

This paper focuses on cognitive-linguistic features of the binary opposition “man-machinery” in the science fiction works by R. Bradbury. The article aims to determine the means of the verbal representation of “man-machinery” and build frame models of its components in Bradbury’s science fiction writings. The study contributes to the stylistic and linguo-poetic analysis of binary oppositions in fiction texts, idiostylistics and genre theory. The study relies upon linguistic, stylistic, and discursive analyses as well as cognitive linguistic analysis to ensure the reliability and validity of the obtained results. Furthermore, four-stage algorithm methodology used in this research allowed the author to define a general literary context of the analyzed works, select the research material, analyze the identified means of binary opposition “man-machinery,” and model frames of its components. The obtained results reveal that the linguistic embodiment of the components of the binary opposition “man-machinery” is based on the use of the lexical – direct and figurative, stylistic, and discursive means of nomination. The study reconstructs the concepts – the constituents of the mega concepts MAN and MACHINERY and on the basis of anthropocentric perception compares their conceptual domains, namely as physical, psychological, mental, and social phenomena. The research reveals conceptual binary opposition MAN-MACHINERY as a tool for constructing a science fiction model of the world in Bradbury’s texts within three parameters: space-time coordinates, cause and effect relationships, and valorative indicators. The introduced methodology of binary opposition analysis is perspective within the scope of science fiction, fiction texts and films.

Aditya Nigam discusses the conflictual relationship between the empirical discipline of ‘political science’ and the field of ‘political theory’. He brings out the debate between proponents of scientificity, who favoured quantitative methods and empirical evidence geared towards discovering the seemingly invariable laws of political behaviour; and political theorists who moved towards normative philosophy and critical theory. With a description of these debates that have characterised the discipline since its point of inception, the chapter focuses as much upon contemporary debates, in the present moment of ‘decolonisation’.

Science fiction criticism has long attended the relationship between form and utopian thought. However, increased study of Latin American narratives has allowed for a return to foundational science fiction theories with renewed perspective. While critics have recognized the tendency of Latin American science fiction to slip between genres, a trend termed the “slipstream phenomenon,” there has been little analysis of its impact on utopian imagination. As a result, we miss one of the region's most unique contributions to broader science fiction traditions. In response, this article locates Samanta Schweblin's Kentukis (2018) within the legacies of cyberpunk and argues that the novel uses slipstream to establish and dismantle a series of classic utopian horizons by shifting its genre identity. In doing so, this work identifies a turn in recent Latin American science fiction that metacritically questions the ability of science fiction form itself to imagine a utopian horizon beyond global capitalism.