Category Archives: Volume 20, No. 3

A Desire, Formally Speaking: Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005). Without “the persistence of the dialectic” (Jameson’s phrase), the triumph of postmodern reification would … Continue reading →

Science Fiction in Latin America and Spain Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán, eds. Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003).* Cosmos Latinos is a groundbreaking anthology of short … Continue reading →

Sheree Thomas, ed., Dark Matter I: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (New York: Warner Books, 2000). Sheree Thomas, ed., Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (New York: Warner Books, 2004). Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, eds., So … Continue reading →

A Desire, Formally Speaking: Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005). Without “the persistence of the dialectic” (Jameson’s phrase), the triumph of postmodern reification would … Continue reading →

According to SF critics Alexei and Cory Panshen, Science Fiction fulfills a human need to transcend our normal consciousness and to enter, via the imagination, worlds of marvel, wonder, astonishment and amazement. Though Darko Suvin states that SF’s supposed “sense … Continue reading →

In his introduction to the 1989 re-issue of Invisible Man Ralph Ellison provocatively notes, “a piece of science fiction is the last thing I expected to write” (xv). Both this claim and the way Ellison phrases it are striking. Literary … Continue reading →

The clouds floating above the building were like hard clumps of dirt from a vacuum cleaner no one ever cleaned. Or maybe more like all the contradictions of the Third Industrial Revolution condensed and set to float in the sky. … Continue reading →

In his novel The Savage Girl (2002), Alex Shakar introduces the concept of trans-temporal marketing (15f, 277). Marketers from the future have traveled back in time to “advertise their products” to us in the present. They have brainwashed a supermodel … Continue reading →

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. – Marx & Engels, The Communist … Continue reading →

  Rebecca Ore’s Outlaw School and Nicola Griffith’s Slow River both describe near-future worlds in which class stratification, sexual politics, and a globalized economy have become dystopically exaggerated. The novels highlight the ways in which class and sexual politics intersect … Continue reading →