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I

In 1947, a fire-control-equipment salesman, Kenneth Arnold, flying his private plane, claimed to sight nine mysterious objects flying in the area of Mt. Rainier. He told his story to aircrews when he landed and newspapers picked it up, quickly beginning to call the things “flying saucers.” In the two weeks following Arnold’s report hundreds of accounts appeared in the media or were conveyed to the government as people in all walks of life found objects in the sky that could be seen as flying saucers.

As I have suggested more than once in print, China Miéville is for me the most entertaining, interesting, and intellectually gifted writer of Anglophone speculative fiction to have yet emerged in his generation.¹Less disputably, he is one of the most popular -- in terms not only of the sheer number of his readers but also of the intelligent enthusiasm and intensity of their response (as may be gauged, for instance, by surveying, via a quick Google search, the extensive and unusually serious amateur commentary about his fiction available on the Internet).  Yet it seems doubtful th

"The people should fight for the law as for a wall." -- Heraclitus¹

Introduction

Socialism and Democracy has long embodied a paradox endemic to the US Left. We are a journal strongly committed to helping build a vast popular movement, yet there is a painful barrier between our analyses and many of the people for whom these analyses, if appropriately developed, could have some relevance. In other words, despite the manifest bankruptcy of the capitalist order (expressed in war, global poverty, and environmental degradation), only a relatively minuscule portion of the population is systematically discussing alternatives to it.

Marleen S. Barr teaches in the Department of Communication and Media at Fordham University. She has received the Science Fiction Research Association Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction criticism. Her books include Feminist Fabulation, Genre Fission, and Alien to Femininity. She recently published Oy Pioneer!, a humorous feminist academic novel. <msbarr@nyc.rr.com>

”We live science fiction.”
— Marshall McLuhan

“Thus, instead of belonging to ‘the tiny genre of feminist science fiction films’ (as Dave Kehr of the New York Times so dismissively and condescendingly put it), [Lynn Hershman Leeson’s film] Teknolust is actually part of a rich tradition of feminist works on technology and the body.”
— Marsha Kinder

Science fiction is fiction that is based, before all else, on certain explicit framing hypotheses. These have most commonly (and stereotypically) involved travel into the future and, concomitantly, an array of technological capacities and devices whose effects have not previously been imagined. Foregrounding this latter aspect, certain SF works (including films as well as books) have attained a mass market.