Science Fiction Universe

Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction showcases creative-critical essays that negotiate genre bending and black speculative fiction with writerly practice. As Afrodecendant peoples with lived experience from the continent, award-winning authors use their intrinsic voices in critical conversations on Afrofuturism and Afro-centered futurisms. By engaging with difference, they present a new kind of African study that is an evaluative gaze at African history, African spirituality, Afrosurrealism, "becoming," black radical imagination, cultural identity, decolonizing queerness, myths, linguistic cosmologies, and more.

Fluid Futures is about how science fiction imagines an open future. Science fiction does not claim to predict what will actually happen in times to come. But it offers pictures of potential developments; it narrates the unfolding of possibilities for change that are already implicit, or incipient, in the present moment.

In Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century, eminent contributors pay tribute to Afrofuturism as a powerful and evolving aesthetic practice that communicates the experience of science, technology, and race across centuries, continents, and cultures. While Ryan Coogler and Janelle Monáe may have helped bring the genre into contemporary pop consciousness, it in fact extends back to the writing of eighteenth-century poet Phyllis Wheatley and has continued in the work of Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, N. K. Jemisin, and many others. In examining this heritage, contributors in this volume question generic boundaries, recover lost artists and introduce new ones, and explore how the meteoric rise of a new, pan-African speculative literary tradition may or may not connect with Afrofuturism.

In The Order and the Other: Young Adult Dystopian Literature and Science Fiction, author Joseph W. Campbell distinguishes the two genres, explains the function of each, and outlines the different impact each has upon readers. Campbell analyzes such works as Lois Lowry's The Giver and James Dashner's The Maze Runner, placing dystopian works into the larger context of literary history. He asserts both dystopian literature and science fiction differently empower and manipulate readers, encouraging them to look critically at the way they are taught to encounter those who are different from them and how to recognize and work within or against the power structures around them.

Science Fiction and Climate Change takes as its subject matter what Daniel Bloom famously dubbed 'cli-fi'. It does not, however, attempt to impose a prescriptively environmentalist aesthetic on this sub-genre. Rather, it seeks to explain how a genre defined in relation to science finds itself obliged to produce fictional responses to the problems actually thrown up by contemporary scientific research. Milner and Burgmann adopt a historically and geographically comparatist framework, analysing print and audio-visual texts drawn from a number of different contexts, especially Australia, Britain, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Japan and the United States.

Establishing science fiction as its own distinct and increasingly important narrative form, this book explores how the genre challenges pervasive perceptions of society as they appear in the conventional modern novel. Inspired by, and building upon, Georg Lukács's criticism of the orthodox novel for its depiction of life as alienating and disjointed, Milner, Murphy and Roberts demonstrate that science fiction steps beyond this contemporary form to be a more constructive form of literature, one able to conceive of society as complete, integrated and well-rounded.

Shakespeare and Science Fiction is the first extended study of Shakespeare's influence on the genre. It draws on over a hundred works across different science fiction media, identifying recurring patterns - and telling contradictions - in the way science fiction engages with Shakespeare. It includes discussions of time travel, alternate history, dystopias, space opera, posthuman identity and post-apocalyptic fiction.

In this edited collection, more than forty writers, critics, game designers, scholars, and activists explore core science fiction texts, with an eye toward a future in which corporations dominate both the means of production and the means of distribution and governments rely on powerful surveillance and carceral technologies. Unlike other books of speculative/science fiction criticism, Uneven Futures uses a think piece format to make its critical insights engaging to a wide audience. The essays inspire visions of better possible futures -- drawing on feminist, queer, and global speculative engagements with Indigenous, Latinx, and Afro- and African futurisms -- while imparting important lessons for political organizing in the present.