Call for Papers: Socialism and Science Fiction

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Call for Papers: Socialism and Science Fiction

The Editorial Collective

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In the late 1930s, economic and political upheavals across the world presented a troubling problem to science fiction authors and audiences invested in the genre’s utopian worldbuilding promises. With the rise of fascism both at home and abroad, prominent authors such as Frederik Pohl and Robert W. Lowndes denounced the apathy of the genre and actively moved to radicalize it towards action, seeing in socialism a new utopian promise with actionable worldbuilding goals. An explicitly socialist-informed science fiction, they argued, was one “opposing all forces leading to barbarism, the advancement of pseudo-sciences and militaristic ideologies,” and further insisted that “science fiction should by nature stand for all forces working for a more unified world, a more Utopian existence, the application of science to human happiness, and a saner outlook on life.”

Their proposal was not popular. A relatively conservative and increasingly jingoistic audience and publishing industry denounced socialism itself as a type of science fiction, with little to offer in the way of “real” paths forward. At the same time, preeminent scholars then and now explicitly identified the discursive potential of science fiction with the Marxist (and more generally socialist) emphasis on critical inquiry, with figures such as Darko Suvin stating that utopia was “the socio-political subgenre of science-fiction” and Fredric Jameson arguing that science fiction’s preoccupation with utopian political desire echoed that of socialist revolution.

These conflicting responses to the importance of and overlap with science fiction and socialism illustrate the difficult nature of identifying the purpose of science fiction in the political sphere, but the aforementioned Western authors were, in some ways, already working at the tail end of a tradition that had begun decades earlier in countries actively transitioning to socialism. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin—both a political rival of Marx in the First International and translator of the first Russian edition of Capital, Vol. I—once mocked the intellectualism of his Marxist opponents by quipping “we have too many ideas and not enough action.” In response, the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress claimed that these “too many ideas” had a direct effect on human development, and in order to guide that development, science fiction authors would be held responsible for producing positive-but-accurate—and, more importantly, actionable—depictions of human futures. Similarly, in a China undergoing its own political and literary revolution at the turn of the century, the “father of modern Chinese literature,” Lu Xun, argued that science fiction could be explicitly used as a tool for nation building, writing that: “More often than not, ordinary people feel bored at the tedious statements of science… Only by resorting to fictional presentation and dressing scientific ideas up in literary clothing can works of science avoid their tediousness while retaining rational analyses and profound theories.”

What this should make clear is how the politics of futurity are intimately bound up with those of various literary establishments, and how visions of the future—as well as the sociopolitical and economic assumptions constraining them—both reveal and shape these exercises of power. This CFP seeks to explore how state actors attempted to bring those imagined futures into existence, as well as how newly imagined socialist people, states, and literary traditions came to be created through political, ideological, and literary policies.

This CFP understands “socialist science fiction” in the broadest sense possible and seeks to curate a collection that explores multiple targets of socialist and science fictional discourse, including (but not limited to) the emergence of socialist literary traditions within formally defined socialist countries, how centralized literary establishments shaped the development of national and political literatures, transnational practices of cultural circulation, religious apocalypticism, the formalization of science fictional practices within the political sphere, and scientific socialist thought. We seek to understand the temporality of these socialist worldbuilding narratives and the futures they seek to instantiate, but also to think through genealogies and histories – the pasts they rewrite but also the ordinary political assumptions—both at the turn of the century and contemporarily—they draw upon and magnify. We invite papers that think of these issues capaciously, exploring the genealogies of such representational practices across diverse histories, their circulation and recontextualization transnationally, and the interpenetration of the local and the global in their causes and their rationales.

We invite submissions that focus on the foundational use of speculative, utopian, or futurological imaginings both within and operating outside of socialist cultures, broadly conceived. Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Socialist utopias
• Scientific socialism
• Ideological control and its utilization
• Scientific utopias and the popularization of knowledge and techniques
• Cosmism and socialist rhetoric
• The “New Socialist Human”
• Gender and emancipation
• Practices of distribution and transmission of cultural products
• The Cold War
• Socialism vs. communism vs. capitalism
• Censorship
• Transnational cultural transmissions
• Individual socialist authors and/or individual great works of socialism
• National traditions
• Historical excavations and reconfigurations
• Contemporary social movements and their utilization of literature
• Reactionary politics
• Alternative publishing options
• The “actionability” of socialist science fiction

We invite proposals of ~250 words and short author bios by January 21, 2024. Contributors will be notified if their essays are selected for inclusion by February 4, 2024, and full essays of 5000-6000 words will be requested by April 28. Because the turnaround time from acceptance to initial submission is so short, contributors are encouraged to contact the special issue editor, Virginia L. Conn (vconn@stevens.edu), well in advance with any questions or for early feedback. Edited articles will appear in the Spring 2024 issue.