Author: sfrarev

SFRA Review is the flagship publication of the Science Fiction Research Association since 1971.

Review of Bradbury Beyond Apollo

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 4

Nonfiction Reviews

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Review of Bradbury Beyond Apollo

Rafeeq O. McGiveron

Jonathan R. Eller. Bradbury Beyond Apollo. U of Illinois P, 2020.  Hardcover. 376 pg.  $34.95. ISBN 9780252043413. eBook ISBN 9780252052293.

Jonathan R. Eller’s Bradbury Beyond Apollo completes a biographical trilogy begun a decade ago. The 2011 Becoming Ray Bradbury took us through the early 1950s, and the 2014 Ray Bradbury Unbound actually does touch upon the Apollo era and even Bradbury’s 2012 death, but it is the 2020 Bradbury Beyond Apollo that truly delves into Ray Bradbury’s work and life from the 1960s to the end. The tale is a wide-ranging and sometimes a frustrating and even sad one, told in detail with authority and with compassion and yet also with a true scholar’s evaluation and critical judgment. As with Eller’s previous two installments, the approach here falls somewhere between, say, that of the more theoretical and bibliographically encyclopedic 2004 Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction by Eller and William F. Touponce and that of a more popularly oriented biography such as Sam Weller’s 2005 The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury.

The book is divided into five sections, each of which comprises easily approachable chapters generally between five to ten pages each. Part I, “The Inherited Wish,” covers the period of the late 1960s through the late 1970s, from Bradbury’s awe and joy at NASA’s crewed lunar landings through the Viking I robotic mission to Mars and the publication of Long After Midnight. “Beyond Eden” runs from 1977 through the mid-1980s, including Bradbury’s deepening friendship with Federico Fellini and his work on Disney’s EPCOT. Part III, “1984 Will Not Arrive,” discusses the period of the early 1980s through the early 1990s, in which Bradbury spent a great deal of effort on, among other projects, often-abortive film work, Death Is a Lonely Business, and cable television’s The Ray Bradbury Theater. “Graveyard for Lunatics” covers 1990 through the late ’90s, with projects such as the sequel to Bradbury’s previous mystery novel and Green Shadows, White Whale (1992), and ever more effort for non-print media, along with further NASA honors. “Closing the Book,” the last section, takes us from the late 1990s until Bradbury’s death in 2012, including further awards and honors, the author’s final novels, and ever more story collections as well.

No one can deny the wide-ranging creativity of Ray Bradbury’s efforts in many different genres across seventy-odd years. Certainly Bradbury’s name looms huge, not just in the fantasy and science fiction genres but in broader culture as well. Sought out by NASA “as a validating witness and celebrant—and also perhaps as a talisman”—during “key moments of exploration” (9), reprinted in his own “perennially popular collections” (104) and in school textbooks as well, and lauded with honors from awards for his writing to the naming of sites on the Moon (7) and Mars (1) and even of an asteroid (218), the difficult-to-pigeonhole Bradbury is remembered widely in a way that most other contemporary SF and fantasy greats are not. Three volumes of biography indeed may be necessary. And, Eller reminds us, this volume, like the previous two, covers not only familiar events of Bradbury’s life and career but also “a number of adventures that the public knows little about; yet these were things that he cared a great deal about, whether they succeeded in grand fashion or failed to reach the public eye at all” (2-3).

It is this unevenness of Bradbury’s output and the changes in trajectory of his creativity—a “story…so complex and so full of unrelenting (and sometimes uneven) creativity” (2), as Eller puts it—in the second half of his life that are perhaps the most eye-opening here. On the one hand, despite certain “significant” (3) and “enduring works” (308) appearing in these later decades, “the stories and fables that define Ray Bradbury’s twenty-first-century legacy were almost all written during the first two decades of his seventy-year career” (3). On the other hand, “Bradbury’s pace of writing never slowed, but most of his time at the typewriter was devoted to new adaptations of his stories for stage, television, and film. Newer versions of older adaptations inevitably involved a great deal of new writing as well” (41). Even pieces released brand-new to the public, though, nevertheless still “were often nourished from the safe harbors where he had crafted his earliest stories of fantasy and suspense” (308). Alongside “isolated but significant achievements” of the later part of Bradbury’s career, such as “The Toynbee Convector,” various essays, and The Ray Bradbury Theater (309), after all, stand “late-life fulfillments of major prose projects mapped out half a lifetime earlier, such as From the Dust Returned [2001], Farewell Summer [2006], Somewhere a Band Is Playing [2007], and Leviathan 99 [2013]…” (3).

For any reader or critic of Bradbury’s art, Eller’s investigation is well worthwhile. Bradbury Beyond Apollo is impressively comprehensive, covering not only print works but also “the constant parade of lectures, creative consultancies, and adaptations for stage, television, and films that bled off his once broad channel of original short story production” (308), along with personal and business dealings with a host of famous names throughout the United States and Europe as well. And at the same time that Eller through his thoroughgoing and meticulous research can detail with insight and appreciation the various topics like no other, he is no uncritical panegyrist. Whether it is with a judgment of “Bradbury’s sometimes unreasonable ego” (55) or of the fact that the author “was not always the best judge of his own stories” and in later collections often picked personal favorites “that lacked the tight, emotionally powerful plots of his best work” (105), or with an acknowledgement of the “blunt” critiques, to put it mildly, from “various experts” of the Air & Space section of the Smithsonian Institution to Bradbury’s proposal for a planetarium show (109) or of Thomas Disch’s scathing review of The Stories of Ray Bradbury (105-106), this text puts Bradbury’s work into perspective rather than on a pedestal.

Bradbury’s “true trajectory in the final four decades of his life,” we are told, “would be that of a visionary, asked over and over again to tell us why we desire to explore, why we should go to the stars, and what we might become when we get there” (310). For a widely renowned author whose “unusual brand of science fiction—powerfully emotional studies of the human heart and mind mounted on a barely perceptible armature of science and technology—had inspired many scientists, engineers, and astronauts” (9) right along with countless ordinary readers, this was a worthy undertaking. So, too, was the writing of Jonathan R. Eller’s Bradbury Beyond Apollo.

Rafeeq O. McGiveron has published articles, chapters, and reference entries on the works of authors ranging from Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury and George Orwell to Willa Cather and Truman Capote and Shakespeare.  His edited collections include Critical Insights: Fahrenheit 451 (2013), Critical Insights: Robert A. Heinlein (2015), and Critical Insights: Ray Bradbury (2017) from Salem Press.  His novel, Student Body, was released in 2014, and Tiger Hunts, Thunder Bay, and Treasure Chests: A Memoir of the Path to Fatherhood was published in 2020.

Review of Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 4

Nonfiction Reviews

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Review of Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction

Tristan Sheridan

Zachary Kendal, Aisling Smith, Giulia Champion, and Andrew Milner, editors. Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction. Palgrave McMillan, 2020. Studies in Global Science Fiction. Ebook. 335 pg. $79.99. ISBN 9783030278939.

Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction belongs to the Studies in Global Science Fiction series, edited by Anindita Banerjee, Rachel Haywood Ferreira, and Mark Bould. This particular entry emphasizes non-Anglophone literatures in its ethical examinations of futurity within the SF genre and builds off of existing scholarship within the cli-fi and utopian subgenres as well as postcolonial theory. From its first chapter, “Science Fiction’s Ethical Modes,” Ethical Futures seeks to examine the ethical underpinnings of the SF genre, raising the question of “whether SF has a predisposition to a particular ethical outlook” (3). While the author of the chapter, editor Zachary Kendal, acknowledges “the politically and socially regressive traditions of American pulp SF”—traditions often founded in colonialist and fascist ideologies—the collection as a whole stresses how vital SF is as “a primary mechanism—perhaps the primary mechanism—by which our culture imagines its possible futures, both positive and negative,” as Andrew Milner states in a later chapter, “Eutopia, Dystopia and Climate Change” (8, 77). Indeed, careful envisioning of the future may be more relevant now than ever given impending environmental catastrophe, a relevance that Ethical Futures seeks to emphasize, given its final chapter on the modern prevalence of dystopian narratives in contrast to utopian narratives: Nick Lawrence’s “Post-Capitalist Futures: A Report on Imagination.” If we look to fictionalized versions of the future as a guide when moving towards our own, as Ethical Futures purports, it becomes especially important to incorporate non-Anglophone literature and to decenter Western perspectives when conceptualizing futurity.

Divided into four parts—Ethics and the Other, Environmental Ethics, Postcolonial Ethics, and Ethics and Global Politics—Ethical Futures offers both historical overviews in reoccurring themes throughout SF futurisms, such as Joshua Bulleid’s “Vegetarianism and the Utopian Tradition,” as well as close readings of individual texts such as Jamil Nasir’s Tower of Dreams (1999) and Ahmed Kaled Towfik’s Utopia (2008) in Anna Madoeuf and Delphine Pagès-El Karoui’s “Cairo in 2015 and in 2023.” The collection does significant work to unseat the colonialist dogma that many of SF’s most prominent texts have historically operated under, building off of scholarship such as John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008) in addition to Fredric Jameson’s work on utopian narratives. It does so not only by arguing for anti-colonial and anti-capitalist alternatives, but also by identifying the underlying commonalities between SF and other postcolonial efforts: both literatures “seek alternate futures for the human race, both look beyond the joint nightmare of colonial modernity, both are profoundly involved in future thinking, and both offer a clear platform for the utopian,” as Bill Ashcroft observes in “Postcolonial Science Fiction and the Ethics of Empire” (165). The range of literatures covered in Ethical Futures is extensive, including French, Macedonian, Haitian, Mexican, and Indian literature; however, they are frequently analyzed alongside those from the Anglosphere; futurism and ethics are what most tie this collection together.

The essays contained within Ethical Futures are in clear conversation with one another thematically, even across the differing sections, although these potential connections are often left unexplored more explicitly due to the nature of the collection and its lack of direct collaboration among authors. For instance, Ashcroft’s analysis of the Oankali’s ethical culture in Octavia Butler’s notable Xenogenesis series would have benefitted from Kendal’s own discussion of ethical obligation towards the other earlier in the book, as the alien Oankali and their drive to “seek [otherness], investigate it, manipulate it, sort it, use it” echoes the totalizing ideology that Kendal problematizes as violent and imperial in his critique of Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and Zamyatin’s Мы (We [1920-21]) (172). Even so, Ashcroft still reaches the conclusion that the Oankali are not as morally superior to humans as they initially appear to be on the basis of their lack of ethical “responsibility to otherness,” rather than their totalizing efforts towards the other (179). It is a strength of the collection nevertheless that its individual pieces have clear intersections and develop one anothers’ arguments, however inadvertently. Some essays could be more fully developed, such as Lara Choksey’s examination of Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber (2000) in relation to dependency work and the politics of care; her argument would have been improved had it explored—or even directly mentioned—the novel’s theme of labor as a practice which its protagonist turns to in order to heal from her trauma, in direct opposition to Hopkinson’s representation of the postcolonial state of Toussaint and its desire to avoid work altogether in the aftermath of slavery. This exploration would have neatly connected to Lawrence’s discussion of automation in the book’s concluding chapter, but it is worth noting that Choksey makes a compelling argument about the role of feminized labor in decolonial states.

On the whole, Ethical Futures makes meaningful contributions to the study of utopian and dystopian literatures and reminds its audience of the importance of collectively imagining a future that is less destructive than our present. Even as Ethical Futures contains thoughtful analysis of dystopian literature and does not begrudge said literature of its abilities to offer needed insights regarding our ethical responsibilities in the present, it is significant that Ethical Futures spends its concluding chapter on the relative absence of modern utopian literature. As Lawrence observes, “there is no outstanding example of utopian thought in the twenty-first century that has achieved success on a mass scale” (318). The final question that Ethical Futures raises, then, regards our seeming inability or unwillingness to imagine beyond the destructive systems under which we live and therefore our turn to dystopian fatalism over utopian hopefulness. In doing so, Ethical Futures marks itself as relevant not only to academic scholarship, but to all those who seek to imagine a better future than the one toward which we seem to be heading .

Review of Terry Pratchett’s Ethical Worlds: Essays on Identity and Narrative in Discworld and Beyond

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 4

Nonfiction Reviews

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Review of Terry Pratchett’s Ethical Worlds: Essays on Identity and Narrative in Discworld and Beyond

Maria Alberto

Kristin Noone and Emily Lavin Leverett. Terry Pratchett’s Ethical Worlds: Essays on Identity and Narrative in Discworld and Beyond. McFarland, 2020. Paperback. 155 pg. $39.95. ISBN 978-1476674490.

There is no getting around this fact—Terry Pratchett’s work is funny. Powerfully amusing, we might even say, in every sense of the term. However, as any of his multitudinous readers could also report without a second’s hesitation, Terry Pratchett’s work is likewise thoughtful, deliberate, and nuanced, offering pointed satire, incisive social commentary, and gentle moral reflection filtered through the worldview of witches, watch-members, and other fantasy characters whose experiences both replicate and reveal our own.

Likewise, Kristin Noone and Emily Levin Leverett’s 2020 collection Terry Pratchett’s Ethical Worlds offers an illuminating—and, honestly, just plain fun to read—addition to the growing body of scholarly work on Pratchett’s oeuvre. Noone and Leverett characterize their work as an exploration of the means through which Pratchett “constructs an ethical stance that values and valorizes informed self-aware choice, knowledge of the world in which one makes those choices, the value of play and humor in crafting a compassionate worldview, and acts of continuous self-examination and creation” (2).  These four themes, the editors and their contributors find, run throughout Pratchett’s canon, from his well-known Discworld novels and co-authored Good Omens (1990) to more clearly science fiction works such as Strata (1981), the Long Earth series (2012-2016), and the less-discussed short story “#ifdef DEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time’” (1990). From the introduction onward, too, Pratchett’s interest in forms of intertextuality, identity, and genre-switching is also noted and explored (1-2). As Noone and Leverett point out, Pratchett constructs worlds and narratives “in which questions of identity, community, and relations between self and other may be productively discussed, debated, and reshaped” (4), in turn leading to their definition of the “ethical worlds” named in this collection’s title: rich, multifaceted “fantasies in which language always matters, stories resonate with the past and the future, and the choices characters make reflect the importance of self-aware and ongoing acts of compassion and creation” (4).

Overall, collection contributors build from a shared interest in Pratchett’s inventiveness and creation—of secondary world(s), of language, and of characters’ selves as well as our own—to offer nine chapters drawing from a diverse range of critical lenses and perspectives. Here readers will find highly-enjoyable pieces examining acts of creation in science fiction (ch. 1), hypermasculinity and adaptational influence (ch. 2), the ethics of choice (ch. 3), free will and growing up (ch. 4), Old English influences (ch. 5), identity construction through language (ch. 6), rhetoricity and magic (ch. 7), “golempunk” and ownership of the means of production (ch. 8), and grappling with the ethics of neomedievalism and aftershocks of colonialism (ch. 9).

In their introduction, Noone and Leverett identify three primary strands of Pratchett scholarship—one apiece focusing on his genre fiction writing, his YA authorship, and his Discworld stories (2)—and position this collection as an attempt to bring various elements of these strands together. In this light alone, the collection is a success. For one thing, while the Discworld novels do feature heavily here, most of Pratchett’s work also receives mention—and in many cases, full chapters—that are characterized by as much attention and detail as his most well-known work. Noone, for instance, looks to Pratchett’s early science fiction and its depictions of acts of creation, maintaining that these texts “offer insight not only into prototype versions of the later Discworld but into the evolution of Pratchett’s moral stance” as these develop across genres and narrative forms (3). As Noone correctly notes here, Pratchett’s work as a fantasy or a YA author, as often prioritized by those existing strands of scholarship, is greatly enriched when considered in light of his science fiction roots, where we find him first sketching out the ethical stances and foundations that he would build later works upon.

For another thing, the chapters that do focus on Pratchett’s best-developed and most extensive work, Discworld, also span a wonderful variety of the characters, narratives, and locations that readers encounter in Ankh-Morpork and beyond. This collection’s contributors bring their insights to familiar faces from Tiffany Aching and her community (friends and enemies alike) to Cohen the Barbarian and his complicated relationship with violence, the Watch and their different arbitrations of justice, and Moist von Lipwig and the technological advances he reluctantly shepherds into the big city. In so doing, the collection thus reiterates the sheer range of subjects to which Pratchett brought his stance on compassionate, self-aware, and humorous creation: capital-b Big topics that include gender roles, the dangers of sexual and gendered essentialism, war and warfare, the legal and justice systems, capitalism, and the all-too-common violence of minority communities’ integration into even heterogeneous societies. It is quite a balancing act, to give these topics the space and thoughtful treatment they deserve in the limited word count of single chapters—particularly while also extricating them from the writing and perspective of a cis, white male author from a former colonial world power, radical as his worldview was and beloved as he himself is—but this collection and its chapters do so admirably.

Finally, and very aptly indeed, I also found that this collection is just a delight to read. Its ambitious project and often complex topics are bolstered by contributors’ obvious enjoyment of the texts themselves, which shines through in the writing of just about every chapter. While definitely an academic work, complete with the criticism and bibliographic work that entails, Terry Pratchett’s Ethical Worlds: Essays on Identity and Narrative in Discworld and Beyond also struck me as accessible and exciting, one of those uncommon works of scholarship that I would also pick up on a rare day off just to enjoy seeing rich new perspectives on a favorite fantasy world.

All things considered, this collection’s emphasis on compassion, creation, and self-awareness, as Pratchett uses genre fiction and its attributes to broach such topics, is well worth a read. Those interested in examinations of the fantasy genre (and in particular, continuations of work by Farah Mendlesohn, Edward James, and John Clute) or seeking out complications of its science fiction counterparts will appreciate the collection’s focus, while those still keeping #TerryPratchettGNU alive and well will value its thoughtful revisitation of a gentle giant in the genre.

Maria Alberto is a PhD candidate in literature and cultural studies at the University of Utah. Her research interests include adaptation, popular culture, digital media, and fan studies, and her recent work includes essays in Mythlore, M/C Journal, and Transformative Works and Cultures, as well as forthcoming book chapters on digital-born romance, fan studies methodology, and queer readings of Tolkien’s legendarium. At this very moment, she is probably working on her dissertation on “canon” in popular culture texts or playing D&D. Either way, coffee is definitely involved.

Review of AKB48

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 4

Nonfiction Reviews

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Review of AKB48

Amber A. Logan

Galbraith, Patrick W. and Jason G. Karlin. AKB48. Bloomsbury, 2020. Print. Paperback. 144 pg. $22.95. ISBN 97815013411379.

AKB48 is a short monograph that is part of the broader series of books called “33 1/3 Japan.” This series aims to provide a deep dive into contemporary Japanese popular music, ranging from the soundtrack of Cowboy Bebop (the classic anime series) to the music of Hatsune Miku (a vocaloid star). This particular volume provides an in-depth analysis of the girl group AKB48 (so named because of its origins in the Akihabara district in Tokyo, and the originally intended 48 group members). While the subject matter of the book is analyzed academically, the content is fascinating enough (and the size of the book small enough) to appeal to a more general audience—particularly if they are fans of the band, or of Japanese popular culture more generally.

Formed in 2005, AKB48 is now the most commercially successful female group in Japan (which is itself the second largest music market in the world). This popularity alone is not necessarily worth scholarly analysis, but clearly Patrick W. Galbraith and Jason G. Karlin, the authors of this book, saw behind the success of AKB48 a greater and more fascinating business model in contemporary Japanese pop culture. This business model relies upon the idols monetizing their fans’ enthusiasm and affection through personalized interactions and fan-led elections to determine which girl gets top billing. The authors then utilize critical theory to extrapolate beyond this specific idol group to speculate about Japanese culture and beyond.

From the group’s beginning, the idols cultivated a sense of personal connection with their audience; AKB48’s slogan is literally “idols that you can meet” (ai ni ikeru aidoru). Their humble beginnings were in a small Akihabara theater where live performances took place in front of intimate crowds where idols could make eye contact with individual fans. Fans are encouraged to see themselves as supporters of a specific idol by calling out her name at live events, buying her specific merchandise, and visiting her at the special hand-shaking events where fans can both see their favorite idol up-close-and-personal and be seen by her, as well. The catch? Hand-shaking may only be accessed with the purchase of CDs packaged with special tickets for the events. To take things even further, AKB48’s overseeing company designed a General Election which allows fans to vote on which idol gets the top spot in the group—not unlike the highly successful American television show American Idol, in which fans participate in voting for their favorite singer. Again, fans must purchase CDs with special ballots inside in order to participate in the General Election, allowing the group to monetize the fans’ devotion to their particular idol and their desire to support her—both emotionally and financially.

Galbraith and Karlin point out that this style of interactive support is a key example of affective economics, which involves harnessing the power of a relatively small number of enthusiastic loyalists to monetize the relationship between them and their objects of desire. Some fans will buy hundreds of copies of the same CD in order to buy the chance to vote for their favorite idol; the actual content of the CDs, the music product itself, becomes secondary or even trivial. In fact, the idols are not known for being skilled singers or performers; instead, they are beloved for their relatability, their vulnerabilities, their intense striving to do better—hence making them girls who need the fans’ support in order to succeed.

In essence, the idols are selling a relationship between themselves and their fans, similar to how in Japanese host clubs, the host (while actively convincing the patron to buy expensive food or drink) is selling the perceived relationship between host and patron, demonstrating yet another example of how affective economics are at play in Japanese culture. But even if the specific appeal of AKB48 seems largely limited to Japan, the rise of idol groups in South Korea demonstrates how this phenomenon is not specific to Japan.

AKB48 provides a fascinating look at the history of idols in Japan and how they led to the success of AKB48 in recent years. While the book clearly would appeal to fans of AKB48, pop idols, or the Japanese music scene in general, the authors do an excellent job of connecting the specifics of the band’s business model and social interactions to broader concepts of business, marketing, economics, psychology, and sociology. AKB48 could be used as an engaging case study for any of these fields, as well as for students of Japanese culture or music studies.

Amber A. Logan is a university instructor, freelance editor, and author of speculative fiction. In addition to her degrees in Psychology, Liberal Arts, and International Relations, Amber holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. Her thesis “Men Who Lose Their Shadows: from Hans Christian Andersen to Haruki Murakami” examines the intersection of fairy tales and near-future speculative fiction, and her debut novel The Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn will be published in October 2022.

Review of Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction: Travel, Technology, Time

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 4

Nonfiction Reviews

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Review of Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction: Travel, Technology, Time

Adam McLain

Ingrid E. Castro and Jessica Clark, eds. Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction: Travel, Technology, Time. Lexington, 2019. Hardback. 304 pg. $105.00. 9781498597388. Paperback. $42.99. 9781498597401. EBook. $40.50. 978149859739.

The conceptualization of children as agents has been an often-overlooked factor in academic conversations. This collection, edited by Ingrid E. Castro and Jessica Clark, contains twelve essays that serve as an excellent introductory point for those studying depictions of agency in science fiction. It also sets the stage for further development by beginning specific lines of inquiry and creates theoretical foundations by which future studies can interrogate cultural conception of the child and childhood. Although the collection lacks in its theoretical engagement with science fiction as a genre, favoring the application of sociological theories of agency and childhood to a chosen text, the essays provide arguments about child and youth agency that can be brought into many future studies of science fiction.

The introduction by editors Castro and Clark and the first chapter, Joseph Giunta writing about Stranger Things (2016- ), lay an excellent groundwork for the rest of the collection. Castro and Clark establish the dearth of scholarship on children in science fiction. Giunta’s chapter further elaborates this history of children’s agency by outlining the “‘new’ sociology of childhood, [which] embraces agentic youth and their active participation within hierarchies of social order” (25). This “new” sociology of childhood—that children are beings that fully act in and influence the world—is the foundation on which the essays engage with their chosen science fictional texts. Indeed, none of the essays argue that children do not have agency: a core supposition in each essay is that the actual agency of children is often overlooked, and therefore, almost all the essays outline how the characters in their chosen texts use agency. However, most of the essays don’t take the added step of detailing how the use of agency then affects the theory of agency or genre of science fiction.

For many of the essays, agency is most visible in oppositional acts. In Jessica Clark’s riveting assessment of masculinity and boyhood in the anime film Akira (1988), Clark declares that the use of agency shows that “adult status, political authority, and ideological principles are all questioned and transgressed” (123, emphasis mine). This transgression of strictures, systems, and hierarchies around the characters is what forms the ability to see the character’s agency at work. Similar to Clark, Megan McDonough argues that each book in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy (2008-2010) “culminates in one major agentically defiant act against the powerful government in charge” (134–35, emphasis mine); for McDonough, then, agency is about defiance and is thus a reaction to power. This approach to agency always already assumes agency as an act of opposition: a response rather than a decision. Essays like Clark’s and McDonough’s do well at showing agency, but in future studies, we must consider how an agency that emphasizes “impacting” or “subverting” rather than being in and of itself might hide some forms of agency.

Agency is also outlined in the relationship between child and parent. In Kip Kline’s chapter on Back to the Future (1985), Marty McFly is given power over not only himself but also his parents in a reading of his use of time travel as reversal of who determines whose futures: McFly becomes the metaphorical head of his family as he changes the past to align his present with his wants and desires. Kwasu David Tembo and Muireann B. Crowley look at the relationship between the X-Men characters Jubilee, X-23, and Wolverine, arguing that Jubilee and X-23 make agential actions but that those actions are always marked by Wolverine’s influence, the cultural experience of gender, or the influence of the bio-power of the controlling hegemonies. Whereas Tembo and Crowley find a frustration of agency within this relationship, other chapters, like Joaquin Muñoz’s chapter on Ender’s Game (1985) and Castro’s essay on David R. Palmer’s novel Emergence (1984), find agency in the rebellion against parents or figures of authority. Muñoz argues that in Ender’s Game, the protagonists “operationalize their agency for gaining power and control over their respective situations” (223); in other words, for Muñoz, the agency of children exists in an exerted influence on surroundings, contrary to what is controlled by the adult characters. In Emergence, Castro argues that the posthuman and biological relationships (e.g., with animals, with the surrounding world) is a place in which agency finds “purchase and context within their new intersectional and interdependent relationship” (259); in other words, a child’s agency is not determined only by a relationship with adults but by the child’s contextual world. The relationship of parent and child is also seen in Stephanie Thompson’s argument that youth agency in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011) and Neal Shusterman’s Unwind (2007) is found in the child’s transgression and subsumption of the adult’s role of home provider.

This relationship between child and adult as space for agency creation is navigated in different ways in Erin Kenny’s article on fanfiction of The 100 (2014-2020) and Jessica Kenty-Drane’s essay on Black Mirror (2011- ). Kerry’s article shows how the fanfiction communities that navigate and imagine diverse sexualities of youth characters in The 100 gain power over the narrative and their own sexualities by using their agency to pen alternative couplings than what the adult creators of The 100 intended. Kenty-Drane writes about how adult authors fear and speculate children’s use of technology as potentially binding of agency in two Black Mirror episodes. While these articles aren’t necessarily about how children gain power or voice through their use of agency, as in other articles, they do show agency as an interaction and conversations between adults and youths.

The collection is a good tool to establish one’s self in the conversation of agency in children and youth. However, even though the collection centers itself on science fiction, the theory of science fiction seems secondary to arguments about the conception of agency. While the texts considered in the collection are all science fictional in nature, the science fiction nature of the texts isn’t discussed. The collection favors describing agency and what that means to our cultural conceptions of agency to its engagement with science fiction as a field. This choice, then, leaves room for further investigations between conceptualizations of children’s agency and theorization about science fiction media, especially those that speak to science fiction studies and science fiction as genre.

Adam McLain is a MA/PhD student in English at the University of Connecticut. He researches and writes on dystopian literature, legal theory, and sexual ethics. He has a bachelor’s degree in English from Brigham Young University and a master of theological studies from Harvard University.

Review of Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 4

Nonfiction Reviews

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Review of Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture

Anelise Farris

Sanna Karkulehto, Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, and Essi Varis, editors. Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture. Routledge, 2019. Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture. Hardcover. 400 pg. $160.00. ISBN 9780367197476.

A post-anthropocentric worldview rejects the primacy of human beings and seeks to encourage more ethical cohabitation between humans and nonhumans. In this vein, the anthology Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture offers a collection of essays that aim to encourage serious reflection on the intra-action of various forms of matter.

The editors, Sanna Karkulehto, Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, and Essi Varis, acknowledge that this line of inquiry has become increasingly popular across disciplines as the destructive impact of human life on the planet can no longer be ignored (1-2). However, what sets this collection apart is its literary and cultural studies methodology and its subsequent attention to both real and imagined figures. They argue that art’s capacity to induce reflection on “subjective, embodied aspects of (nonhuman) experience…is likely to have notable epistemological and ethical repercussions” (5)—in ways that other disciplines are not able to achieve.  In addition to effectively demonstrating the need for such an approach, the editors’ introduction identifies the significance of narrative studies to the processes by which posthumanism, and by extension new materialism, interrogate forms of embodiment.

The anthology is divided into five sections. The first section contains essays that focus on theoretical and methodological concerns. In the opening chapter, Carole Guesse, questioning whether literature can ever really be posthumanist, ponders what a literary studies framework has to offer posthumanism. This chapter is followed by essays on the summoning of nonhuman entities through art and engaging in a mode of reading called “becoming-instrument” (57).  This latter chapter in particular, by Kaisa Kortekallio, offers a useful way for thinking through the essays in the second section, which reflect on the depiction of nonhuman characters in a variety of media: comic books, video games, and children’s literature. Each of these chapters posits that fictional characters “can be used as a tool for approaching other, actual or imaginary, nonhuman creatures” (Varis 87). In their chapter “Wild Things Squeezed in the Closet: Monsters of Children’s Literature as Nonhuman Others,” Marleena Mustola and Sanna Karkulehto conclude that such a tool (like a monster in a children’s book) reconfigures the boundaries between humans and nonhumans through the cultivation of empathy. The third section addresses the relationship between humans and nonhuman animals. Mikko Keskinen opens the section by positioning the deceased dog narrator in Charles Siebert’s Angus (2001) as a hybrid, “quasi-human character” (159). Similarly, the other chapters in this section examine the transboundary relationship between humans and pigs, as well as disabled humans and guide dogs.

The fourth section analyzes the agency afforded to human-created machines. Among calls for “renewed narratives about digital machines” (Collomb and Goyet 203) and “resisting the capitalist agenda of colonialism and docile subjectivity available for the player in Minecraft” (Huuhka 220), Patricia Flanagan and Raune Frankjœr offer the most distinctive chapter in the anthology: “Cyberorganic Wearables: Sociotechnical Misbehavior and the Evolution of Nonhuman Agency.” They contend that the “techno-genesis of the body [via wearable technology]…has the potential to foster interconnected ways of understanding our place within the Neganthropocene” (Flanagan and Frankjœr 236). The chapter is filled with images of cyberorganic technology like the Bamboo Whisper, and the authors make a compelling case for how such wearables force us to rethink what it means to be human, nonhuman, and everything in between. Thoughtfully placed, the final section, which consists solely of Juha Raipola’s “Unnarratable Matter: Emergence, Narrative, and Material Ecocriticism,” considers the limitations of seeking to understand that which is not human through a narrative lens. 

As evidenced by the range of content contained in this collection, the diverse texts and modes that are addressed is commendable. As with any anthology, some of the essays are stronger than others, but this is a collection that conveys a sense of cohesion, of each chapter being essential and in conversation with each other, in a way that anthologies don’t always achieve. If there’s a weakness, it’s that the contents vary in terms of their accessibility both stylistically and in their subject matter. Accordingly, this is a collection for the posthumanist scholar who is already well-versed in posthumanist thought. Despite the heavy subject matter, however, there is a refreshing sense of playfulness to Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture that manages not to undermine the urgency of the topic but instead demonstrates the imaginative potential for more ethical cohabitation. Ultimately, this is a significant contribution that reminds us what art and literature have to offer an endangered planet.

Anelise Farris is an Assistant Professor of English at the College of Coastal Georgia, as well as the Faculty Advisor of Seaswells, the Art and Literary Magazine. Her research interests include genre fiction, disability studies, folklore and mythology, popular culture, and new media. She has presented her work internationally and actively publishes in her fields of study. She holds a PhD in English and the Teaching of English from Idaho State University, in addition to an MA, a BA, and a Graduate Certificate from George Mason University, where she studied literature and folklore.

2022 SFRA Award Winners

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 3

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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2022 SFRA Award Winners

SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship
Originally the Pilgrim Award, the SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship was created in 1970 by the SFRA to honor lifetime contributions to SF and fantasy scholarship. The award was first named for J. O. Bailey’s pioneering book, Pilgrims through Space and Time and altered in 2019.

This year’s awardee is Roger Luckhurst (Professor of English, Birkbeck, University of London).

SFRA Innovative Research Award
The SFRA Innovative Research Award (formerly the Pioneer Award) is given to the writer or writers of the best critical essay-length work of the year.

This year’s awardee is Amy Butt for her essay “The Present as Past: Science Fiction and the Museum” from Open Library of Humanities 7.1 (2021). The selection committee also awarded an honorable mention to Katherine Buse for her essay “Genesis Efects: Growing Planets in 1980s Computer Graphics” from Configurations 29 (2021).

Thomas D. Clareson Award
The Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service is presented for outstanding service activities-promotion of SF teaching and study, editing, reviewing, editorial writing, publishing, organizing meetings, mentoring, and leadership in SF/fantasy organizations.

This year’s awardee is Gerry Canavan of Marquette University.

Mary Kay Bray Award
The Mary Kay Bray Award is given for the best review to appear in the SFRA Review in a given year.

This year’s awardee is Nora Castle for her essay “Review of Upload (2020, TV series)” (51.1).

Student Paper Award
The Student Paper Award is presented to the outstanding scholarly essay read at the annual conference of the SFRA by a student.


The winner of the 2021 award is John Landreville (Wayne State University) for his paper “‘Speculative Metabolism: Digesting the Human in Upstream Color.”

SFRA Book Award
The SFRA Book Award is given to the author of the best first scholarly monograph in SF, in each calendar year.

This year’s winner is David M. Higgins for his book Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood.

Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize
Awarded by the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies program at the University of California, Riverside, The Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize honors an outstanding scholarly monograph that explores the intersections between popular culture, particularly science fiction, and the discourses and cultures of technoscience. The award is designed to recognize groundbreaking and exceptional contributions to the field.

This year’s winner is Sherryl Vint for Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction (Cambridge University Press). The committee also chose to recognize Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Duke University Press) with a special honorable mention.

Cosmism and Afrofuturism: Life Against Death

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 3

Sexual Violence and Science Fiction

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Cosmism and Afrofuturism: Life Against Death

Julia Tikhonova Wintner

Time: Mythological present.
Scene: State Museum of Immortality, Moscow, Russia.

Act I, Scene 1

SETTING: We are in a dimly lighted space, spot-lighted large containers on the carpeted floors. These containers preserve cryogenized bodies of people who chose resurrection in the near future. The room is decorated with photos, documents and objects that were related to the dead. These personal objects are “used to restore the personality and individual identity of the deceased. . . . In other words, the Museums of Immortality functioned as a democratized version of Egyptian pyramids” (Groys). 

AT RISE: Nikolai Fedorov, (tall, white beard) the CEO of Museum of Immortality is under a lot of pressure. His “Factory of Resurrection” faces problems: the relatives of the deceased demand priority in the resurrection of their loved ones, they also insist on making the resurrection process more inclusive. The technology of resurrection needed permanent repair, financial resources were always insufficient, there was not enough space to resurrect all. Fedorov’s white beard is flowing like a sail under the blows of an approaching storm . . . For a moment, his eyes go blank—he feels that his vision of a great boat—the Earth, carrying the newly resurrected humans, is doomed to sink. 

Fedorov (1828-1903), a previously forgotten philosopher and provincial librarian, today is being celebrated as the father of Cosmism (Nesbit). 

I was equally surprised that Cosmism, an esoteric teaching derived from Fedorov’s philosophy, has been gaining international attention since 2015, thanks to the single-minded efforts of Russian artist and curator, Anton Vidokle. His fascination with Cosmism started in 2014, and led to Immortality for All, a film trilogy that was followed by three additional films: Citizens of Cosmos (2019), The God-Building Theory (2020), and Autotrofia (2021), all infused with exploration of Cosmism in its popularity in different geographical contexts and available on the website of the Institute of The Cosmos—a comprehensive portal documenting international symposiums, publications, and art works that have fashioned Cosmism into a potent movement.1 Vidokle has successfully leveraged his international profile to draw attention to Cosmism. Cosmism and Afro-Futurism: Life Against Death exemplifies the success of his efforts.

Anton Vidokle, still from Immortality For All: a film trilogy on Russian Cosmism (2014-2017). HD video, color, sound. 96’. Russian with English subtitles. Courtesy of the artist. © Anton Vidokle

The growing interest in Cosmism, which might conveniently be understood as a sort of Russian futurism, suggested to me that much could be learned by placing its beliefs beside those of Afrofuturism. 

Afrofuturism and Cosmism: two cultural movements that are the focus of my work originate in the speculative literature of the early twentieth century. Both movements utilized conventions of speculative writing in pursuit of their respective, unique goals. Afrofuturism challenged the Western tropes of manifest destiny and proposed its own exclusively Black future. Today, Afrofuturism makes a radical call. There will be no justice on this planet as long as  it is governed by the white majority. In this way, Afrofuturism completes the journey begun when Martin Luther King said “I have a dream.”

Cosmism, on the other hand, is grounded in nationalism, and religious Orthodoxy that offered Russians a sense of destiny throughout the nineteenth century. The same sentiments are voiced out in today’s Putin governance. Cosmism is the future of the past. Afrofuturism is chasing the future of the futures. 

Cosmism’s founder, philosopher Fedorov (impersonated above by the CEO of the Museum of Immortality) was an eccentric polymath, celebrated as the “Socrates of Moscow.” Fedorov proclaimed that death was not natural to humans and that all nations must unite to defeat death, gravity, and nature. His teaching inspired an entire generation of writers, artists and scientists. Alexander Bogdanov followed Fedorov’s Cosmic theory in his novel Red Star (1907). The red star is Mars where a prosperous communist society predicated on the exchange of blood as a commodity. Martian society is a system that not only facilitated economic equality but also created an embodied communal existence in which society as a whole was conceptualized as a supra-organism.

Early edition of Bogdanov’s Red Star, title page.

Bogdanov continued Fedorov’s ideas of resurrection through his founding of the Soviet Institute for Blood Transfusion in 1926 (“Alexander Bogdanov”). The goal was to create a “new man” through the exchange of blood between the individuals. Both fictionists believed in the importance of kinship in achieving the ideal state of society: Fedorov through the universal resurrection of ancestors, Bogdanov envisioned a unity that extended into the body itself (Huestis). 

Alexander Bogdanov (pictured with Vladimir Lenin) wrote Red Star, about a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary who visits a communist society on Mars (Credit: Alamy)

In the same year Red Star was published (1908), W. E. B. Du Bois wrote The Princess Steel, featuring a megascope that enables the protagonist to transcend time and space and finds a kidnapped African princess made from steel separated from her mother. Du Bois merges references to modern industrial technology with African aesthetics. This short story has been interpreted as a metaphor for the sense of cultural alienation and dislocation caused by slavery. Both books lay down the pre-history of each movement. Both texts appropriate outer space as un-colonized territory but for different reasons. While The Princess Steel proposes the proud embrace of the past for African Americans, Red Star centers on the collective future and the society devoid of individualism. Evidently, for Du Bois and Bogdanov, the fantasy of space travel offered abundant prospects of new economic resources, wealth, and freedom. The unique connections between these writers have remained unexplored and demand further research. 

Overall, the artists, poets, and philosophers of the early twentieth century envisioned outer space as a vector to examine various futures. The fuel used for takeoff was an ideology, either Communism or Capitalism. The outer space discovered, however, was free from the political machinations and accessible for manifold visions of reclaiming history and bringing it into the future. In 1994, Mark Dery coined the term Afrofuturism in his article “Black to the Future” that opened up a polymorphous stream of creativity centered on the Black community’s embrace of the Future. 

Afrofuturism is international and diasporic. Its science-driven narratives are being written in London, Lagos, and New York. Afrofuturism is inclusive. All mediums and genres, levels of art training, as well as race and class of the art practitioners, have been welcomed into its visual space. It is intrinsic to the Black culture. It is exotic for the white imagination. Among the very many exceptional Afrofuturists, the New York-based artist Sedrick Chisom is a recent seer. Chisom uses his Afrofuturistic vision to render an apocalyptic and follows the steps of Octavia Butler’s open critique of the white supremacy. 

Sedrick Chisom, The Occidental Tower The Capitol Citadel of The Alt-Rightland was Naturally Situated Over a Lake of Fire,” 2021, oil on canvas, 54 x 68, image courtesy of the artist. 

The artist proposes that all people of color have left Earth. That Earth is inhabited by white people who have succumbed to a contagious disease that has put them at war with each other. In an interview with Sofia Hallström, the artist explains “I wrote a sixty page play about different histories of monstrous races, the intersection between histories of disease and race, miasma theory versus germ theory, the relationship between the wilderness and the relationship between the eugenics.” His painting titled “The Occidental Tower The Capitol Citadel of The Alt-Rightland was Naturally Situated Over a Lake of Fire” (2021) depicts a Tower of Babel-like structure. Chisom responds directly to the storming of the United States Capitol by Trump supporters. He depicts the U.S. Capitol as a deserted and degraded Tower of Babel crowned with a burning cross. His work reminds us that post-racial future is still outside of current imaginaries (Hallström).

In contrast, Cosmists are a tight group of highly educated, well trained, white artists.   

In this paper I focus only on one film from Vidokle’s trilogy, The Communist Revolution Was Caused By The Sun, which spans across the time and space of ex-Soviet Kazakhstan. During Stalin’s epoch, this republic was used as a mass-labor camp housing up to a million prisoners. The unseen protagonist of this film, notable Russian scientist, Alexander Chizhevsky, is represented by a chandelier being constructed under a blazing sun. Vidokle references Chizhevsky’s focus on the meta-historical and poetic dimension of solar cosmology. A woman wearing a white lab overall quotes Chizhevsky: “Sun exerts an influence on the biologic, psychological and social spheres of human activity. Therefore, the Sun influences the rhythm of all historical processes.” Towards the end of the film, the voice over describes the scientist’s fate: “Following the publication of his study, the scientist was invited to lecture at Columbia University in New York, and nominated for a Nobel Prize in science. Instead, he was arrested and sent to a labor camp. Because one possible interpretation of his work could lead to the conclusion that: the Communist Revolution was caused by the sun.”

Anton Vidokle, still from Immortality For All: a film trilogy on Russian Cosmism (2014-2017). HD video, color, sound. 96’. Russian with English subtitles. Courtesy of the artist. © Anton Vidokle.

These incantations are performed in a soothing voice, as if delivering psychedelic instructions. The narrative oscillates between real and staged footage.

Chizhevsky’s imagery is followed by a Muslim cemetery populated by mausoleums in traditional Islamic styles. Two Kazak men are digging a grave; and, later, we enter a slaughterhouse filled with bovine carcasses. The artist conveys a sense of fossilization, and left-behindness. A sense of the impossibility to return to pre-Russian times—of being forever colonized—hovers above the Kazakh steppes that Vidokle films. The wide camera view highlights the vastness of the landscape, suggesting “the master view” and the eye of the colonizer. He suggests that Soviet socialist modernity has destroyed Kazakhstan’s indigenous culture. This ex-colonial state is a progeny of the Soviet empire.

Anton Vidokle, still from Immortality For All: a film trilogy on Russian Cosmism (2014-2017). HD video, color, sound. 96’. Russian with English subtitles. Courtesy of the artist. © Anton Vidokle.

I am not alone in this interpretation. Overall, Cosmists have been criticized for their detached, potentially escapist, futuristic focus, and their lack of any engagement with the political realities of contemporary Russia. Cosmism is a refuge from the void produced by the cult of neoliberalism. Its oppositional forces mirror the intellectual confusion of the post-Soviet generation. Molly Nesbit calls it “a garden of forking but broken paths” (Nesbit).

Anton Vidokle, still from Immortality For All: a film trilogy on Russian Cosmism (2014-2017). HD video, color, sound. 96’. Russian with English subtitles. Courtesy of the artist. © Anton Vidokle.

Today, Cosmism and Afrofuturism align in the following: The Pandemic’s vast death toll provided a void for affirmative visionary cures. Russian Cosmism promised the abolition of death at a time when thousands were dying. Afrofuturism has been called as a source of survival tools for the Black Americans who are disproportionately impacted by Covid. Police brutality and corruption in both countries imposed an urgent call for emotional healing and radical reimagining of our future. Cosmism represents a savior—a system of belief capable of managing the chaos and despair felt by a large swath of the Russian populace under the Putin governance. Afrofuturism formulates a profound critique of current social, racial, and economic orders. It maps out an alternative (digital) space where the black body would not have its opposite—the white body. The singularity will help to finally dissolve ties to its racialized subjectivity. Afrofuturism actively claims digital space that has not been colonized yet. Fear of global ecological collapse renewed the appeal of Cosmism’s dream of resurrection. 

Afrofuturism has its own answer to the ecology crises. The Institute of Afrofuturist Ecology brought together regenerative farmers, artists, healers, technologists, and academics to advance economic and racial justice and to solve environmental problems. 

Both Cosmists and Afrofuturists are speculative narratives fueled by desperate forces of activism and resistance. 

Afrofuturism answers the urgent need to imagine possibilities outside of the predominantly black pandemic’s death toll and the U.S. prison complex. The only way we can challenge the status quo is by imagining a world where this status quo does not exist. 

Afrofuturism offers social justice movements a methodology to test their goals within imaginative new worlds. Afrofuturism does not offer a solution—that’s where sustained mass community organizing comes in. It is only through imagining the so-called impossible that we can begin to concretely alter our future. When we free our imaginations, we question everything. Afrofuturism tells us that other worlds are not only possible, but are on their way. We can already hear them, fast approaching. 

Cosmism does not challenge the status quo, but perpetuates naïveté, mysticism, and the emphatic nationalism of its ideas. It fills the ideological void that emerged after 1989 at the clash of post-Soviet, Imperial, and neoliberal historical periods. Cosmism is, at best, a place-holder for the day when Russian artists can reclaim the dynamism as leaders of the European avant garde. 

If Fedorov could wake up today, he and Afrofuturists would have a lot to learn from each other. 

NOTES

[1] Autotrofia is simultaneously a documentation of an ancient pagan fertility ritual that is still practiced in this region, and scripted fiction. The scripted content of the film explores the ecological dimension of Russian Cosmism: https://www.berlinale.de/en/programme/programme/detail.html?film_id=202101630.

WORKS CITED

“Alexander Bogdanov.” New World Encyclopedia, https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Alexander_Bogdanov. Accessed 17 July 2022.

Chisom, Sedrick. Interview by Sofia Hallström. “In the Studio With Sedrick Chisom.” émergent magazine, https://www.emergentmag.com/interviews/sedrick-chisom. Accessed 17 July 2022.

Groys, Boris. “Becoming Immortal.” Institute of the Cosmis. https://www.cosmos.art/cosmic-bulletin/2020/becoming-immortal. Accessed 17 July 2022.

Huestis, Douglas W. “Alexander Bogdanov: The forgotten pioneer of blood transfusion.” Transfusion medicine reviews, vol. 21, no. 4, 2007, pp. 337-40. doi:10.1016/j.tmrv.2007.05.008. 

Nesbit, Molly, “Cosmist Rays: The Rise of Cosmism.” Artforum, 2018, https://www.artforum.com/print/201802/molly-nesbit-on-the-rise-of-cosmism-73668. Accessed 8 Aug. 2021.

Vidokle, Anton. Autotrofia. 2021.

—. Citizens of Cosmos. 2019. 

—. The Communist Revolution Was Caused By The Sun. 2015.

—. The God-Building Theory. 2020.

Julia Tikhonova Wintner is the director of Eastern Connecticut State University Art Gallery, in Willimantic, CT. Wintner envisions Eastern Art Gallery as a leader in situating the arts in the service of the quest for social justice and promoting the role of artists in building economic and cultural equity. Wintner presented her paper “From Louverture to Lenin: Haiti, Russia, and the Dilemma of Post-Coloniality” at The U.K. Association For Art History (AAH) Annual Conference.

In her previous position as the director of UCF Art Gallery, Orlando, FL, Tikhonova developed a solid record of multidisciplinary curating and made art a central, highly visible part of academic and co-curricular life on campus. She worked closely with faculty and students, offering the gallery environment as a space to take individual risks and learn to be together both in moments of communion and in those of disagreement. Through her exhibitions and programs, she enhanced the University’s core teaching and research mission. Tikhonova was graduated from The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, NY.

The Relationship Between Solarpunk and Ecofeminism

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 3

Sexual Violence and Science Fiction

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The Relationship Between Solarpunk and Ecofeminism

Meltem Dağcı

Solarpunk is a new genre of literature among ecological utopias that started to emerge in the 2010s and is also categorized as post-utopia in the field of science fiction and fantasy. Rather than focusing on the past or the future, this genre depicts utopian cities by considering current society and environmental conditions and creating realistic fictions based on the present. The most striking feature of these depictions is that solarpunk imagines a life to solve the problems of the twenty-first century.

Solarpunk’s notion of justice is a tool for understanding capitalism’s exploitation of nature. By blending alternative economic systems of capitalism with science fiction, it depicts realistic scenarios aimed at solving the climate crisis and producing enough to meet human needs. The ultimate goal of every solarpunk story, consciously or unconsciously, is the discovery of an equitable distribution of goods, because without equal distribution societies cannot exist in an ecological way. It is essential to rebuild economic and social structures that will create fair bonds in human-nature relations, as well as between people.

In addition to its social and economic characteristics, solarpunk also stands out for its creative depictions of architecture and aesthetics. Concepts such as “brightness” are described in detail, with emphasis on advanced solar technology in the works. For example, the facades of buildings are usually completely covered with solar panels, and structures similar to trees and flowers built into architectural structures occur frequently. These aesthetic designs hide the functional properties of solar panels and bring groundbreaking innovations to the infrastructure systems of cities. The fact that the technical features of the infrastructure systems are provided by renewable energy sources such as solar and wind reflects the desire of the system to be self-sustaining.

Throughout the history of humanity, women and nature have been controlled and exploited by the male-dominated understanding of humanity. This conflation of women and nature is turned into a tool of exploitation by equating a woman’s production function with her body and labor and nature’s function of providing production. Nature and women are at the center of the same problems in terms of the situations they are exposed to in the process and are negatively affected by these problems. The problems in question are caused by the domination-based understanding of the patriarchal society mentality towards women and nature (Özdemir and Aydemir 273)

The subordination and oppression of women, their inability to have a say over their body, and their unequal position in social roles and responsibilities exist due to the unequal, unjust, and exploitative understanding of the male-dominated system. Since the basis of the inequality and domination system is pervasive, the women’s issues have started to be handled with different approaches in the feminist movement, for example, liberal feminism with gender inequality on the political plane. Every feminist approach deals with gender inequality in a complementary way, such as gender-based wage inequality with Marxist/socialist feminism, racial inequality with Black feminism, gender inequality in internet and technology with cyberfemism. Thus, feminism gave birth to various feminist branches in the twentieth century, branches that look at women’s problem from different perspectives. Due to postmodernism, branches that deal with women’s issues in different contexts—such as radical, Marxist, socialist, Islamic, existentialist, cultural, ecofeminism—have developed. Özdemir and Duygu  argue that the source of women and environmental problems is the male-dominated understanding, and argues that in a world woven with relations based on domination, an egalitarian, just, non-oppressive, livable life can only be achieved through a feminist approach to environmental problems (Aydemir 1).

Ecofeminism is a movement that sees the connection between the exploitation of the natural world and the oppression of women. It emerged in the mid-1970s with the impetus of second- and third-wave feminism alongside the green movement. Ecofeminism combines feminism and environmentalist understanding in the same pot by striving for the solution of natural and environmental problems while struggling with the sexist understanding that feminism struggles with. At this point, it is important to examine the common points of feminism and ecological approaches. I summarize the common points of feminism and ecological approaches as follows:

  • Patriarchal domination is associated with rationality and technocratic values, which it holds responsible for the destruction and exploitation of nature. Feminism’s criticisms of science and philosophy shaped by a masculine point of view, and criticisms of ecological approaches to the position of human in the ecosystem align. (Soper, qtd. in Üzel)
  • According to the common point that both feminism and “Greens” emphasize, the integration of the ecosystem and its interdependence with the human create a necessary relational ethics. This ethic, according to Ruether, “must be an ethic of environmental justice that recognizes the interconnectedness of social domination and domination over nature” (189).
  • The reactions of ecologists to the exploitation of nature and their demands for a change in the view of nature are parallel to the demands of feminism, the domination of women and the change of stereotypes associated with femininity. Another common point of ecological view and feminism is that the Enlightenment thought sees nature and animals as lower than human beings and makes them a means of discovery for humans, and that women are positioned lower than men (Soper, qtd. in Üzel 112-113)

Women, who came together to discuss the intersections of feminism and environmentalism, underlined the need to respect women and nature and stated that throughout human history, women and nature were associated and both were kept under pressure (Plumwood 33). As a result of a male-dominated understanding, women and nature are generally chaotic, irrational, and controlled; men, on the other hand, are generally described as rational and controlling beings. (Aydemir 1). Therefore, throughout history, nature and women have remained under the order and control of men. Ecofeminists argue that this arrangement empowers men and leads to a hierarchical structure that allows the exploitation of women and nature, especially as long as the two are interrelated. King explains the source of women and nature problems in the ecofeminist movement as follows:

Eco-feminism is about the integrity and commitment of theory and practice. It shows the special strength and integrity of all living things. We are a movement that defines women and we believe we have a special job to do in these challenging times. We see the destruction of the land and its assets by corporate fighters and the threat of nuclear annihilation as feminist concerns. It is the masculine mentality that deprives us of our rights over our own bodies and sexuality and has multiple systems of domination to possess them. (King qtd. in Salleh).

The main purpose of ecofeminist research has been to reveal the connections established between women and nature throughout history and to weaken patriarchal domination by criticizing these connections. Ecofeminist activists—women and environmentalists—invite us to work together, to end the hierarchical structures forced on both women and nature, and to end unequal relationships based on domination of one over the other. With the emergence of these ideas, critical voices have emerged among both environmental groups and feminist groups. Environmentalists, within their groups, do not question the patriarchal elements in the environmental struggle; feminists, on the other hand, criticized those who do not question the traditionally assigned relationship between nature and women.   

Ecofeminist entrepreneurs point to the contradiction between production and productivity, especially regarding human reproduction, and stand up to the blows inflicted by production on both biological and social productivity, thereby drawing attention to issues and suggesting solutions. (Tamkoç) When radioactivity emerges from nuclear power plant accidents, toxic chemicals and hazardous waste threaten the biological development of the human species; thus, women have become aware of this contradiction in their own bodies and in the bodies of their children. In Western society, nature and women in their homes are polluted by industrial waste, excessive packaging and plastics; third-world women also experience the helpless feeling brought on by a lack of food, fuel, and clean water. Third-world women are also desperately trying to cope with the ecological imbalance created by multinational companies and the consumption industry by preserving their traditional lifestyles.

Women from both worlds can be ecofeminists who take action against life-threatening ecological attacks. Since many societies use the female physiological structure as an excuse to prevent them from walking freely in the society like men, women have naturally stayed at home and specialized in the management of the house and food preparation. Since women have to cope with personal problems and crisis situations at home and in their immediate environment, and their sensitivity skills are developed, they find practical solutions, and their personal and gender characteristics reveal women’s personal problems and political problems according to the growth and development processes of children. Many women activists reject technology developed by men and stress that they, not the men, have to fight the ill effects of chemical waste. They insist that their protest is a matter of life and death for women, as pesticides sprinkled on vegetables and trees reach pregnant women and children by air and water, and poison causes deaths and miscarriages.

If there is a much more important task for ecofeminists, it is to scientifically examine the reasons why the capitalist system wants to ruthlessly defeat nature. We know that the world desperately needs ecofeminists, since within patriarchal thought, ideologies such as capitalism, militarism and colonialism—that is, a system of relations based on domination—relies on the oppression of women and nature.

Factors that determine the extent to which people will be affected by climate change include social status, gender, poverty, access to resources, and who is in control. It has become questionable how both women and men respond to climate change, to what extent their views are received and supported, and how they contribute to climate change. The fact that women are not represented in decision-making mechanisms reduces the effectiveness of planning, developing, and implementing climate policies. In combating and adapting to climate change, women are unable to influence policies, programs, and decisions that may be closely related to their own life.

It has been widely accepted in recent years that climate change increases existing inequalities, especially gender inequalities, and creates different effects on women and men (Talu). The existence of structural differences between men and women due to gender-specific roles in society, work and family life, the vulnerability of both sexes to climate change, and their capacity to adapt to the impacts all cause social differences according to age, ethnicity, class, income level, religion, and gender. In this respect, it is necessary to consider the unique needs and priorities of each gender in all areas of combating climate change, and not to think that the effects on women and men are limited to short-term effects and behavioral changes. Women and men differ in their perceptions of climate change and the way they deal with this phenomenon. 

Gender-based inequalities play a role in increasing vulnerability to climate change. Especially in developing countries, women living in rural areas are among the groups most affected by climate change. Rural women are more dependent on threatened natural resources for their livelihoods, due to their traditional role as primary users of natural resources and working in unpaid agricultural work. As the effects of climate change make the supply of natural resources increasingly difficult, women are more exposed to the negative effects of climate change in their daily lives—for example, in the supply of water and food than men.

The physical disadvantage of women in climate disasters is exacerbated by social norms. Even their clothes create obstacles for women to escape from disasters. In one recent Bangladesh cyclone, women could not run because of their traditional clothing, the sari—which is a long one-piece garment woven from silk or cotton, fitted to the body without the use of stitches, worn by women in South Asian countries such as Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. The women could not swim and thus died. Also in Bangladesh, the fact that some fathers rescued their sons instead of their daughters for the sake of perpetuating their surname is a striking example of gender inequality that yields to social norms in climate disasters (“Women in Bangladesh”).   

The 6th Ambassadors Meeting of the “Women’s SES” project was organized by the SES (Equality, Justice, Woman Platform) Equality and Solidarity Association in cooperation with Operation 1325 in order to make women’s voices more prominent on social media. The project aims to enable more women to be active in decision-making through raising the “Women’s SES,” as well as bringing awareness to issues such as gender equality, social peace and sustainability, reducing women’s poverty, violence against women, women’s participation in politics, and climate justice. It aims to raise awareness with creative social media campaigns to take action on urgent issues such as media freedom and solving the problems of women and girl’s refugees. (SES Equality, Justice, Women Platform)

The climate crisis has a serious relationship with gender. Nature has been metaphorized for years as a consumable, productive entity. It has been long paired with women’s sacrifice, fertility, and productivity. But this is one of the things that the patriarchal thought system produces. The representative of the climate crisis is the patriarchal system itself. If we consider how patriarchal all states and systems are, we can see that the decisions made by the system are in these non-pluralist, non-inclusive institutions where women are not permitted.

Climate justice is one of the most debated topics. Justice and equality do not go together, but simultaneously. Climate justice is also not possible without gender equality. Combating climate change is not possible without gender equality. A climate change struggle without women is unthinkable.

“Young women in Turkey have great entrepreneurial potential. We can use this potential very well. I think women should be supported a little more in this regard. Education is very important here. During the pandemic, everything went online. Increasing the access of young women to online education is very important. Of course, this is also connected with the climate crisis. The first name that comes to mind in the fight against the climate crisis is Greta Thunberg. Greta was able to educate herself on this, and so have I. I am in a position to access resources when I want to read about the climate crisis. But it is very important to raise awareness of the climate crisis among young women who do not have access to education in this way.” (SES Equality, Justice, Women Platform, Speaker: Selin Gören)

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) report, which took two years to prepare, is the largest and most comprehensive study to date on the effects of climate change and environmental degradation on gender-based violence. The report mentions that the rate of forced marriages of girls increases in situations such as famine and hunger caused by climate disasters. Malawi is one of the regions where this situation occurs. Ntoya Sande is one of the girls forced into marriage at the age of thirteen by her family, who lost their land as a result of a flood. In times of famine in Ethiopia and South Sudan, girls are sold for cattle. (Karakaş, 2020)

Juliana Schmucker, Asia regional director of the NGO International Plan, points out that child marriages and forced marriages have increased significantly during the climate crisis. Worldwide, roughly 12 million girls are thought to be forced into marriage as a result of escalating natural disasters. In addition, climate-based disasters seem to increase trafficking in women for forced sex by 20-30%. It was also noted in the report that women fighting for environmental rights received death and rape threats. In the West, it was seen that women working in these fields were exposed to similar threats on social media. 

In IUCN’s research, which compiles the responses from a total of 300 NGOs around the world, 6 out of 10 participants stated that women living in areas of environmental destruction, women’s environmental rights defenders, and women who had to migrate or take refuge in other countries as a result of environmental crises, were exposed to gender-based violence. 

When we look at the international agreements that take into account the climate- and women-focused components, almost all of the governments of the world have accepted the global commitments on climate and gender. However, the policies established within the framework of these agreements do not yet contribute to the development of gender-based climate policies at national levels. Creating gender-equal climate policies should be seen as an important opportunity not only to combat climate change, but also to reduce gender discrimination.

As can be seen, gender analysis is strongly needed in areas such as mitigation, adaptation, financing, technology transfer, and capacity building in the fight against climate change. Thus, gender-sensitive priorities and needs should be highlighted. I believe that ecofeminist women/girls are on a similar and common ground of thought in the face of the problems they face, without being imprisoned in the idea of a capitalist and masculine world. 

For this, women should have a say in the policies of combating climate change in order to be sensitive to gender at almost every level of government—global, regional, national, or local.

WORKS CITED

“Kadın SES’i: İklim Krizinin Sebebi Patriyarkal Sistemin Ta Kendisi.” SES Equality, Justice, Women Platform. 25 Dec. 2020. esitlikadaletkadin.org/kadin-sesi-iklim-krizininin-sebebi-patriyarkal-sistemin-ta-kendisi. Accessed 17 July 2022.

Karakas, Öznur. (2020). “Kadına Yönelik Şiddet İklim Değişikliği İle Artıyor.” terrabayt, 9 March 2020, https://terrabayt.com/kultur/iklim-degisikligiyle-birlikte-kadinlara-yonelik-siddet-artiyor/. Accessed 17 July 2022.

King, Ynestra. “Healing the wounds: Feminism, Ecology and Nature/Culture Dualism.” Gender/body/knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, edited by Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo, Rutgers UP, 1990, pp. 115-44. 

Özdemir, Hacı and Duygu Aydemir. “Ekolojik Yaklaşımlı Feminizm/Ekofeminizm Üzerine Genel bir Değerlendirme: Kavramsal Analizi, Tarihi Süreci ve Türleri [A general review of Ecological Feminism/ecofeminism: its conceptual analysis, historical process and types].” Mediterranean Journal of Women’s Studies and Gender, vol. 2, no. 2, 2019, pp. 261-78.

Plumwood, Val. Feminizm ve doğaya hükmetmek. İstanbul, Metis, 2004.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation. Seabury Press, 1975.

Talu, Nuran. “İklim Değişikliği ve Toplumsal Cinsiyet Politika Belirleme Süreçleri.” Yasama Dergisi, vol. 33, 2016, pp. 68-87. https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/yasamadergisi/issue/54466/741353. 

 “Women in Bangladesh build resilience against climate change.” 11 Sept. 2015. www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2015/9/bangladesh-climate-change, accessed 17 July 2022.

Tamkoç, Günseli. “Ekofeminizm Amaçları. [Aims of Ecofeminism]” Kadın Araştırmaları Dergisi, vol. 0, no. 4, 2012. dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/iukad/issue/732/7912. 

Üzel, Esra. Feminizm ve doğa ekseninde ekofeminizm. 2006. Master’s Thesis, Ankara Üniversitesi, Ankara.

After graduating from Ondokuz Mayıs University with a degree in computer programming, Meltem Dağcı graduated from Anadolu University in the Department of Turkish Language and Literature. In recent years, she has been interested in stories and novels in the genre of science fiction and fantasy. Her stories, book articles, and interviews have been published in various magazines and newspapers. She has been on the team of the Edebiyat Nöbeti Magazine for six years. She has been continuing her conversations with the Writer’s Room in Edebiyat Haber for about two years.

Subversion of Patriarchal Norms Through the Metaphor of Mythology in Indian Science Fiction

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 3

Sexual Violence and Science Fiction

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Subversion of Patriarchal Norms Through the Metaphor of Mythology in Indian Science Fiction

Simran Gindwani

“While speculative fiction has not yet fully realized its transgressive potential, dominated as it has been White Man’s burden in outer space—there is still a strong undercurrent of writing that questions and subverts dominant paradigms and persists in asking uncomfortable questions.” (“A Speculative Manifesto” 202)

Advocating Vandana Singh’s above quoted remark, this paper attempts to vocalize the social issues and activist concerns associated with women’s bodies by considering three short stories— “The Good King,” “This, Other World,” and “Sita’s Descent”—from Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana. In these SF short stories, Sita’s character becomes a metaphor of subversion in modern Indian society as the authors aim to substantiate and reinterpret Sita’s character from a different lens. Considering Sita as an emblem of subversion, the paper discusses how her character mutates into an ordinary woman, meta-human, and AI nebula in the above-mentioned short stories, respectively. All the scientific mutations are significant, and these mutations not only keep the myths alive, but continue to compress the truth as well (Disch 22). The core connecting question in this paper manifests as: How does Sita becomes a metaphor for the #metoo, #ownvoices, and other social movements of India?

Mythology and Its Contemporary Efficacy 

#Metoo, #ownvoices, and other social movements related to feminism emerged as a crucial part of historical discourse in India. The revolution transpired through media, Twitter, and other social media forums; this became crucial as powerful men were exposed by the women who were oppressed by these men. As Jhalak Jain states, “It began in October 2018, with multiple women coming out with their stories of sexual abuse, harassment, rape and, misconduct.” Sita becomes a metaphor for contemporary Indian women who were confronted with sexual abuse, workplace harassment, and rape. Traditional Indian mythology, thus, is not only used as a historical tool to bring contemporary utility, but it is used with creative liberty to compound upon a few factors on how the rebellion could bring a downfall to the most powerful and corrupted men. The usage and contextual meanings of this metaphor lie in knowing its utilities and the roots in the great epic, Ramayana.

Anil Menon, in his essay titled “The Speculative Ramayana,” comments on the varied versions of Ramayana written by different authors and considers different types of narratives. In addition, Menon says: “One radical retelling is of special interest. TheChandravati Ramayana, composed by a sixteenth-century female bhaktin, barely concerns itself with Rama” (2). The most accepted and widely read version of Ramayana was written by Tulsi Das. The story follows the pattern of any other religious fantasy in which there is an avatar of God who stands against a Monster/Daityas/Rakshas and this avatar rescues the bhaktas (a spiritual devotee) from the ill-treatments of the monsters. In similar trials, Ramayana portrays an esteemed set of events wherein Sita (a goddess, a manifestation of Laxmi) and Rama (a god, a manifestation of Lord Vishnu), takes an avatar (form of human being). Sita is a victim but she is interrogated about her purity and has been accused of infidelity. These acts are similar to what happens today: the victim-blaming and oppression of a woman who has suffered. Thus, the mistreatment and misconduct of patriarchal keepers become questionable in this tale. These two situations create a similar political climate, close to giving a voice to the marginalized in not only ithihas (Indian history) but relevant in the contemporary Indian environment. Nivedita Menon also comments on how the modern Indian laws do not favour the abused/victims and how they confront the Indian society. Thus, this binary is evinced and analysed through the scientific mutations in Sita’s character. In the story, Rama and Sita (avatars of Lord Vishnu and Mata Laxmi, respectively) get married. They are sent away for an exile of fourteen years. Rama is accompanied by Sita and Lakshman. Surpnanka, Ravana’s sister, is seduced by the charm and beauty of the princes, Rama and Lakshman. Surpnakha’s face, including her nose and ears, are disfigured by Rama and Lakshman. Ravana, Surpnakha’s brother, abducts Sita after deceiving Rama and Lakshman by creating illusionary images. Rama rescues Sita and kills Ravana, the Demon king. Rama, Sita, and Lakshman return to Ayodhya but Sita is interrogated about her purity. Thus, when asked to give agni-pareeksha (an ordeal of fire to prove her chastity before she returns to Rama as a wife), she gives agni-pareeksha but has been proven ‘pure’ and truly faithful to her lawful husband by Agni Deva. She leaves the mortal Earth and is voluntarily absorbed into the Earth. Thus, the victim-blaming and victim-mistreatment, which has its roots in ancient India, begin to emerge. The goddess or god, symbols of idealistic vision of an Indian society, negotiates with the patriarchy in multiple ways by scavenging the beliefs of mankind. 

Myths act as tools to endorse as well as compress subjective truths, which are subject to change from era to era. When the truth started to gain this popular meaning of ‘meaning’ in itself. Thomas M. Disch also addresses the idea of truth, explaining: “Myth aims at maximizing meaning, at compressing the truth to the highest density that the mind can assimilate without the need of, as it were, cooking. (Extending that metaphor, natural philosophy—science would represent truth in a less immediately ingestible form—dry lentils, so to speak.)” (22). In this case, the subjective truths come from distinct communities of women who attempt to raise voice against the patriarchy—whether it is related to marginalized sections of Indian society or the urban class. Activism and resistance have taken the shape through this massive feminist movement. 

Sita as Metaphor of Defiance against Victim-blaming and Victim-shaming

Abha Dawesar’s “The Good King” begins with the reinterpretation of the great mythic tale, Ramayana, in a futuristic world. Ravana has a utopian kingdom, and using the pre-eminent scientific temperaments, he attempts to deceive Sita through virtual illusions, disguising himself as Rama. During her abduction, she is raped, abused, and mistreated by Ravana in different universes and in different time zones. But the fate of mythology has been creatively used to subvert the patriarchal norms of the great epic. Sita challenges and confronts traditional victim blaming and abuse when she, as a goddess, resolves to leave her mortal body and rebel against mistreatment, and she asserts her individualism and dissolves the ties of marriage: 

He besmirched her. The demon in him started to rage. Upset, shaking, equally furious, Sita took up his challenge. She was pure and chaste and she was going back to Earth. Inside it. The tectonic plates shifted; the land cleaved. Sita was swallowed. (“The Good King” 60)

The scientific mutations within mythology have been constructed to showcase the rebel in contrast to the most powerful man, the hegemonic construct of a man who was placed at a higher pedestal. Nivedita Menon assesses the legal claim of how the understanding of rape by the patriarchal society has disabled not only women’s freedom but has given the rapist the opportunity to marry. The victim-blaming and commodification of women’s bodies seems to be obvious even when the just laws could protect them. Thus, the voice of Sita, who fought against her mistreatment, becomes the voice of modern Indian women who strive to rebel against their own injustices. Considering some instances from Seeing Like a Feminist, Nivedita Menon claims:

In the feminist view, the raped woman does not lose her honour, the rapist does. For instance, the campaign against the rapists of Bhanwari Devi coined the slogan Izzat gayi kis ki, Bhateri ki, meaning it was not Bhanwari Devi who lost her honour, but the village defending the rapists. Bhanwari Devi—this Dalit woman who was raped by upper caste men as a punishment for trying to implement the government’s law against child marriage in her village-is a heroine for the movement. Bhanwari Devi is the dignified and public face of the campaign against sexual violence against women. (116)

Sita as Metaphor of Non-compliance to Social Orders of Patriarchy

At the mention of her name Rama’s face closes. Sita, of Clan Janaka, sister-cousin to Boss Gui of the Kunming Toads. Chinese and Thai and Indian, her genes are the best Kunming Labs could produce. A meta-human, interfaced with cross hatched Other, she is the Queen to rule the houses of both Janaka and Ayodhya. (213)

Furthermore, when Rama rescues Sita from Ravana, she responds to him:

“What brings you to this place?” 
“You do.” 
“I never asked you to.”
“You are my wife.”
A single perfect eyebrow rises, and she laughs. Her voice is different, a recital when she says: “Divorce proceedings initiated by confirmatory data packet, registered Tong Yun, Mars, approved by trans-colonial Belt by-laws, Asteroid Vesta, date-” 
She recites a string of numbers, colons, sub-clauses and legalese. They mean one thing.  
“Unmarried?”  
“Unmade a long long time ago” 
“The clans-” 
“Can fuck themselves”, she says, with sudden savagery. “I am not a toy, a thing made for a purpose. An I-loop needs no reason but reason.” (154)

In this particular instance, Sita asserts individualism, self-love, and her own choices over the construct of marriage and goes against the conventional practice of reproducing. Through scientific mutations of power in a SF narrative—where Ravana assumes a place of an AI and Sita is a meta-human, she is already in an inverted structure of the futuristic dystopian society. This endorses Nivedita Menon comments in Seeing Like a Feminist on how the bond of marriage (which emerges out of the social order of patriarchy) binds a woman through only her predefined roles and duties. She brings light to the fact that Indian women’s unhappiness remains invisible in a marriage but her duties as a wife are only the ones she is accountable for. Menon writes: “There is no explanation available for the woman’s unhappiness at her changed state. Can a woman just go back home saying simply: ‘Idon’t want to be a wife, Idon’t like this job?’” (Seeing Like a Feminist, 44-45).

The reinterpretation of Sita’s character is employed as the epitome of revolution against the Indian patriarchal society whose goddess steps up to understand the hierarchy and rebel against it. “This is what a family is supposed to be; as a wife, you are supposed to give up everything that you thought you were; we have expectations of you, which you are supposed to fulfil. This is marriage” (43). The existing ‘expectations,’ ‘roles,’ and ‘maternal duties’ are taken into account while changing the centre of this story/epic.

Sita as Metaphor of Dissent against Courtly Injustice  

“Sita’s Descent” by Infrapramit Das proposes a distinct scientific mutation of Sita’s consciousness stored in an AI nebula constructed by Laxmi, a scientist who works with a team of scientists in Bangalore; the evolution of her consciousness takes place within the mythic tale. The mythic tale is revised, and Ravana and Rama (who are seen as the most powerful) play their roles in a cosmic drama. But Sita refuses to play her ordinary role as defined in Ramayana; she rather assumes the role as the one who wants to destroy humankind for victim-blaming and mistreatment. Laxmi says in regard to the creation of Sita:

I realize once again that I am talking to a part of myself. I wrote and programmed Sita’s personality. I rebelled against the idea of a partial enactment of Ramayana in space, using these multi-billion-rupee constructs that I helped design. In some strange way Sita is trying to honor her namesake. She is doing what I would have done, if I lacked sympathy with the human race, if the only thing I could calculatedly detect was the legendary injustice evoked by any flaming. (162)

But she refuses to reconcile or settle for any injustice, she rather declares herself as a ‘Martyr.’ The consciousness in the story is used as a metaphor in order to evoke a rebellion against men, which generally happens in the sexist courtrooms (qtd. in Menon, Seeing Like a Feminist 116-117). Though the roles of other goddesses are also pointed out in other sections of the story: “We have Kali, we have Durga. Sita is not a destroyer. You are not a destroyer.” (163). Thus, #ownvoice is alluded to in these narratives. To support the notion that myth is used to subvert norms, Sami A. Khan in “Goddess Sita Mutates Indian Mythology into Science Fiction: How Three Stories from Breaking the Bow Reinterpret the Ramayana” says:

With gendered violence still a ruthless reality, the writer speaks up on behalf of all women who are victims of patriarchal setup and refuse to undergo such fire—ordeals. Still, Sita the AI does not seek vengeance. When reminded that she is not a destroyer and innocents must not pay for the sins of a few, she chooses not to engage in a similar gender power—play and exiles herself from this very binary. (20)

Conclusion

Mythology might be used as a tool to expand the truth, state the truth, or subscribe to the subjective truth through a different dimension. Sita’s character as a symbol evolves in these science fiction narratives; therefore, the meaning of the symbol and context of its use rotates within the contemporary period. Concepts like meta-humans and AI nebula not only focus on the scientific contingencies of the short stories but reinterpret them as a way to resurrect the futurisms which welcome a world of dystopia. It chooses to raise the most uncomfortable questions within the historical discourse of India. Other stories from Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana like “The Other Woman” by Manjula Padmanabhan and “Oblivion: A Journey” by Vandana Singh project the historic gendered oppressions throughout the mythology in India. These scientific temperaments and mutations subsidize the elements of newly constructed myths which could be juxtaposed within the contemporary culture and socially and politically mutable world. Besides, these novel myths blur the boundaries among culture, caste, and geographical differences by drawing mythology close to global issues. 

WORKS CITED

Das, Indrapramit.“Sita’s Descent.” Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana, edited by Anil Menon and Vandana Singh, Vol. 1, Zubaan, 2012, pp. 155-167.

Dāsa Tulsī, and Frederic Salmon Growse. The Ramayana. Ram Narain Lal Publisher and Bookseller, 1938. 

Dawesar, Abha. “The Good King.” Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana, edited by Anil Menon and Vandana Singh, Vol. 1, Zubaan, 2012, pp. 79-100. 

Disch, Thomas M. “Mythology and Science Fiction.” On SF, U of Michigan P, 2005, pp. 21-24. 

Jain, Jhalak. “India and Its #MeToo Movement in 2020: Where Are We Now?” Feminism In India, 2 Feb. 2020, https://feminisminindia.com/2020/02/03/india-metoo-movement-2020/. Accessed 11 Sept. 2021.

Khan, Sami Ahmad, “Goddess Sita Mutates Indian Mythology into Science Fiction: How Three Stories from Breaking the Bow Reinterpret the Ramayana”, Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, vol. 3, no. 2, 2016, pp.17-24. 

—. “Mythology.” Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction, Vol. 1, U of Wales P, 2021, pp. 95-142. 

Menon, Anil, “The Speculative Ramayana.” in Imran Ali Khan Kiski Kahani: Thee Ramayana project, Open Space Publications, 2012, pp. 2-4.

Menon, Nivedita. Seeing Like a Feminist. Vol. 1, Zubaan, 2012. 

Padmanabhan, Manjula.“The Other Woman.” Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana, edited by Anil Menon and Vandana Singh, Vol. 1, Zubaan, 2012, pp. 184-207.

Singh, Vandana. “A Speculative Manifesto.” The Woman who Thought She was a Planet: And Other Stories, Penguin Books India, 2008, pp. 200-203.

—. “Oblivion: A Journey” Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana, edited by Anil Menon and Vandana Singh, Vol. 1,Zubaan, 2012, pp. 377-414. 

Taylor, Sonya Renee. The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love. Vol. 1, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2021. 

Tidhar, Lavie.Menon, Anil, et al. “This, Other World.” Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana, edited by Anil Menon and Vandana Singh, Vol. 1, Zubaan, 2012, pp. 145-157.

Simran Gindwani completed her undergraduate studies and postgraduate studies in English literature from DU and GGSIPU, respectively, in India. She is a writer and an independent research scholar. Her area of research lies in mythology, science fiction, and postmodernism. She presented in a National Conference of Science Fiction Studies organized by the Indian Association for Science Fiction Studies on Mythology in Indian Science Fiction. Besides this, she has published a paper on posthumanism titled as “Eternity of Posthuman Intellect and Algorithmic Sentience: A Hybrid of Reality, Memory and Consciousness in Japanese Visual Culture” in Consortium: An International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies.