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

Stories on Sexual Violence as “Thought Experiments”: Post-1990s Chinese Science Fiction as an Example

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 3

Sexual Violence and Science Fiction

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Stories on Sexual Violence as “Thought Experiments”: Post-1990s Chinese Science Fiction as an Example

Xi Liu

Science fiction is a unique genre of “thought experiment” that can address different socio-political, cultural, and philosophical issues in the process of imagining the development of science and technology in relation to the human world. Post-1990s Chinese science fiction also actively engages with existing and potential crises of the world we are living in—social, ethical, existential, and psychological—and proposes hypotheses or imaginary solutions. Lots of thematic explorations and artistic innovations in current Chinese science fictional works are ignited by deep concerns with long-existing or newly emergent problems such as globalization, over-urbanization, ecological injustice, class distinction, gender inequalities, and so on. Among these issues, gender injustice and sexual violence remain one special thread for the “thought experiment” of science fiction, as this fantastical genre can serve as an “important vehicle for feminist thought” by representing “worlds free of sexism” or “worlds that move beyond gender” (Helford 291).

Facing the remaining patriarchal thinking influenced by thousands-year-long feudalism as well as resurgent masculinist logic in post-Mao China, different artistic works of contemporary China have produced sophisticated inquiries into different gender issues. Chinese sci-fi writers joined this trend to offer critical views on unequal gender conditions and sexual ideologies. More and more writers, especially those from younger generations, have begun to negotiate with gender stereotypes and to assert female autonomy and agency within their fantastical or speculative works. It has already been discussed by some scholars how post-1990s Chinese sci-fi writers offered bold imaginations of bodily transformation, changing gender roles, new sexual identities, and even a posthuman-feminist world (Liu; Cai; Ma et al.).  This article surveys various works of post-1990s Chinese science fiction that sharply render sexual violence and gender asymmetries. This survey serves as an introduction to this much-neglected research topic, showing potential avenues of engagement for future work.

There are several contemporary Chinese sci-fi writers who frequently thematize sexual oppression and violence, especially that suffered by women. Han Song (韩松, b. 1968), Chen Qiufan (陈楸帆, b. 1981), and Wu Chu (吴楚, b. 1984) have represented rape, kidnapping, killing, domestic violence, sexual harassment, and forced sterilization in their works. Those violent deeds are done to human, clone human, or cyborg bodies in the settings of the near or far future, exposing gender inequalities caused by male-dominating powers, with all the victims bearing the gender of “female.” While Chen Qiufan and Wu Chu use sexual violence as a lens for questioning the intersectional social injustice in contemporary China, Han Song’s works feature a kind of abstract, symbolist sexual violence for reflecting on how human society is structured. Two female sci-fi writers, Zhao Haihong (赵海虹, b. 1977) and Chi Hui (迟卉，b. 1984), have also adopted gender perspectives in their two stories about humanity’s interactions with prehistoric or extraterritorial civilizations. They both revealed one hidden side of sexual violence imbedded in the human world—epistemic violence marked by delegitimizing subjectivities and agency associated with femininity. This article will focus on the following questions: by representing sexual violence in quite different ways, concrete and abstract, realist and surrealist, historicist and de-historicist, what main agenda and concerns do these Chinese sci-fi works have? What relevant views on science and technology are expressed? Are ideas of humanism and posthumanism articulated and how? By exploring these questions, this paper aims to disclose the current gendered textual politics of these works and elucidate the emerging feminist writing practices in contemporary Chinese science fiction.

Representing sexual violence for questioning intersectional inequalities in contemporary China

Chen Qiufan contends that science fiction is “the biggest realism” in today’s China, as “it provides a window for imagining through its open realism, and for delineating a kind of reality that no mainstream literature has written about” (“Rethinking of sci-fi realism,” 38). Actually, the  term “sci-fi realism” (kehuan xianshi zhuyi, 科幻现实主义) has been proposed and discussed by several Chinese sci-fi writers, including Zheng Wenguang, Chen Qiufan, and Han Song since the 1980s, for exploring the role of science fiction in social comments or criticism in the context of contemporary China (Chen, “Rethinking of sci-fi realism”; Zheng). Waste Tide (Huangchao, 荒潮, 2013) by Chen Qiufan and The Happy You Gang (Xingfu de yougang, 幸福的尤刚, 2020) by Wu Chu are two representative science fiction texts that address the issue of sexual violence in sci-fi realist ways. These two works vividly show how different categories of oppression based on the rural-urban divide, class, and gender determine the intersectional nature of sexual violence in the context of China’s globalization and urbanization.

Chen’s Waste Tide is an important Chinese cyberpunk imagining of a technological dystopia engulfed by corrupt local government, patriarchal local lineage, and global capitalist companies. Region, class, and gender persist as unequal social distinctions in a near-future, technology-dominated society, represented most saliently by “Guiyu” (Silicon Island). Migrant workers from underdeveloped regions in China (including the female protagonist Xiaomi/Mimi), wretchedly work as a cheap labor force. “There are multilayered discriminations against Mimi. She is a female repressed by a patriarchal system. She is a waste girl, representing those who are stratified as low class and socially marginalized and exploited by the privileged people at the top of the social pyramid” (Zhou and Liu 107). All these social inequalities are not eased but conversely reinforced by new technologies. The sexual violence Xiaomi suffers is caused by the multiple social disctinctions and exclusions. After being subjected to beating, rape, confinement, and electric shocks, Xiaomi is transformed into a cold-blooded and formidable cyborg Xiaomi 1.  It is this evil female cyborg that becomes the central character signifying the technological dystopia challenged by the author.

Sexual violence against women is prevalent due to intertwining patriarchal powers of different kinds: rural and capitalist, structural and symbolic. In this story, male-centrism dominates social spaces as well as cyberspace through new technologies. One example from the story describes this misogynist environment of Guiyu. A video on rape circulating on an underground online forum supported by augmented reality technology is:

recorded in augmented reality glasses, with a strong first-person perspective, shaky, out of focus, but with an uncanny sense of immersion. . . . The first-person perspective technology was used to make everyone watching the video a rapist and experience the thrill of torture. (Chen, Waste Tide 165)

This sexual violence against women is transmitted to more people through the new information channel, and the male gaze is enhanced by the new communication technology. In this way, the writer cautions the readers against the possible collusion between patriarchy and technology. However, the cyborg Xiaomi 1 is finally defeated by the human Xiaomi’s remaining sense of morality. This positive ending symbolizes the victory of humanist values and ethics (Liu; Jiang).

The story of Wu’s The Happy You Gang is set in a remote village in “universe 046.” This village, although set in the near future, is still a male-dominated area where traditional ideas of female chastity and submissiveness are maintained. Due to the father’s genetic physical defect, villagers You Er and Niu Hongmei’s first two children die because of anal agenesis. The couple is encouraged to accept a new gene-editing technique to replace the problematic gene in the fetus with genes from other people without the defect. However, after the gene correction operation, the healthy baby, You Gang, is believed by others to be the son of another man and is called a “bastard.” You Er is defeated by the gossip and leaves his family. Niu Hongmei is sexually assaulted and verbally humiliated by villagers and ends up becoming a prostitute. When You Er returns, he violently abuses his wife for her supposed disloyalty: “You Er caught up with her from behind and yanked her hard by the hair, kicking her over and low again. You Er stomped on Niu Hongmei’s chest and asked her what the hell to do” (Wu 339–40).

The new biotechnology can help this couple give birth to a healthy baby, but can do nothing in breaking the traditional Chinese ethics of blood. It is this rural woman who ultimately bears the consequences of conflicts between modern technology and the remaining patriarchal ideas in the countryside. This reveals how difficult it is for socially marginalized groups including rural women and migrant workers to benefit from technological advancement under unequal social structures in China. The physical violence and mental trauma Niu Hongmei suffered push readers to think about how the development of new technologies may be overshadowed by entrenched sexist ideas and practices.

“To understand gender, then, we must constantly go beyond gender,” as “gender relations are a major component of social structure as a whole” (Connell 76). R. W. Connell reminds us not to discuss issues of gender/sex only within the framework of gender/sex but to regard them as integral parts of a larger social system. Pierre Bourdieu also calls our attention to the role that complicated structures of domination play in reinforcing violence. If the social conditions of the production of unequal power relations are not dismantled, then mere consciousness raising for the dominated is inadequate for ending violence (Bourdieu). Meanwhile, the perspective of “intersectionality” is an important analytical category for understanding violence, which emphasizes the intertwined structures of domination that produce racialized/classed/gendered/sexualized violence within nations (Abraham; Collins). With the help of these insightful perspectives, it can be seen that the thematization of sexual violence in the aforementioned two texts points to larger, intersectional social problems in contemporary China. Realist experiences of subaltern women who are constantly devalued and downgraded are used for revealing and reflecting on the resurgent regional, class, and gender inequalities along with rapid globalization and urbanization. Different subaltern women are imagined not to be empowered by scientific development and new technologies. Stories on sexual violence help to expose different hierarchical social orders and social justice, especially gender justice sought with the specific genre of science fiction.

Symbolizing sexual violence for reflecting on humanity and human society

Han Song is one of the leading sci-fi authors in China and is famous for his Kafkanistic, uncanny, and eerie writing style. His sci-fi works usually convey critical comments on the huge social changes and human cost incurred in post-Mao China. His story Regenerated Bricks (Zaishengzhuan, 再生砖，2010), for example, is a story about how the remains of human flesh after one earthquake helped China to conquer the universe, but criticizes the huge human cost in the rise of China; similarly, Subway (Ditie, 地铁，2010), is a story about people stuck in alienation, despair, and conflicts in fast-speed, public vehicles in order to comment on asymmetries between economic development and psychological wellbeing of ordinary people. Gender is used as key textual tropes for Han Song to signify dystopian post-human worlds and to express his deep reflections on humanity and society. This section discusses two sci-fi works by Han Song that deal with sexual violence.

“Dark Room” (Anshi, 暗室, 2009) is a dark and pessimistic story about a war for equal status and rights between the world of unborn fetuses and the world of adults. The former is a peaceful, contemplative, connected, and reflective community, trying to fight against the latter, which is totalitarian, violent, and patriarchal. Both sides are constructed as masculine, while women (mothers) remain subordinate and victimized in these masculine power struggles. No matter which part wins the war in the end, women (mothers) are manipulated and sacrificed.

It was mainly the decision of older men, because for young lives, only people of this age would not be matronly. In short, during that time, tough measures were taken in principle against every pregnant woman, and it was better to kill a thousand by mistake than to miss one. … Later, people resorted to more than just forced abortion. The resentment of society, which was like wildfire, was also spread against the mothers themselves. It seemed inevitable that mothers would always be unable to defend themselves in the event of a change, and that they would once again become victims in this man-led war. (Han 32)

The bio-politics of birth control are used in the story as an effective tool for male domination. In a surrealist way, this work vividly portrays how women’s bodies are manipulated for power in the story world, as an allegory of the gendered nature of power struggle in the reader’s world.

Similarly, “A Guide to Hunting Beautiful Women” (Meinü shoulie zhinan, 美女狩猎指南, 2014) also addresses the problem with male-dominated bio-technology. In the story, beautiful clones are created and put on an island for male consumption in a game called sex hunting, which recuperates the sexual abilities of men and restores their masculinity. After inventing this “game for true men and exercise for winner” (Han 277), this hunting club:

provides guests with a first-class beauty, not in a room but out in the wild. Women are constantly running like beasts, to be captured by the men themselves; the captured can be treated in any way, including rape. As women hold weapons in their hands, the men who are not capable of capturing them may be killed. In the face of danger, men can take extreme measures against women, including shooting them on the spot. (Han 277–78)

However, although this island is full of male predators raping and killing beautiful clones, it ultimately becomes a suitable place for female liberation. The beautiful clones form a community and enjoy autonomy in their daily life, especially the social relationships free of male-defined obligations.

This group of women live in an extremely pure way, where social roles like mother, housewife or professional woman disappear. Thus, hidden behind the bloody killing, isn’t it a new and highly promising human relationship? It is only here that women truly achieve their liberation. (Han 352)

In the end, the male protagonist, Xiaozhao, who came to the island to be stimulated, finally becomes frustrated because of the diversity and complexity of this “female world.” He castrates himself and embraces a “gender neutral” identity. The ending of the story is meaningful in its attempts to deconstruct gender binarism, which is arbitrary and violent.

Different from Chen Qiufan’s and Wu Chu’s works (which have a strong realist relevance to social transformations in China), Han Song’s dystopian post-human worlds have more symbolic meanings supported by his use of unruly language, cold tone, and non-realist imagery. Together, these writing skills create defamiliarizing effects and push readers to decipher the main concerns of these works. Similar to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours, rivalry, conflicts, and violence within human relations are rendered as gendered or sexualized. Using Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman’s perspective on how “violence is actualized—in the sense that it is both produced and consumed” (2000 2), we can see how these stories visualize that male subjectivity is constructed on the violent “othering” of female gender. Sexual violence is based upon the binary and hierarchical relationship between the masculine and the feminine. Hunting women for entertainment or social control is potentially symbolic of the organization of real human society, with women usually being exploited and objectified for the interests of men. Rather than historicized realities, the signifiers of “sexual violence” in Han’s works are more like an overall comment on the development of human civilization, which are male-centered.

Deconstructing epistemic violence in female-authored sci-fi works

Zhao Haihong and Chi Hui are two Chinese female writers who express strong feminist impulses in their sci-fi works. Both of them created fabulous stories about the communication and interaction between humans and beings from prehistory or outer space. Although there is no explicit plot of sexual violence in their works, they both show how gendered violence can be exerted epistemologically, such as delegitimating “knowledge” associated with femininity. In Feminist Science Fiction and Feminist Epistemology: Four Modes, Ritch Calvin argues, “The category of femininity, and the social and cultural traits associated with femininity in the West, have been discounted as contrary to knowledge and to reason or rationality, and, therefore, women qua women cannot claim knowledge or offer truth claims” (229). By imagining conflicts between humans and other forms of life, two stories by these female writers demonstrate a science fictional approach to how the normative way of understanding what is knowledge in the human world is both anthropocentric and masculinist.

“Jocasta” (Yi E Ka Si Da, 伊俄卡斯达, 1997) by Zhao Haihong is a story about a female scientist’s self-sacrifice for scientific experiment by serving as the surrogate mother of an embryo cloned from a prehistoric human body. Her female body is exploited while her love and affections are devalued as non-rational by other male scientists. The male collaborator of the female protagonist emphasizes her loss of “rationality” in the experiment:

Melanie, everything we do is for science; you must not get emotionally involved. I am in no way trying to exclude you from the experiment in order to enjoy the results alone. From beginning to end, you are the greatest contributor to this experiment. But, Melanie, you now harbor a motherly affection for this child—this prehistoric man—that will be harmful to our experiment because you will not be able to face him with a calm, rational, scientific mind. (Zhao 23)

The male scientist employs Melanie’s female body for conducting the experiment, but delegitimizes her motherly devotions and emotions. This is an implicit sexual violence in exploiting women’s bodies while disqualifying their subjectivities. Melanie resists this opinion with strong agency. She still develops a romantic relationship with this prehistoric man and accompanies him until his death, saving this man from becoming just the research object of a scientific experiment. The story challenges this idea of non-rationality by valorizing women’s experiences of connection, affection, and care as important values for scientific exploration. This work aims to break down the gendered and hierarchical value systems of emotion/reason and caring/transcendence in the context of scientific research.

Chi Hui’s “Nest of Insects” (Chongchao, 虫巢 2008) also addresses the gendered epistemic violence deeply rooted in the human world. She imagines a planet named Tantatula that has a harmonious symbiosis of all species based on equality and connection. But humans from Earth just want to colonize this planet for its natural resources, and they do not treat the lives of this planet as equal “intelligent beings” because of the matriarchal social structure of Tantatula.

For the creatures of Tantatula, life is divided into hatchling, child, and adult. In the hatchling stage we learn and we grow; in the child stage we give birth and we live; and in the adult stage we need to come to the nest, to change and grow in the resonant call of the nest and our bodies, and finally to become what you call a Tantatula giant worm and plunge into the universe—this is what we call the third season, the adult season. (Chi 62)

The racialized violence of colonization is deeply rooted in an epistemic violence justifying a series of male-dominated power structures. This violence is also gendered in that the matriarchal social system is despised and devalued from the masculinist perspective of the Earth colonizers. They refuse to understand the different social arrangements that have females as decision makers. Moreover, gender-based violence is normalized as part of masculinity for Earth colonizers. The epistemic and psychological violence has finally brought explicit violent actions including killing. However, these different forms of violence are questioned and resisted by the lives of this planet. One female resident from Tantatula expresses her doubts on the violent ideas and deeds by visitors from Earth:

I once wondered why a passing visitor would commit such a crime against us. Today I still wonder why a male would encourage his own son to commit crimes and violence, and then would commit his own tree to his son’s care? (Chi 60)

There is no need to be afraid of what you do not understand. This is not the monster you imagine in your mind, this is just the process of evolution of our Tantatula people. (Chi 62)

In the end, the male protagonist from the Earth begins to reflect on the anthropocentric and androcentric way of living and thinking of the Earth civilization, especially his belief in the “natural superiority” of humans.  “Through science-fictional imagination, the writer proposes a view that human species from Earth are just like well-protected children and have no idea about the adult world in outer space. At the end of the day, they must face the consequences of being self-centered, which is significantly exacerbated by technological advances” (Zhou and Liu 105). “Adult season” in the story could signify the deep connections with nature instead of segregation or exploitation of it, which is highly necessary for human society.

Calvin proposes that sci-fi works with feminist epistemology can “challenge the arbitrary division between rational and irrational; they value the rôle of the senses in knowledge validation; and they emphasize the importance of the body in producing and validating knowledge; they acknowledge the communal (subjects; discourses) over the individual” (237). Within the above two works, epistemic violence embodies different forms of knowledge production that deny the subjectivity of particular populations (women, extra-terrestrial). The epistemic violence is gendered in that “the social and cultural traits associated with femininity”(Calvin 229) are devalued while structural gender inequalities are maintained. These two female authors firstly expose and interrogate this violence in their stories and then explore complex forms of resistant subjectivities. They assert their political ideas by creating fantastical or utopian worlds in sharp contrast to the human world.

Conclusion

This paper surveys contemporary Chinese sci-fi authors who represent sexual/gender violence within the specific genre of science fiction. All the works discussed above presented utopian or dystopian worlds with diverse styles of cyberpunk, science-fiction realism or postmodernism. Multilayered forms of sexual violence as well as their complex effects are explored in their works. Centering on the tragic sufferings of sexual violence by subaltern women, sci-fi realist writers like Chen Qiufan and Wu Chu strongly question the existing, intertwined inequalities in terms of gender, class, and the rural/urban divide in post-Mao China. Han Song tactfully employs an abstract sexual violence in his post-modernist thematization of the unequal power relations in terms of how society is organized and male subjectivity constructed. Female authors like Zhao Haihong and Chi Hui effectively deconstruct the masculinist and violent ways of knowledge production and sanctions while exploring possibilities of feminist epistemology. All of these Chinese sci-fi writers set their human or post-human utopias and dystopias in a gendered environment in order to critique the present-day gendered power relations.

The specific genre of science fiction is viewed by Darko Suvin as “cognitive estrangement” for providing an alternative imaginary framework for the writer’s empirical world (373). Therefore, science fiction serves as a perfect platform for writers to launch their thought experiments of understanding, criticizing and creatively transforming the status quo. Through creating sci-fi works, the Chinese writers discussed in this paper all successfully stir the readers’ conventional or normative way of understanding gender/sex, pushing them to reflect on violence in current gender/sex system and to imagine new possibilities in gender relations/identities. Chen Qiufan and Wu Chu set their stories in near future China to blur the boundaries between harsh realities and fantasies; Han Song’s surrealist rendering of violent gender struggle and violence bring much insights through defamiliarization; Zhao Haihong and Chi Hui create alternative utopia structured by feminist epistemology and make readers to see world they are living in different angles. All of these sci-fi works become, in Suvin’ sense, “a diagnosis, a warning, a call to understanding and action, and-more important-a mapping of possible alternatives” (378) of/to the current male-centered and anthropocentrist ways of doing and thinking.

What’s more, Anna Gilarek proses two approaches of creating feminist science fiction: firstly an exaggerated method utilizing fantastical elements such as “invented worlds, planets, moons, and lands” for reflection on social problems, and secondly a more straightforward approach of “relying on realist techniques to convey the message about the deficiencies of our world and its social organization, in particular the continued inequality of women” (222). The above-discussed Chinese sci-fi writers have incorporated these approaches for problematizing different forms of sexual violence and probing into possible methods of negotiation and resistance. Their artistic explorations and philosophical probings are not just on China-specific issues, but point to problems in a global context. Feminist perspectives of using science and technology for social justice instead of reinforcing unequal power relations are actively explored in these texts. The feminist agenda of opposing male-centrism and anthropocentrism as well as multiple social inequalities are strongly asserted in their sci-fi works, which are all critical stances in this genre of “thought experiments.”

NOTES

[1] I use the collective pronoun we here because I hope my fellow writers, editors, and readers join with me in acknowledging the various material realities of sexual violence.

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Dr. Xi Liu (PhD HKU) is an Associate Professor at Department of China Studies, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Her main research fields are modern & contemporary Chinese literature and Chinese women’s studies. She is the author of Discourse and Beyond: Gender Representation and Subject Construction in 100 Years of Chinese Literature (Nanjing University Press, 2021).

Introduction to Sexual Violence and Science Fiction Symposium

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 3

Sexual Violence and Science Fiction

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Introduction to Sexual Violence and Science Fiction Symposium

Adam McLain

Sexual violence is a difficult topic to wrestle with because it not only spans literature, media, and culture, but also inhabits various bodies and existences. Its effect is widespread but also personal. It is not only sexual and not only violent but both; it crosses the boundaries between very personal parts of a human being—their sexual organs, their sexual arousal, and their sexual engagement—and harasses it, assaults it, and enacts violence against it. Sexual violence harms individuals and societies—from the initial trauma and the recovery required afterward, to the justice (or lack thereof) that can be provided for such an action, to rape culture and the prevalence of how our society teaches its communities to act and react to each other.

Science fiction—whether it be scientific in nature, or fantastical, or horrific, or speculative—has an effect on society and individuals as well. Through various literary tools, conceits, and tropes, readers discover, learn, and grow from these texts, bringing with them the world they inhabit and experiencing a world different than—yet somewhat similar to—their own. Science fiction acts as a tool that estranges us from issues, like rape culture and sexual violence, that have become so normalized and prevalent that a step back from real life into the science fictional universe is needed to see things in our world for how strange they really are. Science fiction has the potential to bring about great change because of what it does to culture and readers: it gives us hope, it opens our eyes, and it helps us look up to the stars and imagine a world different from the one we currently inhabit. The hope, then, is that these experiences influence our own lives to make a change in the world around us.

This is not to say that science fiction is the thing that will change the world and make it a sexually just and safe place; books are still books, inanimate objects that must be read and understood before they can influence change. It is individuals and communities who must work for that change. But that influence, that perspective change, that science fiction brings is what I hope for when considering the intersection of science fiction and sexual violence. I chose a symposium on the subject because I believe that science fiction can and will help us achieve a more just world by causing us to reflect on the kind of present and future we want to build. Science fiction is a tool that can influence people who can affect their communities and societies. By bringing together scholars who analyze and discuss various points of sexual violence in science fiction, I hope that their insights will bring science fiction into closer conversation with current efforts toward sexual justice, like the #MeToo Movement, and create an introductory space for those who wish to use their educational or community action space to combat rape culture.

The symposium begins with an overview of post-1990 Chinese science fiction, showing that Chinese authors are using the genre of science fiction to create thought experiments about sexual violence and feminist thought. Following Xi Liu’s overview, Eyal Soffer analyzes later texts in Frank Herbert’s Dune series, looking specifically at how Herbert portrayed women’s power and authority in relation to sexual dynamics and hierarchies. The symposium turns to dystopian stories next, with Athira Unni’s article discussing identity and hierarchy in Jennie Melamed’s Gather the Daughters (2017) and Ros Anderson’s The Hierarchies (2021), while Verónica Mondragón Paredes argues about the essentializing of masculinity in Virginia Bergin’s Who Runs the World? (2017) and Christina Sweeney-Baird’s The End of Men (2021). Turning from dystopia, the symposium considers horror, post-apocalypse, and space-faring science fiction, with Derek Thiess considering theories around sports in relation to the male body in Michael Swanwick’s “The Dead” (1996), Ryn Yee and Octavia Cade dismantling the logic of rape in post-apocalyptic stories, and Julia Lindsay looking at Octavia Butler’s Dawn (1987) in light of the #MeToo Movement. Leaving books and films, the symposium hones in on board and video games, with Dax Thomas discussing sex in two tabletop role-playing games, Pistol Packing Bondage Nuns from Dimension Sex (2021) and F.A.T.A.L. From Another Time, Another Land (2002); Kenzie Gordon debating whether the new Tomb Raider games (2009–2022) have an impetus of sexual violence; and Steph Farnsworth arbitrating fan conversations around bodily control in the Mass Effect series (2007–). Finally, the symposium ends with a reading of Kristin Cashore’s Bitterblue (2012) by Cheyenne Heckermann, taking our discussion into a young adult fantasy series that focalizes sexual violence.

While these texts deal with fictional literary conceits, such themes are inextricable from the real harm caused by sexual violence. We recognize those who have survived sexual violence perpetrated against their body, their community, or their society. [1] We acknowledge their pain, their trauma, and the effort it will take to heal—if healing comes, for it does not always. If survivors are reading this collection, know that we believe you and we envision a future for and with you that is better—better with justice, better with care, and better with peace. We thank you for engaging with our topics, and we hope we handled them with care. This topic seems like it will always be difficult to discuss, but we hope that through discussing it, we can come to better understand it in pursuit of a more sexually just world. It is our hope that, in many ways, science fiction will continue guiding us there.

NOTES

[1] I use the collective pronoun we here because I hope my fellow writers, editors, and readers join with me in acknowledging the various material realities of sexual violence.

Adam McLain researches and writes on dystopian literature, legal theory, and sexual ethics. He is currently a Harvard Frank Knox Traveling Fellow, studying twentieth-century dystopian literature and the legal history of sexual violence in the UK. He has a bachelor’s degree in English from Brigham Young University and a master of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School.

From the Editor

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 3

From the SFRA Review

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Summer 2022

Ian Campbell
Editor, SFRA Review

The heat wave that struck Western Europe and killed a couple of thousand people was different from other heat waves, not because of its lethality, and certainly not because of its singularity: heat waves will continue and only grow in intensity. What made this latest heat wave unusual was that it was the first heat wave to be given a name: Zoe. Just like hurricanes/typhoons, heat waves are now such a common part of our lived experience that we have engaged in the oddly human habit of naming them. Easier than overthrowing the oil companies, I suppose. The lived experience of an unevenly-distributed (and unevenly-dystopian) science fictional future/present is something inherently science-fictional, in that our reality is always already estranged by technological distortions, not least among them the algorithmic social media feeds that distort the thoughts of even people well aware of how these algorithms work and why.

In this issue, we have three primary perspectives on SF, in addition to the usual run of reviews of non-fiction, fiction and media. We have a group of short papers on various topics in our Features section. We have a group of papers derived from a conference addressing the medical humanities in the fantastic: perspectives on disability, trauma, autism and multiple embodiments. We also have our frequent contributor Adam McLain’s curated collection of papers on sexual violence in SF. Needless to say, readers of this last collection should be forewarned that some of the papers are likely to trigger or otherwise disturb by virtue of their topic and content, though of course none of them is intended to cause anxiety or suffering.

Please also investigate our call for papers on conservative/right-wing SF. We look forward to reading your perspectives on this all too influential discourse, as the continuing resurgence of right-wing values is one of the most puzzling (and least welcome) aspects of the science-fictionality of our contemporary world. And stay away from Zoe.

Call for Papers: Conservative/Right-Wing Science Fiction

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 4

Features

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Call for Papers: Conservative/Right-Wing Science Fiction

The Editorial Collective

Editor’s Note: We are extending the deadline for this symposium in order to further publicize it: we did not receive the volume of submissions this topic deserves, and encourage scholars of SF to consider submitting a proposal.

While the dramatic resurgence of conservative, right-wing, and openly fascist movements became more visibly mainstream once the Trump 2016 campaign began to develop momentum, the SF world had already been introduced to this growth in unapologetically right-wing discourse via the controversies surrounding the various Puppies movements and their attempts to hijack the major awards in the years immediately prior. With the dramatic success of right-wing movements in the years before and since 2016, we of the SF community are well-suited to explore the works and worlds of SF created by right-wing authors as well as authors estranging right-wing discourse.

The SFRA Review is interested in short papers addressing conservative/right-wing SF in all its manifestations: literature, film, other media, games. We are also interested in papers addressing the science-fictionality of right-wing discourse outside of explicitly SF media.

  • Papers should be from 3000-5000 words in length, with references in MLA style and few if any discursive footnotes.
  • Our primary areas of interest are how right-wing discourse manifests in SF, how SF estranges right-wing discourse and how 21st-century conservative discourse takes on a science-fictional aspect.
  • Papers by conservative writers, or papers that take a conservative stance on works or the genre of SF, are absolutely welcome. Racism, etc., will not be tolerated, but a good-faith conservative argument is well within the purview of this collection.
  • Papers that engage with conservative theorists or media figures are also absolutely welcome, insofar as the papers address the science-fictionality of their discourse. Again, good-faith argumentation is our goal here; so long as the argument of the paper itself does not engage in (e.g.) gender essentialism, we welcome papers that address such tropes in the writing/speech of conservative theorists or figures.
  • Papers that engage with conservative/reactionary approaches by fandom to changes in works, genres or the overall discourse of SF, broadly defined, are also welcome.
  • Metacommentary about (e.g.) the Puppies is welcome; however, we are more interested in literary analysis, in the broadest sense, of works of SF and/or right-wing discourse.
  • Much right-wing SF is of questionable literary quality: we are less interested in papers whose primary rationale is to point this out than we are in how and why right-wing tropes manifest or are estranged in works of right-wing SF or discourse.
  • Images should be at least 2000 pixels wide; given that this is literary analysis, the exceptions to copyright for fair use will apply.
  • Please send email to Ian Campbell (icampbell@gsu.edu) with the subject line SFRA Conservative SF and a brief description of your paper by 15 September 2022. Any other queries should be sent to this address, as well, with the same subject line.
  • Complete drafts are due 15 February 2023.
  • Edits will be due 15 April 2023.
  • Papers will be published in the Spring 2023 issue (53.2) on 01 May 2023.

We sincerely hope that you will be interested in what we feel is an important aspect of SF in these current times and encourage you to submit.

From the President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 3

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the President

Gerry Canavan

We now are getting dangerously close to my last note as president of SFRA! It has been my genuine honor to serve this organization in this way and I look forward to staying on in the role of immediate past president for the next three years. I really want to encourage anyone who is interested in taking on an enlarged service role in the group to respond to Keren Omry’s recent calls for candidates for election this fall (including the next secretary and the president, as well as the two new “at-large” positions) as well as a US-based candidate for the outreach and publicity officer. And if you have experience with grants and/or with investment, we would love to talk to you about the development office position; please reach out! Also note Ida Yoshinaga’s recent call for the “Support a New Scholar” grant—and, if you’re eligible, consider applying! If you have any questions about any of these opportunities, please, reach out.

Last month’s conference in Oslo was a true highlight of my time as president; I want to thank Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and the CoFutures collective for putting on a simply incredible event that I know people will be talking about for a long time. As discussed at the business meeting on the last day of the conference, the next two conferences for our group will be Dresden 2023 and Estonia 2024; I’m glad to say we have secured US sites for 2025 and 2026 and will publicly announce those as soon as we’ve worked out all the details. If you’re interested in hosting SFRA in 2027 or beyond, reach out! It’s truly never too early to start thinking about this.

As always, if you have an event you’d like SFRA to distribute through its media lists, or any other idea or concern about the work the organization is doing, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at gerry.canavan@marquette.edu. I’d love to hear from you. These are hard times, and getting harder, but, as I said in my little speech at the awards banquet, the people in this organization lift me up, and bring me hope.

From the Vice President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 3

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the Vice President

Ida Yoshinaga


Dear colleagues,

Thanks to all participants in our “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging” (DEIB) hybrid session, held on June 29 during our Oslo summer conference. We on the Executive Committee appreciate Simran, Sabiha, Athira, Founder, Aishwarya, Manuel, Ingvill, SC, Larisa, Tânia, Flip, Jaak, Kara, Steve, Candice, Sara, Andrew, Sarah, Priteegandha, Chris, and others who attended, including those who shared these critiques and suggestions:

  • This conference expanded the areas of representation compared to previous ones.
  • The yet-unbalanced dynamic between whiteness/white scholars (often speaking for/about other cultures) and marginalized/regional groups (Indigenous peoples, etc.) remains the “elephant in the room.” Power still tends to flow in 1 direction.
  • Accept conference papers/panels based in part on their DEIB balance issues; rethink paper-acceptance policy or conference-site proposal selection, by being more conscious of such issues.
  • Fund projects with hands-on approaches to sf in regional communities (e.g., those working with child readers in India).
  • Greater visual accessibility for presentations, with prepared subtitles or transcripts; or use the hybrid format to display papers’ words onscreen.
  • The antiracism workshops should not only deal with U.S.-based racism but also European and other forms; we could also focus on methodology such as addressing ethics of researchers’ positionality/intersectionality; or such as ethics of Indigenous literary research in Europe (etc.).
  • Appoint a careers-research officer and an equality/diversity/ inclusion officer. [Note: the EC decided to approach DEIB from many angles among various responsible charges, rather than hold 1 person responsible.]
  • Support networks of emerging scholars from around the world, especially the Global South (being done in Germany and in Canadian studies); also, networks of early-career scholars in Europe and the Americas.
  • Conference format marginalizes online participants. Facilitators should engage all participants including virtual ones. Greater inclusion in webinars may help online attendees feel less lonely, more engaged. [Note: In Europe, there are privacy issues with some online formats; signed author forms, however, might aid in this, and help address the question of why not distribute emails of all presenters?]
  • Address larger question, “What is science fiction?,” from the perspective of different global populations.
  • The sheer power of one keynote (Laura Ponce) unapologetically giving her talk in Spanish was appreciated.
  • Consider providing child care (accessibility). [Note: Other conferences have found this issue tricky.]
  • Give attendees the choice of 10- or 20-min. papers.
  • Volunteer positions include conference committees and awards committees; however, compensation is an issue many.
  • More formal mentorship is desired esp. for BIPOC folk.
  • Better time zones needed for the bulk of the sessions.
  • A roundtable, not of regular SFRA committee members, but of others, to discuss careers research and/or DEIB issues, might be a good idea.
  • A Counter Space and a Keynote panel would be helpful, too.
  • Join in on a global-sf translation publication project which includes fandom-generated works, put together by Larisa Mikhaylova (larmih@gmail.com) towards facilitating diversity in the field.

Keep sharing your ideas,
Ida Yoshinaga, VP

Review of Hunting by Stars

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 3

Fiction Reviews

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Review of Hunting by Stars

Jeremy Carnes

Dimaline, Cherie. Hunting by Stars. Abrams, 2021.

Content Warning: This novel and review discuss Residential Schools in Canada, which may be distressing or triggering for some readers. It also contains some spoilers for The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline.

Hunting by Stars is the highly anticipated follow up to Cherie Dimeline’s (Métis) 2017 novel The Marrow Thieves. Both novels tell the story of a dystopian Canada after people lose the ability to dream. A lack of dreams eventually leads to a lack of sleep and, by extension, a fundamentally changed society. However, in the midst of collapse, settlers in Canada learn that Indigenous people are still actively dreaming; in an effort to determine why Indigenous peoples still have access to their dreams, the Canadian government develops centers to imprison, study, and experiment on Indigenous individuals. The system is based on the residential schools common in the 19th and 20th centuries, where Indigenous youth were separated from their communities and cultures, had their hair cut, and were violently “educated” according to Western cultural standards. In fact, the Native characters throughout both books refer to each of these centers as schools; some of them were built atop the bones of the old residential schools, themselves covering the bones of Indigenous youths. Settler society and systems of power repeat themselves again.

While The Marrow Thieves introduces its readers to a cadre of characters that comprise a found family as they run from recruiters, soldiers sent to capture Indigenous people to take them to the schools, Hunting by Stars focuses more on the violent settler system itself. In many ways, this is a book about the ways settler colonial education extends tendrils into young Indigenous minds in an effort to drive out their communities and cultural ontologies. Of course, it is equally about the violence enacted upon Indigenous peoples in general to extract seemingly necessary resources, in this case dreams.

In The Marrow Thieves, readers follow Frenchie, a Métis teenager, as he watches his brother get kidnapped by recruiters. That same brother, Mitch, returns in Hunting by Stars as a brainwashed worker for the settlers in the schools. As Frenchie continues to resist the violent invasions into his mind and body, Mitch continually reminds him of the ways that the school’s program helped him and how it will help Frenchie and others. After all, as Mitch admits, it’s better to be working for the schools than to be killed in them. Throughout the novel, Frenchie must toe the line between working for the schools as an act and becoming conditioned to believe the worst in his communities because of the school’s violent indoctrination, a balancing act made poignant by his found family outside the school and his brother inside urging him toward assimilation.

The school, the stand-in for the systemic oppression of Indigenous communities, doles out violence again and again as the program works to keep “residents” calm and obedient. In some of the most difficult passages from either book, Hunting by Stars describes torture designed to claw into the psyche of “residents” and consume them from the inside out. As Frenchie undergoes much of this torture, his hopes and dreams, fears and desires are laid bare as he confronts the traumas he’s faced and the utter loneliness he is made to feel through complete isolation. The system and the individuals who design and run it understand that a central goal of the program must be driving a wedge between “residents” and their families and communities. Many of Frenchie’s strengths in The Marrow Thieves are found in his family; his weaknesses are exploited in Hunting by Stars when he is separated from them.

While Frenchie’s perspective was the sole one in The Marrow Thieves, Hunting by Stars cycles through the perspectives of various characters, many of whom readers already know. Miigwans (Miig), the stand-in father figure for Frenchie and his partner Isaac take the found family away from the recruiters to protect the others while Rose, Frenchie’s love interest, begins the journey to the nearest school to try to rescue Frenchie. For tension’s sake, she is accompanied by Derrick, another boy around her age who is also vying for her affections.

Thus, much like its predecessor, Hunting by Stars is a book about communal connection. It examines the search for connection against the power of huge systems: settler colonialism, capitalism, and nationalism. It explores the fallout of violently forced disconnection. In all of this, it never forgets that systems are maintained by people and people are blinded by systems. In as much as systems are maintained, they are often done so through a process of blinding: a skewing of knowledge or understanding, a cloaking of truth, a redirection of desire. Oppressed communities then come to serve the larger system that continually keeps them oppressed; this is most clear in the character of Mitch.

Throughout these broad conversations that examine the social systems dictating our lives, Hunting by Stars considers local levels of relationality and oppression. From alliances found in the most unexpected of places to the appropriation of Indigenous cultures by New Agism in the time of dreamlessness, Dimaline takes particular care to show that love and demoralization both come in the closest of spaces. She also makes sure that we continually remember that loss happens here as well–marking it as personal, bodily as much as it is communal and collective.

While this particular novel, and its predecessor, might see most use in Indigenous literature or science fiction courses, there is applicability broadly through the analogous ways this novel gestures toward the historical backdrop of settler colonialism in Canada and the United States. One of the best pedagogical applications lies in the central metaphor of the novel itself—residential schools in Canada. Both The Marrow Thieves and Hunting by Stars are young adult novels that circle around the generational trauma caused by the residential school system and the ways by which Western education has had deleterious effects on Indigenous communities broadly. From the specifics of the residential school system to the broader connections across settler colonial policies, Indigenous language revitalization, and communal ceremony and connection, Hunting by Stars could play a pivotal role in many different cultural or historical studies courses.

At its very foundation, then, Hunting by Stars is a book about resistance and remembering. As Miig notes, “They never win when we remember.” The act of remembering and connecting is both about resisting and building a world that looks better than the one that Frenchie, Rose, and the others are living in now. Centrally, the book returns to the responsibility of ancestors—those that came before and will come after. Dimaline returns to the central mantra: “Sometimes you risk everything for a life worth living, even if you’re not the one who’ll be alive to live it.” In the end, community, language, and land are what matter fundamentally.

Jeremy M. Carnes is a recent graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Central Florida. He is working on his first book on comics by Indigenous creators and the affordances of comics as a visual medium for considering land-based practices by Indigenous communities. He is also co-editing a collection titled The Futures of Cartoons Past: The Cultural Politics of X-Men: The Animated Series with Nicholas E. Miller and Margaret Galvan. He is reviews editor for Studies in American Indian Literature.

Review of Final Fantasy VII Remake

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 3

Media Reviews

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Review of Final Fantasy VII Remake

Lúcio Reis-Filho

Final Fantasy VII Remake. Square Enix, 2020.

Fifteen years after first being announced at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and twenty-three years after the original game’s debut, the long awaited Final Fantasy VII Remake was released. The classic FFVII is considered groundbreaking as it paved the way for other JRPGs outside of Japan, and it was responsible, along with anime, for making local pop culture take off in the global market. According to Matt Alt, FFVII injected “a megadose of Japanese sensibilities” into the American mainstream, including the characters with big eyes and spiky hair, the manga-style melodrama, the androgynous heroes, and the very idea that games could be profound in so many ways.

FFVII was remarkably innovative in the late 1990s, as Pablo González Taboada’s book on the franchise and the Vol. 2 of Dark Horse’s Final Fantasy Ultimania Archive both recall. The game’s basic concept, drawn from the cyberpunk subgenre, presents an industrial world of highly advanced technology in contrast to deep inequality and humanity in decline. With high-tech vehicles, garments, locales and other cyberpunk motifs, the city of Midgar lays its roots in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and later futuristic urban landscapes as depicted in Blade Runner (1982) and Akira (1988). An exponent of cyberpunk storytelling, FFVII addresses late capitalism, existential dilemmas, psychological disorders, identity crisis, climate change, and class struggle. There are also nods to steampunk retrofuturism from previous games in the franchise, all reshaped for a more dieselpunk version. Biopunk themes are also relevant, such as the plot of the genetic modification that Shinra’s soldiers undergo.

Since its debut, FFVII has inspired countless other games, spin-offs, animated shorts, and a CGI film. What fans wanted most, however, was a remake, which was finally released in 2020. Far beyond introducing FFVII to new generations, the main goal of the project was to create a “new and nostalgic” experience for longtime fans. Thus, the Remake captures a broader sense of nostalgia in a context where a range of disparate cultural texts return to be explored for their intrinsic nostalgic value; at the same time, it rebuilds game systems to fit contemporary tastes.

Being the first installment in a series focused on recreating the classic game, the Remake only covers FFVII’s first act. The premise is the same: a group of heroes tries to save the world from capitalist exploitation. Players control the mercenary Cloud Strife, who joins the eco-terrorist group AVALANCHE in its resistance against Shinra, a megacorporation that is harvesting the planet’s energy to feed an industrial society and generate cutting-edge technology. However, the Remake deepens characters’ development, recreating them with updated visuals. The new model for Cloud has more nuance, with the handsome, androgynous, sensitive hero reframing and deconstructing the heteronormative masculinity archetype. Cloud’s effeminate features echo the archetypal images of androgynous male beauty, which Yumiko Iida relates to the visually attractive male idols of contemporary Japanese youth culture. This topic invites scholarly discussion on the “feminization of masculinity” and the androgynous male ideal of JRPG (and anime) heroes, especially in the Final Fantasy franchise.

Social criticism converges with climate justice in both FFVII and the Remake. According to Stephen K. Hirst, the classic game has inspired an entire generation of climate activists, including members of Greenpeace. It harshly denounces the savage jaw of capitalism, the power and monopoly of megacorporations, environmental degradation, and social inequality. More than two decades after FFVII’s debut, the criticism has not lost its relevance and is gaining momentum as a driving force in the environmentalism agenda in times of global warming. The Comic Book Resources noted how the social issues raised by the game are even more relevant today than they were in 1997. Following this argument, Dani Di Placido has drawn parallels between the game’s events – Shinra as a predatory force and the meteor’s approaching – and contemporary issues such as climate change, environmental catastrophes, economic collapse, and the COVID-19 pandemic. As a critique of the Anthropocene, Final Fantasy VII Remake could be of scholarly interest to environmental fiction and climate fiction scholars, since they often intersect in speculative fiction studies.

WORKS CITED

Alt, Matt. Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2020.

Final Fantasy Ultimania Archive. Vol. 2. Milwaukie: Dark Horse Comics, 2018.

Gramuglia, Anthony. “Final Fantasy VII’s Story Is More Meaningful Today Than in 1997”. Comic Book Resources, June 22, 2019. Accessed 6 July 2022.      https://www.cbr.com/final-fantasy-viis-story-relevant-today/

Iida, Yumiko. “Beyond the ‘feminization of masculinity’: transforming patriarchy with the ‘feminine’ in contemporary Japanese youth culture”. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, v. 6, 2005, pp. 56-74. Accessed 10 July 2022. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1462394042000326905

Hirst, Stephen K. “How Final Fantasy VII radicalized a generation of climate warriors”. Ars Technica, 29 July 2021. Accessed 6 July 2022. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/how-final-fantasy-vii-radicalized-a-generation-of-climate-warriors/

Placido, Dani Di. “In Our Sci-Fi Dystopia Of 2020, ‘Final Fantasy VII’ Feels More Timely Than Ever”. Forbes, April 5, 2020. Accessed 6 Jul. 2022. https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2020/04/05/in-our-sci-fi-dystopia-of-2020-final-fantasy-vii-feels-more-timely-than-ever/

Taboada, Pablo González. Final Fantasy: la leyenda de los cristales. Palma de Mallorca: Dolmen, 2013.

Lúcio Reis-Filho is a Ph.D. in Media Studies, film critic, filmmaker and historian specializing in the intersections between cinema, history and literature, with focus on the horror and science fiction genres. He writes book, film and game reviews, and is coordinator of Projeto Ítaca (https://projetoitaca.com.br/), a Brazilian educational website devoted to the tropes and representations of mythology in the media. His research and academic interests are essentially interdisciplinary, as they cover Cinema, Visual Arts, History, Comparative Literature and Game Studies.

Review of Don’t Look Up

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 3

Media Reviews

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Review of Don’t Look Up

Steven Holmes

McKay, Adam, director. Don’t Look Up. Netflix, 2021.

“Dr. Mindy, I hear you. I hear you,” President Orlean (Meryl Streep) says after Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) emphasizes that a comet racing toward earth will be an apocalyptic event. This scene is a critical point in both the film and audience reception of the film, as Streep’s Orlean seems indebted to the trappings of the Trump presidency, even though this specific line seems to more evoke the Bush presidency. The line echoes Bush’s “I hear you” line during the Bullhorn Speech at ground zero after 9/11. In such a moment, the film clashes between Saturday Night Live-style direct political commentary, and the attempts of the film to push its critique and satire into a broader reflection on 21st century political norms and discourse.

Adam McKay’s apocalyptic black comedy set records for streaming on Netflix. Apocalyptic black comedy has become its own sub-genre, with iterations going back at least to Dr. Strangelove (1964). Like Shaun of the Dead (2004), Don’t Look Up acts as a comment on capitalism, complacency, and the power of denial and indifference. But the closest tonal analogue may be 2013’s This is the End, an apocalyptic black comedy that used as its chief form of irony the discord between celebrity personas and actual personality. Don’t Look Up is particularly focused on the interplay between celebrity persona and personal politics both in the dramatic narrative and in the production of the film. The individual conflict and character arcs for the film protagonists—DiCaprio’s Dr. Mindy and PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence)—centers around these scientists suddenly being thrust into the limelight, and the differing ways they respond to their newfound celebrity. This is contrasted with bit parts, such as the arc of celebrity Riley Bina (Ariana Grande) who goes from overshadowing the comet in the news with her personal life to encouraging people to “look up” through her songs. Behind the scenes, lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio had significant control over the script of the film;      DiCaprio, who produced and promoted the film Before the Flood (2016), a documentary on climate change, has used his celebrity status to actively advocate on behalf of the issue of climate change. Don’t Look Up is a meditation on the role of celebrity in shaping political issues, starring an actor who uses their celebrity to shape political issues.

This is not the first narrative to use a comet or celestial body as a foil for political reflection. In H. G. Wells’“The Star” (1896), the near-miss of a comet forges a new brotherhood among men. In W. E. B. Du Bois’ “The Comet” (1920) the cataclysm of New York serves as a pretext to explore race relations. The narrative overtones of these stories seem in line with many apocalyptic narratives, where dramatic disturbances in organized human life allow for the re-examination or re-organization of human society. But the narrative that Don’t Look Up most directly evokes is the 1998 film Armageddon, with its celebration of heroic blue-collar oil drillers who absurdly end up more fitted for saving the world than astronauts. Don’t Look Up is not a direct parody of Armageddon (indeed, it also is drawing heavily from Deep Impact [1998]), but it doeshave a brief arc where it telegraphs the Armageddon plot structure. Orlean brings in Benedict Drask (Ron Perlman), a casually racist parody of Bruce Willis’s hero of Armageddon, to pilot a spaceship and use nukes to blow up the comet. That is, until the plot is foiled by Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), an amalgam of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who in trying to profit off the comet dooms earth to annihilation.

Despite its viewpoint characters both being scientists, Don’t Look Up is not interested in the science behind astronomy or astrophysics. The locus of its exploration of technology is less on the exigence of the comet, spaceships, and nukes, and more on the capacity to exchange in rational-critical debate and the functionality of the state. Unlike Deep Impact, where nukes are detonated but fail to completely offset the comet (only for a spaceship to fly in and use even more nukes to save the day), it seems like in Don’t Look Up the original plan to offset the comet would have succeeded had the plan not been undermined by Isherwell and his desire to profit off the comet. In turn, President Orlean’s capitulation to Isherwell highlights the extent that greed and corruption can lead to the full-scale agency capture of the state by privatized interests. In essence, the film suggests that the mechanical technology to solve largescale problems may exist, but it is the social technologies of democratic government and public discourse that are failing.  

Although the comet is a metaphor for climate change, the discourse surrounding it has clear parallels in the Covid-19 pandemic. In a historical survey, Don’t Look Up could be positioned as one of the most direct comments on the Covid-19 pandemic (and state responses to the pandemic) that was written, produced, and released during the pandemic itself. It is probable that in creating literary histories both of science fiction and apocalyptic narrative, Don’t Look Up serves as a compelling touchstone piece indicating at least some of the concerns of the post-pandemic era: collective denial in populism, the capacity of institutions to handle emergent issues, the agency capture of state institutions by privatized interests, and the totality of the warping of popular discourse around celebrity. Likewise, the strength of the film is encapsulated in the conceit of its title, where the president begins to advocate the public “don’t look up” (don’t acknowledge the comet) in a way that evokes how conspiratorial ideas can be intermixed and interwoven with both political and financial interests. Furthermore, in its interplay with Armageddon, Don’t Look Up emphasizes the cynicism and hopelessness of contemporary mass media entertainment in one of the sharpest possible contrasts to the optimism of the 1990s. To that extent, Don’t Look Up is a film that is highly productive when considered in relief to historical and literary histories.

Dr. Steven Holmes is a lecturer at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, where he is currently finishing a book project entitled Exploding Empire: Imagining the Future of Nationalism and Capitalism. His publications include articles in Studies in the Fantastic, The Written Dead: The Zombie as a Literary Phenomenon, War Gothic in Literature and Culture, and Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Popular Fantasy. He teaches classes on argumentative writing, science fiction, fantasy literature, digital art, and Shakespeare.

Review of The Witcher, Season 2

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 3

Media Reviews

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Review of The Witcher, season 2

Cait Coker

The Witcher (Season 2). Created for television by Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, based on the novels by Andrzej Sapkowski. Sean Daniel Company, 2021.

The Netflix television series The Witcher is primarily based on the novels by Andrzej Sapkowski (published in Poland from 1994 to 1999, and translated to English from 2007 to 2017), though the second season abruptly introduces elements from the popular video games created by CD Projekt Red from 2007 to 2015. The books are a political parable of Eastern European history; they utilize the language of eastern European genocide and the Holocaust—pogroms, concentration camps, political putsches, etc.—to discuss genocide, totalitarian and fascist governments, and political resistance bluntly and unsparingly. The games keep certain plot elements but scale back the political context significantly while greatly expanding character stories and arcs, thus making the television series its own unique hybrid creation. (Incidentally, and with Sapkowski’s participation, Netflix has also created a prequel anime film, The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf (2021), and a forthcoming prequel miniseries, The Witcher: Blood Origin (2022) to expand further on the world of the franchise.)

The second season of The Witcher picks up shortly after the first season concluded, with the dual protagonists Geralt of Rivia and Ciri finally meeting. Geralt is a Witcher, a genetically modified and mutated (and sterile) human trained to hunt and slay monsters, with an extended lifespan and enhanced healing, strength, and agility. Ciri is a refugee princess in hiding after the violent invasion of her kingdom by the Nilfgaardians, an expanding imperial force, and the murder of her family, as well as a cursed figure of prophecy. The first season of the television show revolved around the question of monstrosity: what indeed, is a monster, and when must it be killed? The eight episodes return to this question repeatedly, and often with the answer that humans are worse monsters to one another than creatures of magic ever can be. Season two returns to this question by digging into the political parables of the novels, with plots touching on revisionist histories, genocides historical and contemporary, and modes of political resistance. The character of Jaskier, for instance, Geralt’s troubadour friend and a figure of comic relief in both books and games, becomes a tortured political prisoner after running an underground operation to spirit people to safety from the violent rule of the Nilfgaardians. His role of the poet speaking truth with popular songs that put him in prison speaks to a long tradition of Polish poetry specifically as well as to the ways that art makes its own records of war and abuses. Geralt rescues him from prison, putting Geralt himself—who, as a Witcher, is ostensibly nonpolitical—into the fray as well. This is an interesting shift from the books, where Jaskier’s popular prestige usually lands him in safe space; both texts emphasize that it is the bard’s own choice to put himself in danger for his friends and their cause.

A frequent criticism of the first season was the confusing narrative structure: its eight episodes were narrated using nonlinear storytelling (effectively foreshadowing much later events in the books, should Netflix choose to renew the series for enough seasons), a trait which is alluded to in a joke about Jaskier’s singing storytelling in episode four. This second season is much less episodic as it adapts much of the material of Blood of Elves, the first novel in the series pentology (the first season being primarily drawn from the short stories collected in The Last Wish), which details Geralt’s training of Ciri and their eventual reunion with the sorceress Yennefer, sometime lover of Geralt and eventual mentor to Ciri. It also introduces the characters of the Voleth Meir, a Baba Yaga-esque demon original to the show, and the Wild Hunt, spectral figures from the games. The “Conjunction of the Spheres” that is often referenced in all franchise texts is not elaborated on in the novels, but explicated here as the specific traveling of beings across multiple worlds via interdimensional portals. Humans, then, are not just invaders of a new continent as a metaphor for real world colonization and conflicts, but they are invaders of a whole new world.

Geralt is always presented as other, as is Ciri, despite their able white bodies. In the second episode of the season, Ciri and Geralt discuss the history of the Witchers; she asks, anxiously, if he was attacked because he was “different.” Difference lies at multiple intersections here: the genetics that set them apart—Geralt being genetically-engineered while Ciri carries “the blood of Elves” that makes her both magically powerful and socially persecuted—and the social structures that endorse hierarchies of social and cultural value with nonhumans (whether Elves or Dwarves) at the bottom. Elves are coded both as indigenous peoples native to lands that are being encroached upon by human invaders and as Jewish, with scenes that invoke Passover, including a city filled with the anguished cries of families finding their magically murdered babies. Ciri is also structured as sexually different with her imitations of the sorceress Triss, foreshadowing the queer relationships that appear in the novels. The sorceress Yennefer, too, is coded as monstrous through her own sterility and the often selfish choices that she makes. All three characters are socially punished for their differences, but consistently prove themselves to better people than the humans who choose to torment them.

It is worth noting that Andrzej Sapkowski is the second most-translated SFF author after Stanisław Lem. If Lem’s work is preoccupied with failures of communication, memory, and trauma, then Sapkowski’s work finds itself in found families amid immense geopolitical unrest. Geralt, Ciri, Yennefer, and Jaskier are a chosen family trying to survive a world that is evocative of the worst parts of the Holocaust, World War II, and the Cold War. Airing only weeks before the uproar over the censorship and book banning of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in Tennessee as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, The Witcher presents its viewers with stories that grapple with these newly hot-button issues, showing that history not only repeats itself but is only as fantastical as the next retelling.

Cait Coker is Associate Professor and Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work is located at the intersections of gender, genre, and publishing, and her essays have appeared in journals such as Foundation, Transformative Works and Cultures, and The Seventeenth Century, among others.