The Emergence of Bujold Studies

This introductory essay provides the context for the present volume, establishing Lois McMaster Bujold as a multiple award-winning writer of science fiction and fantasy worthy of scholarly attention; providing an overview of extant scholarship; and identifying the twin aims of the book, to extend scholarship on Bujold’s fantasy novels, and to account for the wealth of cultural production inspired by Bujold’s corpus (e.g. fan fiction, fan discussion or meta, and the GURPS: Vorkosigan role-playing game in depth). The essay concludes by identifying gaps that might be fruitfully explored in ‘Bujold Studies’: perspectives from Indigenous science fiction studies on The Sharing Knife series; critical engagement with wider scholarship on race in sf; analysis of artworks inspired by Bujold’s writing, both ‘official’ cover art and fan art; and comparative analysis of her reception beyond Anglophone countries, particularly the immense fannish engagement from Eastern Europe.

Sideways in Time

This book is the first collection of scholarly essays on alternate history in over a decade and features contributions from a mixture of major figures and rising stars in the field of science fiction studies. Alternate history is a genre of fiction which, although connected to the genres of utopian, dystopian and science fiction, has its own rich history and lineage. With roots in the writings of ancient Rome, alternate history matured into something close to its current form in the essays and novels of the nineteenth century. In more recent years a number of highly acclaimed novels have been published as alternate histories, by authors ranging from science fiction bestsellers to Pulitzer Prize-winning literary icons. The success and popularity of the genre is reflected in its success on television with original concepts being developed alongside adaptations of iconic texts. This important collection of essays seeks to redress an imbalance between the importance and quality of alternate history texts and the available scholarship and critical readings of texts, providing chapters by both leading scholars in the field and rising stars. The chapters in this book acknowledge the long and distinctive history of the genre whilst also revelling in its vitality, adaptability, and contemporary relevance, with many of the chapters discussing late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century contemporary fiction texts which have received little or no sustained critical analysis elsewhere in print.

How Dumb Are Big Dumb Objects? OOO, Science Fiction, and Scale

This article considers the potential intersections of object-oriented ontology and science fiction studies by focusing on a particular type of science-fictional artifact, the category of ‘Big Dumb Objects.’ Big Dumb Objects is a terminology used—often quite playfully—to describe things or structures that are simultaneously massive in size and enigmatic in purpose: they stretch the imagination through both the technical aspects of their construction and the obscurity of their purpose. First used to designate the subjects of several science fiction novels written in the 1970s, Big Dumb Objects (often called BDOs) have been understood in terms of science fiction’s enduring interest in the technological sublime and the transcendental. While object-oriented ontology has often turned to science fiction and weird fiction for inspiration in rethinking the possibilities inherent in things and their relations, it has not considered the implications of BDOs for a theory of the object more broadly. The goal of this article is to consider how extreme size and representations of scale in science fiction can help expand an understanding of the object along lines that are similar to those pursued by object-oriented ontology, especially Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobjects.

Introduction to Part II

Another brief interlude presents a brief description of the second part of the book, the emphasis of which is on the tension between individual athletes and the systems in which they perform. Once again, brief mention is made of the wider implications for this study to science fiction studies more generally. Particular emphasis is on systemic thinking in sf studies.

Introduction to Part I

This brief essay clarifies the central theses outlined in the introduction and places them in the wider context of science fiction studies. Emphasis here is on the greater critical attention to embodiment in contemporary science fiction studies and the need for an approach that is both intersectional and biopsychosocial. This discussion includes an analysis of the 2017 film Life.

Science Fiction Worlding and Speculative Sex

Chapter 4 extends part 2’s analysis of queered and gendered black futurities to the realm of racialized queer masculinity, focusing on the work of Samuel R. Delany. His writing provides a bridge between the discourse of “world-making” developed in utopian theories of queer performance and the idea of “world-building” common in science fiction studies. Delany’s fiction shows how the narrative tactics of science fiction, a genre whose most popular literary and media versions have tended to proffer timelines reliant on unmitigated heterosexuality, can turn against assumptions that the future must be straight, or at least arrived at through heterosexual reproductive logics. In Dhalgren (1974) and Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand (1984), speculative iterations of 1970s and 1980s public sex cultures use genre tropes to reimagine sexual and racial temporalities in response both to the histories of enslavement and to the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.

Australian Aboriginal SF – Blending Genre and Literary Fiction: A Review of Futuristic Worlds in Australian Aboriginal Fiction by Iva Polak

The fact that Iva Polak’s monograph Futuristic Worlds in Australian Aboriginal Fiction is the first volume in Peter Lang’s World Science Fiction Studies series, edited by Sonja Fritzsche, is symbolic of the actual novelty and relevance of Polak’s work. It is, in fact, the first book-length study in English dedicated to the analysis of Australian Aboriginal fiction from the point of view of the theory of the fantastic.