European Journal of American Culture - North American Speculative Fiction and the Political, Sept 2022

The article is a case study of James Blish’s short story adaptation of the Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS) episode ‘Balance of Terror’, originally a pacifist narrative focused on tragic choices forced upon individuals. The episode is notable not only for introducing Romulans to the franchise but also for painting them in an unexpectedly sympathetic light as the extratextual power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union is criticized by means of cognitive estrangement. The hegemonic tenor of the submarine film subgenre the episode emulates becomes quickly subverted as both sides of the conflict are given a voice, and the eventual victory of Captain Kirk is painted almost as a moral defeat. Blish’s adaptation is a testimony to the misinterpretation of TOS. Blish did not translate an SF story into another medium but rewrote it into a war narrative while not changing any major events, taking the episode at face value and apparently not noticing the allegory on which it was founded. This case serves as an example of how easily a subversive narrative can be co-opted the moment genre is misidentified.

In Stephanie Saulter’s 2013 debut novel Gemsigns, a pandemic known as ‘the Syndrome’ has wiped out most of humanity. To cope with the sudden loss of most of their work force, bioengineering companies have modified human genes to create genetically altered workers, the so-called gems. For more than a hundred years, gems have been the property of the company that created them, but as the gems have become more and more advanced in their cognitive skills, calls for their emancipation arose, until gem enslavement is eventually abolished. This article reads Gemsigns as a warning against how bioengineering can be employed to reaffirm racialized hierarchies with racialization working as a technology for oppression. The enslavement of gems does not merely replace older forms of economic exploitation of oppressed groups but is firmly rooted in real-world power structures, thereby addressing the exceptional vulnerability of marginalized people to be commodified by technological progress instead of profiting from it. I further suggest that Gemsigns uses its post-abolition setting to illustrate that the struggles for equality of formerly enslaved people do not simply end with the official abolishment of enslavement.

After giving a short insight into the ambivalent relationship between science fiction (SF) and futurology, this article sheds light on the current trend of what can be called science-fictional scenario writing, focusing on the publications of the Center for Science and the Imagination at the Arizona State University. The stories published in projects, such as Hieroglyph, the Climate Fiction short story contest Everything Change or the Tomorrow Project, are indistinguishable from conventional SF short stories. However, the frameworks of these projects share a certain futurological ambition. Also, they seek to enable the readers and writers of these stories to actively shape possible futures. In search for a label for this specific text form, Rebecca Wilbanks aptly coined the term ‘incantatory fictions’. This article explores the nature, the self-understanding und the practices of these speculations, fabulations and incantations by considering the metatexts of the afore-mentioned publications and by talking to people who work at the interface between SF and futurology.

The alternate realities and imagined futures of speculative fiction provide a rich source of material through which to interrogate our views of history, elucidate our contemporary cultural milieu and chart what we see as possible. This article attends to the politics of Indigenous–Settler relations through an engagement with speculative fiction. Spatially and temporally located in the country now called Canada in the twenty-first century, the work centres on a conversation between the author, a Settler Canadian, and writer, playwright and humourist, Drew Hayden Taylor, from the Curve Lake First Nation. A full transcript of the conversation, edited for length and clarity, is provided. In it, Taylor describes his speculative writing practice and engagement with Indigenous futures. The article concludes with the author’s reflection on the process of decolonization, situating engagement in Indigenous futurisms as a step in this process.

Review of: Black Trans Feminism, Marquis Bey (2021)

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 304 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47801-781-3, h/bk, $104.95

Review of: Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State, Moon-Ho Jung (2022)

Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 368 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-52026-748-0, h/bk, £24.00