Special issue ‘Geographies of science fiction’: introduction

Introduction

The papers of this special issue were first presented at the workshop ‘Earth and its Others: The Geographies of Science Fiction’, held in 2020 at the Department of Geosciences of the University of Fribourg. We believe that this context – or better, the particular time and modalities in which it took place – was formative for the theme and shaped the matter of interventions presented here. Although the event was nominally hosted by our institution, none of the participants was actually physically present. We were all attending the workshop online, from the distance required by our isolation induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our collective reflections on the spaces of SF speculation were taking place while hitherto familiar understandings of public and private, of accessible or interdicted, of safe or unsafe were being undone. As we were unable to access offices, classrooms, libraries, museums and restaurants due to pandemic-related restrictions, we all became used to interacting with each other via screen. This shift took time to be assimilated. For a long time, social interaction via online spaces created by platforms such as Zoom, MS Teams and Google Meet felt eerie – often out of synch, low-resolution and stuttering, propped up with fake backgrounds. At the same time, the screens bestowed an awkward intimacy as they granted access to personal spaces that would be otherwise private. No radically new technology had suddenly come to revolutionise our way of living, however, due to the biological novum of the virus, our spatial consensus had changed. As other scholars noted, the extraordinary time in which workshop took place appears – especially now in retrospect – as a temporary heterotopic rupture in which new modalities of living and relating to space were experienced and envisioned. ¹

With this special issue, we trace the geographies of SF through the lens of five papers who have engaged with different bodies of SF works. These papers attend to these works’ affordances in a careful and sustained way, giving insight into the complex, dynamic and non-dichotomic nature of how SF literature as a genre that interweaves spaces in a range of narratological movements and gestures, which make boundaries both instantiate and disappear. By moving in and out of the text – historicising, contextualising, spatialising, extrapolating – our contributors seek to understand the cultural politics of the text’s performances in specific societal contexts, and their transformative potential to change the current predicaments we live through.

Loïc Aloisio’s paper explores the spatial affordances of the science-fictional unreal. As he argues in his analysis of the work of Chinese SF writer Han Song, a strategic retreat into the unreal can become necessary for one’s safety and sanity in authoritarian contexts such as that of the People’s Republic of China today, where a state-sanctioned ‘real’ is coercively regimented. By focusing on Han Song’s use of heterotopic spaces as framing devices for interrogating the social costs and disruption generated by the blind pursuit of rapid social engineering and technological innovation, Aloisio shows how SF texts can become unreal ‘counter-sites’ ² through which the purported reality ‘represented, contested, and inverted’. ‘Comparable to a trompe l’oeil’, Aloisio writes in this issue, ‘Han Song’s works exacerbate the effect of figuration in order to better highlight the true nature of the reality that surrounds the readers and that remains invisible to their eyes’. Whether developed in the coaches of an unstoppable train, the cabin of a Boeing aircraft in a never-landing flight, the hallways of a Kafkaesque hospital or an entire dystopian city populated by sleepwalkers, the heterotopic unreal destabilises the reader’s frameworks of reference by injecting uncanniness to known cultural signifiers and staging hyperbolic exaggerations of what is taken for real. In this process, the reader is put in front of a mirror that ‘is both distorting and magnifying, and which, by the estrangement it imposes, allows [them] to perceive the world around them in a new light’.

Robert Saunders’ paper deepens this engagement with counter-sites of the unreal. However, rather than exploring them in a horizontal relationship with a coercively prescribed reality, in this case, the unreal unfolds ‘between the pleats’ ³ of the real. To this aim, Saunders engages with the Norwegian SF tv drama Beforeigners. Beforeigners is a tv series that engages with questions of immigration, national identity and spatial belonging by staging a near-future Oslo populated by ‘time-immigrants’ who materialise in present-day Norway from different eras of the country’s past. As Saunders argues, by dispelling with race altogether and instead displacing ‘Norwegianness’ by means of the country’s very own national past, Beforeigners complicates notions of identity and belonging. Here the negative affordance of the science-fictional unreal, allowing for the substitution of the immigrant other with an erratic national self, highlights and at the same time undermines the exclusionary and coercive normativity of ethnonationalist discourse and its claims to spatial sovereignty. The science-fictional unreal subverts the real from within by displacing spatiality through temporality, thereby opening up ‘new lines of sight’, as Saunders (this issue) writes, ⁴ ‘reshaping socio-cultural understandings between immigrant communities and host societies’.

Frank Mueller and Anne Schwartz’s paper furthers explorations of temporality as means to complicate existing notions of belonging. With their multipronged intervention on home-making as future-making, they call for ‘a critical, multiscalar geography of home’. In a genre that is conventionally so inclined to spatial estrangement (via reversal displacement, refraction, etc.) such as SF, the notion of ‘home’ may appear obsolete or, at least, anachronistic – something to be rejected or at least set aside. But ‘domus’, Mueller and Schwartz argue, should rather be understood as ‘a place of struggle’ – the ground upon which the future-making and spatial affordances of SF ultimately coalesce and build. Drawing on Octavia E. Butler’s Parables, the third instalment of this special issue delves into the ambivalent political agency of home as both a ‘topos of domestication of the familiar’ and the original ground for the exclusion of the Other. Warning against anthropocentric and nativist conceptions of home as colony or colonialist enterprise, Mueller and Schwartz argue instead for home-making as an emancipatory and radically-transformative political praxis of worlding to counter present tendencies of environmental destruction and conflict, through which collective emancipation and (posthuman) kinship formation become possible.

Ben Garlick and Liesl King’s paper sustains the attention to the politics of home-making and world-making that the previous intervention is concerned with. By returning to Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1985 novel Always Coming Home, they reiterate the power of stories to articulate moments of crisis. In Le Guin’s work, SF’s future-perfect perspective, which historicises the present, enables a future archaeology of global catastrophe through which the reader is invited to envision restorative geographies beyond the Anthropocene, that attuned to ‘place love’ and future survival. As Garlick and King remark, Le Guin’s narrative gesture, like the geography of the ‘Valley of Na’ on which the text lingers, steers away from modernist narratives of evolution and progress in favour of a ‘new way of writing place’ that interweaves, meanders, salvages, contains while deferring interpretation, rather than flat-out stating, telling or prescribing a narration. Here, once again, the (false) dichotomy of real and unreal falls apart or is rather revealed as a function/effect of our way of telling stories, for which what is ‘real’ is not what adheres to material reality but rather what is asserted with more authority about it; extrapolating from Garlick and King’s paper, we can thus say that Le Guin, by abstaining from such assertive gestures in favour of other modalities of story-telling undermine the normative aspect of the real, substituting it from the (archaeological) ground up with a ‘performative commitment to care, respect and response’. Their paper mirrors the increasing traction that the idea of home as locus of transformative imagination (and potential political praxis) has been gaining in contemporary SF scholarship. This renewed attention toward the politics of home-making as world-making over SF’s more escapist tendencies signals perhaps an increasing awareness toward the ongoing, systematic erosion of home as both an actual place – threatened as it is by climate crisis on a planetary scale; and ultimately as an idea itself – one could argue that there is no such thing as home under capitalism, only shelter.

Finally, Amy Butt’s paper continues the engagement with restorative geographies within SF literature. Her examination of the ‘radical architectures of understatement’ of feminist science fiction engages with the texture of the quiet spaces staged by N.K. Jemisin in the Broken Earth trilogy, by Sally Miller Gearhart in The Wanderground and by Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. These spaces represent neither full-fledged utopia nor dystopia. Crucially, they are not announced and do not announce themselves with noise and commotion, but put forth different modalities of being and (be-)longing: the quiet. Juxtaposing them with ‘the harsh edges of noise’, Butt alludes here to spaces that offer refuge from the ever louder and faster-turning wheels of capitalism and crisis with their reverberating echoes, depriving people from listening to this quiet, from distinguishing its many forms and from realising its potentials. With the quiet, Butt’s engagement with these works of feminist SF shows, comes protection, nurturing, social bonds and belonging. The transformative affordance of these works is in their powerful imaginaries that create different rather than competing spaces, yet this difference in itself is not revolutionary, but almost an understatement against the background of the soundscape of capitalism and crisis. These are ‘imagined sites of radical quiet’ that, as Butt (this issue) writes, ⁵ ‘these us the respite required to consider what practicing the future together might feel like, and consider the spaces it might require of us’.

By gathering and presenting to the reader an anthology of quiet spaces collected from stories ‘that make a difference’, Amy Butt’s closing essays reprises Ursula K. Le Guin’s ⁶ ‘carrier bag theory of fiction’ and develops it in the form of a scholarly article. Such critical gesture informs the writing of this introduction as well. As guest editors for this special issue, we aimed for weaving a conceptual ‘carrier bag’ for gathering the interventions that come together here. This operation of collection began already in 2020 with the unfolding of our virtual gathering/workshop; it continued in the months and years to come, as we encouraged our friends and colleagues to work with us on this project; and came to an end only recently. The carrier bag that we weaved had holes in it, and much to our dismay, some of the contributions that we originally gathered with it fell through along the way, their fruits sprouting elsewhere. Nonetheless, we believe that the papers collected here ultimately succeed in showcasing the ‘strange reality’ ⁷ that SF has to offer, and how by inhabiting such reality – if only provisionally, in shared suspension of disbelief – we can rethink the ways we shape and relate to the space we inhabit.