Punking Speculative Fiction
Sean Guynes-Vishniac – Special Edition Editor Punk, today, is an easily appropriated symbol that signals cultural frustration, youth angst, and a generalized fuck-the-man attitude, at the same time that it remains a lively anti-capitalist, anti-state subculture. The dialectical tensions of punk—moving between resistance to and reification of mainstream social forces—are especially obvious in sf,…
Andréa Gilroy Katsuhiro Otomo produced work in the cyberpunk mode long before the 1988 animated adaptation of Akira made him a global icon of the sf genre. He began the Akira manga in 1982 and wrote and directed the segment “Construction Cancellation Order” in the 1987 anthology Neo-Tokyo. Shortly after Akira, he also wrote…
Patrick Whitmarsh Human consciousness, that poor cripple, that deformed and doomed thing, is about to be born. — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow There is a pleasing irony in composing a think-piece about the mind’s capacity for thought. The topic has fascinated philosophers for centuries, its modern vocabulary and mode of inquiry deriving from…
Ashley Gordon According to Darko Suvin’s famous formulation, sf is best understood as the ‘literature of cognitive estrangement’: an estranging literature because it defamiliarizes and reimagines social reality, and a cognitive one because it does so according to the supposed rigour of scientific rationalism (Suvin 1979: 4). Suvin proposes sf as the fictional mode…
Lars Schmeink The relation of science fiction and the utopian tradition has been a point of some contention among critics of either field—Darko Suvin, for example, famously argued that “utopia is not a genre but the sociopolitical subgenre of science fiction” (61). And Peter Fitting refutes Suvin’s simplistic conflation, instead arguing “that there is…
Brian Willems “The whole point of punk is not doing what you’re told to do.” — Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory Cyberpunk has become a neoliberal dream of technological ubiquity. Steampunk reinserts a romanticized sense of craftsmanship into the world. The term salvagepunk was coined by Evan Calder Williams to gather science fiction…
Megen de Bruin-Molé With its fetishization of social hierarchies, at first blush mannerpunk, more commonly known as “fantasy of manners” fiction, seems incompatible with a punk aesthetic. One online reviewer writes: “Basically, if you can stick ‘Jane Austen meets X’ in front of your story proposal, it’s got a good chance of being Mannerpunk”…
Marleen S. Barr A year into Trump’s presidency, we’ve thoroughly established what a liar he is. . . . The man dwells in the loopy land of his own invention. The [Electoral College] landslide was a fiction. The millions [of illegal ballots] were a mirage. . . . It’s not merely that this emperor…
Anelise Farris The punk portion of cyberpunk indicates that one can expect to encounter marginalized figures who threaten—either aggressively or just by nature of their existence—the social norm. Of course, the referent of punk changes in meaning depending on who is using it and in what context. Oftentimes the label punk is used derogatively…
Anna McFarlane In the word ‘cyberpunk’ it is that ‘punk’ suffix that gives the term its edge of anarchic cool, the successful branding of which has arguably contributed to the enduring influence of the genre. The adoption of cyberpunk’s suffix by an endless number of descendants (steampunk, dieselpunk, solarpunk, etc.) has been used to…